Toledot (Genesis 25:19 – 28:9)
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Toledot marks a clear demarcation line in the Torah to the story of Isaac, beginning with his marriage to Rebekah when he was forty years old. The chapter culminates with Isaac’s son Jacob traveling to Paddan-aram to take a wife from the daughters of Laban, his mother’s brother. Jacob’s twin brother, Esau, on the other hand, deliberately disobeys Isaac’s injunction not to marry a Canaanite woman and instead chooses his wife from the line of Isaac’s half-brother, Ishmael (whose lineage was detailed at the conclusion of the previous parasha).
Esau had good reason to be angry with his father, although he is also complicit in his own deception by exchanging the spirituality implicit in his long term birthright for the temporary satisfaction of a hunger-satisfying, red stew. Toledot details how Esau was the victim of his own impetuousness, his twin’s deceit, the complicity of his mother (who favored Jacob) in his deception, and the weakness, metaphorically paralleled by his dimming eyes, of a prematurely aging father. “One may have the dignity of old age without its years, or length of days without the dignity of old age,” proclaimed Rabbi Aha, a fourth generation Amora sage [1]. The result is that Esau’s birthright, as the first son to emerge from his mother’s womb, with Jacob a close second, holding on to his brother’s heel, is mistakenly bestowed upon Jacob. It is Jacob who, masquerading as Esau through a downright dirty trick, obtains his father’s blessing. Eventually it is Jacob who must flee to Laban to escape Esau’s wrath.
The Torah portrays the two brothers as engaged in a struggle for dominance, even in the womb.
“Two nations are in your womb,
Two separate peoples shall issue from your body,
One people shall be mightier than the other,
And the older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23).[2]
According to the biblical scholar, Richard Elliott Freedman, the wording of the last sentence in the biblical Hebrew is ambiguous, so that one cannot really tell which twin should serve whom.
“The decision as to who is number-one son is still God’s….The text does not in fact say that the elder will serve the younger son. In biblical Hebrew, the subject may either precede or follow the verb, and the object likewise may either precede or follow the verb. What that means is that sometimes it is impossible to tell which word in a biblical verse is the subject and which is the object, especially if the verse is in poetry.” In other words, ‘the elder will serve the younger’ can also mean “the elder, the younger will serve.’ “ [3]
As Friedman explains this verse, it’s a toss-up. My take, though, is that the implicit mutuality of the verse is intentional in the Torah. Yet the adversarial interpretation of this verse situation persists today in real life, thousands of years later, in the Middle East.
What is not intimated in this verse, however, is that the brothers – each of them, despite having taken different paths, emerge successful and prosperous. When they eventually meet again, it is at first uncertain whether they will fight or reconcile – is the greeting of Esau, the wronged party, a kiss or a bite, or perhaps both? – but the brothers do make peace with one another (just as Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury their father, Abraham in the preceding parasha). And then Jacob and Esau part, each to continue his own life, but the pact of brotherly love and goodwill remaining.
Why is their long enmity, rather than the embrace that brought them both together, the story that has resounded through the centuries?
Last night in Los Angeles, I attended the Israeli Film Festival’s showing of a rediscovered, filmed interview with the first leader of modern Israel, David Ben Gurion in his 80s, already retired from politics and personally engaged in rebuilding the desert. He was simply a Jew, he said (to paraphrase), who wanted to live in Israel in a world where there was peace among the nations – and where people did not exploit one another but rather put the Jewish value of loving one another into practice.
“Judaism has always been more than mere expectation, or fulfillment postponed; it has always looked to some this-worldly expression of progress toward its long range hopes,” penned Rabbi Gunther Plaut [4]. Maybe it’s time to put the long-ago reconciliation of Jacob and Esau into the present tense. Maybe it’s time for a mutual embrace instead of a bite.
[1] Quoted in “Gleanings,” The Torah: A Modern Commentary, revised edition, ed. Rabbi Gunther Plaut (New York: Union for Reform Judaism), 164. Rabbi Aha was one of the Ammoraim (interpreters of the Torah), the sages who followed the first and second century CE Tannaim (repeaters of the Torah).
[2] JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999) 48.
[3] Commentary on the Torah: With a New English Translation and the Hebrew Text, ed. Richard Elliott Friedman (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 88.
