Loving Disputes
The rabbis of the Talmud believed that in order to understand a situation fully, and to make a resolving decision (where possible), it was best to take all aspects of a situation into consideration. This entailed different points of view, and they were able to hold multiple points of view in their minds as true, each from their own perspective. The Talmudic method was one that fostered a delight in argumentation, but they were intended as loving disputes. Of course, eventually they had to come to a decision, and then the majority decision ruled. But the minority decision was also recorded (because times change, and different decisions may be needed). Interestingly, the U.S. justice system has many similarities to Jewish law, especially in terms of the way appeals and the Supreme Court works.
The Talmudic tale of “Akhnai’s Oven” (a circuitous story that begins with loving disputes about repairing and purifying a broken oven and takes a long route to its resolution) is one of these disputes. Inspired by this Talmudic tale, my own narrative, “The Herem (Banishment) of Anony-Mous, is a round-about story about wrong, shame, recovery, and a heavenly voice called the bat kol. In Akhnai’s Oven, the reader or listener does not know where the story is going until it gets there. In the same round-about manner, The Herem of Anony-Mous makes the point of the narrative. My story is a contemporary illustration of how people with group-think can inflict pain – ona’ah — on a talented person with original ideas beyond the capacity of the group to understand. The story makes much use of an oft-used literary device characteristic of rabbinic narratives: the divine voice from heaven (the bat kol), and the banishment of Anony-Mous from his community – and his music — parallels the herem imposed on the Talmud’s Rabbi Eliezer.
The “Herem” of Anonymous: A Contemporary Fable
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Anony-Mous was not Jewish; he lived in remote area of North China where it was unlikely that he would ever encounter a Jew. But Anony-Mous did have a religion of his own, although he didn’t know it was a religion. He called it Music. He did not have to seek Music. It came to him, as if he had a Divine Voice, a bat kol in his head. The bat kol was with him always, when he rose up and when he lay down to sleep. It was always there.
The poor, uneducated people who lived in the rural, impoverished town in North China where he was born didn’t have musical training, but Anony-Mous’ bat kol could transport them to internal places they understood from Nature, from the sparse trees in the area, and the waterfall’s flow. They understood the sounds of the birds and the animals, and they heard the breath of the wind, the ru-ach. But never before had anyone in their town made the beautiful “Music” that came from Anony-Mous’ bat kol. On their home-made instruments the villagers tried to reproduce the sounds that Anony-Mous played on his improvised instruments as if truly a Divine Voice were directing him. This was the first miracle, that a little boy could hear that Voice and create its sound for all to hear.
The people whispered about this miracle to the nearby villagers, who whispered to other villagers, and soon the news of Anony-Mous’ bat kol traveled all the way to Beijing, the capital of China, and the home of its musical culture. The Beijing Opera, for example, was there, along with some of the finest musicians and music teachers in all of China.
Anony-Mous was eight years old when Chinese officials from the capital visited the little town to hear his music and promptly whisked him off to Beijing, where he was housed and fed in a style he had never experienced and given the rigorous training accorded to those whose musical genius came to the attention of the State. This was the second miracle. Anony-Mous’ bat kol was very happy there and sang in his head all day long and sometimes all night too, as Anony-Mous learned from expert teachers to write down the notes of the Divine Voice in his head. By the time he was twenty, he was composing music – operas, symphonies, concertos — not only in the Chinese style, but in the Western method he was learning too. He was greatly attracted by what he learned about the West, where there was a political system called “democracy,” as if all the instruments in the orchestra had a chance to play so that their voices could be heard.
By now Anony-Mous was not only conducting an orchestra, he was also a university student at Beijing’s finest facility, where ideas he had never encountered before floated around surreptitiously. Unwisely, he took a leadership role in a student protest: The students wanted the government to ameliorate impoverished conditions throughout China — poverty very unlike the elegant living to which Anony-Mous had been introduced in Beijing. He wanted to make life better for simple people, like those who had valued the soulful beauty of his bat kol when he was a little boy.
