A D’var Torah: by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“Blessed shall you be in your comings and blessed shall you be in your goings” (Deut. 28:6)
Ki Tavo, which means “when you come to,” referring to the Holy Land (and also, according to Talmudic lore, to when you enter the world without sin, in the hope that you may leave it the same way) [1] is often called the “Blessings and Curses” chapter.
Personally, I have experienced many blessings. For one thing, I have a loving family. Secondly, I live in sunny California, something that can only be appreciated fully by someone who has spent most of her life in a wintry climate. You have to admit, though, that this state is an uncommonly beautiful and diverse –both geographically and humanly — part of America. Thirdly, I have been able to visit Israel twice and look forward to the next time. Yes, I am saying it out loud.
“Blessings and curses were closely bound to a belief in the power of speech,” in a way that was almost magical, writes Rabbi Gunther Plaut in The Torah: A Modern Commentary [2]. In fact, when this parasha is read aloud in the synagogue, the reciters lower their voices to a whisper when it comes to the curses.
Bar/Bat Mitzvah kids groan when they have to learn this portion for their Jewish coming-of-age ceremony. Since the list of curses are four times the length of the blessings, many wise rabbis simply give these young people the “blessings” part to absorb.
But sometimes curses can turn into blessings. When the last stock market crash occurred, cutting my hard-earned, mutual fund savings in half at a time in my life when I could not replace what was lost, I was distraught. Then I decided that the best investment was in myself: I enrolled in rabbinic school, and my rabbinic education and eventual ordination has turned out to be a wondrous, life-changing blessing, one that I can hopefully transmit to other people.
Both “the blessings and the curses,” Richard Elliott Friedman points out, “are there out of a realistic recognition of human psychology: rewards and punishments are effective tools of instruction from childhood and up. But the aim is higher: that humans should come to see that what is being put in their hands is ‘life’ and ‘good’ and love’ (Deut.30:15-16) [3]. There are indeed many blessings to come.
Towards the beginning of Ki Tavo is a summary of all the blessings that the Creator has already given to the Israelites, beginning with their liberation from Egypt. You may recognize this time-honored portion (don’t skip it!) from the Passover Haggadah:
“My father was a fugitive Aramaean [4]. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there, but there he became a great and populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Lord freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deut: 26:5-9).
Isn’t it amazing how quickly we forget good things that were done for us in the past and get into the “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” mode? So at least twice a year, when we read Ki Tavo in the approach to Rosh HaShanah, and again in the Spring in the month of Nisan, we remember to be grateful for past gifts.
The Haftarah (Isaiah 60:1-22) that accompanies this Torah portion, framed in the imagery of light and of worldly splendor, is itself a gift to the human spirit. It is the sixth of seven weekly haftarot of consolation recited weekly to precede Rosh HaShana after the devastation of Tisha B’Av. Distinguished commentator Michael Fishbane discusses the Haftarah’s proclamation of the new light that shines on Jerusalem because God’s presence is now there. The Haftarah also predicts the ingathering of the exiles to Zion, of a glory that transcends nature, and of the peace and victory that will ensue [4].
Given the devastation from natural causes during the past weeks in the world we live in today, this Haftarah is especially uplifting this Shabbat, with its poetic message of redemption. It is one of the most beautiful of all the Haftarahs:
“Arise [kumi], shine [ori] for your light has dawned;
The Presence of the Lord has shone upon you!” (Isaiah 60:1)….
“And nations shall walk by your light” (Isaiah 60:3).
Could we ask for anything more? Shabbat shalom!
[1] Cited in Gunther Plaut, Ed.,“Gleanings, “ The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised edition (New York: Union for Reform Judaism),1366.
[2] Ibid., 1363
[3] Commentary on the Torah, with a new English trans. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003),648.
[4] “Fugitive” is alternatively translated as “wandering.” According to Plaut, the Aramean could refer to Abraham (not a fugitive) or Jacob (not an Aramean), but was possibly Laban, who tried to undo Jacob (representing the father in this passage), Ibid., 1363.
However, more plausibly in my view, the revered 16th century rabbi, Sforno, identifies Jacob as the wandering Aramean because for a time “he was a wanderer in Aram without a permanent home and therefore not prepared to establish a nation fit to inherit a land” (Sforno: Commentary on the Torah, eds. Rabbis Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz, trans., notes Rabbi Raphael Pelcovitz (N.Y.: Mesorah Publications, 1993) 837.
