By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
This week we move from the first book of the Torah, Genesis, to Exodus. Genesis, which largely concerns the development of human relations as it details the spiritual and physical journey of Abraham and his descendants. In a personal revolt against an immoral pagan society, the young Abraham follows a divine inner call: It urges him — Lech Lecha! — to go forth, to live by his perceived understanding of an abstract God who will make his descendants as numberless as the stars in the sky. By the close of Genesis (which incidentally is not governed by Jewish law, halakha), the ancient Ivri, the Hebrews, have not as yet received the Ten Commandments to govern their moral behavior. This will take place in the book of Exodus, which concerns the development of the Jewish people from an enslaved bunch of semi-nomadic tribes to an independent nation upholding some of the highest moral standards in our world; it is a process that is some ways is still taking place. Perhaps it always will.
In the beginning pages of Exodus, we note that the initial group of 70 people who fled the famine in Canaan when Joseph held a high position at the side of the Egyptian Pharaoh has greatly multiplied. Four hundred years later, the current Pharaoh has no memory of Joseph, and the phenomenal growth of the Hebrews is politically worrisome to the Egyptians.. What if these Hebrews, who breed in such numerous swarms despite enslavement and continual hard labor, should side with Egypt’s enemies? So the Pharaoh issues a decree to the mid-wives, personified in the Torah as Shiphrah and Puah: “When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birthstool: If it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl let her live” (Exodus 1:16).
The courageous midwives, risking their own lives, were not about to commit infanticide, however. They feared God more than the Pharaoh. “The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live.” In what is likely the first recorded case of civil disobedience, the mid-wives did not obey immoral orders. The Torah is teaching us that we can disobey laws that are crimes against humanity. In other words, moral right supersedes sovereign might. In fact, there is a moral imperative to disobey laws that are crimes against humanity. Perhaps they would not have been able to put it into words, but Shiphrah and Puah, understood that it was their role, even as humble midwives, to be God’s partners in upholding a just and compassionate world. That is the message of the Bible in the first pages of Exodus.
It is a lesson that has not been fully understood even in the 21st century. In our time, the power of high office or money or both all too often still supersede moral right.
Even though the Pharaoh summoned them to account for their actions, the midwives placated him:
“The king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this thing, letting the boys live?’ The midwives said to Pharaoh, ‘Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women: they are vigorous. Before the midwife can come to them, they have given birth’ ” (Exodus 1: 18-19).
But when the Hebrew women continued to “multiply” by giving birth, the Pharaoh was enraged and ordered his people: “Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”
That’s how it happened, the Torah portrays, that when Moses was born, his mother hid him in a basket in the reeds of the Nile while his sister, Miriam watched him from a distance until the Pharaoh’s own daughter, sympathetic to the plight of a child, rescued him. The Egyptian princess brought him up as her own son, as an Egyptian prince. This was the Moses who, as a grown man, was to discover the moral responsibility of his own heritage. He would free the enslaved Hebrews by leading them through the desert for 40 years to the shores of the Promised Land. This parasha and the chapters to follow are the very foundation of the Liberation Theology inherent in Judaism.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2018. All rights reserved
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Years ago, when my sister was in another city, she was the victim of a violent attack headlined in the morning’s newspapers, which also reported that my parents had immediately traveled there to be at her hospital bedside. When I hurriedly returned home (I still lived with my parents, as most young women I knew did in the 1950s until they married) from university classes that very afternoon, thieves — human vultures, believing the house empty — had already been there before me. It had been ransacked.
Just in case you think a thief and a robber are synonyms for people who take something from you that doesn’t belong to them, think again! In the Talmud, a distinction is made between a thief (a “ganaf”) and a robber (a “gazlan”). Really? What’s the difference? Either way, they take our things and cause us grief!