[4] “Essays,” The Torah: A Modern Commentary, revised edition, ed. Rabbi Gunther Plaut (New York: Union for Reform Judaism) 165.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
Chayei Sarah (Genesis 23:1 – 25:18)
The First Recorded Real Estate Transaction
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
It’s small wonder that Sarah died shortly after the Akeida incident which precedes this parasha. If your husband trekked your obedient, only child, one thankfully born to you at a late age, up a holy mountain with the intention of sacrificing him to God on an altar, you’d possibly have cardiac arrest too. Would you forgive your husband for what he did without consulting you, even if he tried to atone for it by buying you – and your family thereafter — a beautiful burial cave?
In any case, after mention of Sarah’s death (in Kiriath-arba, now Hebron, in the land of Canaan), in the second verse of “Chayei Sarah” (the life span of Sarah), a momentous transaction takes place. In fact, it is the Torah’s first recorded real estate transaction: the purchase of a family burial plot by the first Jewish patriarch, Abraham, from Ephron the Hittite. Even the price, 400 shekels of silver, is recorded in the written Torah.
After Sarah died, the sympathetic, neighboring Hittites, who considered Abraham the “elect of God among us,” had actually offered to give the site to Abraham as a gift. But Abraham, who called himself a resident alien, a “ger vtoshav,” insisted on formally paying for it, thus establishing legal ownership of the Cave of Machpelah facing Mamre, now Hebron.
At the divine level, though, ownership has limitations. Jewish people have long recognized that every corner of the earth belongs to God, and that, as God’s creations – whatever the financial transaction — we humans have only temporary custodianship of the land. It is ours as long as we keep the covenant with our Creator.
So, from a metaphorical (and metaphysical) perspective, all the land belongs to God. As human beings, we belong to God too; we are merely vessels, containers for the divine spirit. That’s why (just like the American dollar), we are not allowed to deface our bodies – they are on loan to us for the time we are on earth. The divine spark within each of us, by contrast, is part of the wholeness of God.
In temporal terms, however, through our patriarch Abraham, we Jews bought the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, and we paid for it in the coin of the land. A fact. Recorded in writing in the Torah and passed down through the centuries.
“Abraham accepted Ephron’s terms. Abraham paid out to Ephron the money that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites [i.e.,witnesses] – four hundred shekels of silver at the going merchants’ rate….Thus the field with its cave passed from the Hittites to Abraham, as a burial site” (Genesis 23: 16-20).[1]
There are no Hittites living in Israel anymore; but, despite persecution, the Jews of the world have survived for thousands of years. Even though Hebron is a tinderbox of political unrest today, Jewish people certainly have the right to access the purchased cave of their ancestors.
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Another real estate purchase — a very important one, in the time of King David – is also recorded later in the Bible. After King David makes Jerusalem his capital around 1,000 BCE, he “buys the upper part of the hill above the northern boundary of the city,”[2] the site of the future Temple – the Beit HaMikdash on Mount Moriah, the place where he will eventually bring the Holy Ark.
Why, in the midst of combat with his adversaries, would David urgently want to buy the threshing floor on Mount Moriah? Because pestilence is sweeping the land of Canaan. The beleaguered David wants to set up an altar to God – in the hope that prayer will help his people avoid the terrible plague. Once again, the selling price is recorded in the Bible, but this time in two different places. [3]
In the 2 Samuel (24:18-25) account, David buys the threshing from Araunah the Jebusite (like the Hittites, the Jebusites are also long gone from Israel). Just as the Hittites did earlier, Araunah offers to give the land to King David for this purpose, and once again, David will not accept the land as a gift.
“But the king repied to Araunah, ‘No I will buy them from you at a price. I cannot sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that have cost me nothing.’ So, according to this account, David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver from Araunah the Jebusite.
However, according to1 Chronicles (21:25-26), written at a later date, the price of the land was much higher: Here King David purchased the land from Ornan (rather than Araunah) the Jebusite for 600 gold coins, then a large sum. “So David paid Ornan for the site 600 shekels worth of gold. And David built there an altar to the Lord and sacrificed burnt offerings and offerings of well-being.”