[5] Michael Fishbane. The JPS Bible Commentary: Haftarot (Philadelphia: JPS, 2002), 304-305.
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
My maternal grandmother, Rachel Freedman, had a very loving view of God. She imbued in me the idea that the God of Israel was compassionate, forgiving. In my grandmother’s mind, God would always understand — within my grandmother’s religious and moral boundaries, of course.
For instance, my grandmother kept a strictly kosher home all of her life. So she would never eat ANYTHING at my mother’s house because my mother had been brought up in a kosher home (my grandmother’s), and therefore she should know better than to be a Reform Jew who didn’t uphold all the Judaic rules.
Yet my grandmother ate at MY home – also within certain boundaries – because I, her darling ainekel, had been brought up in a home that DIDN’T KEEP KOSHER, and therefore I hadn’t been taught better.
So my grandmother sat down, along with my parents, at my Friday night table most every week from the time that I married (at 22, which seems so young today, but then was quite normal, even late, to be wed) until almost the day she died. But my grandmother only ate the fruit salad I would specially prepare for her on a glass plate never used for any other purpose. Also a small piece of the kosher challah. And she always had a glass of red wine because it was good for her heart. God would understand, she said.
Since my husband and I lived quite a distance away from her own apartment, she allowed herself to be driven (by my parents) to our home for Friday night dinner and then back again at the conclusion of the evening. God would understand, she assured me, that it is more important to share a Sabbath meal with your beloved grandchild and her husband (and later with her great-grandchildren) than to obey the injunction not to drive when distances were so far. (It’s not as if we had to throw a blanket over a camel or commandeer a horse and wagon). My grandmother was pretty good at getting God to approve of what she wanted.
My long-deceased maternal grandfather, on the other hand, had been a labor socialist immigrant to Canada from Russia in 1903. Although he claimed to be an atheist, he was nevertheless active in organizing the Russian-Polish Society’s Jewish cemetery in Montreal. It is still there on rue de la Savane, where my grandfather’s name – Joseph Freedman – is etched in stone as one of its founders.
In fact, when my father, Rachel and Joseph’s son-in-law, graduated as a dental surgeon from McGill University, his first job was with the landzman Russian-Polish Society, whose members he tried to educate in taking better care of their teeth. This he did with the aid of the Talmud. In the 1837 Jubilee Anniversary book of the Society, he began his article, “Dentistry and the Jewish Public,” with this story:
“The Talmud tells of a pseudo-scientist who, although able to count diligently the planets of the sky, did not know how many teeth there were in his oral cavity. One day this man bragged about his profound knowledge of astronomy in the presence of the great Rabbi Gamliel and said: ‘The number of stars is well known to me.’ Smiling, the Sage replied, ‘Tell me how many teeth you have.” The braggart, confused, put his hand to his mouth and began to count them. The Rabbi then exclaimed, ‘You don’t even know what you have in your own mouth. How do you expect to know what there is in the sky?”
As we approach Rosh HaShanah In 2017, we humans think we know quite a lot scientifically about stars and planets and how to travel to them, and about crashing meteors, and even multiple universes, perhaps to an unimaginable infinity. But we are still trying to discover whether life existed on any of them before the created beings of this Planet Earth did. We are still awed by the constantly changing “facts,” whether allegorical, scientific, evolutionary, or theological, and the manner of creation.
And, even with all our technological tools, we are still overcome by the unpredictable patterns of the sea and the devastation to the land and its people that overflowing waters and uncontrollable air currents – and human greed — can wreak. How much has really changed since the biblical generation of Noah inhabited the earth?
This is the greatest who-done-it story of all time. Is God the Creator the perpetrator of this chaos? Of the deaths of so many innocent people? Is God the perp? Or do we humans have a hand in it? Or is that just the way Nature is? I feel as if I’m still counting the teeth in my mouth. Dear God, I don’t understand.
(When Corinne Copnick, now an ordained rabbi, contemplated moving from Toronto to California, she sent a number of stories about her experiences back to The Jewish Tribune, a national Canadian newspaper, for which she had written a weekly column and other stories for several years. This true story was first published in 1998. She has made a few small changes here.)