According to the Talmud, a “ganaf” intends to remain invisible to the property owner; that is, his thievery is by stealth. A “gazlan,” on the other hand, is someone who robs you by confronting you, and, unfortunately, there may even be violence. There is a caution, though: A ganaf who intends to remain invisible to the property owner may become a gazlan under certain circumstances. When? If the ganaf is surprised and becomes violent (i.e., a gazlan) upon being seen.
Which one does the Talmud consider worse? You may be surprised to find out that a ganaf is considered even more reprehensible than a gazlan because the people whose property has been taken by an invisible thief don’t know where the threat to them – the violation of their property — came from. It could occur again, at any time, leaving them uneasy, even in their own homes. On the other hand, those stolen from by a gazlan may also become uneasy when they can actually identify a gazlan who hasn’t been apprehended.
It is hard for most of us to believe that there are people who thrive on profiting from others’ misfortune, compounding it in fact. Yet one of the ugly things that all too often follow loss of life and property in the face of natural disasters like the horrific wildfires so recently fought in California – or the floods experienced in Puerto Rico and Houston and elsewhere – is their aftermath, looting.
There are other consequences, emotional ones. The medieval scholar, Rashi, taught that people who have been robbed may go into a state of abandonment of hope, what the Talmud calls “conscious ye’ush.” It all depends, the Talmudic rabbis believed, on whether those robbed have given up any hope of recovering their property or still hope to recover or restore the loss – to rebuild. Only life cannot be restored. Fortunately, although harmed physically and emotionally for a long time, my sister did not lose her life.
Although property and life do not weigh evenly on the scales of consequence, age also comes into the equation as a determinant. The young, of course, bounce back more quickly; there is time for new dreams in their life spans. But can older people harmed by the acts of others or by natural disaster find the strength to rebuild their lives? “Halakha (Jewish law), writes Rabbi David Hartman, “does not permit spiritual incapacity…. [1]. Every day is a new day, and every day promises hope.” As an older person who became a rabbi late in life, this is something I believe with all my heart.
[1] “Sinai and Exodus: Two Grounds for Hope in the Jewish Tradition,” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journal/religious-studies/article/div-classtitlesinai-and-exodus-t…, Vol. 14, Issue 3, David Hartman, October 24, 2008, 378.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
Moving On?
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Let me share with you true story about something that happened to me, about personal property that was lost. My personal property. It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. After I finished stuffing a turkey for a holiday celebration and, with a sigh of satisfaction, had put it in the oven for about twenty minutes per pound at 400 degrees Farenheit, and with a nicely folded foil tent over it, I began to tidy up the kitchen. That was when I noticed that my beautiful, emerald-cut diamond was missing from the ring that had marked my engagement, a ring, that, together with my matching wedding band, I never, ever took off. I had been wearing it for many years. The engagement ring was still on my finger all right, but there was a big, gaping hole in the center where four prongs had formerly held the lovely gem.
My diamond was lost! No, I did not enter into a state of ye’ush (abandonment of hope), not at the beginning. I still hoped; no way would I abandon hope. I searched all over the kitchen, in every nook and cranny of the floor, the counters, for my diamond. Not too easy to find a clear diamond on a white tile floor or white counters (white, European kitchens were in vogue then), but … no diamond! I searched and washed all the dishes in the sink. Nothing had been put in the dishwasher yet, so maybe … no, no diamond. “Oh no,” I cried. “The turkey!”
Releasing a keening sound of something that was not yet resignation, that still had a note of hope in it, I removed the turkey from the oven, and, bit by bit, removed what would have been a delicious stuffing from the turkey, examined it with a magnifying glass, kneaded each morsel carefully between my fingers. No diamond was to be found. Next, as I peered into the now empty cavity of that turkey and poked and prodded its insides (fortunately it had been deceased for some time), the sinews glistened back at me as if they were laughing. After all, the turkey had been cooking in a pre-heated oven for twenty minutes. It dripped a little here and there.
