Congregation Beit Simcha

A Donation: Saving and Treasuring Life
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Yikzor 5787, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Life is precious, my friends. Above all, this amazing gift we have each received is a sacred trust, simply to be, is given once to each of us. It is sacred. When those we love are threatened with its loss the feelings can be overwhelming.

Life and love. In many ways, these are all we have to treasure in this world.

I recently learned an old story from a member of our congregation, Sherry Cunial, a cancer survivor. She told me about a Jewish oncologist, Dr. Stephen Forman, who treated her own cancer years ago at The City of Hope Hospital in California, and had a most unusual patient and family, an extraordinary, unique experience that speaks to the holiness of life.

You may or not be familiar with The City of Hope; long ago, during rabbinical school in Los Angeles, I had the privilege of serving a chaplaincy internship at that remarkable facility, visiting bone marrow transplant patients in the suburb of Duarte, in the San Gabriel Valley outside of LA. The City of Hope does incredible work, and I will always be grateful for what I learned there.

The hospital was founded in 1913 by the Jewish Consumptive Relief Association as an institution to care for destitute patients suffering from tuberculosis, TB, which was a common and uncurable disease in those days. Its Los Angeles Sanatorium opened its doors in 1914, treating its first 31 patients in canvas cottages. It became the premier TB treatment location in the west. In those days, the dry western air was considered a panacea for those suffering with tuberculosis, as was the bright sun; like Tucson, Southern California became a magnet for urban easterners seeking a chance to breathe again. Often those people were Jews, usually recent immigrants; many of our original Tucson Jewish community members came out to try to cure TB with sunlight and desert air. Both St. Mary’s Hospital and the VA Medical Center were originally built as TB hospitals.

By the 1940s, as new antibiotics successfully treated and cured tuberculosis, the City of Hope redirected its mission to treating cancer and other life-threatening diseases, with great success. Scientific medical developments allowed its doctors to pioneer new and effective treatments. It was one of the pioneering centers of bone marrow transplantation for leukemia and other blood cancers, and it has saved the lives of many people over the decades. In bone marrow transplantation the donor is not harmed, and if the matching bone marrow is accepted by the recipient they can, essentially, be cured and live a long, healthy life thereafter.

For those who don’t know, blood cancers, like leukemia and lymphoma, are extremely difficult to treat, since they start in the bone marrow and lymphatic system where blood cells are made, meaning abnormal cells circulate through the entire body instead of forming a single, localized tumor that can be removed by surgery. Bone marrow creates the white blood cells that fight off infections. When it goes wrong, is changed by cancer, instead of producing infection-killing white blood cells it spreads the malignant cells throughout the patient.

The standard medical treatment for blood cancer is to literally kill all the bone marrow in the body of the affected patient and then transplant healthy bone marrow from a matching donor into the patient. It is delicate work that requires full isolation of the patient from any and all germs, since until the new, healthy bone marrow has taken hold the patient has essentially no immune system to ward off infections. A minor cold or flu, even an infected cut, is likely to kill the patient. As student chaplains this was our first experience of what they later called PPP, and we had to learn how to communicate compassion and caring with bone marrow transplant patients while completely gowned, masked, and covered up. It was a powerful learning experience.

The story that Sherri told me when I visited her in the hospital recently—she has, thank God, recovered from that episode—took place 35 years ago, and involved a teenage girl who developed leukemia. She was treated at the City of Hope hospital by a Jewish doctor, Dr. Stephen Forman, originally from Galveston, Texas—Sherri’s doctor at around the same time. The problem for Dr. Forman and the teen patient and her family was that there was no matching donor for the 16 year-old girl, Anissa Ayala. When there is no matching donor, the patient’s survival rate is essentially nonexistent.

Anissa’s parents decided to take a series of long chances to save their daughter. There were no outside matches in the database for her bone marrow, and neither parent was a match for donating bone marrow to their child. But there was a chance—perhaps one in four, the doctors calculated, 25%, 4 to 1 against if you are betting person—that a sibling would have the matching bone marrow, and could serve as a donor. Unfortunately, the girl’s only sibling, the Ayalas older son was not a match.

