By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
As teachers soon discover, there is a lot to learn from your students. The very vocal and informed Jewish study group, which I founded and teach twice a month at my home to about twenty people, is now in its fourth year of existence. This past week we began to examine the tension between the original 1948 Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, (embodying democratic principles similar to those of the U.S.), and the new Nation State Declaration (proclaiming the uniqueness of Israel as the historic homeland of the Jews).
There are 11 clauses in the new Declaration. Following delicious refreshments for Succoth (a happy festival representing the harvest), and after considerable historical preamble, we managed to get through clause 1-A. As I said, my study group – which includes people, of various ages born in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Argentina, Chile, Europe, and elsewhere — depending on who is present or visiting that day – is very vocal. There are lots of opinions and lots of diverse and often fascinating knowledge.
The Ten Days of Awe, representing the holiest days of the Jewish year and preceding Sukkoth, have so recently been with us. We have liturgically chanted the sacred Hebrew refrain long inscribed in the Jewish collective memory, in our prayer books, and hopefully our practice: “Tefillah, teshuvah, tsedakah.” It is usually translated in English as “Prayer, Repentance, Charity,” long-standing tenets of the Jewish people Sometimes teshuvah is translated as “return, homecoming,“ symbolizing return, not only to God, but also to the Promised Land, Israel. We refer to someone who has returned to the tenets of Judaism as a Ba’al Teshuvah (Master of Repentance).
However, during my class, one of my students, an Israeli, informed me that teshuvah has a different meaning in the secular Israel of today. It is commonly used to mean “answer,” she said. We checked the translation of teshuvah in two dictionaries, one used for Torah, Tenakh and Talmud and the other for modern Hebrew. Sure enough, there are two meanings recorded in both dictionaries: “Return, repentance” is the primary meaning, and “answer” is the secondary usage.
I suppose if you choose to live in the Diaspora, as “exiled” Jews were forced to do for centuries — that is, until the founding of the modern State of Israel gave us back our long-lost home — it makes sense to be repenting for your sins and praying at Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur for “return” to the Holy Land. But If you live in Israel, you have found the answer: You are already there. (Unless, of course, you choose to leave Israel and make your home in the U.S., as so many Israelis have done. And then you can teach your American teacher what teshuvah means – not in the prayer book, but in Israel.)
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2018. All rights reserved.
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Another jolt from the past came last week when I viewed “Operation Finale,” the stirring film starring Sir Ben Kingsley as Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi “architect” of the final solution. Eichmann was the man who ensured that transport of Jews to the death camps ran continuously and faultlessly. In 1957, aided by a blind man (who nevertheless recognized Eichmann), and his granddaughter, Sylvia, Mossad agents discovered him living in Buenos Aires, Argentina (a prime place for former Nazi officers to hide) under the false name of Ricardo Clement.
Avenging the death of his sister, Fruma, at the hands of the Nazis, Israel’s Peter Malkin was the man who actually kidnapped Eichmann, and, surmounting a host of difficulties, the Israeli team brought him back to Israel for trial.
Eichmann could have simply been killed by an assassin’s bullet. But the Israeli authorities declined to do so. Rather, they would bring him back to be tried in Israel, with the court of world opinion watching on television, as the proceedings were broadcast internationally. The benchmark trial, flying in the face of Holocaust deniers, finally took place in 1961. As the Israelis intended, it proved to be an unforgettable, educational experience for those who viewed the proceedings.
As with many filmed accounts of historical events, “Operation Finale” is not completely accurate in all its details – after all, it is a movie, not a documentary — but, as someone who viewed the real trial on television, I find it chillingly accurate enough. (Deborah Lipstadt’s book, The Eichmann Trial, published in 2010, gives further information.)
In “Operation Finale,” Kingsley gives a nuanced and memorable performance. Yet, as I viewed the action, my mind kept drifting back to the real Eichmann, the real trial held in Israel, the one that I watched on black and white television so many years ago. In its time, it was sensational in an odd way. Behind the bullet-proof “cage” of see-through panels that protected the defendant at the trial, sat a bespectacled, mild-looking man who might have been an accountant. The monster was reduced to human proportions.