It was at this point that I began to cry. I entered a state of resignation, a state of ye’ush, but I did have the presence of mind to report the loss to the insurance company. “My diamond is gone,” I sobbed. At least some of the economic value, if not the sentimental value, was recoverable. And it did not take too much effort to report an insured loss. Now, if I had known that the diamond could not be found, that the loss was irrevocable despite all my effort, at the time the loss occurred, would I have entered a state of retroactive ye’ush immediately – that is ye’ush without knowing it, ye’ush shelo medat? It would have saved me a lot of searching time!
However, my story is not finished. When I finally served the turkey to my guests at a beautifully laid table that night, there it was, my diamond, floating in the gravy, as several of my guests pointed to it with astonishment. Thank goodness nobody had swallowed it! And yes, the diamond was undamaged. Diamonds, as you probably know, can survive high heat.
Yes, I had abandoned hope prematurely! Can we ever know, I reflect now, the precise time at which hope should be abandoned? Is there a time when we should give up hope and say, “Move on now! Collect the insurance money! Forget the sentimental value! Replace the diamond!”
But that is not the end of the story. Some years later, my diamond ring, this same diamond ring was stolen. A thief, a ganaf, broke into my house by stealth and stole all my jewelry, including this ring. And, oy vay, this time I no longer had jewelry insurance. It was too expensive! Since I was living in a large, metropolitan center where one diamond is like another diamond, I realized that I probably would not recover it. Even before the police advised me that it was unlikely I would recover the ring, that the thief would have fenced it or shipped it to another country before I had even discovered the loss. There were no identifying marks because the ring was not engraved with an inscription or initials, and, in any case, the thief would likely have taken the diamond out of the ring for resale. So this time, my ye’ush was not in vain. I had to abandon hope for real.
But since, as the police said, it was already too late to retrieve my loss before I even discovered it was missing, was this not also ye’ush shelo medat—ye’ush without knowing it, unconscious ye’ush? In other words, if I had known, would I have given up hope of recovering it from the moment it was stolen, even before I actually knew it was stolen?
But that is not the end of the story. After I set this seemingly cyclical tale of loss and recovery and loss down on paper, I had a sudden urge to put “recovery” – hope — back into the picture when a recurring advertisement in a very reputable magazine caught my attention. National Geographic, no less, in which a company reachable on the Internet was advertising gem-quality diamonds that looked very much like the one I had lost and found and lost again. Only these diamonds were not extracted from deep in the ground through the grime and sweat of miners working in unspeakably treacherous conditions that have been the subject matter of recent movies. These advertised diamonds were cooked in a scientific lab, and, yes, they had all the properties of natural diamonds found in the ground – but with one very important difference: They were flawless, a quality almost impossible for natural diamonds to attain. And, yes, these synthetic diamonds had another favorable attribute: The price was miniscule in comparison to what a “real” diamond would cost.
The temptation was too great to resist. I selected my ring (platinum-fused silver), with the large emerald-cut center stone surrounded by smaller baguettes on the side, just like the ones my long lost ring (solid platinum) had possessed. Again, there was a difference. This time the emerald-cut stone I chose was not a diamond; it was a synthetic emerald, proudly reflecting four karats of polished green, chemical properties in the sunlight.
It is very beautiful ring but somewhat ostentatious, so I haven’t worn it yet. Maybe I never will. If I should, however, it is unlikely that anyone would realize that this artful replacement for my lost jewel is synthetic. But if an unknowing thief should attempt to steal it from my jewelry box at any time in the future, that ganaf will have gained only an object of no significant value, not compared to the multiple lives that have been lost in mines over the centuries trying to recover that sparkling “real thing” – like the one I formerly owned — from the ground.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2015. All rights reserved. This story appears in my rabbinic thesis, “The Staying Power of Hope in the Aggadic Narratives of the Talmud.”
