by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
If there is anything positive to emerge from the current, gut-wrenching television coverage of Nazi flags and slogans, swastikas and Heil Hitler salutes, torch parades with uncovered faces, and violence in the streets of America, perhaps it is this: that our millennial generation will begin to understand how manipulated hatred — grounded in fear, racism, and bigotry — can spread like a cancer through an unsuspecting population. Maybe they will understand why there must be a State of Israel.
Fortunately, there are gentler ways to teach about the Holocaust and its ramifications, as “Schindler’s List “and many other fine films have demonstrated – so that hopefully it will never happen again. Learning about the history of that time from the lips of those who experienced it is irreplaceable, of course, but there are fewer survivors now every year.
One such survivor – in that he escaped Germany on the cusp of the Holocaust – was the esteemed, late Rabbi Gunther Plaut. More than four decades after World War II, I met him in Toronto, Canada, where he had been the longtime rabbi, soon to become Rabbi Emeritus, of the highly regarded Holy Blossom Temple.* During the 15 years I lived in that city, I was a member there. I consider myself blessed to have attended Rabbi Plaut’s Torah Study classes each week..
It was the late 1980s, and I was deeply honored when he asked me to direct a reading of his one-act play about the Holocaust. Although he had written it long ago, he had kept it to himself for many years. Now he wanted to open his experience as a young man in Nazi Germany to his congregation.
The play was called “The Train.” It portrayed the painful, dislocated feelings of a new Doctor of Laws graduate from the University of Berlin in 1934, forced to leave his native Germany after the restrictive Nuremberg Laws (first introduced on September 15, 1935 but not enforced until after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin) prevented him from practicing law. Even worse, Jews were stripped of their citizenship.**
The young lawyer represented in the play was, of course, our esteemed rabbi, Gunther Plaut. The conflicted feelings expressed were his own as he left family, friends, his now denied means of making a living, and the country he once loved for America. Luckier than most, he had gained sponsorship to rabbinic studies in the U.S. There he would study Jewish law.
As the war came to a close in 1945, Rabbi Gunther Plaut would be among the army chaplains who participated in liberating the concentration camps, the death camps, in Europe. It was an experience he would never forget. And he would go on to become a great rabbi, one of the pioneers of the Reform movement in Canada and regarded internationally as a highly erudite author. His landmark book, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, is still widely used today.
When we mounted Rabbi Plaut’s play, he was truly thrilled to be cast as the Narrator (he had thrown out a few hints that he’d like to do it!), whose commentary was a hallmark of the play. Thespian members of the congregation filled the other roles, and one of the congregational members was a talented harpist who played in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. When the soft cadences of her harp accompanied his narrations, shivers went up and down my spine. The play was extremely moving for the audience. For Rabbi Plaut, I think it was cathartic to have the feelings of his younger self, buried for so many years, enacted on the stage – and shared with the receptive, loving members of his congregation. The audience – the auditorium was packed — watched the performance with tears in their eyes and gave it a standing ovation when it ended.
When he retired, the Law Society of Ontario awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, a thoughtful and sensitive replacement for the degree he was forbidden to use as a young man in Nazi Germany.***
The Holy Blossoms refer to the tender young shoots, the students who study Torah.
** Prior to the passing of the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws, The Law for Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which passed on April 7, 1933, excluded non-Aryans from the legal profession and civil service. The Nuremberg Laws two years later codified the racial theories and ideology of the Nazi party. The first two laws passed in 1935 were the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. Jews (defined racially rather than religiously) were stripped of their citizenship, and the new laws had a devastating economic impact on the Jewish community as well.
*** The following is a narration from the dramatized The March of Times radio series about the Munich Crisis, Sept. 16, 1938:
NARRATOR: “Tonight, hour after hour, by short-wave wireless through the ether and along the cables undersea, the news piles up from the capitals of Europe…world-shaking, momentous news that sends Britain’s grave Prime Minister flying to Adolph Hitler and President Roosevelt hurrying back to Washington…the grim, portentous news that Sudeten Germans are in armed revolt, and behind every dispatch the mounting fear that the field-gray German regiments, mobilized and ready, may march into Czechoslovakia. All this week, day after day, and every hour of each day, the news poured in…and tomorrow and all next week, news will come from London, from Paris, from Prague, from Berlin. And as the headlines record each flying fact and rumor, United States citizens watch and wait and try to understand” (“The March of Time: Munich Crisis, Sept. 16, 1938,” Generic Radio Workshop Script Library (http://www.genradio.com/show.php?id=0079c4704cd5da4).
