My International Kids: Danilo, Olga, and Llazlo [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Danilo was the next student who came to live at my house. I was hosting International students in Toronto while waiting for my U.S. documents so that I could join my children in California. Tall and handsome, with hazel eyes that belonged on a film screen, he was my first Brazilian student, my first male guest, and a breath of fresh air every time I came home after visiting my mother. We got along so famously, it was like having an eighteen-year-old son live with me. (They’re so happy when you feed them well!) He wouldn’t let me lift a finger to do anything that he could physically help me with.
He explained to me that the degree of poverty experienced in Brazil is almost unimaginable for a Canadian. It is nearly impossible for poor people to have any upward mobility. If you are born poor, you die poor, he said. Even though I did not consider myself to be a rich person, Danilo would point to my dishwasher, or to my washing machine and dryer, or the décor in my living room and pronounce gravely, “You are a favored person” in the English he was rapidly learning.
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The next student to enter my home came through the door with the largest suitcase I had ever seen – almost the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk – and behind him slipped a second someone who appeared so furtively that, for a moment, she appeared to be a shadow.
“I am expecting one student,” I said. “Not two.” It was two in the morning. I had expected my Yugoslavian student to arrive well before midnight, and I was already in my nightgown and bathrobe.
“No,” the shadow cried dramatically, her feet firmly planted in my hallway. “We cannot be separated.”
“You are from [the former] Yugoslavia?” I inquired. “Students at the language school?”
The male student nodded vigorously, as his female companion in the hallway answered rapidly in understandable, heavily accented English.
“Yes, and we have been assigned to different home. No! No! We must remain together.”
“Why did the school place you in different home?” I asked, trying to assess the situation. The school’s rules did not require that hosts keep students assigned to them if they did not find the students suitable to their home environment.
“We are not married,” she told me. “They say that we can only stay together in the same house if we are married. But we live together in Yugoslavia. We are like one!”
“I see,” I replied. I knew that many of the host families had young children, and the language school had set the rule in order to prevent embarrassment to the families.
“It’s very late,” I continued. “I can’t contact the school now. I do not have any young children, and I have no objection to you sharing a room since you have apparently been living together for some time, but I have only one room to offer you. It does have a double bed.”
I thought for a moment about my former students — Lily from Hong Kong and Mariko from Japan — and their different space perceptions compared to their home environments. Lily thought the guest room in my house was small, and Mariko thought it was very big. Danilo from Brazil thought I was rich. Khaled from Saudi Arabia prepared rice sitting on the floor of my kitchen.
“I think the room is big enough,” I told the Yugoslavian students, “but you might find it too small for two people.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” the girl replied, tears filling her eyes. “it does not matter if it is a single bed. The room will be big enough.”
When I opened the door to what would be their bedroom for the next two months, they gasped with happiness.
“It is wonderful. Thank you, thank you.”
“We’ll talk at breakfast,” I said, summoning up a pleasant smile. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “Welcome to Canada.”
After a myriad of “thank yous” later that morning, they began the task of hauling the new suitcase up the stairs to their new room, where they somehow stashed it in the clothes closet. Olga and Llazo were a team not only in regard to hauling a suitcase, but when it came to language skills as well. They were a totally complementary couple. She could speak English but not read or write it (Cyrillic script is very different from the English alphabet), and he could read English but not write it. Their intention was to equalize the situation at the language school. She hoped to learn to read and write, and he wanted to learn to speak English. Meanwhile, together they could communicate in a strange land.
During the few weeks they were with me in the last year of the 1990s, gradually they told me a lot about their life in their home country. They marveled at the variety and plenitude of food that stocked the shelves of Toronto’s supermarkets. “We earn salaries,” Olga said sadly, “but we can’t buy anything with them. The shelves are empty in my country.” In comparison to the other students I had hosted, their concerns were so serious, so concentrated on basic needs.
At my anything but empty table, they greedily filled themselves with food. Olga was a tiny brunette, but it was amazing how much food she could hold. And Llazlo was a big boy, a professional hockey player in his home town, who was always hungry. They ate everything at every meal. It was as if they wanted to make sure they were full in case another meal was not forthcoming.
One day, as Olga grew closer to me, she showed me the contents of their still bulging suitcase. It contained mostly food. “Look,” she gestured grandly, “dried soups, smoked sausages, sardines, crackers, enough for a long time.” They had stocked themselves up for a disaster.
