(When Corinne Copnick, now an ordained rabbi, contemplated moving from Toronto to California, she sent a number of stories about her experiences back to The Jewish Tribune, a national Canadian newspaper, for which she had written a weekly column and other stories for several years. This true story was first published in 1998. She has made a few small changes here.)
KISS A WHALE — AND LICK CANCER?
The Whale Enjoyed it Too!
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
The biblical Jonah didn’t know about it when he inhabited the belly of a whale, but kissing a whale can lead to an easy recovery from cancer surgery. It may not be in the medical text books, but that’s what Jane (not her real name) believes. She is a retired Canadian businesswoman now living in coastal California.
The encounter between Jane and a young Pacific grey whale took place in the warm, salty waters of San Ignacio Lagoon on the western coast of Baja California. This area is the mating and birthing grounds of thousands of Pacific grey whales who divide their time between Baha and their feeding grounds near Alaska.
After their encounter – a friendly kiss — Jane, who teaches yoga, felt as if she had journeyed through a mystical experience. Apparently, the whale enjoyed her kiss too, and it may even have been partly the whale’s idea. Richman weighs a little over a hundred pounds. The whale weighs in at fifty times more.
“The young whale came right up to the boat, and his head came straight out of the water,” Jane recounted excitedly. “I leaned over and kissed him.” At the time, she was one of several dozen members of a whale-watching expedition sponsored by the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Diego.
Her husband (now late husband), Mark (not his real name), had arranged to take her on the whale-watching trip three days before her operation for thyroid cancer. Jane was dreading the operation because previous thyroid surgery had involved a very painful recovery. But after kissing the whale, she claims, both the surgery and the recovery were a breeze in comparison to her previous experience. She credits the awes-inspiring whale encounter with giving her such a positive feeling about life that it affected the aftermath of her surgery.
It is not only Jane who believes the whale kiss helped her lick cancer. Her husband felt the same way. In fact, he filmed his wife’s interaction with the whale, as well as another two hours of the whale-watching trip. The behavior of these “friendly” whales, he pointed out at the time, is particularly astonishing “when measured against the savage, bloody history of mankind’s interaction with the Pacific gray whale.”
It is not known exactly why whales in these protected lagoons actually seek out physical contact with humans. According to a report in California’s Westside News, “the young whales in particular swim right up to small boats, pop their heads out of the water, look around with eyes the size of baseballs, and then, like dogs wanting to be petted, nuzzle up to the boats and the outstretched hands of the humans aboard. They seem to enjoy the contact. With the mother keeping a watchful eye nearby, some of the young whales will frolic around the boats for half an hour or more. Sometimes the mother will even nudge her off-spring toward the boats, as if eager for the young whale to get a look at the strange creatures inside.”
Just in case you’re already reaching for your weathered copy of Moby Dick for a whale refresher, the story of Jonah, which traditionally we’ll be reading on Yom Kippur afternoon, is even more enthralling. When he got a long look at the inside of that strange creature, the whale, he underwent a complete spiritual overhaul. Just like Jane says she did when she shared a friendly kiss with a young whale on the west coast of Baja California. In that mystical moment, she understood the interconnectedness of all living creatures. She tickled the insides of the whale’s cheeks too, and he loved it.
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, and you take some of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife, you shall bring her into your house, and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, and discard her captive’s garb. She shall spend a month’s time in your house lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and possess her, and she shall be your wife” (Deut. 21:10- 13 ).
If you are a rabbi intending to write a concise D’var Torah, it is certainly an exploratory journey to sort through through the myriad of Judaic laws and ethical considerations that make up Ki Tetsei (meaning “when you take”). Then, when you take the centuries of rabbinic and midrashic commentary into account as well, there is enough legal content, sensitivity, and human understanding – not to mention rationality — in this powerful parasha for a lifetime of study.
Finally, I settled on the opening verses of the parasha. What I had in mind was the relative kindness – in that time and place – with which Jewish law mandates a captive woman must be treated by soldiers in time of war. Especially if she is beautiful and evokes a soldier’s sexual desire. Rape is not condoned in the Torah, not on the battlefield, not anywhere (as long as the woman cries out for help).
