Vayehi: (Genesis 47:28 – 50:26)

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)

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.

Mikeitz, 2017

Mikeitz, 2017

by Rabbi Corinne Copnick, C.M., M.A., M.R.S.

Mikeitz, occurring in the Torah portion sequence ten weeks after Simchat Torah, is a hopeful parasha to read at Chanukah. It concerns dreams and their interpretations, and how they impact our lives. It is also a biblical “type scene” of deception, which details an astonishing sequence of dramatic moments, as the parasha balances the Hebrew word shever (usually translated as grain, food) with sever (the dot is on the other side of the letter shin), which stands for hope. [1]

Our home

From childhood, I have been aware that dream interpretations are sought after because they evoke “the human desire to know the future and the belief that this foreknowledge must somehow be available to us” (Plaut, Essays, 281).[2]  My mother, whose imagination and sensitivity were both super-attenuated, was known to her friends as a great tea leaf reader. They would often gather at our home over tea and delicate pastries and persuade her to “read” their fortunes. In those days, tea bags were not in vogue, and if you wanted a reading, you didn’t use a strainer to keep out the tea leaves when you poured the tempting brew into the tea cup. Then, when you were finished imbibing the amber liquid, you turned the cup upside down in the saucer and let the tea leaves set. After an interval, the “reader” would interpret the pattern formed by the leaves. My mother also interpreted dreams, but only those of her family and close friends. I remember her cautioning me that one must only give positive interpretations. [3]

There is always a caution when it comes to dream interpretation. Divination (for example, predicting the future from sounds made by hissing snakes) has been traditionally frowned on in Jewish thought as representing pagan superstition. Thus dream interpretation in Mikeitz, suggests Nahum M. Sarna, represents “the first clash recorded in the Bible between pagan magic and the will of God…. [It] constitutes a polemic against paganism.” [4] According to the Sages in the Talmud, “it is an open question as to whether dreams have a validity” (Berachot 55a).

For Joseph, the hero of Mikeitz, though, recounting his own dreams initially got him into a lot of hot water with his brothers. Understandably, they didn’t like the idea of bowing down to their younger brother, as his dreams suggested. Their jealous ire against him took the extreme form of casting him into a pit, selling him into slavery, and deceiving their aging father that Joseph had been killed. Later, when the enslaved Joseph is relegated to prison in the court of the Pharaoh, he impresses his fellow inmates by interpreting their dreams (much like my mother and the tea leaves), so much so that when the Pharaoh has troubling dreams, the released inmates recommend Joseph to his attention. Eventually, through his visionary interpretations and the practical solutions he suggests, a famine is averted in Egypt.  Joseph rises to become the Pharaoh’s right hand man, dressed in rich robes with ceremonial accessories to accentuate his status.

As Rabbi Gunther W. Plaut points out:

“Joseph was the first Hebrew who lived, so to speak in Diaspora, the galut. He became thoroughly assimilated, adopted the customs of his environment, changed his name, wore Egyptian clothes, swore by Pharaoh’s name (Gen. 45:15), and married an Egyptian wife. In Potiphar’s house and prison, he was still ‘the Hebrew’; as an Egyptian official, he became wholly Egyptian. He entered a new life of affluence and power, and the past seemed far away” [5](280).

But it never really went away. You can only travel so far from who you are. As Rabbi Plaut wrote the above words, he may have been thinking about the increasing assimilation of secular Jews into 20th century North American society. In any case, it is the Diaspora Joseph that his brothers will meet when they travel from a drought-stricken land to Egypt in search of provisions for their family. Although Joseph recognizes his brothers, they do not recognize him, and Joseph struggles with his conflicting feelings of revenge and love, amid concern for his ailing father. “What we achieve in disguise is never the love we sought, “Rabbi Sacks comments. “We don’t need disguises before God.” [6]

He points out that Joseph had three gifts that enabled him to reach such heights: First of all, Joseph dreams dreams himself; indeed, his double dreams are a sign that they are not simply imaginings. A repeated dream, Rabbi Sacks explains, is “a signal sent by God” to suggest that there is something deeper about the human condition.” Secondly, Joseph could interpret dreams, and thirdly — perhaps most important of all — he had the ability to implement dreams, transform them into realistic applications. “It’s easy to see what’s wrong,” adds Rabbi Sacks, referring to societal problems. “A leader has the ability to make it right.” [7]

In order to give this tale of multiple deceits a positive outcome, as the brilliant commentator Nechama Leibowitz explains, Joseph’s brothers eventually evidence a sense of responsibility towards one another. Also, while Joseph’s interactions with his brothers [at first] seem vindictive, he is actually facilitating “their growth and rehabilitation.” In other words, Joseph “forced his brothers to simulate experiences that would help them to confront their dark past and pave the way for a bright future.”

In a D’var Torah that I previously posted on my own website (www.rabbicorinne.com), I wrote about my personal belief that dreams are pointers to the future, and that we should believe in them. In a corroborating passage (Berachot 55a), Rav Hisda tells us that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read. Dreams are the unopened letters of the soul. If we have the courage to open them, they point to the paths we need to follow – our soul paths – if only we can find the moral strength to do it. However, dreams, the Talmud also cautions, are only 1/60th of prophecy. That still gives us 59/60ths to fulfill. It takes a lot of hard work!

1. Three other episodes in the Bible center on deception: the episode that begins in Isaac’s tent, when Jacob deceives Esau; the deception in regard to Rachel and Leah’s marriage to Jacob; and the deception that takes place between Judah and Tamar (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Power of the Dream,” Covenant and Conversation. www.Sacks. Aish.com/tp/i/sacks/233216101.html).