And so they decided to try to get pregnant. They had to overcome a series of obstacles. The husband had had a vasectomy, and that had to be reversed, a standard procedure that often works, but not always, to restore fertility. Then, her mother was 43 years old, making pregnancy a far from certain thing. And of course, Anissa needed to survive and be strong enough for the operation to take place.

The Ayalas were given a 10 percent chance to conceive. Time was running out. They weren’t sure if Anissa would live long enough to receive a transplant. They took her on vacations to Yosemite and Hawaii.

Against the odds, a new baby was conceived, and born, and named Marissa. Against the odds, her bone marrow matched her sister’s. When she was 14 months old and weighed enough to be a donor, Dr. Forman transplanted the bone marrow from the baby—who had a sore hip for a few days but otherwise was unaffected by the surgery—into the now 19 year-old young woman. The transplant was accepted, and the recovery, which is not instantaneous, was completely successful. Anissa recovered, married, had a career and a family. Marissa grew up, graduated from college, and became a speech pathologist. Her parents raised her with love, and she remained close to her older sister, even moving in with her after college for a while. This time, we know that there was a happily-ever-after.

It is a beautiful true story, a near-miraculous one.

There was much criticism at the time this story came out in the media of that day: how could you have a child just to save another child? Isn’t it wrong to have a child just to save another child? Isn’t that like harvesting one human being to save another? Are we on the road to an immoral world of choosing one life over another, manufacturing human beings to save or elongate the lives of other human beings?

And so on.

The ethical implications were complex and raised an entire constellation of issues that our society hasn’t fully grappled with yet, three decades later.

Now, my friends, people have children for so many reasons: to perpetuate their family traditions; to fulfill religious doctrines; in order to have an heir, or even a spare; to try to save a failing marriage; by complete accident, against their own preferences; because they think it will be easy, or fun. Giving life is a powerful thing indeed, a beautiful and sacred thing, but many people—more than we would like to think—do so without anywhere near enough thought about just how it will all play out, about the responsibility and care that are essential to creating not only another being but a good life for that child.

Giving life is—should be—a kind of sacred trust.

But saving a life is more than that. Treasuring a life—treasuring life—so much that you willingly take long, even crazy chances in order to rescue that life, that is something else. That is uniquely holy. That sanctifies life in a way we must not only respect but revere.

Because, you see, it is life itself that is sacred, unique. That is the gift God has given us, that we have the capacity to make valuable, meaningful, special, even holy. That is what we have prayed for throughout these High Holy Days—to be written in the metaphoric Book of Life.

As we enter this time of Yizkor, the service in which we remember the lives of all the people who have touched us, and whom we have touched, in which we bring back their memories and our feelings of love and care, may we also take this gift: that our lives, like theirs, have the innate spark of the divine that can create and give life, but also save life. That our ability to treasure this amazing gift we have received, our very lives, is something we must know, always.

That is what Yizkor can mean: a time to celebrate the lives of those we have loved but can no longer touch, or save. And a time to embrace the reality, and the goodness, of our own lives.

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Redemption: The Connections Between Us
Kol Nidrei Eve Sermon 5787
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

What invisible threads connect us to other people? What are the unseen synapses that link human beings together in the great fabric of creation, that allow us to supersede our lonely, isolated individuality and realize we are part of something much greater? Most of the time in our lives we don’t even know that these connections exist. But there are moments and events when these nexuses, these unnoticed, hidden strands become visible. Only then are we likely to become aware of the way our own lives are part of a more complicated system in this cosmos, and understand that we are truly connected to others, and the universe, in a deep and powerful way.

