The fourth aliyah of Parshas Vayeishev contains the story of Yehuda and Tamar, as it is usually referred to. We are told that Yehuda had three sons: Er, Onan, and Sheila. Yehuda finds a great shidduch for Er, whose name is Tamar. Yet the very next verse tells us tersely: “And Er, Yehuda’s firstborn, was ra b’einei Hashem (bad in the eyes of Hashem) and Hashem killed him.” Very rarely does the Torah say so directly that Hashem judges a person to be evil, nor do we find Hashem just killing people for being bad – even Par’oh, Amalek, Bil’am, or any other rasha you might think of. Hashem didn’t say to Moshe at the burning bush, “Go down to Egypt and bring Am Yisroel up from there – don’t worry about the Egyptian slavedrivers or Par’oh, they’re bad so I knocked them off.” Stranger still, now that the Torah apparently is emphasizing some extreme of evil, so bad that G-d just knocks Er off for it, the verse doesn’t bother to mention what this evil is.
Okay, so since Er never had any children, Yehuda tells Onan to marry Tamar and have children who will on some level be considered Er’s children. Now the Torah is more explicit – Onan also does ra b’einei Hashem, but the Torah describes his sin. Not wanting to “give children to his brother,” Onan would have relations with Tamar but deliberately spill his seed on the ground. For doing bad in the eyes of Hashem, he dies also. The Gemara learns from the fact that it says the word gam (also) about Onan’s death, that Er’s death was for the same sin – spilling seed so as not to impregnate Tamar. But, the Gemara asks, why would Er do such a thing? Onan doesn’t want to have children that aren’t really his, but why didn’t Er want children? The Gemara’s answer, which Rashi quotes, is that Er didn’t want to impregnate Tamar and ruin (alternatively, contradict) her beauty. Unbelievable…
The Izhbitzer Rebbe learns that in all of our service of G-d we have to be careful not to make Er’s mistake. What was Er’s mistake, really? You know, you might think it just means that Er didn’t want to have children so much, didn’t long for them. He had a hedonistic swinger mentality. But the truth is, Er’s mistake was much more subtle than that. It wasn’t that Er didn’t want kids. In fact, he longed for children and could see them in his mind’s eye, so perfect, so beautiful. But he knew that when you bring something from the ideal to be born in the real world, the very fact of it’s being born means it’s not going to be as beautiful as his ideal. So he didn’t bring children into the world. The Izhbitzer says there are a lot of us who are the same way in our service of Hashem – if it’s not going to be smooth, perfect, ideal, so I don’t want to be involved. I’d rather have a perfect ideal in my mind of what it will be like, what it could be like, if I really prayed, really learned, really loved, really worked on myself. But chas v’shalom I should start working on it, bringing it into the world. It will be so ugly, so imperfect…
So it says of Er that he was bad “in the eyes of Hashem” – meaning only in the eyes of Hashem. Only for the One who sees the inside. On the outside, everything was beautiful. Beautiful and lifeless, beautiful and not fruitful. This beauty is not Hashem’s idea of beauty.
Since it is Chanukkah, it is a good time to reflect a little on beauty. The ancient Greeks considered beauty amongst the highest virtues, especially as defined by perfect proportions and irrefutable philosophical proofs. Therefore the ancestor of Yavan (Greece) is named Yefet in the Torah, which means beauty. There is a verse “Yaft Elokim lYefet v’yishkenu b’ohalei Shem” G-d considers Yefet beautiful, but he will dwell in the tents of Shem, our holy ancestor. The Gemara in Megillah contains a dispute as to what languages are kosher for writing a Sefer Torah. The Sages say in all languages, but Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel holds only Greek, since it is so beautiful. And the verse says G-d gives beauty to Yefet, but this beauty must live in the tents of Torah. Beauty must be secondary to Torah. Or, to put it differently, the Torah considers something which is alive, fruitful and in the world to be much more beautiful, despite (and perhaps because) of its imperfections, than any “perfect ideal” which only exists in one’s mind. The truth is, what could be more beautiful than a mother with a newborn child? And I don’t mean outside beauty, I’m not talking about a pose or a posture, I mean the inside beauty that anyone with eyes to see can see. The strength and gentleness that shines out from one who is involved with giving life, bearing, and caring for the world. Not only through children, but also through giving to others, reaching out. Yes, if you reach out, and step out, you’ll make mistakes, it won’t be perfect.
One last thought about Torah and beauty. Really, you know that the Torah itself is the most beautiful thing in the world. But there is one flaw with the beauty of the Torah, which is that the Torah is perfect. That’s why the Gemara says a person who doesn’t stand for a Talmid Chocham is a fool – if you stand for a Torah scroll, all the more so should you stand for a Talmid Chocham. Why all the more so? Because the Torah is beautiful, it’s perfect – if one letter is off in the whole Torah scroll, the whole thing is not valid, can’t be read from, it’s not holy… so the Torah scroll is so perfect, but it’s only an ideal. A person who has integrated and lives the Torah is much holier and more beautiful than the Torah itself. And unlike a Torah scroll, you still have to stand for the Talmid Chocham even if he’s made mistakes, a lot of mistakes. Sure he has, he’s in the world. Those mistakes don’t make him less than the Torah, though all its letters are perfect. They make him more, because he is the Torah in the world. And the beauty of Torah in the world is its imperfection. We should all be blessed with eyes to see the inner light this Channukah, and to defeat the Greeks by allowing our beautiful ideas to become beautifully imperfect realities.