The Chinese government’s reaction was harsh: It was dangerous to allow a charismatic leader like Anony-Mous to disrupt society with his Western ideas. Even if the rural people of China were indeed suffering dire poverty while Beijing officials lived in luxury. Even if Anony-Mous was right, and they were wrong. Even if his bat kol sang out in magnificent music that celebrated and supported these ideas. The people were listening, and they might begin to understand where the bat kol was leading. An individual must bend to the majority decisions.
The majority decision of the Chinese court was dire: herem, banishment. The learned judges had the power to execute him if they so decided. Instead, they tried to kill his bat kol, his special power that came from a place they could not understand. They realized that it was not Anony-Mous but the magnetism of his bat kol that could lead the people astray. So not only did they banish him from the capital and sentence him to hard labor in a remote agricultural commune in North China, but the judges further decreed that he could not write music nor play an instrument. Not for twenty years. Their intention was to break his spirit into defamed pieces, like the sections of Akhnai’s oven that were no longer ritually pure. Anony-Mous was made tamei (impure).
That night, with uncontrolled anger, the bat kol wreaked vengeance on the capitol. The wind howled, uprooting the trees, the waters reversed their direction, and the earth shook, causing the very walls of the courthouse that had witnessed Anony-Mous’ sentencing to bend perpetually in penance. The animals screamed in terror. But the people were silent. They understood that their beloved bat kol was leaving them.
Miraculously, the bat kol did not leave Anony-Mous. That was the third miracle. Like the Shechina, it accompanied him to the remote rural community where his muscles would ache from the hard labor and the harsh climate until he got used to it and became very, very strong. Inside and out. Although he was not permitted to sing, play an instrument, or write a note of music, the bat kol sang in his head day and night – as he was awakening to the dawn, while he was working throughout the day, and as he was going to sleep. It created beautiful operas and symphonies, and concertos that only Anony-Mous could hear. For nineteen years. In the twentieth year of his harsh sentence, he was permitted to conduct a rural orchestra in the village where the labor camp was located, and where he improvised rough instruments. As the stirring notes of the bat kol took heart and emerged in the compositions he created for the orchestra, the people were awed. The notes were not yet written down. They were all in his head.
At the end of the twentieth year, the authorities whisked him back to Beijing as if the herem had never happened. He was considered “re-educated” and reinstated to all his former musical glory. Then he was formally introduced to the current female director of the Beijing Opera, whom he married, and they had a son — who perhaps one day, if Anony-Mous is lucky, will defeat him. It was like the restoration of Job after all his hardships. Or the restoration of Akhnai’s oven that had been dismembered but put together with sand between the three sections so that it could remain pure.
Yes, there are some pure individuals who must adhere to their own absolute truth, despite the consequences. No matter what happened to Anony-Mous, he had kept faith with the bat kol. Finally, his tears at the ona’ah, the pain inflicted on an individual by a group, by a majority that was wrong, had penetrated God’s gates, even though they remained locked to others. Now, aided by the bat kol, the notes emerged from his head and flooded onto pages and pages of musical compositions. As one of the foremost modern composers in China, Anony-Mous would become well known in the West for compositions that reconciled the sounds of Eastern and Western music into a unified whole. And the bat kol rejoiced. When Anony-Mous’music is played all over the world, some say they can hear the bat kol – or is it God? — laughing.
* * * *
Is this a true story?
Who was my Anony-Mous (not his real name)? Like Rabbi Eliezer, Anony-Mous was cruelly treated by his community. He, too, had suffered the debilitating effects of ona’ah, and eventually — twenty years later — his tears penetrated the locked gates too. I encountered him at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, where we were both guest artists in different disciplines and became friends. In his early fifties then, tall for a Chinese man, slim, and fit, with black hair, flashing black eyes, and hands that gesticulated like a Rabbi Heschel captured on film, he was in the process of writing a symphony for presentation at the Lincoln Centre. Although his studio at the Banff Centre was furnished with a grand piano, he rarely used it. The notes of his composition simply poured out of his head to his pen and transferred themselves to paper in astounding fluidity. Cemented together like Akhnai’s oven, he was purified. He had emerged from his broken state, from a herem that would have broken lesser souls to become the musical pride of China.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2015
Aharei Mot (Leviticus 16)
A D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
“Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the Lord at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the Lord and the other marked for Azazel” (Leviticus 16: 7-8).
