Who? [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Who can dry the tears of God?
Is it the earth forever
quivering with remorse
or space itself curving
to cradle such pain?
Who can share the fears of God?
Is it man and wife grown
old in friendship, enfolding
family before and
after their ending?
Who can light the face of God?
Is it an artist’s fiery spirit
steeping red-blossomed in
a rose-petal’s clear
white water?
Who can feel the touch of God?
Is it our sleeping child
caressing once more
the wounded world
with wakened wonder?
Who can know the mind of God?
Ah!…
©Corinne Copnick, Toronto, 1992; Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
[1] “Who?”– my anthropomorphized concept of God in the spirit of poetic license — was originally narrated in “Altar Pieces (1992)” a collage of my poems and stories that was screened nationally many times on Canada’s “Vision TV” over a period of five years.
Yizkor: Remembering [1]
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
We have to accept that our flesh and blood, earthly lives – all life, our lives, the lives of our parents — eventually come to an end. But that understanding does little to reduce the pain of watching an ailing parent, a beloved parent, decline and deteriorate when there is nothing more we can do to reverse the effects of nature. In many instances — if we are lucky — this is our first personal encounter with death, and it brings into question our own mortality. It is painful to lose our beloved protector, not the protector of theology or the supernatural one of fiction, but our own personal protector who participated in giving us life.
Death is a homecoming, according to Abraham Joshua Heschel. In the final analysis, in the same way one prepares for life, one must prepare for death and depart with a sense of peace. “The Jewish mystical tradition sees old age in a positive light,” writes Rabbi A. J. Seltzer. “Aging is not seen as a defect to be eliminated by medical science. Old age presents the opportunity for the divine soul to assert primacy over the animal soul….The more the powers of the body subside and the fires of passion ebb, the stronger the spirit becomes…and the greater its joy over what it knows.” _
* * * *
Dr. Irving (Israel) Copnick
As I helped feed my father in the dining room of the hospital for the aged where he was confined, I slowly became aware of an incessant refrain. It came from a nearby elderly female body, twisted and deformed. Professionally, a uniformed attendant continued spooning soup into the old lady’s mouth. The soup dribbled down her chin while she chanted over and over again in Yiddish, “Ich vil nor leben, ich vil nor leben!” (“I want to go on living. I still want to live.”)
The confused floor for the totally helpless. Despite all assurances, I was not prepared for my father’s placement in surroundings where his companions were those who had lost their way in the world. My father had been a member of a healing profession. Now the healer could not be healed. I was not ready for this reality.
Nor was I prepared for the fact that my mother would be spending part of every day at the home-hospital and feeling guilty if she missed a morning. She had already tended him, confused and incontinent, for nine years by herself at home. She had been coming to the hospital every day for four years. She had exhausted her self and her financial resources. And so we moved the man that we both loved from this friendly, sectarian hospital to a larger government hospital – bright and airy – twenty miles away. My father had been an officer in the army, and this was a hospital for veterans.
When I walked through these halls lined with men occasionally saluting one another, reliving their days as heroes, remembering when they were healthy and went to war for their country, I could remember myself as a little girl, standing proudly beside my father, so handsome in his new Captain’s uniform. Together we peered through the venetian blinds at the parade of soldiers smartly marching in unison several stories below.
My father….
I have come to accept that even when the loved one does not know you anymore, even when a gleam in the eye can no longer be evoked, there is still a breath of fresh air, a ray of sunshine, a taste of cool ice cream. These were the things my father could enjoy. Or the touch of my hand even if he didn’t know it was mine. And when, just once, he tapped his foot in sudden response to a familiar song, I knew my father was, for those few seconds, alive in spirit for me.
In this more distant setting, we do not visit as often now. We feel the need to detach ourselves from the accumulation of what is now more than twenty years’ witness to suffering, to remove ourselves from continually reliving the pain. But although he know longer knows us, he is still ours. Still a part of us. Neither can we abandon him.
“You understand, darling,” my father had written to me during the war when I was just a little girl, “your father is a doctor and a soldier. I dream of you every night, and I pray to God to protect you while I am gone. I miss you terribly, but soon, very soon, I shall come home again.”