That said, however, I thought the recent film provided an even-handed view of the trial of a Nazi who had wrongfully escaped the Nuremberg trials and deserved to die. It was, as the Israelis intended, a fair trial, even though the death sentence at the end was a foregone conclusion. In 1962, Eichmann was hanged and then cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, so that, as the film relates, he would never have a final resting place.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2018. All rights reserved.
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Shalom everyone!
One of the most precious gifts granted to the elderly is a detailed memory of things past. I was 12 years old in 1948 when Israel was proclaimed an independent state. I remember hearing the brand new Declaration of Independence read by Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, on the radio. Three generations of our family – parents, children, grandparents – clustered around the crackling radio in our Montreal living room. Such excitement filled the room as we strained to listen to every word broadcast to us from so far way. From Eretz, from the Promised Land.
In 2018, I cannot expect the generations that did not experience this literally awesome moment – and the events that led up to it — to feel those same Diaspora vibrations of pride and joy when they read about Israel, an established country now with many amazing attainments. But at least the dwindling number of those who remember its beginnings can try to communicate what it meant to us as Jews to have a homeland at last. Not only a spiritual homeland, but, after 2,000 years, a physical homeland – to which we could flee if we were persecuted for being Jewish. No longer could our schoolmates taunt Jewish children at Easter, “Go back to Palestine” (even though we couldn’t), because now there was an actual place where we could go. At the same time, we understood that it was our obligation to help the young Israel grow in every way we could.
Every Sunday, my parents, my sister, and I packed clothes for immigrants to Israel – “Aid to Israel.” My family helped displaced immigrants. I took a leading part in a Jewish Federation play created to train volunteers to fund-raise. My father, a dentist, equipped two mobile dental units in Israel. On my wedding day, my in-laws contributed the money to plant one hundred trees in my name and one hundred trees for my husband in an Israel reclaiming itself from the desert. My cousin went to Israel to help. That was a long time ago. Of course, I have visited since and once gave a Drama Therapy Workshop on preventative drug education at the Jerusalem Theatre.
Now I live in California, close to my children and grandchildren. It is hard for young American Jews, who have grown up in freedom, with a firm appreciation of their rights as American citizens, and with a true love of their country of birth, America, to understand that maybe, just maybe, “it could happen here.” Something we must not allow to happen. And Israel must be more to our young people than an insurance policy.
A variety of articles in Jewish weeklies or on the Internet have recently been questioning whether Jews can be Jewish without God – or even without Judaism. [1]
In my humble opinion, such questions verges on being oxymorons. Can human beings truly be human, one might ask, without having at least a spark of humanity? In that sense, can we truly be Jews without holding Judaism or at least Jewish Peoplehood, if not religion itself, at the core of our belief system? I am aware, of course, that many Jews define themselves in limited ways: as secular Jews, cultural Jews, historical Jews, humanistic Jews, and even anti-Israel Jews. We come in all shapes and sizes and colors. Many of us are intermarried. Some of us simply don’t believe, or at least not without reservations, in the God of the Torah and its teachings, nor the moral covenant that has bound us together for thousands of years. Nor in the promise of Eretz Israel, even though the Jewish People are indigenous to Israel, a fact recorded in history.[2] How do we pass on such a weakly brewed tea of Jewish peoplehood and all it implies to our children? This is a subject discussed in detail in Religion or Ethnicity: Jewish Identities in Evolution, a group of essays edited by Zvi Gitelman [3].
In the light of the displacement that took place during and after World War II, with its consequent unavailability of identity papers, David Ben Gurion proclaimed that anyone was a Jew who said that they were. Anyone who was a Jew could come to Israel for a new beginning. That was the immigration policy of the new state of Israel.