“Aharei Mot,” the title of this parasha, means “after the death,” referring to “the two sons of Aaron who died when they were too close to the presence of the Lord” (JPS translation) [1]. These words are a time reference as we continue the great biblical story to the Day of Atonement we call Yom Kippur, a set day to be kept forever. All of Leviticus 16, in fact, is devoted to the expiation of sin and consequent purification. Great detail is given as to how the priests prepared for this time of atonement, which Jews all over the world honor (even if it is the only time they go to the synagogue). Scrupulous attention is paid to the priestly white linen attire and a host of other atonement rituals, including the choice of a bull for sacrifice and a pair of he-goats. Of the latter, only one is chosen by lot to be sacrificed. The second, marked for Azazel, is to carry all the sins of the Israelites into the wilderness. Like casting our bread crumbs into natural waters at Rosh Hashana, sending Azazel into the wilderness is reminiscent of the banishment of Cain and of Hagar and Ishmael as well. Cain eventually found respite in Edom, where he and his descendants prospered. Hagar and Ishmael were comforted that God would make of the Israelites two great nations.
But what of Azazel, who symbolically carried all our sins away? Did he find respite on the mountain that some think was near Mount Sinai? Different rabbis of old have different explanations. The one that I like best is that of Ibn Ezra. “According to Saadia [Gaon],” he writes, Azazel is “the name of a mountain, so called because it was precipitous”[2]. Possibly the goat driven into the wilderness would eventually stumble on the rocky cliffs and fall to its death, but it would not be slaughtered as a sacrifice. Other commentators explain that “Azazel” is a compound word (more common in Aramaic than in Hebrew). Thus “az azel” means “the goat went” [3]. Rashi, however, translates Azazal as meaning “to the goats;” in other words, the goat was released alive into the wilderness, presumably to dwell among the other wild goats. The “el” at the end of the word is simply a grammatical suffix. I am comforted by Rashi’s explanation [4].
I was born in January, you see. My astrological sign is the goat, a designation with which I was never comfortable until I visited Arizona, Scottsdale to be exact, where a single, dry, brown mountain dominated the arid landscape. As my stay there grew longer, though, I began to discern shapes on the rocky mountain. Animals, living being of different kinds. And the most agile among them were goats. Surprisingly beautiful to my newly opened eyes, they were mountain goats. One of them stood high on a cliff, looking out beyond the mountain, protecting the flock below. I began to think that being a mountain goat was perhaps a wondrous thing. To me, it signified that Azazel was cast by lot to be a survivor, a goat that could withstand the barren wilderness and create a family there. Perhaps, in overcoming the sins with which it had been burdened as a form of sacrifice, the biblical goat had also endured.
Watching God’s creatures, the nimble goats, I was so moved at the time that I wrote a poem about this experience. I called it “Born in January,” like me. Now, with a little more humility – fitting for Yom Kippur — I am giving it a new name: “Azazel.”
Azazel [5]
Mountain goats in their whiteness
clamber up the stony cliffs,
scale rocky heights,
melt age-old snowcaps
with heated vision.
Flock protected beneath his
Fortress, a monarch stands
alone atop the tajo.
Azazel.
[1] Aharei Mot, JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999) 244.
[2] Ibn Ezra. Quoted in Michael Carasik,
[3] Michael Carasik, 120
[4] Ibid., 121.
[5] First published in the 10th Anniversary Issue of “Voices Israel,” Haifa, Israel, 1982.
©️Corinne Copnick, Toronto, 1974. All rights reserved.
For those who would like to read a story about a spiritual awakening related to the Book of Jonah, which is usually read the afternoon of Yom Kippur, please see my earlier posting, “Kiss a Whale and Lick Cancer,” in the section headed “Musings.”
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.