Literally meaning “not falling together,” an asymptote is the term given for when a curve approaches a line more and more closely but never actually ever touches it. It’s the name given to the phenomenon of striving continuously for something but never being able to attain it fully. It’s when you’re one millimeter away from something and to the eye’s view, it seems like you’re touching something, but you’re tantalizingly not.
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וַיִּגַּשׁ אֵלָיו יְהוּדָה, “And Judah came close to him’”(Gen. 18.4). The scene is one of tenterhooks and apprehension. Judah is about to plead for his brother Benjamin’s security and so dispenses with the interpreter to speak, at his own peril, directly with Joseph, viceroy of Egypt.
This coming close predicates Judah’s success. And yet it is a strange choreographing.