“How do you know that your blood is redder than his, perhaps his blood is redder than yours?”
(Rava in Sanhedrin 74a, Talmud)
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I didn’t know yet that the Talmud teaches each and every life has value. I learned it by example when I was eleven years old from an animal, from my pet cat, Buttons. She was a beautiful Persian cat with piercing green eyes and fur so glossy and black it seemed to have purple highlights. Naturally she attracted the attention of some of the neighborhood Toms, and soon we noticed that Buttons seemed heavier around her middle.
Then one evening as I was taking a bath, I heard sounds behind the tile bathroom walls, faint sounds. Mice? No, they seemed to be mewing sounds…behind the wall. Wrapping my towel around me, I rushed to the cupboard just outside our bathroom. Sure enough, the cover to the opening of the wide pipe that ran behind the bathroom wall had been chewed off. I put my ear to the pipe and listened. Yes, those sounds were alive, and, oh, the heated air was warm in there.
With eleven-year-old valor, I reached my hand in as far as I could and touched…wet fur. That is how I lifted out, first one, then two little kittens. But I could still hear a faint mewing. Stretching my arm to the limit, I reached in once more and lifted out a third kitten. Jubilant, I carried them all downstairs to our warm kitchen and settled them comfortably in a basket lined with soft towels. My little sister instantly named them Spic, Span, and Rainbow. Spic was white, Span was black, and Rainbow was multi-colored.
I thought Buttons would be so pleased to see her kittens safe and sound in the basket. But she was not pleased. No, she was frantic as she touched each of them on the nose and paused. And then again, she counted noses. Then she rushed up the stairs to the bathroom closet and squeezed into the warm pipe. She soon emerged with one kitten (Blondie, we called her because she was a strawberry-blonde), and then with another (Tawny, the color of café au lait). She carried them down one by one to the kitchen basket, and when all five of them were settled, she counted their noses with her own nose. ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-FIVE. And then again to make sure. That’s how she took her own census. I didn’t know that cats could count, but they do if it concerns their own children. Finally, she settled contentedly into the basket with her furry kittens – like the biblical Joseph’s coat, a magnificent blend of many colors.
That’s how I learned from one of God’s small creatures – a black cat with diverse children, each of whom she loved — that every life counts. As the Torah teaches, and poets have always known, each star, each grain of sand, each human life matters. Everywhere.
And for the precious gift of our lives, we owe it to God and to ourselves to make every minute, every hour count. To use it well for ourselves in the time that we have – something we especially appreciate as we grow older — and to use it well for the rest of the lives that have been created, for humanity and for all of God’s creatures.
D’var Torah by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
From what they see on the riverbank, they can also glimpse what the future might hold.
The central theme of this week’s Torah portion, Re’eh, which is Hebrew for “See,” is God’s gift to us: choice. In today’s political climate, freedom of choice is something we must be vigilant to safeguard. It was equally true in the Torah. This is the choice Moses presents in this parashah as he quotes God saying, “See, I have placed before you blessing and curse. Re’eh, anochi noten lifneichem hayom bracha oo klalah.”* These are the opening lines of the portion. The implication is for the Israelites to choose between alternative futures.
In the parasha itself, the word, “Re’eh,” is written in the imperative. But it means more than a literal command to “See! Look!” in the everyday, practical sense. It also implies that – as the Israelites stand on the heights of Moab, looking out over the Jordan River they will soon cross to take possession of the land of Canaan – they should believe the evidence of their own eyes.
They should also perceive much more than that. From what they see on the riverbank, they can also draw insight, understanding, a glimpse of what the future might hold. Re’eh is about deciding how you’re going to live and taking action to make that way of life possible. It is similar to another injunction later in Deuteronomy 30:15: “Re’eh, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity.”
So what do the Israelites see? Visualize twin mountain peaks, Mount Gerizim in the south and Mount Ebal in the north, both in the same Ephraim mountain range. In those early biblical days, there was, of course, no television, no social media, no “You Tube’ to present a panoramic view to a large multitude; so instead the Torah presents the textual image of these very real mountains as symbols. Mount Gerizim is located near the biblical Shechem (Nablus in modern times), and it is lush, covered with greenery and fruits, a green zone one might say. The other peak, Mount Ebal, is bleak, steep, and arid. Nothing grows there. The Israelites are instructed to pronounce blessings on green Mount Gerizim and the reverse on bleak Mount Ebal. Traditionally Mount Ebal represents strict justice, severity. How’s that for symbolism? If you were an Israelite overlooking the Jordan River, which route would you choose?
