[Avodah] Tamar Not Embarrassing Yehuda

[Zvi Lampel]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 3:39 PM Yisrael Herczeg <yherczeg at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...if Yehuda never divulged his sin, he did not do teshuvah optimally
> according to the Rambam, Hilchos Teshuvah 2:5, who says that someone who
> sins bein adam lechavero should confess publicly. So according to the
> Rambam, it would be easier to say that Tamar did send the message to Yehuda
> privately, as you suggest, but Yehuda confessed publicly. Tamar is not held
> accountable for the embarrassment that Yehuda chose to bring upon himself
> with his viddui.
>
> Yisrael Herczeg
>

Thanks for your point. But this brings everything back to my problem: To
avoid putting Yehuda in the embarrassing position of publicly confessing a
sin, she could have said nothing to anyone. (He would then have no
incentive to make an embarrassing confession, and she would be thereby
''throwing herself into a fiery furnace'' to save him from that.) Instead,
she put him into the position--be it through an explicit or implicit
accusation with supporting evidence--of deciding between letting her be
unjustly executed, and making an embarrassing public confession. I can see
that she should want him, for his own good, to do voluntary teshuva, but
that would be accomplished by an explicit accusation as well as by an
implicit one--either of which he could deny. Again, I see a lesson in
framing accusations that lead to embarrassment in lashon nekiya, but not in
refraining from causing embarrassment.

Perhaps another thread should be started discussing the Rambam you cited.
Truth is, I have never heard of gedolim (even in gedolim stories), not to
mention others, making public confessions of specific or even non-specific
sins bein adam lechaveyro. In fact, from the way we are taking the Rambam,
one would expect that there would have developed a formal exercise of this
together with Hataros Nedarim and personal asking of mechilah.

Zvi Lampel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20221219/c567a8b5/attachment.htm>