KISS A WHALE — AND LICK CANCER?
The Whale Enjoyed it Too!
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
The biblical Jonah didn’t know about it when he inhabited the belly of a whale, but kissing a whale can lead to an easy recovery from cancer surgery. It may not be in the medical text books, but that’s what Jane (not her real name) believes. She is a retired Canadian businesswoman now living in coastal California.
The encounter between Jane and a young Pacific grey whale took place in the warm, salty waters of San Ignacio Lagoon on the western coast of Baja California. This area is the mating and birthing grounds of thousands of Pacific grey whales who divide their time between Baha and their feeding grounds near Alaska.
After their encounter – a friendly kiss — Jane, who teaches yoga, felt as if she had journeyed through a mystical experience. Apparently, the whale enjoyed her kiss too, and it may even have been partly the whale’s idea. Richman weighs a little over a hundred pounds. The whale weighs in at fifty times more.
“The young whale came right up to the boat, and his head came straight out of the water,” Jane recounted excitedly. “I leaned over and kissed him.” At the time, she was one of several dozen members of a whale-watching expedition sponsored by the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Diego.
Her husband (now late husband), Mark (not his real name), had arranged to take her on the whale-watching trip three days before her operation for thyroid cancer. Jane was dreading the operation because previous thyroid surgery had involved a very painful recovery. But after kissing the whale, she claims, both the surgery and the recovery were a breeze in comparison to her previous experience. She credits the awes-inspiring whale encounter with giving her such a positive feeling about life that it affected the aftermath of her surgery.
It is not only Jane who believes the whale kiss helped her lick cancer. Her husband felt the same way. In fact, he filmed his wife’s interaction with the whale, as well as another two hours of the whale-watching trip. The behavior of these “friendly” whales, he pointed out at the time, is particularly astonishing “when measured against the savage, bloody history of mankind’s interaction with the Pacific gray whale.”
It is not known exactly why whales in these protected lagoons actually seek out physical contact with humans. According to a report in California’s Westside News, “the young whales in particular swim right up to small boats, pop their heads out of the water, look around with eyes the size of baseballs, and then, like dogs wanting to be petted, nuzzle up to the boats and the outstretched hands of the humans aboard. They seem to enjoy the contact. With the mother keeping a watchful eye nearby, some of the young whales will frolic around the boats for half an hour or more. Sometimes the mother will even nudge her off-spring toward the boats, as if eager for the young whale to get a look at the strange creatures inside.”
Just in case you’re already reaching for your weathered copy of Moby Dick for a whale refresher, the story of Jonah, which traditionally we’ll be reading on Yom Kippur afternoon, is even more enthralling. When he got a long look at the inside of that strange creature, the whale, he underwent a complete spiritual overhaul. Just like Jane says she did when she shared a friendly kiss with a young whale on the west coast of Baja California. In that mystical moment, she understood the interconnectedness of all living creatures. She tickled the insides of the whale’s cheeks too, and he loved it.
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, and you take some of them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and would take her to wife, you shall bring her into your house, and she shall trim her hair, pare her nails, and discard her captive’s garb. She shall spend a month’s time in your house lamenting her father and mother; after that you may come to her and possess her, and she shall be your wife” (Deut. 21:10- 13 ).
If you are a rabbi intending to write a concise D’var Torah, it is certainly an exploratory journey to sort through through the myriad of Judaic laws and ethical considerations that make up Ki Tetsei (meaning “when you take”). Then, when you take the centuries of rabbinic and midrashic commentary into account as well, there is enough legal content, sensitivity, and human understanding – not to mention rationality — in this powerful parasha for a lifetime of study.
Finally, I settled on the opening verses of the parasha. What I had in mind was the relative kindness – in that time and place – with which Jewish law mandates a captive woman must be treated by soldiers in time of war. Especially if she is beautiful and evokes a soldier’s sexual desire. Rape is not condoned in the Torah, not on the battlefield, not anywhere (as long as the woman cries out for help).