Of course, Mount Moriah is famously the spot where Abraham brought his beloved son, Isaac, to show his devotion to God – and where an angel or messenger of God – prevented human sacrifice. Instead a ram was miraculously provided.
Although the Torah doesn’t specifically say so, there is no mention of Isaac ever talking to his father, Abraham, again. Surely Isaac was traumatized by this incident. Abraham had to send a servant to fetch a suitable wife for his son from Canaan. Despite all of this, Isaac loved his wife, tried to live a tranquil life peacefully with his neighbors, and he never left Israel. Biblical scholars, unfortunately, often describe him as “a placeholder” in the Bible.
Perhaps Isaac was a weaker man than his father, but he was always true to the land and his family, including his half-brother, Ishmael. Apparently, when Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael reconciled. Thus in “Chayei Sarah,” the Torah recounts that, as Abraham joined his dearly loved Sarah in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, the two half-brothers buried their father together, as Abraham joined his dearly loved Sarah in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron.
“His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the Cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites: there Avraham was buried, and Sarah his wife. After the death of Abraham, God blessed his son Isaac” (Genesis 25:9-11). [4]
As for Mount Moriah, where the first Temple once stood – the Temple Mount — the Islamic Dome of the Rock is now situated, often a place of controversy in recent times. But what is below the earth tells the story in a different, very beautiful way. Hidden behind the Western Wall [5] and under the golden dome of this Muslim shrine is “an exposed piece of the bedrock of Mount Moriah – metaphysically known as the shatiya, literally, ‘drinking stone.’ Water and spirituality are synonymous, and the Torah is known as mayim chayim, ‘water of life.’ According to [mystical]Judaism, the world is spiritually nourished from this spot, this stone — which is the metaphysical center of the universe” [6].
May God’s blessings shine on us all.
[1] JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation. Second Edition. Ed. David S. Stein. (The Jewish Publication Society, 1999).
[2] http://kenspiro.com/article/history-drash-course-12-david-the king. See Aish.com
[3] See 2 Samuel 24:18-25 and 1 Chronicles 21:25 for two different accounts of this purchase.
[4] JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh translation. The Torah also mentions that, after Sarah died, Abraham had taken another wife, Keturah (which means “the exotic one”). Since Isaac and Ishmael buried their father together, there has been some speculation that Keturah may have been an oblique reference to Hagar. In any case, “Chayei Sarah” ends with listing the genealogical line of Ishmael.
[5] Although today Jewish people pray at the Western Wall (the Kotel) and insert written hopes between its stones, it was not originally intended as a shrine. Rather, more than 2,000 years ago, Herod the Great built it as a retaining wall around Mt. Moriah (see Talmud, Sanhedrin 107a).
[6] http://kenspiro.com/article/history-drash-course-12-david-the king. See Aish.com
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
Homage to a Veteran [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I found a tree that feels like me,
all flame and autumn fire,
dark branches reaching fine-honed
fingers to hold the wistful sky.
I touched a tree whose roots go deep,
proudly placed by sturdy stones,
moistly loved by velvet earth,
tall grown to sanctify this day.
I touched a tree whose time has come,
whose winter color gladly bares itself
to winter’s gusty grasp and
guards her blazing power,
transplanted in the night.
[1] This poem first appeared in “Altar Pieces,” by Corinne Copnick, a narrated collection of the author’s stories and poems that was screened many times nationally on Vision TV in Canada.
©️Corinne Copnick, Toronto, 1992; Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
My International Kids: Danilo, Olga, and Llazlo [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Danilo was the next student who came to live at my house. I was hosting International students in Toronto while waiting for my U.S. documents so that I could join my children in California. Tall and handsome, with hazel eyes that belonged on a film screen, he was my first Brazilian student, my first male guest, and a breath of fresh air every time I came home after visiting my mother. We got along so famously, it was like having an eighteen-year-old son live with me. (They’re so happy when you feed them well!) He wouldn’t let me lift a finger to do anything that he could physically help me with.
He explained to me that the degree of poverty experienced in Brazil is almost unimaginable for a Canadian. It is nearly impossible for poor people to have any upward mobility. If you are born poor, you die poor, he said. Even though I did not consider myself to be a rich person, Danilo would point to my dishwasher, or to my washing machine and dryer, or the décor in my living room and pronounce gravely, “You are a favored person” in the English he was rapidly learning.