Richard Elliott Friedman explains this important dictum in the notes to his vibrant, plain-spoken Commentary on the Torah [1] “Contrary to one of the most common practices of war, the Israelite soldier is not permitted to rape her [the captured woman]. He may take her as a wife. But even then he must give her time to mourn the loss of her family.” The month allowed for grieving is is also intended as a period of reflection, a time to reject the gods of her culture and to accept the God of Israel, something she must do in order to marry a Jewish man. It is additionally a time of purification – in accordance with Jewish mourning rites, she must cut her hair and pare her nails — that is sensitive both to Jewish law and to the emotional needs of the woman concerned. Given the tenor of the times, it bespeaks a human generosity on the part of the man.
I agree with Friedman’s interpretation of this passage. In our modern, technological society, many people would, I believe. Yet in this same century, 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram militants, and women have been gang-raped in India, Mexico, and too many other countries, including our own. Smugglers entice women from poor, “undeveloped” countries to the U.S.A. with false promises of employment, only to force them into prostitution. That is why this Torah portion remains very relevant today.
Surprisingly, however, the time-honored medieval rabbis [2]– a whole bunch of them (Rashi, Nahmanides, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Abarbanel, Gersonides, Hizkuni), almost uniformly look at this granting of a mourning period with a patriarchal, even misogynistic, perspective quite different from Friedman’s. Or mine. While the mourning period allowed the woman is undeniably humane, they point out that the soldiers likely would not have killed her mother (thus she would have at least some family left!), and maybe her father fled the battlefield. Furthermore, this 30-day period is intended to give the desire-stricken soldier a cooling-off period.
The medieval rabbis do a real hatchet job on the captured woman! They point out that the surrounding pagan cultures deliberately sent their women out in revealing dress in order to entice the Israelite soldiers. So taking off her captive’s garb meant that this woman would be changing into more modest dress. In addition, they question whether she “does” her nails (“yields her crop”) for mourning purposes. They claim that the Hebrew verb used suggests that she “grows” them long so that her claw-like nails and shorn head look distasteful in the soldier’s eyes. It is a very different perspective, indeed. At any rate, only after this 30-day period can this soldier have sexual relations with the captured woman and make her his wife.
At the same time, the Torah portion itself realistically recognizes that sexual desire can be fickle: “Then, should you no longer want her, you must release her outright. You must not sell her for money; since you had your will of her, you must not enslave her” (Deut. 21: -14). In other words, if, having now found the once beautiful captive distasteful, the soldier rejects the captured woman as his wife, Ki Tetze warns that, since he has degraded her, he cannot treat her as a slave or sell her to someone else. He must let her go free. Friedman notes that here “[t]he Torah text uses the same verb as in the law of divorce” (Deut: 24:1). [3]
As a Jewish people once enslaved by the Egyptians – and who celebrate our release every year – we are taught what slavery does to the human spirit. We are expected to understand the harm done to the psyche by such degradation and humiliation. “The [Hebrew] words for degrading her and for letting her go are the same words that are used to describe the Egyptians’ degrading of Israel and then letting Israel go (Exod. 1:11-12; 5:1),” Friedman points out [4].
As a people, we have also learned in every generation to have compassion for others, that compassion is the counterpart to justice. As Jews, we are expected to act when injustice is done – not just to sit around tut-tutting about how terrible it is when bad things happen. There are still slaves, and still beautiful women forced to prostitute themselves in order to survive, in other parts of the world. Certainly it is something to think about – enslavement, justice, compassion, action — during the High Holy Days.
[1] Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, with a New English Translation and the Hebrew Text (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 629.
[2] All those listed above are quoted at length in “Deuteronomy,” The Commentators’ Bible: The Rubin JPS Miqura’ot Gedolot, ed., trans., and annotated by Michael Carasik (USA: Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 142-143.
[3] Friedman, 629.
[4] Ibid.
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This story was first told by Rabbi Corinne Copnick at a storytelling conference in Toronto, Ontario and later published on http://cryo-kid.blogspot.com.
Why Hurt, Little Tooth?
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I’m going to tell you a story – a true story about my father who was a Montreal dentist. I first told this story at a storytelling session, where one creative artist after another got up and told a story. We made them up. To relax. For fun. Because, after two days of workshopping, it was a time for sharing. And now I want to share my story with you.
At the storytelling session, just before my turn, a young student was telling a story about chickens, and the story preceding her story concerned the financially hard times we were experiencing in Canada in the early nineties.