When their language classes concluded, a relative of one of them – an aunt — drove up to our door. By pre-arrangement, she carried with her official documents allowing Olga and Llazlo to visit her in New York State. Down the stairs came the suitcase, and somehow they stowed it into the trunk of her car. As they said their goodbyes, accompanied by hugs, kisses, and heartfelt thanks, I wondered if they would ever return to their home country.
[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.
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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Soon after the proud accomplishment of Expo’67 came a period of extreme separatist sentiment in Quebec, which continued into the mid-1980s. Like many primarily English-language Montrealers, I contemplated a move to Toronto in order to ensure remaining in ROC (the rest of Canada). This poem was written at that time, but it could represent uprooting yourself from any land you love. I remember how, so many years later, my grandmother, who fled from persecution to Canada at the age of 17 – with a labor socialist husband and a babe in arms – would still sing songs about the beauties of Russia. The land of your birth never leaves you.
Au Revoir
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Lands where my fathers cried
brought me to birth
on rich, free man’s soil
where each one has worth.
Quebec, how I love you,
rivers flow through my mind;
Quebec, how I’ll miss you,
shall I leave you behind?
Your green forests encircle,
binding me close,
Lest I grow to feel alien
in my very own house.
Quebec, how I love you,
you sing in my soul.
©️Corinne Copnick, Montreal, 1984; Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
Lech Lecha (Genesis 12: 1- 17:27)
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Why are you going? Where are you going? What will you do when you get there?
“Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those that bless you
And curse him that curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you” (Genesis 12: 1-4). [1]
Where was the place that God was exhorting Abraham (still called Abram because the covenant between God and Abram had not yet been invoked) to leave? It was located in the city of Ur in the Sumer region of Southern of Mesopotamia (later Babylon and today the site of modern Iraq). [2] The city of Ur where Abram lived was no rural backwater. It was a busy city situated on several trade routes, a hotbed of commerce. The people worshipped idols (one of the three capital crimes in later Jewish law), and Abram’s father manufactured the representations of these idols that they purchased for their altars and homes. Abram eventually destroyed them in anger as he answered the inner call of an abstract God – whose guiding, invisible presence he was the first to discern.
According to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, “Abraham was commanded to leave behind the sources of both tradition-directedness (‘your father’s house’) and other-directedness (‘your land, your birthplace’). He was about to become the father of an inner directed people. His entire life was governed by an inner voice, the voice of God.” [3]
Abram was seventy-five years old (it’s never too late!) when together with his wife, his family, including his nephew, Lot, and the wealth that he had accumulated over the years, he set for the land that God had promised – the land of Canaan. To be sure, there were interruptions in the journey. Because of a terrible famine, they had first to sojourn in Egypt for a while. They proceeded to Bethel in the Negev, where Abram first invoked the Lord by name. Lot pitched his tent near Sodom (people conducted their lives in wicked ways, and where God eventually destroyed Sodom and Gemorrah for sexual immorality), but Abram remained in the land of Canaan, “settling in the terebinths of Memre, which are in Hebron; and he built an altar there to the Lord”( Genesis 13:18).
The Hebrew verb in “Lech Lecha” is doubled, which connotes extra urgency, not simply “Go forth!” as it is often translated, but more like and emphatic “get out of here” in modern terms. “Get out of Iraq!” There is a better place that your faith in the Creator will lead you, a place where you can live by your values, a place where you can develop and transmit your spiritual possibilities.
How many of us have felt that interior urging at various junctures of our lives? How many of us have had the courage to leave everything we have established behind and actually get up and go? Sometimes we cannot stomach the moral injustice in the land where we live. Sometimes we have no choice; conditions are so intolerable that we have to leave while we can. Sometimes, as survivors of disasters can testify, you have to leave what was behind, and rebuild with purpose what can be – even if it will never reach its fullness for them but they are laying the groundwork for the next generation. And sometimes we simply have wider vistas – or we experience the divine call.
America was built by people with that kind of courage, by people with faith that, with God’s help – and often with only a few dollars or less in their pockets — they could make it. Because they believed in a religious faith that was persecuted elsewhere, or because they had ideals they could not compromise.
Sometimes we can stand up, individually and together, and rectify injustices being perpetrated, even legislated into being, in the land that we live in and love. Sometimes we can stand firm in unison – and then we don’t have to leave.
