THE MESSAGE OF THE WAVES [1]
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Continually, I try to make space on my bookshelves for new books. That means packing away others because rabbis tend to acquire a lot of books, two large bookcases full, in my case, overflowing on to piles on the floor and in little nooks and crannies around the house. Even my Kindle has grown heavy. I have considered putting the new books in the pantry, but my family dissuaded me. What could I relinquish then? Not books about Jewish history… or thought … or liturgy … or Jewish values. Not Talmudic logic or narrative or Hasidic tales. Certainly not the Torah, the Tenakh, and all the valuable commentaries I have acquired (and continue to acquire) over the years. They have become part of me. So I keep taking books off the shelf and putting them back.
One of the books I leafed through was Rabbi Ed Feinstein’s “Tough Questions Jews Ask,” a slim little volume intended for young adults. It flew open by itself at a page that addressed the question, “What is God Anyway?” What is the One in the Shema? That’s what the young adults he teaches want to know. They have been taught to say the Shema – six little words, we Jews say them all the time, we cover our eyes to increase concentration. But what does it mean? What does “One” mean?
In reply, the rabbi presented an analogy to the waves in the ocean. Imagine that you are at the ocean, he said, looking at that large body of water. If each wave had awareness, it would understand that it is part of something bigger. Each wave rises and comes to an individual crest – there are small waves and middle-size waves and huge waves (how big will this wave be?) – but their life span is short. They recede and become part of the ocean again. Once more each wave merges to become One.
It is so fascinating, I reflected, that in this century, scientists, great minds like Stephen Hawkings, have been trying to create a Theory of Everything. There is speculation that if Albert Einstein had lived in the age of Information Technology, he might have developed a formula for Everything. Now there is an Internet of Everything. Yet for thousands of years the Theory of Everything has been encoded in six little words in the Torah that end with three words: God is One.
What Rabbi Feinstein’s little book was really teaching these young people about was the ocean of humanity. We are all individual waves that eventually merge with the One, with the Everything. I put the little book back on my shelf. A keeper.
However, the analogy to the ocean didn’t mention the destructive power the same waves could unleash if nature ran wild. Or if, as portrayed in the Torah, God decided to destroy mankind by flood for immoral conduct beyond reprieve, a destruction God regretted and promised never to do again. “My love shall never depart from you,/And my covenant of peace shall not be removed — says the One who loves you, the Eternal” (Isaiah 54: 9-10).This is something to remember as once again our present day world stands on the brink of nuclear devastation. How do we best use our scientifically awesome individual and collective power? How do we prevent the flood?
I shook off these heavy thoughts and returned to the book shelf. Since one can readily find health care information on the Internet, I removed a large book — a tome, really — dealing with diagnoses and remedies for common medical problems. Then I gasped to see my late mother’s handwriting on the book’s flyleaf. It looked so much like my own, a little fancier, the letters more open. It was dated 1995 when my mother was 90 and intended as a birthday gift for my daughter. The inscription explained the etymology of the word shalom, one little word this time, one little word that guides our journey on earth from life to death. It is a salutation that greets us when we arrive. “Hello, we are glad you are here.” It means not only peace but wholeness, completion. For my mother, shalom also meant healing and health, all of which she wished her grand-daughter on her birthday, in effect, the day of my daughter’s continued rise to the crest of her individual wave. That is why my mother placed this inscription in a medical book.
Later, my mother explained, not only did shalom become salaam in Muslim usage, but the Malaysian Muslims adapted it to salang. Many years later British soldiers serving in Southeast Asia during World War II appropriated it when they returned to Britain, and that is how shalom, which also means goodbye became the salutation, “So Long.” I remember the words of this song of my Canadian youth, sung in hale and hearty celebration:
“So long, it’s been good to know you …
it’s a long time since I’ve been home.”
This is the message of the waves, I thought. A few little words. Enjoy your brief time as you rise to your towering strength. It’s been good to experience the air and the sun and to see far into the land, but don’t overpower it. Don’t use your strength to destroy. Be the best wave that you can be until it is time to recede into the company of the other waves in the Oneness of your eternal home. It’s good to be home. That’s what my mother did when she was ninety-three. She went home. To the One, to the Theory of Everything. Yet her generous spirit still lives in the company of those who knew her, loved her, in the inscribed message of the flyleaf. When we say shalom and mean it, we prevent the Flood.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2015. This story first appeared in my thesis, “The Staying Power of Hope in the Aggadic Narratives of the Talmud,” 2015.
* * * *
My International Kids: Lily and Mariko [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Hosting international students during the time my mother – who had lived with me for the last ten years — was cared for at a nursing home filled my own home with life, with young people who had dreams for the future. On occasion, some of the students visited the nursing home with me; they offered smiling faces and gentle words to my blind mother.