I knew that I had brought my father to his last home. For that is the dread of placement – that it is final – a stepping stone to death. Only death will secure one’s release, once admitted, from these walls. And you can’t get out of death alive. That is what is so hard to face. That in placing someone you love, you must come to terms with your own mortality too.
What placing my father, with all its attendant sorrows, has given me that is positive, is a deeper understanding of the sanctity of life. That while the heart beats, there must be dignity, and that while the heart beats, there must be joy.
There is always compensation. When we placed my father here – his death in life – my mother began to live again. Who can know the mind of God?
* * * *
There is so much that we do not know about life and death in this world and the next. My father had not been able to utter a word for eleven years, nor to give any evidence that he heard the tender words with which my mother and I caressed him when we visited. Then, on a day that was earth-shaking for me, I told him that I was going to teach a course at McGill University (something I knew that he would prize), and for the next thirty seconds or so, my father burst into speech. He spoke to me in Yiddish (his first language as a young boy, but one with which he never addressed me), and the cascade of words told me how much he loved me, that I was the finest, the best. These words were the last my father, my earthly protector, ever spoke to me – or to anyone. They were his last words.
I will always remember.
©️Corinne Copnick, Toronto, 1992, Los Angeles 2015, 2017. All rights reserved.
* * * *
[1] “Yizkor” originally titled“ The Loss of the Protector,” is reprinted from an editorialized version in my 2015 thesis, “The Staying Power of Hope in the Aggadic Narratives of the Talmud.” It was first told in “Altar Pieces” (1992), a narrated collage of my original stories and poems that was videotaped and screened nationally many times on Canada’s “Vision TV” over a period of five years.
With the resurgence of Nazi ideology in many places in the world, including, sadly, America, my story, “Dried Brown Ink,” written in 2007 (when my sister was still alive), is a reminder of what happened once – and must never happen again. It is also a testament to the human spirit.
Dried Brown Ink (1)
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick (2)
The little old lady presents the kind of idyllic grandmother you see in a commercial: perfectly waved white hair, no make-up, metal-rimmed glasses, a simple, white dress flecked with black, pearl necklace and earrings. And a soft voice. Her name, it turns out later, is Edith Reimer. Could be an Ashkenazi Jewish name, but she is not Jewish.
I am wearing a necklet, a small Jewish star. She leans forward and whispers in my ear, “People say it didn’t happen. But I saw it with my own eyes. I have the photographs. Of Bergen Belsen. I took them with my own camera.”
We are both sitting at an elegantly set lunch table at the British Home in Sierra Madre, California. On the white tablecloth, place settings of English china are framed by silver flatware in an antique pattern. English antiques, their polished dark wood glowing, stand stalwartly like guardians around the perimeter of the dining room. The tranquil, civilized setting amid five acres of green, rolling landscape seems a million miles away from horror. Yet all the inhabitants of the room are witnesses to history.
I am only a visitor to this room, a 21st century Canadian immigrant to Los Angeles who will leave after lunch. Considerably younger than the other diners, I have just entered my seventies, but I remember well what happened in the middle years of the twentieth century. I am a witness too.
The British Home in California is a private corporation with a connection (not financial) to the Daughters of the British Empire (a classy, long-distinguished organization) since the 1930s. It offers a retirement home in a beautiful setting to seniors living in California who come from the countries of the commonwealth. I learned about this remarkable facility from the Women’s Canadian Club in Los Angeles. I am checking it out for my sister, also a Canadian by birth. She lives in New York, and I would like to bring her to California. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the continuing terrorist activities that destroy innocent people, it seems so important to gather your loved ones close to you. Unfortunately, the Home is not licensed for wheelchairs. Walkers yes, wheelchairs, no.
“I worked for the United Nations after World War II,” Edith confides. She does not need a walker. “In the refugee camps. I was a nurse in England, and my husband was stationed in Germany. I came to be with him. My second child was born in Wittenberg.” The last city that was bombed in Germany. Her first child, a son, was killed in the blitz in England. He was five years old.
“I am sure he is in your thoughts every day,” I respond.
“Yes,” she nods simply, continuing to eat her salad. “My daughter was born in America. She comes every second Saturday to take me shopping. I was a nurse in America too.”( One of the longest residents, Edith had been living at the British Home for more than ten years when she told me her story.)