In his column for the Reform movement, Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce points out that millennia after Abraham’s biblical journey, the rabbis have been concerned with the tension between the physical and spiritual – that is, the ideal – worlds, and how we can reconcile them [4]. It takes courage as well as inspiration and yes, faith, to attempt it, and it can be a lifelong endeavor.
And when one day we die, like Abraham we begin a journey that is both physical and spiritual. As we are in the process of departing from our physical selves in the lands where we live – as we humans inevitably do – we also have to take heart that we have lived a life of courage and vision to the best of our abilities, circumstances, and resources, and that we are now journeying to a new land that God will show us, the inner landscape of the soul. Who knows what opportunities we will find there to aid the human spirit?
[1] The JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh translation.
[2] A significant port on the Persian Gulf, the biblical Ur was first established in 3800 BCE.
[3] http://rabbisacks.org/inner-directedness-lech-lecha-5778/
[4] https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/lech-lcha
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017.
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A Different Kind of Noah: Opening the Letters of the Soul [1]
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
The Dream: The island was a land mass, eight miles long and six miles wide, located in the Niagara River near Buffalo. [1] The idea, with the blessing of the State of New York, was to create a temporary homeland for the persecuted Jews of the world under American protection. It was to be called Ararat (symbolizing Noah’s Ark, which some believe to be stranded atop Mount Ararat)….It was 1820.
Our dreams are pointers to our future. In that sense, we should believe in them. At the age pf 72, I had a dream – a dream about becoming a rabbi. It seemed an impossible accomplishment at my age – especially since I had still to learn the Hebrew language — yet seven years of dedicated study later, I was ordained as a rabbi in Los Angeles.
According to the Sages in the Talmud, “it is an open question as to whether dreams have a validity” (Stone Bible, quoting Berachot 55a). But in the same section (Berachot 55a), Rav Hisda tells us that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read. Dreams are the unopened letters of the soul. If we have the courage to open them, they point to the paths we need to follow – our soul paths – if only we can find the moral strength to do it. However, dreams, the Talmud cautions, are 1/60th of prophecy. That still gives us 59/60ths to fulfill. It takes a lot of hard work!
A Spiritual Home
Did you ever hear of Mordecai Immanuel Noah (a different Noah from the biblical one)? Few people today have. Although he was not so recognized, he was actually the very first Zionist. He pre-dated Theodore Herzl – usually credited with being with being the Father of Zionism – by a century. Mordecai Noah was not afraid to follow his dreams, not even a dream that seemed impossible at the time, but was based on an ancient promise – the promise of Va’era when God appears and says to the ancient Hebrews: “I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm…And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God….I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession, I the Lord” (Exodus 6:6-9). And, believing in the promise, Mordecai Immanuel Noah opened the letter of his dream.
A Preliminary Refuge
Mordecai Noah believed sincerely that the Jews needed to leave the lands of their persecution, the lands where they lived in ghettos, and worse, with continual terror and death a ruler’s whim away. They needed to pursue the goal – the never-forgotten dream – of living once again in their spiritual home, Eretz Israel, as Jews. Yet because, at that time, there were no political barriers to that dream, Mordecai Noah envisioned a preliminary Promised Land, a temporary refuge until the time was right to settle in Israel. And that first place of refuge was to be an island with a small native population off the East Coast – near Buffalo, N.Y. — of the United States.
Who was Mordecai Noah?
So who was this Mordecai Noah? And where was that preliminary Zion? First of all, he was an American, born in 1765 in Philadelphia, and the son of Spanish-Portuguese Marrano (secret Jews) immigrants to Georgia in the New World. He was smart, seemingly well-off, well mannered, well-liked, well-connected, and with such a vibrant personality that he rose – a Jew in the latter part of the 18th century – to be appointed American Consul to Turkey.
While redeeming American hostages with great panache from Barbary Coast pirates –with such over-enthusiastic vigor, in fact, that he was eventually recalled to the U.S. – he saw many cruelties that disturbed him. Especially, during his time in that region, he was deeply saddened by the deplorable conditions in which the Jews of that area lived. He had been brought up as a free American. He had never seen anything like it. And, using his diplomatic know-how and political connections – among them his relationship with Andrew Jackson’s daughter, whom he married, planting him firmly among the Jacksonians – he decided to do something about it.