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The next student to enter my home came through the door with the largest suitcase I had ever seen – almost the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk – and behind him slipped a second someone who appeared so furtively that, for a moment, she appeared to be a shadow.
“I am expecting one student,” I said. “Not two.” It was two in the morning. I had expected my Yugoslavian student to arrive well before midnight, and I was already in my nightgown and bathrobe.
“No,” the shadow cried dramatically, her feet firmly planted in my hallway. “We cannot be separated.”
“You are from [the former] Yugoslavia?” I inquired. “Students at the language school?”
The male student nodded vigorously, as his female companion in the hallway answered rapidly in understandable, heavily accented English.
“Yes, and we have been assigned to different home. No! No! We must remain together.”
“Why did the school place you in different home?” I asked, trying to assess the situation. The school’s rules did not require that hosts keep students assigned to them if they did not find the students suitable to their home environment.
“We are not married,” she told me. “They say that we can only stay together in the same house if we are married. But we live together in Yugoslavia. We are like one!”
“I see,” I replied. I knew that many of the host families had young children, and the language school had set the rule in order to prevent embarrassment to the families.
“It’s very late,” I continued. “I can’t contact the school now. I do not have any young children, and I have no objection to you sharing a room since you have apparently been living together for some time, but I have only one room to offer you. It does have a double bed.”
I thought for a moment about my former students — Lily from Hong Kong and Mariko from Japan — and their different space perceptions compared to their home environments. Lily thought the guest room in my house was small, and Mariko thought it was very big. Danilo from Brazil thought I was rich. Khaled from Saudi Arabia prepared rice sitting on the floor of my kitchen.
“I think the room is big enough,” I told the Yugoslavian students, “but you might find it too small for two people.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” the girl replied, tears filling her eyes. “it does not matter if it is a single bed. The room will be big enough.”
When I opened the door to what would be their bedroom for the next two months, they gasped with happiness.
“It is wonderful. Thank you, thank you.”
“We’ll talk at breakfast,” I said, summoning up a pleasant smile. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “Welcome to Canada.”
After a myriad of “thank yous” later that morning, they began the task of hauling the new suitcase up the stairs to their new room, where they somehow stashed it in the clothes closet. Olga and Llazo were a team not only in regard to hauling a suitcase, but when it came to language skills as well. They were a totally complementary couple. She could speak English but not read or write it (Cyrillic script is very different from the English alphabet), and he could read English but not write it. Their intention was to equalize the situation at the language school. She hoped to learn to read and write, and he wanted to learn to speak English. Meanwhile, together they could communicate in a strange land.
During the few weeks they were with me in the last year of the 1990s, gradually they told me a lot about their life in their home country. They marveled at the variety and plenitude of food that stocked the shelves of Toronto’s supermarkets. “We earn salaries,” Olga said sadly, “but we can’t buy anything with them. The shelves are empty in my country.” In comparison to the other students I had hosted, their concerns were so serious, so concentrated on basic needs.
At my anything but empty table, they greedily filled themselves with food. Olga was a tiny brunette, but it was amazing how much food she could hold. And Llazlo was a big boy, a professional hockey player in his home town, who was always hungry. They ate everything at every meal. It was as if they wanted to make sure they were full in case another meal was not forthcoming.
One day, as Olga grew closer to me, she showed me the contents of their still bulging suitcase. It contained mostly food. “Look,” she gestured grandly, “dried soups, smoked sausages, sardines, crackers, enough for a long time.” They had stocked themselves up for a disaster.
When their language classes concluded, a relative of one of them – an aunt — drove up to our door. By pre-arrangement, she carried with her official documents allowing Olga and Llazlo to visit her in New York State. Down the stairs came the suitcase, and somehow they stowed it into the trunk of her car. As they said their goodbyes, accompanied by hugs, kisses, and heartfelt thanks, I wondered if they would ever return to their home country.
[1] ©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved. Adapted from Corinne Heather Copnick, Cryo Kid: Drawing a New Map, Los Angeles, (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2008). Finalist, Next Gen Awards of Excellence, 2009. Available from Amazon.com.