However, the choice is not so easy. Sure, everyone would like to live in the green zone. But making the choice to live there involves choosing a way of life – permanently, for all your generations. The land across the river Jordan is to be sacred, a holy land, and the people who choose to live there, to opt for green Mount Gerizim, must choose to be a holy people, a nation of priests, in fact. That’s the catch. God is to be their only God, and they will have to live by special moral and ethical rules. We have already heard about most of these rules in Leviticus, but of course, Deuteronomy is a recap, a summary of the previous books of the Torah, a looking back. The rules are reiterated here before the people actually move into the land and make it their own. A good deal of what is mentioned anticipates what will actually happen in future years.
Reality check: The land of Canaan is not empty. It is already occupied by pagans who worship other gods and sacrifice their own children by burning them as offerings to their gods. They have disgusting sexual practices, abominable health habits, they treat animals cruelly. And ever since the Golden Calf incident, God is particularly touchy on this issue of idolatry. There are still Israelites who tuck little idols into the corners of their tents. It remained an issue even in later years.
Get rid of the pagans, God commands in the Torah. The land must be purified. Tear down their altars. Destroy their towns. Execute them. There is only one God of Israel.
To our modern ears, this sounds horrific, barbaric. It is important to remember that historically this did not happen. Whole towns were not destroyed because people who worshipped pagan gods lived there. In this parasha, God is using hyperbole intended to warn the Israelites: Evil practices and the people who practice them are to be routed out. The Israelites are exhorted not to be lured by the heathen practices of the Canaanites, nor to be seduced by false prophets who claim to perform supernatural acts, not even by their own relatives who may worship idols. The death penalty is prescribed by anyone who tries to entice others to idolatry.
And if anyone doubts that Jerusalem – “the site that the Lord will choose” – was intended to be a holy city for a holy people, they should read this Torah portion — as well as the haftarah in Isaiah describing the beauty of a Jerusalem set in precious stones, and assuring that the city will be restored to her former glory, and that peace will prevail. All ritual sacrifices would henceforth take place only in Jerusalem, that is, the centralization of ritual sacrifices that actually took place in the reigns of King Hezekiah and, especially, King Josiah, several centuries later. God is giving the Israelites a choice to transform society, to move forward with purpose.
So, with the Israelites still looking across the Jordan River at the land beyond, God says, “If you choose to follow my rules, you will be my chosen people.’’ To be one of these treasured people means that you will take upon yourselves the responsibility to live morally and make ethical choices. It’s not always easy. You can choose or not choose. The hardest part is making the decision. You can listen to what wise people say. But, in the end, it’s up to you.
* “Consequences “(klalah), a word adopted from neo-Syrian vassal treaties, is likely a better English translation for curse.
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
All my grandchildren are teenagers now, learning to make their own near-adult decisions. One is already away at college; another is thoughtfully filling out her college applications; a third is entering high school. Time for choices.
When I moved into my own teenage zone so many years ago, my mother explained that I was old enough to learn how to make decisions on my own. “You make two columns,” she explained in her high-pitched, school-marm’s voice (in her salad days, my mother had been a school teacher with 58 immigrant children in her fifth grade classroom. In those old depression days, jobs were scarce for new graduates without experience, so my spunky mother took a job in a rural school where she taught eight grades in one room. After that, she was able to get a position in an overcrowded city school. So she certainly felt qualified to teach her budding daughter how to make an important decision).
“You head one column with the word ‘PRO,’” she continued. “That’s the column for all the reasons you should something.” I dutifully wrote “PRO” at the top of the first column.
“And then you put ‘CON’ at the top of the second column. That’s where you put all the reasons why you shouldn’t do something.” Respectfully acceding to her instructions, I wrote “CON” at the top of the designated column.
“What do I do now?” I asked.
“You think,” she replied. “You think and think.”
Immediately I started thinking, but I wasn’t sure what I was thinking about.
“Now,” she instructed, “you start writing down all the reasons why you want to do something.”
“What is it I want to do?” I asked.
“Think of something,” she replied. “Something important.”
“Okay,” I replied. I want to play hooky from school and just laze around. For a week. I’m tired of studying.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “Now put all the reasons why that would be a good idea in the PRO column.”