James Madison Granted Charter
It took Mordecai Noah until 1820. He was fifty-five. By then, this very able, extremely theatrical, master politician had mustered enough support to persuade the then Governor of New York State, James Madison, to grant him a charter to purchase large tracts of Grand Island (a former Canadian possession then ceded to New York State.
This island was a land mass, eight miles long and six miles wide, located in the Niagara River near Buffalo. [1] The idea, with the blessing of the State of New York, was to create a temporary homeland for the persecuted Jews of the world under American protection. It was to be called Ararat (symbolizing Noah’s Ark, which some believe to be stranded atop Mount Ararat) – and given Noah’s last name and his considerable ego, he promoted the comparison. He was saving the Jews from persecution.
Economic Prospects: The Erie Canal
It wasn’t all philanthropy. Since the Erie Canal was about to be opened, the location and development of Grand Island offered great economic prospects, both for the Jews who would settle there and develop it, and for the State of New York.
In this enterprise, Mordecai Noah had both the enthusiastic financial backing of devout Christians and the supportive participation of Grand Island’s Seneca Indian population, a peaceful tribe. (Mordecai Noah believed that the American Indians were lost tribes of Israel, and the native population liked that idea. Grand Island was also intended to be a refuge for them against discrimination, and he would bring them prosperity.
But No Jews…
At the time, the Indians were all for it. In fact, the only people who did not support this enterprise were the rabbis of the Jewish communities of the world, who refused completely to send any representatives to the dedication ceremony.
The Indians were there at the ceremony, which took place on the mainland, dressed in full ceremonial attire. All the politicians were there, prepared to endorse the endeavor, as well as the enthusiastic Christians who had lent the money to buy the land. Mordecai Noah was there, prepared to preside over Grand Island as a judge, just like in biblical days, to get things started.
With his theatrical panache, he was dressed in ceremonial robes (rented from a costumer). The boats were all there ready to transport the invited guests to the island, despite the unexpectedly stormy weather. The only people who weren’t there were the Jews, whose rabbis had been invited from all over Europe.
The island was too small to accommodate all the Jews of the world, the rabbis. And who wanted to live in an undeveloped wilderness? And, most important, the Messiah hadn’t come yet. So despite the fact that Grand Island offered a beautiful refuge with a temperate climate, it wasn’t Eretz Israel. And despite the fact that Mordecai Noah explained that the refuge was planned to be temporary in nature – until one day they could move safely to the Holy Land, nevertheless, for the rabbis, it was Israel or bust. They had no idea that a Holocaust would decimate the European Jewish communities in the twentieth century. If it wasn’t Israel, the rabbis declared, not a single Jew except for Mordecai Noah was coming to the dedication. Nevertheless, the dedication ceremony did take place, and the cornerstone still rests today in Grand Island’s museum.
Mordecai Noah was born just after the close of the first American Revolution. He died in 1851, a few years before the Civil War – the War Between the States – began. When he died, he was still a dedicated Zionist. But he had come to the realization in the thirty years after the Grand Island venture failed in its intent, that, for the Jews of the world, Zion had to be in Israel [3].
As for me, born in the middle of the 1930s depression and writing this is 2017, Israel is the land of my spiritual heritage as a Jew, the opened letter of the Jewish soul so long repressed, one-sixtieth of prophecy in a time frame beyond our human comprehension. It is our hope, perhaps the hope of all mankind. There is a lot of work to do.
[1] When I first heard of Mordecai Noah’s story, I was so intrigued that I considered making his efforts – and Grand Island – the topic of my rabbinic thesis. However, when I explored this theme further, I discovered that a Ph.D. student at Cornell University had already written a doctoral dissertation about Mordecai Noah, Cornell holds many of the authentic documents relating to Grand Island, some of which are available online. So instead I wrote about finding hope in the stories of the Talmud. Its academic title is “The Staying Power of Hope in the Aggadic Narratives of the Talmud.”
[2] By comparison, the island of Montreal is 31 miles long and 9.9 miles wide at its widest point.
[3] There have been many suggestions of alternate refuges for the Jews over the years, usually in places of extreme climate – Uganda, the Arctic, Canada, even Arizona before air-condition. Some people believe that America is the “Goldene Medina” (i.e., the Promised Land), so why do we need Israel? Other people think that the Promised Land is a metaphor, an ideal to hold in our hearts, that it doesn’t need a location – but unfortunately, history has taught us that it is impossible to flee to a metaphor when you have no place else to go.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017.
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