Richard Elliott Friedman explains this important dictum in the notes to his vibrant, plain-spoken Commentary on the Torah [1] “Contrary to one of the most common practices of war, the Israelite soldier is not permitted to rape her [the captured woman]. He may take her as a wife. But even then he must give her time to mourn the loss of her family.” The month allowed for grieving is is also intended as a period of reflection, a time to reject the gods of her culture and to accept the God of Israel, something she must do in order to marry a Jewish man. It is additionally a time of purification – in accordance with Jewish mourning rites, she must cut her hair and pare her nails — that is sensitive both to Jewish law and to the emotional needs of the woman concerned. Given the tenor of the times, it bespeaks a human generosity on the part of the man.
I agree with Friedman’s interpretation of this passage. In our modern, technological society, many people would, I believe. Yet in this same century, 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram militants, and women have been gang-raped in India, Mexico, and too many other countries, including our own. Smugglers entice women from poor, “undeveloped” countries to the U.S.A. with false promises of employment, only to force them into prostitution. That is why this Torah portion remains very relevant today.
Surprisingly, however, the time-honored medieval rabbis [2]– a whole bunch of them (Rashi, Nahmanides, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Abarbanel, Gersonides, Hizkuni), almost uniformly look at this granting of a mourning period with a patriarchal, even misogynistic, perspective quite different from Friedman’s. Or mine. While the mourning period allowed the woman is undeniably humane, they point out that the soldiers likely would not have killed her mother (thus she would have at least some family left!), and maybe her father fled the battlefield. Furthermore, this 30-day period is intended to give the desire-stricken soldier a cooling-off period.
The medieval rabbis do a real hatchet job on the captured woman! They point out that the surrounding pagan cultures deliberately sent their women out in revealing dress in order to entice the Israelite soldiers. So taking off her captive’s garb meant that this woman would be changing into more modest dress. In addition, they question whether she “does” her nails (“yields her crop”) for mourning purposes. They claim that the Hebrew verb used suggests that she “grows” them long so that her claw-like nails and shorn head look distasteful in the soldier’s eyes. It is a very different perspective, indeed. At any rate, only after this 30-day period can this soldier have sexual relations with the captured woman and make her his wife.
At the same time, the Torah portion itself realistically recognizes that sexual desire can be fickle: “Then, should you no longer want her, you must release her outright. You must not sell her for money; since you had your will of her, you must not enslave her” (Deut. 21: -14). In other words, if, having now found the once beautiful captive distasteful, the soldier rejects the captured woman as his wife, Ki Tetze warns that, since he has degraded her, he cannot treat her as a slave or sell her to someone else. He must let her go free. Friedman notes that here “[t]he Torah text uses the same verb as in the law of divorce” (Deut: 24:1). [3]
As a Jewish people once enslaved by the Egyptians – and who celebrate our release every year – we are taught what slavery does to the human spirit. We are expected to understand the harm done to the psyche by such degradation and humiliation. “The [Hebrew] words for degrading her and for letting her go are the same words that are used to describe the Egyptians’ degrading of Israel and then letting Israel go (Exod. 1:11-12; 5:1),” Friedman points out [4].
As a people, we have also learned in every generation to have compassion for others, that compassion is the counterpart to justice. As Jews, we are expected to act when injustice is done – not just to sit around tut-tutting about how terrible it is when bad things happen. There are still slaves, and still beautiful women forced to prostitute themselves in order to survive, in other parts of the world. Certainly it is something to think about – enslavement, justice, compassion, action — during the High Holy Days.
[1] Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, with a New English Translation and the Hebrew Text (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 629.
[2] All those listed above are quoted at length in “Deuteronomy,” The Commentators’ Bible: The Rubin JPS Miqura’ot Gedolot, ed., trans., and annotated by Michael Carasik (USA: Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 142-143.
[3] Friedman, 629.
[4] Ibid.
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This story was first told by Rabbi Corinne Copnick at a storytelling conference in Toronto, Ontario and later published on http://cryo-kid.blogspot.com.
Why Hurt, Little Tooth?
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I’m going to tell you a story – a true story about my father who was a Montreal dentist. I first told this story at a storytelling session, where one creative artist after another got up and told a story. We made them up. To relax. For fun. Because, after two days of workshopping, it was a time for sharing. And now I want to share my story with you.
At the storytelling session, just before my turn, a young student was telling a story about chickens, and the story preceding her story concerned the financially hard times we were experiencing in Canada in the early nineties.