2. Plaut, Rabbi Gunther W.,  Gen. Ed., “Essays,” The Torah: A Modern Commentary, revised ed. (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2006), 281.

3. In writing this D’var Torah, I first toured interpretations of this parasha in previous years on the AJRCA website (www.ajrca.edu). Dr. Tamar Frankiel also accents the positive in her 2014 essay: “Joseph reads [dreams] so that a positive resolution can be found,” she writes. And in tractate Berachot, the rabbis say that “one should always give the dream a good turn” (Frankiel, Mikeitz, 2015). In Rabbi Janet Madden’s interpretation of the same parasha, she writes that, according to Berachot b, “realization of all dreams follows the mouth; that is, that the import of a dream depends upon the interpretation given to it” (Mikeitz, 2014). In addition, Rabbi Elihu Gevirtz notes that the Hebrew letters of lechem (bread) are the same as the letters for dream (chalom); both bread and dreams “sustain us and give us nourishment and satisfaction” (Gevirtz, Mikeitz, 2010).

4. Sarna, Nahum M. “Gleanings,” The Torah: A Modern Commentary, revised ed. (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2006), 282.

5. Plaut, Ibid., 280.

6. Sacks, Ibid.

7. Ibid.

©️Rabbi Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.

Va-yashev (Genesis 37:1- 40:26)

Va-yashev (Genesis 37:1- 40:26):

Recognizing the Intention to Transgress

By Rabbi Corinne Copnick

“I am with child by the man to whom these belong….
Examine these: whose seal and cord and staff are these?”

Genesis 38:25

She said to him: “It was I.”

He said to her: “But in any case, my intention was to transgress.”

B. Kiddushin 81 b

On the agenda this week for my welcoming Jewish study group, Beit Kulam, now in its third year, is a Talmudic tale about a long-married, Jewish couple [1]. Over the years, their marriage has faded from romanticism to a purported asceticism in the name of holiness.  In other words, sexual relations are no longer part of their marriage. One day, as the wife goes out to market on Mondays and Thursdays, the husband, wailing aloud, begs God to repress his “evil impulses.” When the wife, returning to pick up a forgotten object, overhears him, she devises a scheme to attract him. Dressing like a prostitute, complete with disguising heavy makeup and jangling bracelets, she attempts to seduce him in the garden outside their home, and he propositions her. After their encounter, she demands that he prove himself by bringing her a pomegranate (the sign of his attraction) from the top of a tree, which he does. Then, once more dressed as his wife, she re-enters their home and lights the oven, but she is taken aback when husband immediately sits inside its fiery heat as penitence. As she attempts to reassures him that she, his wife, was the seductress – “it was I” – he still groans under the weight of his guilt. “But the intention to transgress was mine,” he answers.

At least, unlike some others who transgress in public life today, he can admit that he was wrong. (And she has the pomegranate to prove it, although that fact is implicit, not expressed, in the terse Talmudic story.)

There are some similarities in this Talmud story to the interaction between Tamar and Judah, one of the major stories (Joseph is the other protagonist) in our Torah portion this week, Vayashev. “Judah is the first person in the Torah explicitly to admit he was wrong,” writes my favorite Torah commentator, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “…[T]his seems to be the moment at which he acquired the depth of character necessary for him to become the first real baal teshuvah” [2].

What happened in the Torah’s story to lead to this moment? Tamar, who was not Jewish, had been previously married to two of Judah’s sons, both of whom died. Er, the firstborn,it seems, was a sinner, while the second son Onan (bound by the custom of levirate marriage to marry his widowed, childless sister-in-law) did not want to have children and wasted his seed. Thus Tamar was unable to have a child to honor her first husband’s memory, especially since Judah hedged about letting his third son, Shelah, marry her – even though Shelah was actually bound by Jewish law to marry his brother’s widow.

Tamar was not going to put up with this evasion. So she took the only recourse open to her in biblical times: seduction. Disguising herself as a prostitute and putting herself in Judah’s direct path as he went to the sheep-shearing, you can guess what happened. He engaged her “services.” Not only did they have intercourse, she became pregnant.

When Tamar (as the prostitute) demanded payment for her “services,” Judah said he would send it to her, and when she asked something tangible as his pledge, he handed over the cord and seal proving his identity (a proof more significant than the simple pomegranate demanded in the later Talmudic Kiddushin story).

When Judah learned about Tamar’s pregnancy, however, he was furious. Of course, he didn’t realize that his son’s widow had disguised herself as a prostitute, and that he, her father-in-law, was the one who had impregnated her. So he demanded that she be put to death for adultery. But Tamar held the winning card: she produced Judah’s cord and seal to prove that he was the father. Why had she done it? To perpetuate the memory of her husband [3].

And so Judah admitted his transgression. He was indeed the father, and his son’s memory would forever live on. In addition, both Tamar and Judah ended up being remembered in Jewish history as courageous (she for attaining her goal through clever deception, he for confessing his error). Admittedly, Tamar used the only weapon she had, her sexual self, to attain her aims, but I have to keep reminding myself to see the story through the lens of biblical times (heroic Tamar forces powerful but honest Judah to tell the truth) and not from a contemporary perspective (it’s time sexual predators of both genders changed their behavior).

The Tamar and Judah story is also a good reminder to get promised payment for business transactions in writing!

[1] B. Kiddushin 81 b. Retold by Ruth Calderon, “Libertina,” A Bride for One Night: Talmud Tales, trans. Ilana Kurshan (Philadelphia: JPS, 2014), 39.

[2] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Heroism of Tamar,” www.Covenant and Conversation, (Vayashev 5775, Dec. 8, 2014).

[3] It is ironic that Tamar, along with the now famous Moabite woman called Ruth, both originally non-Jews, was to become an ancestor of King David.