There was Lily (not her real name), a spunky, “poor little rich girl” from Taiwan who had spent most of her growing up years in boarding schools, and the best thing about her stay in Canada, she announced, was me. “I brought myself up,” she would say.
But her eyes sparkled. She was filled with curiosity about life in North America and wanted to see and know everything. The students all shared comments about their respective hosts, and Lily’s reports about me were so glowing that several of her fellow Taiwanese students made their house my meeting place on many evenings. The language school encouraged its host “families” to act like parents, even held meetings where we could get to know one another and share helpful observations, and so here I was – a surrogate Mom, whose own children were, at that point, living in other cities, making their way in the world. When one of my own daughters visited while Lily was living with me, she was surprised to hear Lily (and sometimes Lily’s friends) calling me “Mom.”
My daughter was also amazed that her new Taiwanese “siblings” always asked for “North American food.” Hot dogs and hamburgers were their preference, so they were very easy to please in the epicurean department. Most of them had lived their young lives in luxurious circumstances, catered to by housekeepers and maids, and had never learned to cook for themselves. They delighted in helping me clear the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher. Sometimes I helped them with their homework.
When they arrived in Toronto, all the Taiwanese girls spoke a precise, formal English, fluent in varying degrees, but they were anxious to talk like “native speakers.” I was really upset that their elite language school was teaching them “American-style” English, so that they would “fit in”: to say (and write!) things like “gonna” and “wanna” and “coulda” and “ya” instead of “going to,” “want to,” “could have,” and “you.”
Lily was fascinated by the new idioms she was absorbing on a daily basis. One evening she graphically demonstrated her latest idiomatic acquisition to me. Opening her mouth wide, she repeatedly moved her fingers back and forth inside this moist cavity, as if she were vomiting.
“Do you know what that means?” she cried excitedly.
“Tell me,” I said faintly.
“It sucks!” she pronounced proudly.
“They’re ruining your English,” I wailed.
She was not as impressed by the rooms of my home, though, as she was by her acquisition of English idioms. Although Lily was amazed at the spacious lawns that surrounded many of the homes in my Toronto neighborhood – in Taiwan, such exterior space is limited – she considered her bedroom at my home “small” in comparison to the spacious room she enjoyed in her parents’ grand apartment in Taiwan.
The holiday greeting card she sent to me when she returned home bore a triumphant “Joy!” on its cover. Inside was this message in carefully inscribed block letters:
“WISH YOU ALL THE BEST ON THE SPECIAL SEASON! SINCE WE MET ON LAST SUMMER, YOU’VE BEEN AN IMPORTANT PERSON IN MY LIFE. TO ME, YOU’RE A THOUGHTFUL MOMMY, A LOVELY FRIEND, A WISEFUL TEACHER. YOU’RE EVERYTHING!!! PLEASE REMEMBER ME, THE GIRL WHO ADMIRE YOU SO MUCH.
LILY.”
I still cry every time I come across her message. Dear Lily, I wish I could have given you a bigger room.
I learned, however, that perception of space is culturally conditioned when Mariko (not her real name) followed Lily as the next student I hosted. She found the room that Lily had occupied huge. Mariko was from a middle class family in Japan, where interior space is compact. In fact, she had never before called a room her own. At night, her family unrolled their tatamis, spread them on the floor, and slept in the same multi-purpose room together. In the morning, they simply rolled them up again. At home, she kept her few belongings in a small chest. At my home, she had a big closet with not much in it.
Unlike Lily, Mariko was an amazing chef and could slice cucumbers, tomatoes, and a variety of vegetables paper thin or into beautiful shapes with an alarmingly big knife in the blink of an eye. She took pride in creating some of the most beautifully crafted salads I have ever seen. But she purchased ready-made, packaged Miso soup at the supermarket. After she returned to Japan, a friend of her family hand-delivered a handsome, electric rice maker as a gift to me and bowed his many thanks on her behalf. And once she was back home, Mariko got a job (ready or not!) teaching first-level English at a Japanese language school.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved. Adapted from Corinne Heather Copnick, Cryokid: Drawing a New Map. (New York: iUniverse, 2008). Finalist in Next Gen Awards of Excellence, 2009. Available on Amazon.com.
* * * *
My International Kids: Khaled [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
n Toronto, in the absence of my children when they headed for the American Southwest, I “adopted” a surrogate family. For two years, I consecutively hosted what I called “my international kids,” a “family” of students from a variety of countries. They arrived with student visas that had been arranged in their countries of origin. I gave them my hospitality, my love, and my guidance in a strange land. From each of them I learned more than they learned from me.