We can call our becoming aware of this a tale of redemption. The Hebrew word for that, Ge’ulah, is part of our Jewish prayer vocabulary in every evening and morning service, the Mi Chamocha, in which we remember our salvation from destruction at the shore of the Sea in Moses’ time. That represented redemption from violent death. But I think ge’ulah, redemption, to us can mean something quite different. Redemption truly is those moments of knowing that we are connected to everyone and everything, and so to God. In fact, maybe that very connection is God. So, this then is one story about redemption.

My friends, many of you are no doubt fans of the Tucson Festival of Books, but if you aren’t yet, you should be. It’s quite an event. It’s one of the major book festivals in the country, ranked third in the US. Every spring hundreds of authors and over a hundred thousand readers gather at the University of Arizona to hear from writers and to talk about and buy books. It was launched some years ago by former congregants and friends, Bill and Brenda Viner, and it’s run now by Abra McAndrew Friedman, a member of Beit Simcha, and it’s a lot of fun and an incredible experience. The Book of Ecclesiastes says:
עֲשׂוֹת סְפָרִים הַרְבֵּה אֵין קֵץ “of the making of books there is no end,” and the Tucson Book Festival certainly demonstrates the truth of that.
There are many events at the Festival, including plenty of author’s panels, in which a group of writers—typically three or four—talk about their books, and take questions from a moderator and the audience. Each of these panels has the moderator start the questioning, and over the years, I have been asked to moderate Festival of Books sessions a number times, usually for a subject related to religion or Judaism or ethics, or another topic I am supposed to know something about. I have moderated Festival of Books sessions on books about paradise, and the afterlife, and on books that dealt with contemporary ethical issues; often the authors were Jewish, which is no great surprise. I love books and reading and good writing, and writers are always enthusiastic and articulate about their own works. Plus, I have the advantage of having interviewed hundreds of authors over the 24 years of the Too Jewish radio show and podcast, and I actually read the books before the session, which the authors are genuinely grateful for.

Our Beit Simcha member, Lori Riegel Roman is on one of the Festival of Books’ committees, and I was asked to moderate a session about books focused on redemption, famous people who managed to rise from challenges to achieve some sort of redemption. When Lori asked me to moderate the panel, she mentioned I was the right choice since two of the books were about musicians—I know something about music—and two had connections to Los Angeles, where I grew up, and all three involved redemptive arcs, which seems quite Jewish; plus, the authors were all Jewish. At least that was the original panel. But then, one of the authors withdrew shortly before the festival. That meant it would be panel of just two books.

To be honest, I hadn’t paid too much attention to the books or the panel until a few weeks before the festival—I have this day job, you see, as a rabbi—and so when I turned to the books, I realized they formed a most unusual pairing. Both books were about music and were written by Jewish authors; that much was true. The first was about Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, and was written by an author named David Leaf. It turned out that Arlene Leaf, an active member of Beit Simcha since our beginnings, is his cousin. Well and good; I know the Beach Boys’ music—growing up in Southern California you couldn’t help but know it—and was familiar with his story, which indeed combined great success, creative musical genius, a mental breakdown, and a return from the abyss. The second book, I was pleased to discover, was written by a former top baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, a Jewish guy named Jeff Pearlman whose stories I read in the magazine for years. He’s written a number of books about sports, including the book Showtime which the popular HBO series Winning Time about the Los Angeles Lakers was based on. But this book was a departure for him. It was not about sports. It was about music, alright: rap music. It was a biography of Tupac Shakur.

Now I know a lot about Jewish music, and Broadway musicals, folk music, and classic rock; a decent amount about classical music, opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, jazz and madrigals, some country music, and New Wave and popular music through, oh, 1990. I know some reggae, and heck, barbershop quartets and Civil War music. I even know pop music from the mid-2000s up until today, because by then I had kids old enough to bring me up to date, and the teenagers in our congregation like to share what they listen to nowadays.
But I don’t know anything about rap music, not at all. I might know less about hip-hop. My introduction to rap music came abruptly in rabbinic school in Jerusalem in 1991 when I brought along about 50 CDs—remember CDs?—and a portable sound system, and my younger classmates were briefly thrilled—until they realized that I hadn’t brought the rap and hip hop music that was their pop music of choice. I know nothing about rap. While I had heard of Tupac Shakur and knew he died young and violently, that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of him.