But only half of my mind listened to the students’ tales. I was spinning my own reverie, the other part of my mind taking me back to the the 1930s, to the “real” depression years. I was thinking about hard times, about chickens…about my father. He had so recently passed away.
The chickens I was remembering were the ones my father got in return for fillings in the jobless thirties. Then people asked, “Are you working?” instead of “Hello, how are you?” If you were working, you were obviously all right.
In that very real depression in 1936, the year I was born, my father was accepting not only chickens, but their offspring, eggs. He would receive a wide assortment of other small items (usually grown in people’s back yards) bartered in return for dental work. His impoverished clients could not otherwise pay. My father had been providing food for his own little family in this way since 1933, the year he graduated in dentistry from McGill University.
He had actually been accepted into medicine, quite an achievement at a time when McGill accepted few Jews, especially a poor boy like my father – who sat with his hands covering the elbow holes of his jacket.
My father, the son of a junk peddler, was the only one of eight children to make it to university. This he did by dint of several scholarships and also by holding three jobs at the same time. He peeled potatoes at the amusement park (late night shift), worked as a longshoreman on the docks (summer), and served as a guide on a Montreal tour bus (weekends).
But he couldn’t accept his hard-won entry into medicine. In those days, a Canadian medical graduate had to do a two-year, unpaid hospital internship after graduation. This my father could never afford.
Instead he went into dentistry, which didn’t require the roadblock internship. Although he was very proud of his surgical skills, what I remember most about my father was his compassion. Quite simply, he cared about his patients. He was the kind of dentist who brought morning tea and toast to a disabled patient he was worried about. Once I saw him give back money to a woman who paid him in handkerchief-wrapped quarters and dimes.
“You’ll pay me when you have a little more money,” he said softly. And when his patients didn’t have any, they could bring him some bread or home-baked cake or garden peas – or a chicken.
We ate a lot of chicken. In those old-fashioned, caring, depression days, my father’s office was in our home. In 1939 just before he voluntarily joined the army and went to war, I was just a little girl, but I remember playing with toys in my father’s waiting room. I remember watching the stream of dental patients come with food and go out with fillings.
I remember the incredulous screams of joy that came from his office late one afternoon. My mother came running, and, for a long while after that, I heard sounds that, even to my little girl’s ears that didn’t know yet about miracles, signaled that something momentous was taking place here, in my father’s office.
As I peeked in the doorway, I could see that an elderly woman who had come with a chicken was sitting in the dental chair. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and they were also making joyful pathways down the face of the sister who stood, clutching her hand, beside her.
My father also stood, transfixed, his voice husky with emotion as he asked the elderly woman questions pertinent to this moment none of them would ever forget.
“You can see?” he asked in a hushed tone.
“I can see, I can see,” the woman smiled through her tears. “Oh, dear God, I can see!”
Her sister had brought her to my father’s dental office because she had been suffering from an agonizing toothache. To go to a dentist cost money she couldn’t afford, and she had waited and waited until she couldn’t bear the pain any more. How could one little tooth hurt so much?
Finally, she came to my father. A kind man who would accept whatever she could spare, people said, and so she came with her little offering of food. She walked in, guided by her sister, because the elderly lady was blind. She had been unable to see anything, not anything at all, for several years.
As my father tried to alleviate this terrible ache with his dental arts, as he extracted the rotted, blackened tooth that poverty had kept in the old lady’s mouth, she began to shriek her joyful disbelief. The tooth had been pressing on an optic nerve. For all of the several years the woman had been unable to see.
In my father’s dental chair, as the tooth was removed, as the pressure on the nerve was taken away, she began to see. Oh, not all at once! At first she could only see shadowy glimpses, floating by in black and white. But in the days before color and clarity once again began to fill her world, she could see images – beautiful, long-lost images. She could see the shape of things to come. She could see that the world was a wondrous place where miracles can happen. And that there were people like my father in it.
It was not long after this incident that my father began to feed his family (now there was my sister) with a monthly check from the army. And in the newsletter printed by the Canadian army in Canada, and also in England where my father was stationed during World War II, a poem written by him appeared.
The poem was called, “Why hurt, little tooth?” It didn’t mention the elderly lady. It didn’t mention the miracle. I was only a little girl, but even I knew that the little tooth didn’t hurt any more.