I realize that fewer and fewer Jewish people are still alive who remember what else was happening at the United Nations in 1947, when the UN approved partition of the land called Palestine (after the Romans had destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E., they renamed Israel “Palaestrina”). The boundaries of what would once again be Israel for the Jews and Palestine for the Arabs were defined. (Before that name change took place, however, a silver platter was awarded to my late father by the Canadian Jewish community to honor his devoted service to “Palestine.”)
However, there was another partition taking place in 1947. The partition of India into two parts – India for the Hindus, and Pakistan for the Muslims. The two religions, it was bloodily evident, could not live together without persecution and violence. Better they should separate and live peaceably as two states side by side. Better they should pray to their own deities.
And the same logic was applied to the separation of Israel into two homelands: one for Jews and one for the predominantly Muslim Arabs. (It was Arafat who coined, years later, the term “Palestinians.”) Today we speak of a “two state solution.” That was the original concept!
However, it was not to be. The day after the new state of Israel declared Independence, all the surrounding Arab nations attacked. It was bloody war, and the world expected the Arabs to win. With assurances from the new state, Israel, that those who wanted to could stay, many Arabs did (now Israeli-Arabs), but many others fled from Israel to join the Arab brothers who had broadcast for them to come; sadly, in other cases, they were pushed out of their homes or killed by Israelis soldiers fearing their attacks. Yes, it was war. At least an equal number of Jews fled Arab lands in desperate fear of their lives. By some miracle, propelled by knowledge there was nowhere else for Jews to go, Israel won what Israelis have since celebrated as the “War of Independence.” The Arabs, by contrast, glumly call what happened the “Nakba,” the “Disaster.”
Seventy years have since passed. Other wars have transpired between Israel and its adversaries, and peace is still to be found. But people get tired of perpetually killing one another. I believe that, with eventual good will and plenty of common sense (and maybe a little help from God), peace will come. Shalom/Sala’am. That is what I hope will both “happen here” and “happen there.” That is what Jews everywhere, even if they are not firm believers, will pray for at Rosh HaShana.
L’Shana Tova!
[1] See the diverse opinions expressed in the Jewish Journal’s round table, for example. www.JewishJournal.com/daily-roundtable/se[t-4-2018.-can-jews-without-judaism
[2] “The Jewish people area are indigenous to Israel, the birthplace of their identity and unique culture, and have maintained a documented presence there for over 3,000 years. Half of modern Israel’s Jews returned home to Israel from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Jews who came from Europe were not colonialists. They did not represent a foreign power and rejected any identification with European nations. They were idealists who sought to restore and preserve their unique heritage and fought for the same rights that are granted to all peoples: self-determination and independence in their ancestral home. Over 150 years ago, Jews returned in ever-larger numbers, again became the majority in Jerusalem in the 1860s, and established Tel Aviv in 1909. In 1920 the international community officially recognized the indigenous rights of the Jewish people and endorsed the restoration of the Jewish homeland”(“Answering Tough Questions About Israel,” Los Angeles: Stand With Us: Supporting Israel Around the World, 2015, p. 7). See www.standwithus.com for booklet.
[3] Zvi Gitelman, Ed. Religion or Ethnicity: Jewish Identities in Evolution. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2018. All rights reserved.
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
It’s a truism that just about everything is cyclical; eventually it all comes back into fashion, or history, or politics, or interest in who created the cosmos and what is there. Revival, recycling, regeneration: it’s a law of living. So I am not at all surprised at the new societal passion — in the midst of abundant visual imagery that has overwhelmed entertainment, merchandising, and education — for audio learning and entertainment, for audio books. Now once again, there is a thirst for hearing, for listening. Once again, individual imagination can exercise itself to see what isn’t there. Audio allows its audience to focus on the presentation to a greater extent, I believe, than when everything right in front of our eyes on a television or computer screen.
