Va-yishlach: (Genesis 32:4-36:40):
Sexual Violation in the Bible and Now
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“Now Dinah, the daughter whom Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the daughters of the land. Shechem, son of Hamor the Hivite, chief of the country, saw her, and took her and lay with her by force. Being strongly drawn to Dinah, daughter of Jacob, and in love with the maiden, he spoke to the maiden tenderly. So Shechem said to his father Hamor, ‘Get me this girl for a wife”(Genesis 34:1-4).
Va’yishlach, the Torah portion for this week, is read in our synagogues just as the current news cycle revels in the salacious details of sexual violation in our secular world. As high profile men are publicly disgraced for a sliding scale of offences that include harassment, groping, assault, or rape, we reflect that human nature has not changed since biblical times.
First of all, this portion details Jacob’s fearful return to the Promised Land, his wrestling match with the angel (which leaves him with a permanent limp but rewards him with the new name of Israel), and his bittersweet reunion, and then parting, from his brother Esau. Following these episodes in chapter 34, is the story of Dinah, who never gets to say a single word about her feelings or fate. The pages of the Torah do not give her the opportunity to speak out about her probable rape by a neighboring Canaanite prince, Shechem, the son of his pagan tribe’s important chief, Hamor the Hivite. Nor can she say a word about her brothers’ subsequent actions to punish the offender – and his entire tribe as well by wholesale circumcision — nor about the death of her rapist, who claimed to have fallen in love with her after he violated her. Whatever she might have had to say about the consequential death of Shechem – perhaps she loved him too – the pages of the Torah do not permit her to say anything. Her feelings simply don’t count.
And so Dinah, Leah’s last child, and Jacob and Leah’s only daughter, remains silent through the centuries. We don’t know how she feels, and we don’t know how she was treated once she was taken from Shechem’s house and returned to the bosom of her family. Even today, women in some parts of the Middle East and elsewhere who bring dishonor and shame to their families by being raped, are not treated well, and in many cases (some of which Rabbi Laura Geller enumerates) killed by their own relatives – even though they are the victims. Fortunately, in the Torah’s account, the punishment seems to fall on the male perpetrator and his family rather than on Dinah, but we simply don’t know. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarks that Dinah is a blank page onto which we project our own feelings and opinions.
So here goes: First of all, controversy through the centuries has quite despicably, in my view, revolved around whether Dinah, in modern parlance, “asked for it” by “going out to see the daughters of the land.” This is the antiquated thinking of classical (and even some contemporary) rabbis who prefer women to be modestly dressed – even better, in some Middle Eastern countries, veiled from head to toe – and hidden in their own homes, away from the sight of unrelated men. Curiosity about what’s outside your tribe? Want to learn more about the world? Get an education? Stuff it! Stay home, cook, and look after the kids. So, according to these classical rabbis (yes, shamefully), if Dinah had stayed home like a good girl should (or today, dress appropriately for the office), she wouldn’t have been raped.
Then there’s the argument that centers around whether or not Dinah was actually raped. Perhaps, based on the translation of three Hebrew verbs used sequentially to describe what Shechem did to Dinah, she was not raped at all? Perhaps it was consensual?The first verb, vayineh, could be alternatively translated as “raped, violated, or lay with her by force.” The n-h root could be translated as “oppress, overpower, humiliate, subdue.” None of them sound good to me, however.
Dr. Shawna Dolansky, who warns that we should beware of reading this story from a 21st century viewpoint, nevertheless elaborates on this verbal theme, particularly on the verb, “innah,” which is somewhat untranslatable but usually rendered in English as “rape.” She suggests that it means to “debase” or “lower a person’s status,” but most likely from her family’s perspective. So we don’t really know if Dinah consented, nor exactly what Shechem did when he “innahed” her. In any case, it was apparently to the extent that he fell in love with her.