RABBICORINNE.COM
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Amazing how an age-old Torah portion can apply so well to our contemporary world! Shoftim (which means “magistrates”) is a “Law and Order” portion in the best sense: the first thing the biblical Israelites are obliged to do in setting up their new society is to appoint magistrates and officials for all their tribes. At the same time, these officials are mandated to govern with justice. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you (16:20)
But first the officials have to organize themselves. If the people want to appoint a king because all the neighboring people have kings, they are free – but not obligated — to do so. While this king will serve as what we moderns call the “Executive Branch”, his power will not be absolute. Not by a longshot. Government will have three “crowns”: the Executive Branch, the Judiciary, and the Prophets (the religious branch, a congress of social and moral critics). Does this sound familiar? Yes, following the biblical pattern, the U.S. government is three-branched as well. Each branch serves as a check upon the other in order to have a balanced system.
Furthermore, the character of the king, the head of this government in biblical times, is defined at length. He must not be concerned with acquiring material possessions for himself (no traveling to Egypt to get the best horses!) nor acquire many wives “lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess” (17::17). This king will not indulge in licentious behavior. Instead, he must keep a copy of the Torah beside him and study it daily in order to further develop and guide his moral and ethical sensibilities. With an awareness of the limits of his power under God, the king of Israel must be humble in nature.
This portrait of a Chief Executive may be idealistic (with his taste for many wives and possessions, King Solomon didn’t manage to fulfill these requirements – and he taxed the people too heavily), but It’s certainly a recipe for good government.
The people, too, are advised to comport themselves appropriately and not “imitate the abhorrent practices” of the surrounding nations. (18:9).
Furthermore, the judiciary must temper justice with compassion and with fairness towards both rich and poor. Status in society will not affect the outcome. This was a big statement for the Torah to make. Even though “justice for all” is a precept of American society as well, unfortunately status and riches still affect both treatment by law enforcement and verdicts rendered today: Can someone charged with an offence afford a good lawyer, or is that person relegated to the legal services of an overburdened public defender? Does race, color, and ingrained prejudice affect the verdict (and perhaps the severity of the charge)? If so, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
As for the priests, the third branch, they are freed from worrying about material possessions (which the populace will look after). Neither can they own land; rather, “the Lord is their portion (18:2). The people, too, are advised to comport themselves appropriately and not “imitate the abhorrent practices” of the surrounding nations. (18:9).
Hopefully, there will be peace – that is always the goal — but there is a sober assessment of how to comport oneself in the event of war. “Why do the prescriptions concerning warfare follow the rules of justice in the preceding chapter?” asks the medieval scholar, Rashi. “To teach that Israel will succeed in war only if it practices justice.” *
What I find so touching in this parasha are the words that the priests must say to the soldiers before every battle, an address still practiced in Israel today. Soldiers are not simply pawns in a chess game for the purposes of the State; they are human beings entitled to a taste of life before being sent, perhaps to face death, to protect their country. In Shoftim, first the priests are to counsel the troops not to fear because God will be with them, and then they are to address their very human concerns:
“Is there anyone who has built a new house but has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another dedicate it. Is there anyone who has planted a vineyard but has never harvested it? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another harvest it. Is there anyone who has paid the bride price for a wife, but who has not yet married her? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another marry her (20:5-9)” **
Then the biblical priests turn to another concern: fear in the ranks, which is treated with compassion: “Is there anyone afraid and disheartened? Let him go back to his home, lest the courage of his comrades flag like his” (20:8). Only after these issues are addressed, do the military commanders encourage their troops to defend their new land.
Even after all this preparatory talk, there is an essential point to be made. Before engaging in battle, the commanders are obliged to offer the alternative of peace to their adversaries. They may launch an attack only if peaceful relations have been refused.
With the prospect of several thousand additional U.S. troops – our sons and daughters — soon to be called up to serve in Afghanistan, these biblical precepts are important to understand and remember. Situations change, wars and their devastating consequences come and go in history, but human nature is constant.
*Quoted by Rabbi Gunther Plaut in “Gleanings,” The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised Edition (New York: Union for Reform Judaism) 1314.
**With these concerns in mind, in the modern Israeli army, soldiers who have not yet had children, are encouraged to consign their frozen semen to a sperm bank.