But only half of my mind listened to the students’ tales. I was spinning my own reverie, the other part of my mind taking me back to the the 1930s, to the “real” depression years. I was thinking about hard times, about chickens…about my father. He had so recently passed away.
The chickens I was remembering were the ones my father got in return for fillings in the jobless thirties. Then people asked, “Are you working?” instead of “Hello, how are you?” If you were working, you were obviously all right.
In that very real depression in 1936, the year I was born, my father was accepting not only chickens, but their offspring, eggs. He would receive a wide assortment of other small items (usually grown in people’s back yards) bartered in return for dental work. His impoverished clients could not otherwise pay. My father had been providing food for his own little family in this way since 1933, the year he graduated in dentistry from McGill University.
He had actually been accepted into medicine, quite an achievement at a time when McGill accepted few Jews, especially a poor boy like my father – who sat with his hands covering the elbow holes of his jacket.
My father, the son of a junk peddler, was the only one of eight children to make it to university. This he did by dint of several scholarships and also by holding three jobs at the same time. He peeled potatoes at the amusement park (late night shift), worked as a longshoreman on the docks (summer), and served as a guide on a Montreal tour bus (weekends).
But he couldn’t accept his hard-won entry into medicine. In those days, a Canadian medical graduate had to do a two-year, unpaid hospital internship after graduation. This my father could never afford.
Instead he went into dentistry, which didn’t require the roadblock internship. Although he was very proud of his surgical skills, what I remember most about my father was his compassion. Quite simply, he cared about his patients. He was the kind of dentist who brought morning tea and toast to a disabled patient he was worried about. Once I saw him give back money to a woman who paid him in handkerchief-wrapped quarters and dimes.
“You’ll pay me when you have a little more money,” he said softly. And when his patients didn’t have any, they could bring him some bread or home-baked cake or garden peas – or a chicken.
We ate a lot of chicken. In those old-fashioned, caring, depression days, my father’s office was in our home. In 1939 just before he voluntarily joined the army and went to war, I was just a little girl, but I remember playing with toys in my father’s waiting room. I remember watching the stream of dental patients come with food and go out with fillings.
I remember the incredulous screams of joy that came from his office late one afternoon. My mother came running, and, for a long while after that, I heard sounds that, even to my little girl’s ears that didn’t know yet about miracles, signaled that something momentous was taking place here, in my father’s office.
As I peeked in the doorway, I could see that an elderly woman who had come with a chicken was sitting in the dental chair. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and they were also making joyful pathways down the face of the sister who stood, clutching her hand, beside her.
My father also stood, transfixed, his voice husky with emotion as he asked the elderly woman questions pertinent to this moment none of them would ever forget.
“You can see?” he asked in a hushed tone.
“I can see, I can see,” the woman smiled through her tears. “Oh, dear God, I can see!”
Her sister had brought her to my father’s dental office because she had been suffering from an agonizing toothache. To go to a dentist cost money she couldn’t afford, and she had waited and waited until she couldn’t bear the pain any more. How could one little tooth hurt so much?
Finally, she came to my father. A kind man who would accept whatever she could spare, people said, and so she came with her little offering of food. She walked in, guided by her sister, because the elderly lady was blind. She had been unable to see anything, not anything at all, for several years.
As my father tried to alleviate this terrible ache with his dental arts, as he extracted the rotted, blackened tooth that poverty had kept in the old lady’s mouth, she began to shriek her joyful disbelief. The tooth had been pressing on an optic nerve. For all of the several years the woman had been unable to see.
In my father’s dental chair, as the tooth was removed, as the pressure on the nerve was taken away, she began to see. Oh, not all at once! At first she could only see shadowy glimpses, floating by in black and white. But in the days before color and clarity once again began to fill her world, she could see images – beautiful, long-lost images. She could see the shape of things to come. She could see that the world was a wondrous place where miracles can happen. And that there were people like my father in it.
It was not long after this incident that my father began to feed his family (now there was my sister) with a monthly check from the army. And in the newsletter printed by the Canadian army in Canada, and also in England where my father was stationed during World War II, a poem written by him appeared.
The poem was called, “Why hurt, little tooth?” It didn’t mention the elderly lady. It didn’t mention the miracle. I was only a little girl, but even I knew that the little tooth didn’t hurt any more.
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