All of the men and women in the room – there are twenty-two at the Home at the moment, but there is a capacity for forty-one people in pretty bungalows framed by verandahs and placed like paintings at distances permitting privacy – have stories to tell, and most have distinguished backgrounds. A lady at the next table, just back from the hospital, was born in Winnipeg. She taught creative writing. “If you come from freezing Winnipeg, you can get through anything,” I joke.
“If you come to my room after lunch, I’ll show you the photographs,” Edith offers. We dispense with dessert, a frothy strawberry mousse, and walk up a slight incline to her bungalow. “I have the best view,” she chortles.
In her room, Edith shows me the handicrafts she makes for children – dolls , and crayon boxes, and dresses. Then she takes a small folder of photographs from her dresser drawer. The bed-sitting room is large enough to hold only a few of her cherished momentoes. She has parted with most of her fine furniture and china and silver, but she has hung onto these photos for half a century and carried them with her to this place of final residence. The folder still bears the imprint of the German photo shop that printed them.
The photos are inscribed with faded brown ink in Edith’s handwriting on the reverse and the dates. One photo shows Jewish bodies stacked up like cordwood for the furnaces. Another shows the bodies laid out decently for burial by American soldiers. The subject of another photograph is an American soldier offering a cigarette to a survivor; another refugee is crouched against the wall in the background. Then there are bombed-out views of Hitler’s house, Goering’s house. The destroyed houses of fanatical leadership whose followers exploded bombs on her little son.
We are silent for a few moments together. What is there to say? We both know.
“These photos are historical documents,” I suggest finally. “They should be in a place like the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance.”
“Ah,” she says dismissively. “They have plenty of these.”
“Not taken by your camera,” I offer softly. “Not seen with your own eyes.”
As she puts them away carefully, I prepare to take my leave. We kiss goodbye. Born in companionate countries as members of the British Commonwealth, immigrants to the Southwestern United States — one Jewish, one not — in different centuries, we have shared a memory that has faded for much of the world. Like the dried brown ink.
(1) “Dried Brown Ink” was first published in the 40th year edition of “Western States Jewish History,” Vol. XL, No. 2, Winter 2008, pp. 117 -199, ©Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2007. The author has made a couple of small alterations to the story here.
(2) Corinne Copnick entered rabbinic school at AJRCA in 2009 and graduated as an ordained rabbi in 2015. Many of her original stories are featured on her website: www.rabbicorinne.com.
HA’AZINU
A D’VAR TORAH: BY RABBI CORINNE COPNICK
In the brilliantly evocative Song of Moses that appears as Ha’azinu at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses assures the Israelites that all of Creation is indeed God’s work. The language and imagery is passionate: It was I, God says, “Ani, Ani,” that did all this. In Hebrew, the language is even more gripping, and when God finally says, “I, Anochi,” you know God means business. It’s a word that it used in the Bible, but not in rabbinic times, and it refers only to God.
In this unforgettable passage, we are assured of all the good things that will happen if we follow the moral path divinely outlined for us: feasting on the yield of the earth, honey from the crag, oil from the flinty rock, curd of kine and milk of flocks, the best of lambs, rams, and she-goats, the very finest of wheat, and foaming wine from grapes. This was fantastic fortune in an agricultural society. But then we are warned about the catastrophic things that could happen if we do NOT cleave to God’s moral path: consuming fire and misfortune, wasting famine, ravaging plague, deadly pestilence, fanged beasts, and so on. God will reduce us to naught. The whole catalogue is terrifying.
In a world that has been so recently beset by disasters both natural and man-wrought, these biblical consequences seem dangerously close to us: economic woes, earthquakes, famine, disease, fire, oil spills, floods, tsunamis, nuclear contamination, revolution, chemical attacks on one’s own people. But there are also courageous volunteers who risk their own lives in small boats to save others they don’t even know.
The Song of Moses is undoubtedly a passage about the distinction between good and evil, and the consequential choices our free will allows us to make. This passage clearly presents good and evil as both coming from the hand of God in response to moral or evil behavior. It is certainly something to consider during the week of Selichot, as we deeply reflect in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, the New Year to come in only a few days, when traditionally we recite the “Una Tana Tokef” prayer, often to soul-stirring music. Life or death. Choose.