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Vayehi: (Genesis 47:28 – 50:26)
History Depends on the POV
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“Vayehi” brings the book of Genesis to a fascinating close. As a reading of this Torah portion reveals, there is a “doublet” within the story told here. Think “broken telephone” because the Torah was originally transmitted orally from generation to generation, and you know how that can change the details of a story. God’s Word was in fact told from mouth to mouth, with a few scrolls – mostly Psalms — read aloud at the Temple on marketplace days (Mondays and Thursdays). It was eventually written down (not without opposition), and then compiled centuries later in the fear that the Living Torah – and Judaism with it — could be lost in the wake of the Second Temple’s destruction. This is what I think about when Torah scrolls are saved from a fire at personal risk or wrapped around the body of a Holocaust survivor who managed to get it out of Poland.
So, simply stated, a doublet is a second telling of a story within a Torah portion; it probably differs from the first version in some details (the duplicate stories of Adam and Eve and then of Cain and Abel are two early examples of doublets within Genesis). In Vayehi specifically, there is an alternate or complementary (depending on how you look at it) version of the way Jacob/Israel asks his own son, Joseph, to bring his grandsons, Ephraim (the younger one) and Manasseh (the firstborn) to him for a blessing.
Some rabbis think these different versions were included in the final version of the Torah mainly in order to reconcile different perspectives (those of Northern Israel, associated with King Saul – its ten tribes all too soon conquered by the Assyrians – and Southern Israel, eventual home of King David). Harmony was the desired goal. Other rabbis believe that duplicate stories in the Hebrew Bible were written down at different times and by different authors, so naturally they had different perspectives.
In more “modern” times – the 19th century — four different “sources” were identified by biblical scholars. In my very first year of rabbinical studies, I was spellbound by Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? — a “who-done-it” approach to the compilation of the Bible. Here the four sources are specifically defined as J (Yaweh), E (Elohim), P (Priestly) and D (Deuteronomomistic) [1]. Friedman lays out his basic issues very clearly, detailing in a logical, methodical way how each of these sources – from both North and South Israel, from the priests, and a final summation — contributed to a Torah composed of many genres and many documents and, indeed, the distillation of many traditions. Contributing to the final result were the numerous editors (called redactors) involved and eventually the final Redactor (like a General Editor).
However, to this day, many orthodox (and some very conservative) rabbis will not subscribe to this Deuteronomistic Theory. For them, the Torah was written by God (or possibly divinely revealed), and not a single word can be added or subtracted. Still others, like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, consider the entire Torah “a midrash, an interpretation…formulated in response to ineffable encounters with God” as Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff described. Perhaps Heschel’s point of view (POV) says it all [2].
In any case, this is what happens in Vayehi, in the Torah as we read it today, when Joseph brings his sons (their non-Jewish mother is Asenath, the daughter of a high-ranking Egyptian priest) to his dying father’s bedside. In the two versions that appear here, his father is interchangeably called Jacob or Israel.
In the first of the doublets, “…Joseph was told, ‘Your father is ill.’ So he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Then, when Jacob was told, ‘Your son Joseph has come to see you,’ Israel [this refers to Jacob] summoned his strength and sat up in bed.
“And Jacob said to Joseph, ‘El Shaddai [the Nurturer] appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan, and He blessed me, and said to me, ‘I will make you fertile and numerous, making of you a community of peoples; and I will assign this land to your offspring to come for an everlasting possession. Now your two sons, who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt shall be mine; Ephraim and Manassah shall be mine no less than Reuben and Simeon. But progeny born to you after them shall be yours; they shall be recorded instead of their brothers in their inheritance” (48:1-6). Jacob then goes on to explain to Joseph that he is doing this because Joseph’s mother, Rachel, died while Jacob was on the road to Canaan, and that he buried her near Bethlehem (48:7).