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
If there is anything positive to emerge from the current, gut-wrenching television coverage of Nazi flags and slogans, swastikas and Heil Hitler salutes, torch parades with uncovered faces, and violence in the streets of America, perhaps it is this: that our millennial generation will begin to understand how manipulated hatred — grounded in fear, racism, and bigotry — can spread like a cancer through an unsuspecting population. Maybe they will understand why there must be a State of Israel.
Fortunately, there are gentler ways to teach about the Holocaust and its ramifications, as “Schindler’s List “and many other fine films have demonstrated – so that hopefully it will never happen again. Learning about the history of that time from the lips of those who experienced it is irreplaceable, of course, but there are fewer survivors now every year.
One such survivor – in that he escaped Germany on the cusp of the Holocaust – was the esteemed, late Rabbi Gunther Plaut. More than four decades after World War II, I met him in Toronto, Canada, where he had been the longtime rabbi, soon to become Rabbi Emeritus, of the highly regarded Holy Blossom Temple.* During the 15 years I lived in that city, I was a member there. I consider myself blessed to have attended Rabbi Plaut’s Torah Study classes each week..
It was the late 1980s, and I was deeply honored when he asked me to direct a reading of his one-act play about the Holocaust. Although he had written it long ago, he had kept it to himself for many years. Now he wanted to open his experience as a young man in Nazi Germany to his congregation.
The play was called “The Train.” It portrayed the painful, dislocated feelings of a new Doctor of Laws graduate from the University of Berlin in 1934, forced to leave his native Germany after the restrictive Nuremberg Laws (first introduced on September 15, 1935 but not enforced until after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin) prevented him from practicing law. Even worse, Jews were stripped of their citizenship.**
The young lawyer represented in the play was, of course, our esteemed rabbi, Gunther Plaut. The conflicted feelings expressed were his own as he left family, friends, his now denied means of making a living, and the country he once loved for America. Luckier than most, he had gained sponsorship to rabbinic studies in the U.S. There he would study Jewish law.
As the war came to a close in 1945, Rabbi Gunther Plaut would be among the army chaplains who participated in liberating the concentration camps, the death camps, in Europe. It was an experience he would never forget. And he would go on to become a great rabbi, one of the pioneers of the Reform movement in Canada and regarded internationally as a highly erudite author. His landmark book, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, is still widely used today.
When we mounted Rabbi Plaut’s play, he was truly thrilled to be cast as the Narrator (he had thrown out a few hints that he’d like to do it!), whose commentary was a hallmark of the play. Thespian members of the congregation filled the other roles, and one of the congregational members was a talented harpist who played in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. When the soft cadences of her harp accompanied his narrations, shivers went up and down my spine. The play was extremely moving for the audience. For Rabbi Plaut, I think it was cathartic to have the feelings of his younger self, buried for so many years, enacted on the stage – and shared with the receptive, loving members of his congregation. The audience – the auditorium was packed — watched the performance with tears in their eyes and gave it a standing ovation when it ended.
When he retired, the Law Society of Ontario awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, a thoughtful and sensitive replacement for the degree he was forbidden to use as a young man in Nazi Germany.***
The Holy Blossoms refer to the tender young shoots, the students who study Torah.
** Prior to the passing of the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws, The Law for Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which passed on April 7, 1933, excluded non-Aryans from the legal profession and civil service. The Nuremberg Laws two years later codified the racial theories and ideology of the Nazi party. The first two laws passed in 1935 were the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. Jews (defined racially rather than religiously) were stripped of their citizenship, and the new laws had a devastating economic impact on the Jewish community as well.
*** The following is a narration from the dramatized The March of Times radio series about the Munich Crisis, Sept. 16, 1938:
NARRATOR: “Tonight, hour after hour, by short-wave wireless through the ether and along the cables undersea, the news piles up from the capitals of Europe…world-shaking, momentous news that sends Britain’s grave Prime Minister flying to Adolph Hitler and President Roosevelt hurrying back to Washington…the grim, portentous news that Sudeten Germans are in armed revolt, and behind every dispatch the mounting fear that the field-gray German regiments, mobilized and ready, may march into Czechoslovakia. All this week, day after day, and every hour of each day, the news poured in…and tomorrow and all next week, news will come from London, from Paris, from Prague, from Berlin. And as the headlines record each flying fact and rumor, United States citizens watch and wait and try to understand” (“The March of Time: Munich Crisis, Sept. 16, 1938,” Generic Radio Workshop Script Library (http://www.genradio.com/show.php?id=0079c4704cd5da4).