If we are basically good people, we reflect, if we try to follow a good life, then why, as has been repeated so many times, do bad things happen to good people? As we read scary news headlines and listen to and watch horrendous media reports, it’s something we can’t help thinking about. If God is good, as the Jewish tradition teaches, if the created world is good, as the Bible tells us, then why is there evil?
That is why I was so interested to read a lengthy interpretation by the noted scholar, Jon D. Levinson, called “Creation and the Persistence of Evil,” but very disturbed by its pessimistic tone.[1] Why does evil persist? His article has a somewhat gnostic feel to it, suggesting that evil is a separate, adversarial force.
Even though God promised Noah never to flood the world again, that promise is not so easy to maintain; it requires God’s vigilance. “The world is not inherently safe,” Levinson asserts; “it is inherently unsafe…. Creation endures because God has pledged in an eternal covenant that it shall endure, and because he has also in an eternal covenant, compelled the obeisance of adversarial forces. If either covenant comes undone, creation disappears.”
I wept when I read Jon Levinson’s views because at a time when an evil force like ISiS, with its many variant names, is infecting the world with a fanatic ideology, or when neo-Nazi ideology is re-infecting the globe, it is indeed possible to conceive of the world breaking down to the extent that chaos results, that we, we may return figuratively to the tohu va bohu, the void.
My own view, however, remains more optimistic. As moral human beings, as Jews continually renewing the Covenant, I do believe with all my heart that – together – we can dismember the mythical Leviathan representing the forces of evil, and that we can bring the beneficent side of God that represents love and compassion firmly back into our world.
Last week’s parasha emphasized choosing life. In this week’s portion, the choices are set clearly before us. As God’s partners in creation, we have the gift of free will. We have been taught to remember that, with Divine help, we survived Pharaoh, and we will survive, as best we can, whatever comes our way. This Rosh Hashana, 5778, it’s up to us to transcend the headlines; we must continue to choose life, and all that it requires from us to maintain a world that is inherently safe because we work hard to make it so. And because we have faith that it can be good.
[1] Levinson, J.D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: the Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. xxxiv + 182.
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Can you keep a found object? “Finders keepers, losers weepers,” right? Not according to the Talmud. It all depends on the degree of hope involved. That’s why a small section of the Talmud called Bava Metzia deals with the maintenance or loss of hope when inanimate things, like the loss of property, are concerned. The Talmud teaches that someone who finds a lost object can keep it only when the owner has given up all hope of recovery, when the owner has abandoned hope and made it ownerless. This is called ye’ush shelo medat.[1]
Then the Talmud raises another question: In what circumstances and at what point, does one abandon hope? At what point does one despair of retrieving lost property? And a further question is raised: Can one abandon hope without knowing it? Or can the finder act as if this has occurred and thus treat the object as ownerless?
And even further, can ye’ush be retroactive? What? In other words, even if we were unaware of the loss of property at the time it happened– if we had known facts that were revealed only later – could it be treated as if we would have given up hope at the time the property was lost. Finally, after much discussion, the rabbis of old decided that retroactive ye’ush did not exist! Of course, it wouldn’t be the Talmud if everyone agreed!
Let me share with you a true story, about something that happened to me, personal property that was lost. Like some rabbinic aggadot (non-halakhic narratives) that may go back two millennia, my story below, makes its point in a rambling, round-about, humorous way. You won’t know where the story is going until it gets there!
***
It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. After I finished stuffing a turkey for a holiday celebration and, with a sigh of satisfaction, had put it in the oven for about twenty minutes per pound at 400 degrees Farenheit, and with a nicely folded foil tent over it, I began to tidy up the kitchen. That was when I noticed that my beautiful, emerald-cut diamond was missing from the ring that had marked my engagement, a ring, that, together with my matching wedding band, I never, ever took off. I had been wearing it for many years. The engagement ring was still on my finger all right, but there was a big, gaping hole in the center, where four prongs had formerly held the lovely gem.
My diamond was lost! No, I did not enter into a state of ye’ush (resigned loss of hope), not at the beginning. I still hoped; no way would I abandon hope. I searched all over the kitchen, in every nook and cranny of the floor, the counters, for my diamond. Not too easy to find a clear diamond on a white tile floor or white counters (white, European kitchens were in vogue then), but … no diamond! I searched and washed all the dishes in the sink. Nothing had been put in the dishwasher yet, so maybe … no, no diamond. “Oh no,” I cried. “The turkey!”