Immediately after this first telling of the story, a second version appears in the text, thus creating the “doublet.” This version calls Jacob only by the name, Israel, the new name he assumed after his dramatic struggle with the “ish,” God’s messenger, who left Jacob with a perpetual limp to memorialize how he had altered spiritually. Then the story continues: “Noticing Joseph’s sons, Israel asked, ‘Who are these?’ And Joseph said to his father, ‘They are my sons, whom God has given me here. ‘Bring them to me,’ he said, ‘that I may bless them.’ Now Israel’s eyes were dim with age [recalling his own father Isaac’s poor vision when he was deceived by Jacob]; he could not see….(48:8)”
Then Israel embraces both boys, but when he blesses them, he surprisingly crosses his hands and blesses the children with his right hand on Ephraim’s head – the head of the younger son – and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, the older son. In other words, he reverses the older son/younger son in an inheritance battle that continues throughout the Hebrew Bible.
Why is this second version relevant to us today? Because – if we traditionally bless our children on the Sabbath as Jews are supposed to do – when we place our hands on our own children’s heads, we recite the last line of the blessing that Israel invoked when he blessed both of Jacob’s children: “God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.”
It is still troubling, though, that Israel/Jacob deliberately puts Ephraim ahead of Manasseh. Not so, explains Rabbi Jonathan Sacks [3]. Israel/Jacob does that because of what the blessing says. It has nothing to do with birth order, with older or younger. At the time Manasseh was named, Joseph expressed gratitude that the birth made him forget all the previous troubles he suffered in his father’s house. But by the time his next son, Ephraim, is born, Joseph is able to look forward to a fruitful future, saying, “It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction” (41: 50-52). So Israel/Jacob is accentuating the positive in giving his blessing, and maybe that’s what we should be doing for our kids now.
Maybe, though, what we also need as 2018 approaches is a third story to create a triplet, a third version, that includes a special biblical blessing for daughters as well when they traverse the land.
[1] Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Harper Collins, 1987).
[2] Elliot N. Dorff, “Medieval and Modern Theories of Revelation,” Biblical Religion and Law, 1404.
[3] Vayehi 5767, The Generations Forget and Remember, Covenant and Conversation, Jan. 6, 2007, http: rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-5767-vayehi/. Received Dec. 27, 2017.
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©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles 2017. All rights reserved.
Vayigash: The Joy of Forgiveness (Genesis 44:18 – 47:27)
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“The time has come, the Walrus said,
to talk of many things….”
Lewis Carroll, 1872
In October of 1960, Pope John XXIII famously greeted a group of visiting Jewish leaders with these words: “I am Joseph, Your Brother”[1]. The Pope’s baptismal name was in reality Joseph, and his greeting echoed the words of the biblical Joseph as he revealed himself to his long-lost brothers. The words symbolize an act of mutual forgiveness that begins in Vayigash and resounds through the centuries (Genesis 45:4).
Vayigash is such a rich chapter. Every time I read a Torah portion, something that seems new attracts my attention. This time it is forgiveness. Of course, like the Walrus and the Carpenter in the allegorical children’s favorite, Alice Through The Looking-Glass, we could discuss many other amazing things contained in this portion. For example, we could discuss at length an elevated Joseph’s remarkable prowess as an “economic statesman…one of the earliest in history,” as Henry A. Wallace (a liberal progressive who was the 33rd Vice-President of the U.S. and unsuccessfully advocated universal healthcare) once called him. “Apparently he [the biblical Joseph] put the farmers on relief rolls,” Wallace said, “until the drought was over and then gave them back the use of their land for a very low rent….” [2]. He credits Joseph with larger vision and with preparing for the whims of nature, something with which we are still coming to grips in California as I write this D’var Torah.
Also, while “tax reform” dominates our airwaves to considerable controversy as 2017 comes to a bombastic close, we recall that Joseph instituted a system of taxation (one-fifth – 20 percent of income — payable to the Pharaoh) considered reasonable in the ancient agricultural landscape of Pharaoh’s Egypt. Under Syrian rule, by contrast, “the Jews paid the king one-third of their seed and one-half of their fruits”[3].