So I did. Only one reason to a line. That was the rule. It was a good thing I had ruled paper. I ended up with 25 PRO reasons.
“Next,” she said. “It’s time for the CONS. Write down all the reasons why you shouldn’t play hooky in the second column.”
I was having a hard time filling up the CON column with as many reasons as the PRO column, but my mother threw in a dozen or so suggestions because you should try to have a reasonably equal number. What you have to do then is balance them. She didn’t mean balance them on a scale. It was more the way a juggler juggles balls. Only you have to juggle them in your mind. Until you make a decision.
I had a sneaking suspicion the CON column made a lot more sense. But I got tired of juggling and chose the PRO column anyway.
That’s how I learned to make a decision. You balance the PROS and the CONS.
So, from then on, every time I had to make a decision, my mother would say, “Why don’t you PRO/CON it?”
This is a tough one,” I complained. “I have to write an essay for school. About capital punishment.”
“Capital punishment?” she gasped. “You mean, when the judge decides a murderer should be executed?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Whether they should do it or not.”
“Oh,” she offered sympathetically. “I’ll help you.”
So together we wrote out lots of PROS and even more CONS, but at the end, even though my mother juggled and juggled in her mind, she couldn’t decide which column carried more weight.
“I have to choose,” I exclaimed. The essay is due tomorrow.” She threw up her hands in despair. So, all by myself, I chose the PROS.
“That’s impressive,” she said, relieved that she didn’t have to make a choice. “I think you made a good decision.”
But ten minutes after I laid my head on my pillow, she shook me by the shoulder. “Wake up,” she cried. “I think you made a mistake. Big mistake. Maybe you should have chosen the CONS.
So I got up, and being a dutiful daughter, I listened to my mother who, after all, had more life experience than me. I changed the decision to CON.” And went back to bed.
Then, about three o’clock in the morning, I felt something nudging me. Little nudge. Bigger nudge. It was my mother. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. It should be PRO.”
“Oh no,” I cried. “I’ll change it in the morning.”
“Noooo,” she protested. “You might change your mind in the morning.”
I smiled at my mother. “I’m learning to make a decision,” I said firmly. “MY decision. I’m going to sleep on it!” And I did.
In the morning, I was sure that I had made the right choice. I won’t tell you what it was. It’s my secret. I will tell you that, after that, whenever I had to make a decision, I always made two column, just as my mother had taught me, and I filled them with PROS and CONS. But I did all the juggling in my mind myself.
And what I decided when I was a teenager – and I have lived a long time since then, and it is still true – what I decided is this: Whichever column you choose, there are consequences, even when it is not a life or death situation. If you choose to go one way, there will be consequences, and if you choose to go another way, there will be consequences. But you can’t keep juggling and juggling and be a grown-up, and, once you choose, you can’t have juggler’s remorse, even if you were a school teacher in your salad days. You have to choose.
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Did I tell you that I can’t blow the shofar? I have tried and tried. But I’m a rabbi who can’t even blow up a balloon without getting winded. I could excuse myself by saying, “Oh well, that’s what happens when you’re well into your eighties.” Instead I keep trying.
So first I bought a small one, direct from Israel, a ram’s horn with a kosher sticker (it’s still on the horn). And then I tried and tried to blow it. Not a sound. Over and over again on many occasions, I have tried to produce at least a little noise with my shofar. Nada, as we say in California. Nothing.
At this point, it’s only rational – right? – to think that the fault was not with my blowing ability but rather with the shofar. What kind of a kosher shofar was this short, white horn, sticker and all? That’s when I went shopping and bought a pretty, ebony black, Yemenite shofar. Also kosher, very curvy, and from Israel as well, it came from an antelope, not a ram. It’s skinnier than the ram’s horn, like a shofar that’s been trying to lose weight. “Aha!” I thought. “This looks like a shofar made for me,’ and, without a second thought, I bought it.
Sadly, I couldn’t produce a single sound from it. Not one, even though I tried to blow the shofar many different ways. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Why couldn’t I get ANY shofar to sound for me?
Just then, my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, entered the room and saw me huffing and puffing away. “What’s wrong, Grandma?” she asked, concerned.
“Can you get any kind of noise from this shofar?” I asked her. “It’s from an antelope in Yemen.”
She took the shofar from my hands, put it to her mouth, and drew from it a long, soulful, teenage blast. “Sure,” she said. “It’s easy.”
I took the ram’s horn from its place in the cabinet. “How about this one?”