In my capacity of moderator, I emailed the two authors, noting the panel probably included two books on the whitest American musician of all time, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and the blackest American musician of all time, Tupac Shakur. Jeff Pearlman, a very funny guy, emailed back, writing:
“I can say, with 100-percent certainty, of all the panels I've been on that involve discussing Tupac and Brian Wilson with an Arizona-based rabbi, I believe this will be best.” How could it not be?

For those who don’t know—I was certainly among them—Tupac Shakur was a hugely influential rapper, sometimes cited as the greatest ever, and a crucial figure in the development of hip hop. His success was meteoric, including number one hits and albums—he has sold 75 million of them—and although his entire career lasted just 7 years before he was killed, he recorded an incredible amount of music, and made several films as well. To prepare for this odd task, I opened Jeff Pearlman’s book and started to read.

And almost immediately I was struck by an extraordinary story he told.
When Tupac Shakur was starting out in music and acting, just 19 years old, he was cast in his first film in a small role. There’s a lot of down time on a film set, and one day he was reading the newspaper and saw a very rough story about a 12 year-old girl, Brenda, living in public housing who had been r***d by a cousin, impregnated, and never told her fractured family about it. This 12 year-old girl had given birth at home, alone, and, not knowing what else to do, had thrown the baby down a trash chute into a dumpster. The baby was recovered by a custodian who heard cries coming from a plastic trash bag just before he was going to compact it, and he saved the baby boy. After he read the story, Tupac told a co-star, Omar Epps, that he needed a minute; he went into his actor’s trailer and wrote a song in twenty minutes called, “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” It went onto his first album, and became a hit, and a favorite of Tupac Shakur’s.

In the nearly 25 years since that story came out, the song was written, no one had followed up on what happened to the baby that 12 year-old Brenda discarded in her desperation. Pearlman decided to find out, and contacted an old friend, Michelle, an ace researcher. They didn’t know the name of the baby, or anything else about him, except the date he was recovered. Yet somehow this researcher found a phone number. Pearlman contacted the number, and it turned out that he had found the right man, who lived in Las Vegas. He was a nice young man named Devon Hodge, who said, “You found the right guy. I’m the baby who was thrown down the trash heap.”

What happened was that the saved baby boy was put up for adoption and raised by a good couple. Devon Hodge always wanted to know more about his origins. When he found this out, he sent his DNA to one of the $100 genetic services out there, and discovered he had a huge extended family. These relatives told him he was the baby that inspired Tupac Shakur’s song, “Brenda’s got a baby.” And he was reunited with his larger, extended family; he went to a big family reunion back east, and even took a photo standing next to the trash dumpster he was rescued from.

But he still never had met or been connected with his mother. So, Pearlman went back to his wizard-like researcher, and she found the mother. The researcher, Michelle, called the woman, and said, “Did you have a baby back in 2001?” And the woman started screaming, and crying: “Do you know where my son is? Do you know where my son is? I’ve been looking for him for years. I live in Newark, New Jersey, but I’m away from home at a concert.” The researcher said, “Where’s the concert?” And the mother answered, “It’s in Las Vegas.” And the researcher said, “Your son lives in Las Vegas.” And so that night, in Las Vegas, Devon Hodge met his mother for the first time; it turned out that she had given him his first name at the hospital after he, and she, were rescued by police, and the adopted family kept it. It was an amazing reunion, filled with crying and hugs and emotions most of us cannot imagine. A miraculous reconnection. All because of a song.

Look, Tupac Shakur lived a talented, chaotic, short life. But that his song brought this mother and child together, in a positive and extraordinary way, is amazing.

There is an odd temporal connection here; you may have heard that Tupac Shakur’s killer was, in fact, finally convicted of murder this month some 30 years after the death.