My last student was called Khaled [not his real name] – and I would love him most of all. Like my own son. Khaled was from Saudi Arabia, and I was Canadian. He was Muslim, and I was Jewish. Like the other students I had hosted from many lands, he had come to Canada on a student visa to study at a private school catering to international students who wanted to learn English.
“You are so good with the students,” the coordinator cajoled. “If you are not happy, just call us, and we’ll place him elsewhere.”
Only Khaled didn’t know that he was coming to a Jewish home when he arrived at my home, fresh off the plane and obviously agitated because his luggage had apparently been lost and would be delivered to him later by immigration authorities. Every few minutes he kept stepping out of my home to nervously puff on a cigarette – the school had advised him that he could not smoke on my indoor premises.
He was bareheaded (later he wore a baseball cap) at the time and wearing a business suit, white shirt, and tie that were his usual garb during his more formal, first days in Canada. Sweat was glistening on his dark-skinned face, and his eyes darted nervously around, hesitant to look at me directly. His small mustache quivered above his compressed lips. He was twenty-six years old.
I didn’t know then that I was the first unveiled woman, apart from his mother and sisters, with whom he had ever been alone. Or that he had never before met a Jew.
I had struggled with my own doubts about accepting him as a resident in my home when the school had almost begged me to take him in. “We have such trouble in placing Saudis,” the harried housing coordinator explained. “Most of the Saudi students who come to us are from very wealthy families and tend to be somewhat arrogant. They treat the people who house them like servants.” She told me about one Saudi prince who was furious when the father of the hosting family asked him to limit his time on the only computer in the house. “The prince stamped out angrily,” she confided, “and came back a little later with is own newly purchased lap top.”
Khaled was not a prince. He had not travelled internationally. The only places he had ever visited outside of Saudi Arabia, and then only briefly with his father, a music teacher, were the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. He came, he said, from a “middle class” family of Bedouin heritage (cousins seek to marry cousins, and males must pay a bride price)in Saudi Arabia. The combined family income, with each of his eight brothers (several of whom had some degree of sickle cell disease) contributing, came to about $25,000 weekly.
When he sat down on my white-tiled kitchen floor to mix the rice for the meal he had offered to cook for me, it brought home to me the enormous chasm that separated our cultures – Khaled who called me “Mummy.” The worst day in his own mother’s life, she told her sons, was the one she was too sick to make her husband lunch and forgot to phone him not to come home for it.
“He loved her so much,” Khaled said with pride, “that he didn’t beat her.”
* * * *
Soon after I had transplanted myself to California – living now en famille with my daughter and infant grandchild – I received a concerned e-mail message from Khaled. It was 2001, and the 9/11 disaster was filling the world’s media screens.
“How are you, Mummy? Are you okay? How is your family?”
I noted that the return address on the e-mail was blank but replied immediately. “Yes, we are all okay in Los Angeles. Where are you, Khaled?”
“I am still in Toronto, Mum,” he answered. “I am trying to finish my studies.”
“I am glad that we had a chance to get to know and love one another in Toronto,” I responded calmly. “Let us hope for peace in the world, despite this madness.”
The last e-mail I would receive from him read, “They are crazy, Mummy. They kill everything, even peace.”
[1] ©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved. Adapted from Corinne Heather Copnick, Cryo Kid: Drawing a New Map, Los Angeles, (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2008). Finalist, Next Gen Awards of Excellence, 2009. Available from Amazon.com.
THE GUARANTORS
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Over the years, many imaginative stories have grown up to fill in the gaps in what the Torah tells us. As a favorite midrash from the Song of Songs Rabbah (1:4:1) narrates:
“When Israel stood ready to receive the Torah at Sinai, God said to the people: ‘I am giving you my Torah. Bring me good guarantors that you will guard it, and I shall give it to you.’ The Israelites asked God to accept the patriarchs as their guarantors. But God refused. They then suggest that the prophets should become their guarantors. And again God refuses. Finally, they say, “Behold, our children are our guarantors.” And God responds, ‘They are certainly good guarantors. For their sake, I give the Torah to you.’’’
Personally, I have always had the utmost respect for the prophets who spoke out against the dictums of the Torah being broken. Great prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah all suffered consequences for their honesty, their outspokenness, and their dramatic actions, which, in some instances, rivaled the street theatre of activist Alan Ginsberg and his ilk in the 1960s. These ancient prophets had no television, no 21st century Internet, texting, tweets, or Instagrams to communicate their unpopular messages to the people. They had to use more primitive methods: wearing an ox yoke to symbolize commitment to the Torah, posting messages on the Temple door, or staging what we would call a hunger strike today beside the Chabar Canal. The prophets were indeed guarantors of the Torah. Keep the commandments, they preached in their various ways, and fearlessly they rebuked the Jewish people in no uncertain terms, predicting dire consequences for straying from the covenant. But they also offered hope and consolation to those who returned to the Torah.