Television came to Canada (where I was born and lived most of my life) later than it did in the U.S. Up until then radio had been king, with the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) the only national radio (with lots of local affiliates) heard across Canada. Everyone everywhere in Canada listened to the well-articulated, well-researched national news. In fact, the reliability of the C.B.C. was a source of national pride, a Canadian icon like the Mounties or the national railroad that connected the Western reaches of Canada with the Eastern ones. From sea to shining sea.
If you were to take a trip across Canada in the still golden radio years, every house that could would be tuned into the CBC. In the days before television and later the Internet, it was a national connector. When, as a teenage actress, I performed in CBC International’s “School Broadcasts,” I was thrilled that the scripted words I was enacting (very slowly for comprehension by an overseas audience just learning English) were heard by people so far away. For example, in a “Western” sequence, I might be stretching out the emotional content and enunciation of the words “No-o-o, d’o-o-o-n’t SH-O-O-O-T!!!”
Most people don’t know that, in my salad days, I was a professional radio actress on many CBC dramas. I actually began my radio career at the age of ten on “Calling All Children,” produced weekly on CFCF, a local Montreal station, by the Montreal
Children’s Theatre (directed by Dorothy Davis and Violet Walters with an all-kid cast). I got my first professional role on the Lambert Cough Syrup Hour (CKVL, pre-union, it paid $5 for a 15-minute show), and by the time I was 12, I was auditioning – and getting cast in multiple roles – on the CBC (I was one of the first actors (#67) to sign up for ACTRA, our first professional actor’s association in Canada – and once we had a “union,” we got paid a magnificent $18 for a 15-minute radio broadcast, with an hour and 15 minutes rehearsal). Five days a week x $18 was good pay ($90) then for only one 15-minute radio serial when a man (not a woman) who was not an actor might be bringing home $25 for a week’s labor. Half-hour and hour shows (which we usually did on the weekends) were, of course, much better compensated. That’s how I got through university
The radio scripts were all accompanied by an organist live in the studio. Buddy Payne (who kindly played liturgical music at my wedding) led us musically from scene to scene, fading in the music for narrations and fading it out during the subsequent scene, or providing dramatic highlights to the script. For special radio productions – like “CBC Wednesday Night,” a much-listened to weekly show that produced quality scripts (more often from Toronto than Montreal) – a full, live orchestra accompanied the actors in the studio. What a great time we actors had with the fun-loving musicians in the CBC lounge we shared before the show!
But my radio and theatrical (I was active in local theatre too) career came to an end as, to our joyful surprise, my husband and I produced identical twins to augment the two young kids under five years old we already had. Wow, four kids under five! Acting had to take a back seat. Completely immersed in a joyful motherhood, I “retired” from show biz at 28 — for the first time. Radio would soon give way to television anyway, almost fading into the history books as visual entertainment and learning took over. Who knew that one day, so many years, and so many wide-ranging experiences later, I would become a rabbi, and that theatre experience is very useful in preparing and giving sermons?
In 5778, I wrote a D’var Torah for each weekly parsha and published them all on my website (www.rabbicorinne.com), where they can be individually accessed under the heading “D’var Torah”. You’ll find it on the home page’s sidebar.
Enter the Podcast.
In 5779, I plan to record these Torah commentaries as podcasts for, as they used to say in old-time radio, “your listening pleasure.” It was bound to happen. It’s cyclical, right? And people like to feel connected. So much of life in Los Angeles and other large cities is spent feeling isolated, non-productive, wasteful of time – on highways and congested streets. You can’t look at a screen and drive. The folly of text messaging has taught us that. So listening to something worthwhile, something ofyour choice, perhaps educational, or funny, or just plain entertaining reduces the tension of “getting there.” It can also be a motivational experience.
Listening provides a space for thinking new thoughts.
As the Torah – originally taught orally and only written down much later — instructs us, “Shema!” Listen. Listen and do good things.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2018. All rights reserved.