So why am I telling you all this? Am I now suddenly an afficionado of rap or hip-hop music? Do I want you all to become fans of Tupac’s music? Is it because Pearlman called his book, using a quote from Tupac, “Only God Can Judge Me,” and it’s Yom Kippur, when we are all, by Jewish tradition, judged by God?

It is an incredible story, of course, improbable—and, in its own way redemptive, which was the excuse for that book session in the first place. Tupac was shot to death in a period when rap music and hip hop were identified closely with gang violence, when gangsta rap often spread misogyny and glorified bloodshed. Yet this early song somehow brought about a remarkable reunion, years later. This extraordinary true story about unlikely family reunion reminds me of three Jewish parallels, imperfect but evocative.

The first is the story of our great patriarch Joseph in the Torah. If you recall, Joseph of amazing dreamcoat fame, was thrown down into a kind of garbage pit himself, by his own brothers, before being sold into slavery in Egypt. His father, Jacob, was led to believe that his favorite son was dead. He spent the next 20 years mourning his lost son. And then, against all odds, two decades later, Jacob discovers that his son is not only alive, but the most powerful leader in Egypt. Their reunion is quite amazing in Genesis: there is crying, and tears, and hugs, and incredibly powerful emotion. Ultimately, this reunion, of the entire family of Jacob, literally the children of Israel, is the basis for the formation of the Jewish people. It too, is a miraculous moment of true redemption.

There are also many extraordinary reunion stories from the time of the Shoah, the Holocaust, of parents who believed their children were dead, of children who believed their parents were dead, of husbands and wives separated by the N***s who somehow survived and managed to find each other: in DP camps in Europe, on returning to their destroyed hometowns, in Israel, in America. One of the most remarkable of these true stories was a family of 10 Hungarian Jewish siblings—close to Jacob’s 12 sons in number-- the Katz family, 9 of whom improbably survived the camps, all of whom thought the others were dead, only to be reunited after the war. Their parents and one sibling were murdered by the Germans. Yet against all odds the remaining 9 survived and went on to live successful, full lives.

One day after the end of World War II, one of the surviving brothers, Moshe Katz, who had begun a new life, saw two filthy, gaunt-looking men, sitting on the front steps of his apartment in Budapest. Altruistically, he offered these concentration camp survivors some nourishment. One man pointed to the other and asked if Katz recognized him. Moshe did not, at first; it turned out that he had been unknowingly offering food to his own brother...

A final Jewish parallel story, of sorts. This past year, one redemptive event should have had greater resonance than it apparently has. Last October, just after the end of the Jewish fall holiday season of 5786, the final 20 Israeli hostages, held by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas for two full years, were released, and came home. The reunion for these hostages was long in coming, and their experiences since October 7th, 2023, can only have caused massive personal trauma. And yet, against all the odds, they were finally brought home and reunited with their families and their country. 251 Israelis were taken hostage on that terrible day; 85 ultimately died, either that day, and their bodies were taken into Gaza, or over the two years that followed.

But over those two years, 166 were saved from captivity, and reunited, in a fulfillment of pidyon shevuyim, the mitzvah of redeeming captives. If you have watched the emotional scenes of reunion, of the sense that the entire nation of Israel, all 10 million people, breathed fully again for the first time in two years. This was more than a simple redemption of captives. It was a redemption for the entire country. The return of the last hostages to Israel was, in its own way, a miraculous national redemption.

Many things went wrong this past Jewish calendar year; war in Iran and Lebanon; settler violence in the West Bank; antisemitic attacks in England, Australia, Michigan, indeed, seemingly everywhere; the normalization of antisemitism on the political left and the political right. It is easy to feel that we are in a truly bad time.

But the truth is that these moments of incredible connection are there; they are always there. If we choose to look, if we work to see the semi-invisible lines that link us all together, we can find these moments of extraordinary redemption. Because they are truly just a reminder that we are all connected, always; that God is not necessarily in the great and overwhelming experience of revelation or transcendence, but in the many moments of connection that can show us how we are all, truly, part of a greater whole.

