Final Friday Night Sermon
Friday night, June 29, 2025
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
Yesterday evening I went to fulfill a promise.
Four months ago, a father of three in our congregation emailed to let me know that his daughter Riley, who would be turning ten in June, had asked for a copy of our CBB prayerbook as a gift for her birthday. I’ll say that again, in case you didn’t fully take it in. His daughter Riley would be turning ten and had asked for a copy of our prayer book for her birthday present!!! I was so happy that I showed the email to Marian, who started to cry. I wrote back immediately to say that I would be happy to hand-inscribe a copy for Riley….and made a note to myself, which slipped down to the bottom of my list of tasks, because her birthday was four months away. Now as my retirement is almost here, I have been crossing off many remaining things to do, and I emailed Riley’s parents asking if they would be at home yesterday evening and could I bring over the siddur, the prayerbook. Her mom wrote right back to say yes, that would be wonderful.
I went to my bookshelf at home, where I have a few copies of the prayerbook and picked one in mint condition and took it with me to bring to Riley. When I arrived at their home, everyone was in a state of high excitement, and Riley and I sat on her couch, where I told her that no young person had ever asked me for a CBB prayer book before. I took out my pen and wrote: “To Riley, with all my love, Rabbi Steve Cohen.” And when I handed her the book, Riley said, and I quote, “This is literally the best day of my life.”
That was three days before I retire after forty years as a rabbi. Riley and her family are here tonight. Thank you Riley, and her whole family, for making all my hard work feel worth it. Here is what I mean by that: For Riley to ask for that siddur means that she knows enough about what is in there to already love it. And that she loves this place and the people here. And that she loves being Jewish. And I know that even though Riley is an extraordinary young woman, if she feels that way, there must be others in her generation who also love what they have found here. Transmitting love for our tradition to the next generation has truly been my life’s work, and that is why I say that her response makes all the hard work feel worth it.
Now I want to shift gears, and would like to share with you a poem I wrote many years ago, after walking one day at sunset by the ocean. It’s called A Jewish Ending and it is autobiographical.
A Jew paces the lip of the Pacific Sea.
In his ancient mind, this is the end of the world.
What brought him here?
Far from home;
In the enchanted West he appeared.
The Santa Ynez mountains might be Canaan’s hill-country.
But this pilgrimage has gone wrong,
A wandering too far.
Amnesia.
Squinting into the fading light,
He strains to recall fragments of story:
A ship, storm-tossed,
driven off course by the breath of a demon king.
Or was he drawn spell-bound by the sun,
As it slipped into its place of extinguishing?
My old friend Rabbi Salomon Gruenwald asked me to read that poem when he came here from Denver for my retirement weekend, and I got choked up reading the last line. This poem captures the questions that have haunted me for decades, since Marian and I decided to make this our permanent home. Is this a place with a Jewish future? Is there a reason for us to be here? We assimilated Jews have forgotten so much. Can we recover from our amnesia? Or will this be the place of our extinguishing?
There have definitely been times over the past forty years when it has felt to me like here in Santa Barbara we were watching the sunset of Judaism. We have no Jewish day school. No Jewish Home for the Aged. No Jewish cemetery. No Jewish bakery. No Jewish butcher. No Jewish bookstore. We have no Conservative Shul. No Jewish newspaper. We do not even have a Jewish neighborhood.
And it can be hard to get people to come to Temple on Shabbat. Except for tonight, but I can only retire once! And even harder for important festivals like Sukkot and Shavuot. It can sometimes be impossible to compete with AYSO soccer (as you know, that stands for All Your Shabbats are Over) and gymnastics for our kids’ attention. So it can be easy, at times, to draw the conclusion that in Jewish Santa Barbara the sun is setting. The sunset can of course be very beautiful, but it marks the end of the day.
So what about a sunrise? Here in Santa Barbara, the sun rises over the mountains. One of the very last details that still remains before the completion of the Building Dreams project will come at the very end of the project. A beautiful Hebrew inscription, in fiery white letters running all the way around the circumference of our new shade structure out on the Central Plaza. Those letters will spell out the full text of Psalm 121, which begins “I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come.”
Lifting our eyes toward the mountains means looking toward the sunrise. The new day, the future. In this moment as I stand poised on the verge of retirement, and we as a community, stand poised between our past and our future, let me share with you just a little of my sense of this Santa Barbara Jewish community.
First of all, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants like Judy Meisel, who survived the Holocaust and came to lead our preschool for many years, and to serve hundreds if not thousands of guests in her home for Shabbes dinner. And Margaret Singer, who lost her mother in the Holocaust but who, if I ever said “the world is broken,” Margaret would shout out “no, it’s perfect!” And Lester and Viola Girsh, and the Sanders Family, and Sophie and Max Friedman, and Bob and Ruth Hartzman, and Barney and Valerie Abrahams, and Yale and Eleanor Coggan all the others who founded this Temple and who built this building. And Sylvia Glass, who grew up dirt poor in the Bronx and became our Temple’s supremely literate librarian. And Natalie Myerson, and Ruth Nebel, and Bobbi Kroot, and I had better stop there, because there are just too many, far too many to mention. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, those who led this congregation for so many decades, with grit, and determination. They gave us our name Bnai Brith, which means “The Children of the Covenant”… because they felt an obligation to their own ancestors, and to their future descendants. That obligation, both to the past and to the future is the meaning of brit, or covenant.
Regarding the present. In my very subjective, biased opinion, this congregation is, in this moment, a great Jewish community. We do music really well. We have hundreds of adult learners. We have a superb educational program for children. We are deeply engaged in acts of compassion, and we are highly skilled at relaxing together.
I am so grateful to everyone who created the marvelous three-day Mountains of Wisdom retirement celebration, because for three days, we saw and felt and heard exactly what this community is capable of. Fantastic music, and singing, dazzling learning and an amazing potluck dinner for 200 people, kids playing, an entire community praying, and everybody creating art, and 500 people at the zoo dancing like crazy. We saw with our eyes that at this moment, this is a great Jewish community.
And what would I say about the future? We have joined together in a heroic effort to renew this home. It has been a huge leap of faith, an enormous investment of time and effort and money, all driven by the single idea that there is hope for our future. That is the one idea behind the entire Building Dreams project, that there is hope for our future. As I take this big step into retirement, I am thinking about my life’s work. And I think it all boils down to this: I have tried to be a catalyst for hope. I have tried to bring together anybody who was interested in building a Jewish home for the future. And I have to thank you—all of you. I am not going to start naming individual people because it would go on forever. But I have to thank you all for joining with me in this sacred work.
When a nine-year-old girl in our congregation asks her parents for a copy of the siddur for her birthday, and then tells me that the day she received it was literally the best day of her life….that is one good indication that it has all been worth it.
Shabbat shalom.