Vayera: Genesis 18: 1-22:24
Don’t Laugh, Sarah!
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
In Vayera, we learn not to laugh at what seems impossible in our limited human perception. “Why did Sarah laugh?” a very present Adonai asks Abraham in the tersely worded Torah account (18: 9-15).“I didn’t laugh,” she lies, frightened. “Yes, you laughed,” God corrects her, with the implication: “You think you are too old to have a child, that your husband is impotent?” You do not know the extent of my powers.”
According to Rabbi Gunther W. Plaut, Abraham is indeed Isaac’s father. “There is no hint of superhuman paternity as in similar myths of the Greeks [and, one might add, the later Christians]. The announcement is supernatural but not the conception” [1]. Today we know that male potency can be revived with little blue pills. We know that women past their prime child-bearing years can be helped by assisted artificial reproduction. But the Source of Being doesn’t need frozen sperm or embryos, harvested eggs, or petri dishes to multiply the species.
Yes, there are things in this world of which we humans have not even dreamed. At the beginning of the 20th century, my mother and her brothers marveled at being able to put together a crystal radio set. As my sister and I welcomed television into our mid-century home (ca. 1950) as a near miracle, did my generation imagine that by the end of that century we would be printing out itemized records of every phone call? Did my children’s generation predict that the then newly invented World Wide Web would facilitate global electronic communication, that the fax would be superseded by the increasingly miniaturized computer, and then by the i-phone whose small screen could hold much of the information in the world. Did we imagine that printed books would become almost a thing of the past as electronic readers took over? Or that electronic privacy would become a real concern?
As the present generation wirelessly streams music – and even religious services — or connects on multiple social media websites or twitter feeds in nano-seconds and minimal keystrokes, do they conceive of undiscovered marvels that will in turn replace their ubiquitous, hand-held, digital devices faster than anyone could imagine? Could I have imagined that a 21st stranger in Brazil would check out my Los Angeles house and garden on Google Earth and even see my car in the driveway before coming to enjoy the hospitality of my modern day tent? In a future century – maybe even this one – will we communicate through mental concentration, without any electronic tools?
So don’t laugh, Sarah. When you looked at the moon (in a cosmos of countless moons) in biblical times, did you imagine that a human being would walk on that surface in 1963, and that we would be able to see Mars and Jupiter with a Hubble telescope that has already been surpassed? As words like “bio-tech” and “genetic engineering,” and “Crispr” (technological gene editing “scissors”), and “Big Data” flow off our tongues, who can count the many wonders that are already here in the world we humans inhabit – or in the multiple universes created by Adonai, or where the boundaries between religion and science – and medicine – merge?
And don’t laugh, all the wireless Sarah of the next generation. Technological science has “proven” what the Torah has taught for thousands of years: We are all One, truly One, each linked to the other, all of us connected to the Source of Life. Did God really speak the world into being? The Shema uses only six words – and the underlying math of the Hebrew letters – to enunciate Oneness. Connection.
As humans, however, we love to complicate things, perhaps to transfer our allegiance to concepts like data flow and algorithms. Yet as we try to find answers to age-old questions, Vayera is a key passage in our Jewish understanding of Divinity. The power beyond us transcends the boundaries of our human imagination. We have only to believe. “Life is sacred,” writes Isaac Klein. “Its beginning and its end are mysteries” [2. I believe with perfect faith in that Mystery.
And I am secure in my belief that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Every single day.
My sky has stars to whisper
something-strong-that-lightly-is
will pattern day with rainbow breath.
Wrapped in pale blue water,
I inhale its formless vapor [3].
[1] ] The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised edition. Ed. W. Gunther Plaut (New York: Union for Reform Judaism), 138..
[2 ]Isaac Klein. A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (USA: JTS; Ktav, 1979,1992), 270.
[3] This poem, originally titled “And I Am Me,” first appeared in Corinne Copnick Spiegel, Etreinte/Embrace: Une Poeme D’Amour/A Love Story in Poetry (Montreal: Editions Guy Maheux, 1981) 77. Copies of this limited edition of bilingual (English-French) poems can occasionally be found in rare book sites online.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2014, 2017. All rights reserved.
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