To his credit, though, he did the honorable thing and asked Dinah’s father, Jacob – like Shechem’s father, Jacob was also an esteemed man in the land — for her hand in marriage. Jacob agrees to the marriage, but, in consultation with his numerous sons, with this condition: Since a Jewish women can only marry a circumcised male, Shechem’s whole tribe, along with him, must undergo circumcision as well.
Although Shechem and his father agree to both the marriage and the circumcision, a truly evil act takes place while the whole tribe is convalescing and unable to defend themselves. Two of the brothers, Shimon and Levi, surreptitiously descend on them and kill all the males of the tribe. There are whispers that they had secretly plotted to take advantage of the men in order to confiscate their property and cattle. Jacob, who has always had friendly relations with his neighbors, is so distraught that he feels he must move away in order to prevent vengeful retaliation.
The Torah should really be read straight through like a novel. Shimon and Levi defend themselves with this question: “Should he [Shechem] have been allowed to treat ours sister like a whore?” (Genesis 34:31). It’s a question that would surely have resonated in that time and place. In fact, writes Lewis M. Barth, “the misogynistic orientation of classical Rabbinic Judaism infuses many midrashic comments on this text with statements linking Dinah and her mother to prostitution. Probably the Rabbis reread the final question [above]…as a declarative sentence. The Rabbis’ comments specifically blame Dinah for being raped and being the cause of the slaughter of Shechem, Hamor, and all the males of their community.”
The biblical text, however, does not suggest that Shechem treated Dinah like a whore. We are told that he was drawn to her, and, although admittedly after the act of taking her, in love with her, and that he talked to her tenderly. Since he asked to marry her, surely he did not consider her to be a whore. At any rate, somewhat later in the text, Shimon and Levi get their come-uppance. Jacob does not speak well of them in his bedside oration, and Shimon and Levi are not assigned property in the Holy Land (Genesis 49:5-7).
Thousands of years later, Anita Diament’s The Red Tent (1997), while an historical fiction that invented a sequential period in Egypt, tried to substantially provide Dinah’s voice amid the atmosphere of the times. Of course it was widely read and appreciated – and still is – countless women. Fortunately, there are many female, as well as male, voices (besides lawyer Gloria Allred) that speak out for the Dinahs of this world today.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
Vayetse (Genesis 28:10 –32:2):
Rivalry, Fertility and Infertility, and Surrogacy
“Give me children or I shall die” (Genesis 30:1).
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
This parasha is a veritable soap opera of a chapter. It revolves around familial intrigue, trickery, and competition, initially between twin brothers for the birthright (both material and spiritual) that, in the biblical world, belonged rightfully to Esau, the elder son, a hunter rooted in the physical world. Although Esau was the firstborn son from Rebecca’s womb, Jacob, the more reflective younger son, is better suited to become the spiritual carrier of Jewish precepts into the next generation.
In the midst of this male battle for leadership supremacy, another kind of rivalry emerges: that of two women, Leah and Rachel (again a story of rivalry between the older and the younger), as these sisters compete in the realm of fertility, infertility, and surrogacy – and even romantic love. Both sisters sequentially become Jacob’s wives, but not in the order usually accepted in biblical times (birth order is a frequent theme in the Torah). Customarily, the older sister marries first, but not in this story, in which the trickster, Jacob — smitten with Rachel from the moment he glimpses her at her father’s well – is himself deceived by Rachel’s father, Laban (who is also Jacob’s uncle) into marrying the veiled older sister, Leah, instead. Yes, it’s complicated. This biblical deception is the reason’s why the groom lifts the bride’s veil before they finalize their vows, even in contemporary ceremonies, to ascertain that he is getting the right bride!
In his 2014 book, The Lost Matriarch, author Jerry Rabow explores the relationship between the two sisters [1]. He suggests the possibility that, with compassion for her older sister, it is actually an empathetic Rachel who arranges the deceptive marriage to Jacob, so that Leah will not be humiliated in the eyes of her community. However, it is Rachel’s father (also Jacob’s uncle), Laban, who is the chief deceiver here. He requires Jacob to work seven years tending his flocks in order to gain the hand of Rachel. But then Laban switches sisters in the marriage ceremony, and Jacob must work another seven years in order to gain his first love as his bride. (Spoiler alert: Jacob is permitted to marry Rachel after he has completed the first week of his seven-year travail – but he still has to work out the full time.)