She put it to her lips, and again drew from it a deeper sound than the first one. “No sweat,” she said. “It’s easy.”
So it wasn’t the fault of the antelope, not the fault of the sheep, nor the people who put stickers on.
Then my thirteen year-old-granddaughter became alarmed by all the noise and came running into the room.
“Here,” I said, handing her one of the shofarot. “Can you blow these?”
She gave me an adolescent’s reproving look. “Grandma, I’ve already had my bat mitzvah!”
On the first try, she blew strong, firm blasts from the shofar she selected. And then from the other one. The blasts were so loud, they sounded like a ship’s horn making it way through the fog. Or maybe a shofar – ram’s horn, antelope’s horn, straight, curly, it doesn’t matter — sounding exactly the way it was supposed to. You could hear it from a mountain top.
* * * *
The fact remained that my granddaughters with powerful lungs and musical ability were not coming with me on my High Holy Day assignment on a cruise ship. And now I knew that there was nothing wrong with my either of my shofarot. Well, on a cruise ship you have to improvise. Maybe I would be someone who could play the trumpet on the ship, or at least a wind instrument.
When my little “congregation-at-sea” assembled on the Sabbath prior to Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, I asked if, by chance, anyone could play the shofar or a wind instrument. To my surprise, a short, middle-aged man spoke up.
“I can play the trumpet,” he offered.
Of course I was delighted. I explained that our Rosh Hashanah trumpet would be a shofar, if he could blow that too. The ancient sound of the shofar is supposed to be like the trumpet-blasts acknowledging the coronation of a sovereign – God.
“I’ll try,” he said. “My name’s John.”
While I couldn’t produce a sound from the shofar myself, I did know the pattern of sounds that a shofar should produce for the High Holy Days. So the two of us spent an afternoon in the nightclub on the top level of the ship. Normally, it wasn’t used during the day, and we were able to fill its quiet with lots of shofar noise, while John got used to the sound patterns this shofar could ably produce. During the actual service, I explained, I — as the rabbi — would call out one at a time the Hebrew words meant to evoke the pattern of sounds that John would then draw forth from the shofar. The shofar’s sounds are intended to stir our consciences, individually and collectively to confront our past mistakes.
Tkiyah Shevarim Truah Tkiyah
Tkiyah Shevarim Truah Tkiah
Tkiah Shevarim Truah Tkiyah
As we practiced the sounds together – word call and musical response, I could see that John was very moved. “If we miss the mark, we can always try again,” I told John. And he blew his practice notes of the Tkiyah Gedola, the long, long blast of the Great Shofar until he was so red in the face, he looked like he would burst – with joy, I thought.
During that meaningful afternoon, John poured out his heart to me. He was not a Jew. Although he had been born a Christian, he had always felt drawn to Judaism. Eventually, he had become a Jew for Jesus, a Messianic Jew.
We talked for a long time. John was a deeply soulful person who had read widely. He had a highly developed brain that interpreted the world mathematically and was attracted to Gematria. On his own, he had studied and developed an appreciation of many of the mystical precepts of Kabbala (not the red string kind!), but he was in spiritual turmoil. He longed to be accepted by the Jewish community.
“You need to study with a rabbi, John,” I said. “Jews believe in one God. If you say that you are a Messianic Jew, that means you accept Jesus as divine. You have to decide, and I think you need some help to do that.”
We spent a couple of hours on another afternoon addressing some of the issues that concerned him, and the differences between Judaism and Messianism. I made some further suggestions as to whom he could contact for further study, and what readings would help him in his spiritual quest.
“Take your time,” I counseled. “In order to become a Jew,” as he now claimed he wanted to do, “you would have to convert, and to give up the divinity of Jesus, your belief in him as the Messiah. To become Jewish is a serious commitment. You will have to think about it long and hard.”
When it came time for the Rosh Hashana services, I was a little uneasy. In order to blow the shofar at services, you are really supposed to be a Jew, so I eased my own conscience by thinking of him as a Jew-to-be. “I want to become a Jew,” he told me before the service. “I’m sure of it,” he added with sincerity.
“Time will tell,” I replied. “When you blow the shofar tonight and tomorrow, John, I want you to blow with all your heart. I want you to blow for the Messiah to come. Our world is in turmoil and surely needs one. It won’t matter if he – or she – is coming for the first or second time. Blow for peace in the world.”
John smiled. And when he blew the shofar, not only did his face get red, but tears of happiness shone in his eyes. It turned out to be a terrific Rosh Hashanah.