It’s true: often we can only become aware of our interconnectedness, our redemptive possibility, through extraordinary events. Maybe we have to see a baby saved and reunited with his mother years later through a song; maybe we have to see a family saved from its own failures and raised up; maybe we have to see salvation from destruction, and redemption from captivity before we can know that there is more in this world than just us, that there are forces at work that save, and redeem, and sanctify.

But I can promise: if you look deeply enough, on Yom Kippur, but also on an ordinary day, you will find those connections. You will find your own moments of true redemption.

Over this festival of Atonement, over this long day of Teshuvah, may you each find those connections. And so experience true redemption.

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Everything You Know is Wrong
Opening Kol Nidrei Eve 5787
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

A congregant come up after services one Yom Kippur Eve with a complaint. Imagine that… His kvetch was, “Rabbi: the music is always the same at our synagogue.” And I answered, “That’s because you haven’t been here for a year, and the only song you recognize is Kol Nidrei. Come back next week, after Yom Kippur; we do completely different melodies then.” The things people just don’t know…

On that subject, I received a gift from my mother-in-law, Sophie’s mom Kathy, recently. It was a general knowledge card game, sort of trivial pursuit-like, but the information included in it was not exactly trivial. In the game, you are challenged to try to figure out the answers to the issues raised on the cards about science, history, literature, geography, and arts and letters. It includes questions like, “Who is the oldest man in the Bible?” When you, being knowledgeable as you all are, wisely answer “Methusaleh,” it has a surprising answer on the back of the card. “It’s not Methusaleh; he was just 969 years old. It’s Enoch, who never died—one of only two people definitely identified as not dying in the Tanakh—and therefore he is now something like 5387 years old today.” In case you were wondering, the other non-dead biblical figure was Elijah the prophet, but he lived much later than Enoch, and isn’t nearly as long-lived.

The game is called “The Box of General Ignorance.” But what struck me particularly was not the q-&-a cards inside. No, what struck me was the motto on the front of the box: “Everything you think you know is wrong!”

I wondered about that… “Everything you think you know is wrong…” As a rabbi, was this gift a comment on my professional competence? My pretended universal knowledge of lots of things? The quality of my sermons? Or was it perhaps a hint at something deeper?

“Everything you think you know is wrong…” Hmm… That is a humbling gift to receive, isn’t it? Isn’t this a way of saying, “You think you know so much. You, my friend, do not.” You are not nearly as aware of what the world knows, or thinks about you, as you believe.

Dear rabbi son-in-law: Enjoy your present…

Now, I’m not saying that was the intent of this act necessarily. But it did make me wonder.

Tonight we are all about to begin a process of self-awareness and confession, a time when we examine our souls, our actions, our relationships, when we explore what we did in the past year and what we should have done, and engage in a process of self-correction. And if we look back at the past year, how much of what we thought we knew, about the world, about our country, about the community, about ourselves proved to be true? How often did we find out that what we thought we knew wasn’t the case at all?

Yom Kippur is a time when we are asked—urged—even commanded—to look within. It’s the day when, above all, we must seek to find the truth about who we really are. And when we pull that question card out of the box, and look at the answer—and it may not be what we expected to read at all—well, then, we are gifted with the opportunity, painful as it can be, to change in ways that make us better, more honest, holier people.

Maybe the best way to begin that process is by acknowledging what we don’t know. It may not be true that everything we think we know about ourselves is wrong; but it is surely true that our own certainties about who and what we are and have accomplished the past year may not bear the careful scrutiny of these next 24 hours.

And so, as we begin looking within, we pray: on this Day of Atonement, may we find the ability to look honestly at ourselves. May we admit what we don’t know, and be open to learning what we need to know. And in our prayers, our thoughts, our meditations, and our actions, may we use that knowledge of our own ignorance to find the way to live better lives.

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