So then Jacob has two wives to satisfy, no small commitment in biblical times when a woman’s chief role is to procreate – to bear, tend, and cook for lots of children. Indeed, the plight of barren women is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible. Leah proves to be very fertile, while, for an unbearably long time, Rachel is unable to conceive. But as Leah, who has her own reason to despair, initially produces four sons (Reuven, Shimon, Levi, and Yehudah), she names the first three to reflect her hope that each of their births will induce Jacob to love her.
Rabbi Ilana Grinblatt, who teaches Midrash (the traditional body of stories that imaginatively emerged to fill in the gaps in the Torah), wrote compassionately about these four sons in a Torah commentary posted by the Board of Rabbis of Southern California:
“Leah longed for her husband’s Jacob love so desperately that she named her first three sons after that desire. She named her first son Reuven -which means ‘see son” because she said, ‘God has seen my suffering and now my husband will love me.’ Leah named her second son Shimon which means ‘hear-suffering’ because she said, “God has heard that I am hated.” She named her third son Levi which means “join me” and said, “Now my husband will be attached to me. Yet, when she had her fourth son she said, “Hapa’am” – this time, I will thank God, and so she named him Yehudah which means ‘thank God’ ”[2].
“The Bible made Leah a Matriarch, but it took Midrash to make her a heroine,” comments Jerry Rabow [3]. He also comments extensively, but from a less flattering, male point of view, on the names that Leah bestows upon her children who have no choice in the matter.
Meanwhile, Rachel remains childless, weeping for her children, as the broken notes of the shofar’s call are said to symbolize. Driven by despair –“Give me children or I shall die” (Genesis 30:1) — she enlists the help of a surrogate, her handmaid, Bilhah, and implores Jacob to impregnate Bilhah, with the consequent birth of Dan and Naphtali [4].
Not to be one-upped by Rachel, Leah, who by this time had thought she was finished with child-bearing, enlists her own handmaid, Zilpah, and, through Zilpah’s surrogacy with Jacob, another two sons, Gad and Asher, are born.
An early version of enhancing fertility with medicinal drugs occurs when Leah solicits Rachel to give her some of the mandrake roots (believed to assist conception) that Rachel has managed to obtain, and Rachel complies. Thus Leah is enabled to add to her family through her own procreative ability, and before she is finished, although she has given up trying to get Jacob to love her, she has given birth to two more sons, Isaacher and Zebulun. Eventually, Leah also gives birth to a lone daughter, Dinah, destined to bring dishonor to her family.
As for Rachel, with the help of the mandrake roots, she is finally able to conceive in great joy, and Joseph, is born. He is destined to be sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, but will eventually rise to become the right hand man of the Pharaoh of Egypt, but we don’t know that yet. Sadly, Rachel dies in childbirth with her second son, Benjamin, who will be much loved by his grieving father. Eventually, but much later, all the brothers – and their father – will be reunited.
Or as the title of a very popular 1970s television sitcom told its audience, “It’s All in the Family.” But Genesis told such fascinating, complicated stories of family relationships first. To be continued….
[1] Jerry Rabow, The Lost Matriarch: Finding Leah in the Bible and the Midrash (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2014).
[2] Rabbi Ilana Grinblatt, “Vayatze,” Board of Rabbis of Southern California Torah commentary, 2017 (info@boardofrabbis.org).
[3] Rabow, 187.
[4] My 2008 book, Cryokid: Drawing a New Map, details assisted reproduction in contemporary times, but surrogacy through concubines was already an accepted fact of life in biblical times. Cryokid is available on Amazon.com. It was a finalist in the 2009 Indie Next Gen Awards of Excellence.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
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.
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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