Releasing a keening sound of something that was not yet resignation, that still had a note of hope in it, I removed the turkey from the oven, and, bit by bit, removed what would have been a delicious stuffing from the turkey, examined it with a magnifying glass, kneaded each morsel carefully between my fingers. No diamond was to be found. Next, as I peered into the now empty cavity of that turkey and poked and prodded its insides (fortunately it had been deceased for some time), the sinews glistened back at me as if they were laughing. After all, the turkey had been cooking in a pre-heated oven for twenty minutes. It dripped a little here and there.
It was at this point that I began to cry. I entered a state of resignation, a state of ye’ush, but I did have the presence of mind to report the loss to the insurance company. “My diamond is gone,” I sobbed. At least some of the economic value, if not the sentimental value, was recoverable. And it did not take too much effort to report an insured loss. Now, if I had known at the time the loss occurred that the diamond could not be found, that the loss was irrevocable despite all my effort, would I have entered a state of retroactive ye’ush immediately – that is ye’ush without knowing it, ye’ush shelo medat? It would have saved me a lot of searching time!
However, my story is not finished. When I finally served the turkey to my guests at a beautifully laid table that night, there it was, my diamond, floating in the gravy, as several of my guests pointed to it with astonishment. Thank goodness nobody had swallowed it! And yes, the diamond was undamaged. Diamonds, as you probably know, can survive high heat.
Yes, I had abandoned hope prematurely when I called the insurance company! Can we ever know, I reflect now, the precise time at which hope should be abandoned? Is there a time when we should give up hope and say, “Move on now! Collect the insurance money! Forget the sentimental value! Replace the diamond!”
But that is not the end of the story. Some years later, my diamond ring, this same diamond ring was stolen. A thief, a ganaf, broke into my house by stealth and stole all my jewelry, including this ring. And, oy vay, this time I no longer had jewelry insurance. It was too expensive! Since I was living in a large, metropolitan center where one diamond is like another diamond, I realized that I probably would not recover it. Even before the police advised me that it was unlikely I would recover the ring, that the thief would have fenced it or shipped it to another country before I had even discovered the loss. There were no identifying marks because the ring was not engraved with an inscription or initials, and, in any case, the thief would likely have taken the diamond out of the ring for resale. So this time, my ye’ush was not in vain. I had to abandon hope for real.
But since, as the police said, it was already too late to retrieve my loss before I even discovered it was missing, was this not also ye’ush shelo medat—ye’ush without knowing it? In other words, if I had known, would I have given up hope of recovering it from the moment it was stolen, even before I actually knew it was stolen?
But that is not the end of the story. After I set this seemingly cyclical tale of loss and recovery and loss down on paper, I had a sudden urge to put “recovery” – hope — back into the picture when a recurring advertisement in a very reputable magazine caught my attention. National Geographic, no less, in which a company reachable on the Internet was advertising gem-quality diamonds that looked very much like the one I had lost and found and lost again. Only these diamonds were not extracted from deep in the ground through the grime and sweat of miners working in unspeakably treacherous conditions that have been the subject matter of recent movies. These advertised diamonds were cooked in a scientific lab, and, yes, they had all the properties of natural diamonds found in the ground – but with one very important difference: They were flawless, a quality almost impossible for natural diamonds to attain. And, yes, these synthetic diamonds had another favorable attribute: The price was miniscule in comparison to what a “real” diamond would cost.
The temptation was too great to resist. I selected my ring (platinum-fused silver), with the large emerald-cut center stone surrounded by smaller baguettes on the side, just like the ones my long lost ring (solid platinum) had possessed. Again, there was a difference. This time the emerald-cut stone I chose was not a diamond; it was a synthetic emerald, proudly reflecting four karats of polished green, chemical properties in the sunlight.
It is very beautiful ring but somewhat ostentatious, so I haven’t worn it yet. Maybe I never will. If I should, however, it is unlikely that anyone would realize that this artful replacement for my lost jewel is synthetic. But if an unknowing thief should attempt to steal it from my jewelry box at any time in the future, that ganaf will have gained only an object of no significant value, not compared to the multiple lives that have been lost in mines over the centuries trying to recover that sparkling “real thing” – like the one I formerly owned — from the ground.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2015, 2017. All rights reserved.