Sitting in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis:
Time to Wake Up
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
For the last twenty years, the members of my family and I – originally from the cooler climes of Canada – have been fortunate to be living in California, a landscape of uncommon beauty. Our garden is blessed with oranges, lemons, other delicious fruits, and the healthy vegetables we grow. Even grapes (rather small ones). Roses and other aromatic flowers bloom around us. We are shaded by tall trees and enjoy a solar-heated swimming pool. Just the other day, we drove my grand-daughter to the University of California at Santa Barbara, a stunning college complex overlooking a sandy beach. The campus is such a popular choice this year that a diversity of very bright students are inhabiting its residences three, rather than two, to a room. (In all fairness, I must mention here that my grandson is now in his second year at the highly-rated University of British Columbia, also a campus of great beauty.)
Yet increasingly, in the midst of all this natural and academic well-being, I am beginning to feel as if I am sitting in “the garden of the Finzi-Continis.” As those who are old enough to recall, this excellent movie, produced in the 1970s and based on a book of the same name, depicted the gracious life of a leading, wealthy Jewish family in Mussolini’s Italy in the 1930s. The refined family members are concerned with beautiful things, with their accomplished circle of artistic friends, with gentlemanly sports activities like tennis, and with a warm and welcoming hospitality that keeps the sinister political activity growing all around them at arm’s length. Until it encroaches on their own lives, ultimately destroying them.
Now it is 2018. And this is real life, not a film. What happened in the 1930s and 40s is, of course, history. Yet as a Jew and a Rabbi, I am shocked by the anti-Semitic “dog whistles” multiplying once again in the public sphere. In the U.S.A., welcoming land of liberty? How can I dismiss anti-Semitic sentiments when they come directly from the lips of a totalitarian Russian leader given free reign to express them on national American television. On CNN, for example, where I heard with my own ears Vladmir Putin insinuating that the Jews, not the Russians, were responsible for manipulating the U.S. elections. “Blame the Jews,” he said. “Maybe they were Jews with Russian citizenship.” The dual implication is that Jews in Russia cannot really be citizens, and, furthermore, that Israel is behind it all.
Putin’s despicable comments were REAL news. WHAT HE SAID WAS A LIE, BUT IT WAS REAL THAT PUTIN SAID IT. And, yes, Putin has been asserting this canard for some time.
For those of us who have witnessed malevolent times, our collective memory springs into action. Certainly, various Jewish groups in the U.S. have already protested. They have “compared Vladimir Putin’s comments about the 2016 election to anti-Jewish myths that helped inspire the Holocaust, “ wrote Avi Selk in the Washington Post (March 11. 2018).
Unfortunately, Israel (read Jews as subtext or vice versa) has been the recipient of anti-Semitic attacks from both the political far-right and the political far-left. The infamous linguist, Noam Chomsky, an internationally-known far-leftist – and for years a virulent antagonist of Israel years — has recently contributed to the mix by maligning Israeli lobbying in the 2016 election.
On both television, and in a Gatestone Institute column, lawyer Alan Dershowitz angrily referred to Chomsky’s downplaying Russia’s interference in the American elections, while, at the same time, Chomsky asserted that “the Israeli government’s influence operations are far more powerful [than Russia’s].”
The danger inherent in intentionally targeted words like Putin’s or Chomsky’s is that, as our Jewish history all too well testifies, they can and do incite evil actions. “Good” people — that is, those with ostensibly good intentions — usually don’t anticipate the malevolent actions that may result from those words. By the time, the “good” people wake up, it is often too late. The evil actions may have have progressed beyond what those with good intentions could have imagined, even in their wildest nightmares.
Even as I write this, even as I realize that there are gradations of good and evil, and that sometimes they intertwine, I continue to believe with all my heart that eventually good overcomes evil. The question is when. As humans, unfortunately, we have to adjust our time frame. The overcoming of evil actions takes time, sometimes generations Sometimes there is denial. It takes time for an entire population to sufficiently understand, that no matter how you sugarcoat it with lies, what is evil is not good.
©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2018. All rights reserved.