Today each of us who identify as Jews are guarantors of the Torah, and hopefully we will have children who will want to be Jewish and to be guarantors of the Torah too. Even more hopefully, we will have sufficient children to guarantee the continuity of the Jewish people. In the final analysis, we — each of us — are what our grandchildren are.
In my most optimistic moments, I like to recall the legend of the Lamed Vavs – that if there are only thirty-six righteous people in the four corners of the world, the world will be upheld, and we will always be alright. As individuals, we can’t always affect the course of history, or uphold the world by ourselves, but we can do little things that add up to a lot. In the spirit of the Torah, we can do little acts of kindness.
My father believed in the chain of goodness, that if you do a kind thing for someone, that person will do a kind thing for someone else, and thus the chain of goodness continues, unbroken. You are standing at Sinai. In contemporary terms, they call it “paying it forward.”
You are what your grandchildren are.
When I think of little acts of kindness, I often think of the young Hasid who drove me home in a blizzard when I lived in Toronto. I had bought a home in a mainly modern Orthodox area because I didn’t know if I would like the more straight-laced Toronto after the elegant, exuberant, francophone culture of Montreal, but I did know that I would always be able to sell a home that was within walking distance of so many synagogues. The garden of my house backed onto a lovely park that was very quiet during the week, but on Saturday afternoons, I loved watching the Orthodox families walking together in the park.
One night I drove home from a social gathering around midnight, and, by the time I reached my area, the thickly falling snow had turned into a blizzard. And sure enough, about fifteen or twenty blocks from my street, my car conked out. No way to start it, no how! It was absolutely dead. Cell phones had not yet been invented, so I couldn’t call for help. I couldn’t walk home; it was too far to go in the blinding blizzard, and I couldn’t stay in the car. Without heat, I would freeze. My windows were already frosted over and my car blanketed with snow.
I was loathe to knock on a stranger’s door after midnight. What to do? I decided to stand outside — in the blizzard — beside the car in the hope that someone would soon drive by on the deserted street. Smart people were inside.
Finally, as I was beginning to shiver and shake with the cold, despite my warm clothing, a black station wagon came to a halt beside me. Driving it was a young Hasid. “Do you need help?” he asked. He tried valiantly to start my car, but it was no use.
“I’ll have to leave the car here,” I said. “I just live a few blocks from here. Do you think you could drive me home?”
He looked uncomfortable, and I realized that he did not like the idea of being alone in a car with a strange woman. He scratched his ear behind his black hat. But, as the blizzard whirled around us, he swallowed his misgivings and said, “Sure. Hop in.”
Very carefully, looking straight ahead through the window and not at me, and not saying a word, he drove me home. As I got out of the car, I thanked him profusely. It was pitch dark outside, but I think he blushed. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do a mitzvah,” he replied.
As we looked at one another, two Jews whose backgrounds were so different, our eyes locked in a moment of understanding. A mitzvah. An act of loving kindness. Of course. We knew immediately that we were witnesses. We had seen one another at Sinai. In the midst of a blizzard, a generation apart, we would be guarantors.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2015. This story first appeared in my thesis, “The Staying Power of Hope in the Aggadic Narratives of the Talmud,” 2015. I have also narrated it at various gatherings.
Postscript to the Garden: Knowledge [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
No temptress made me taste forbidden fruit,
I who bareheaded looked God in the eye
was singly my own seducer.
Seven veils vainly cover
my belly’s earthworm’s dance.
Are some things better left unknown?
Snaked to the ground,
I hide my vision, stop my ears,
my mouth fills dumbly with dust.
Who bid me sleuth mystery
prematurely face to face
before the final encounter?
God of wrath, vowed
I have eaten your anger.
Help me rise to receive your love.
©️Corinne Copnick Spiegel, Montreal, 1981; Los Angeles, 2017.
[1] “Knowledge” originally appeared in Embrace/Etreinte: A Love Story in Poetry (Une Poeme d’Amour) by Corinne Copnick Spiegel. (Montreal: Editions Guy Maheux, 1981), 45. “Embrace/Etreinte is ” a volume of bilingual (English/French) poems, published at a volatile time in Quebec and dedicated to people of both French and English cultures. “Embrace/Etreinte,” can be found occasionally on rare book sites. The poem, “Knowledge, was subsequently published in “Bitterroot,” ed. Menke Katz (N.Y., ca. 1981) an international poetry magazine (1962-1991) showcasing poets with mystical reach.