We could discuss how Joseph was a great strategist and master planner, “who protected the surplus of the good years so that Egypt could survive during the lean ones,” as Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff discussed in his recent article for the Reform movement, “Does God Have a Plan?” [4]. In later life, after much adversity, Joseph learned to understand that his own free will could only operate within the big picture — the divine plan for the survival of humanity.
We could discuss, as Rabbi Anne Brener did so eloquently in her drash for AJRCA this week [5], the anxiety and grief of Joseph’s aged father, Jacob as he continued to mourn for the supposed death of his favored son, Joseph, and Jacob’s anxiety as he contemplated the possible loss of his much loved, youngest son, Benjamin. Or of Joseph’s own suppressed primal scream in the face of the reunion.
What particularly stands out for me at this year’s reading of Vayigash, however, is the depth of forgiveness that Joseph offers his brothers. In fact, this Torah portion contains “the first recorded moment of forgiveness in history,” writes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in Covenant and Conversation [6]. This is what Joseph says to them:
“I am your brother, Joseph, he whom you sold into Egypt. Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me thither” (Genesis 45:4).
This is the same Joseph who, clad in multi-colored splendor, once dreamed of his brothers bowing down to him. Now, with the humility that denotes the spiritual growth he has since undergone, Joseph proceeds to explain to these same brothers that it was God’s will, not their own actions, that brought about the course of events that took him to Egypt as Pharaoh’s slave. It was something far greater than the schemes of human beings, ironically including the free will to act that God had granted them.
“God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance [from famine and starvation]. So, it was not you who sent me here, but God; and he has made me [like] a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his household, and ruler over the whole land of Egypt” (Genesis 45: 7-8).
This is how, without recrimination, Joseph forgave his brothers who had once cast him into a pit and sold him into slavery. For repentance and then forgiveness to occur, as our rabbis often point out, three sequential stages are necessary: the admission of guilt, confession, and, finally, behavioral change. It was true in ancient Egypt, and it remains true now. Only when these stages of character change have taken place – and it takes time, often years — is someone capable of sincere teshuvah (repentance). “Humanity changed the day Joseph forgave his brothers,” Sacks explains. “When we forgive and are worthy of others, we are no longer prisoners of our past” [7].
As we begin the new secular calendar year, 2018, maybe it is time for all of us – no matter what our various political or religious leanings — to forgive one another. And ourselves. In humility for our own shortcomings. Then, God willing, we can move forward into a bright future together.
Happy New Year – and Shabbat Shalom!
[1] Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, General Ed. “Gleanings,” The Torah: A Modern Commentary, revised ed. David E. S. Stein (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2005,2006),300.
[2] Ibid., 301.
[3] Ibid, 298. Unfortunately, sometimes historical memory is short and not at all grateful. As Rabbi Plaut describes, later on, new Pharaohs did not remember that Joseph’s sagacity had saved Egypt in a time of famine, and he enslaved the Jews:
“When not long after Joseph’s death the rulers (according to some, the Hyksos) were overthrown and a new kingdom was established, a Pharaoh ascended the throne ‘who did not know Joseph’ (Exodus 1:8). He had no use for associates of the previous dynasty and therefore took no time in enslaving them in the very land of Goshen to which they had come to make their home. The experience of Joseph was to be repeated through many centuries of Jewish history: As long as Jews were useful to the host country, they were tolerated and even elevated; but often when political circumstances changed, they were offered to the masses as convenient scapegoats.”
[4] Rabbi Charles A. Kroloff, “Does God Have A Plan?” www. reformjudaism.org., December 2017.
[5] Rabbi Anne Brener, “Joseph’s Primal Scream,” Vayigash, www.AJRCA.edu, December 2017.
[6] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Birth of Forgiveness,” 5774,Covenant and Conversation,
http://www.aish.com/tp/sacks/460273613, retrieved December 2017.
[7] Ibid.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.