Remembering Sol Cohen z”l

Recently, I lost one of the most important teachers I’ve ever had and the Penn community, as well as the larger world of Jewish Studies, has lost a giant. Sol Cohen was an Orthodox rabbi and semitic philologist—a deeply learned person. I studied rabbinics with him for fourteen years. He died on Friday, January 3, following complications from surgery.

A long-time fixture at the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, and subsequently at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Rabbi Dr. Cohen worked as a Judaic librarian and instructor at several institutions including the University of Pennsylvania and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Though he lived in Philadelphia, he was buried in Jerusalem on Tuesday, January 7. I joined the funeral by Zoom.

It was emotional for me, and also alienating. Two of the three eulogies were in Yiddish, Sol’s native tongue, a language I do not know. 

During the third eulogy, delivered by a distinguished-looking man with a long white beard, whom I could barely hear because the microphone was far from the dais where he spoke, I began flipping through a Hebrew book on my desk: Isaac Abravanel’s commentary on The Ethics of the Fathers—Naḥalat avot. I was looking at it desultorily, trying not to miss anything happening in Jerusalem, in case the audio improved, or in case the speaker said anything significant about Sol.

My eye fell on an Aramaic phrase quoted by Abravanel: ḥavrutata o mitata: “either a study partner or death.” The line brought tears to my eyes. Reading the Renaissance rabbi’s interpretation made me struggle to choke back sobs: “A person is not able to know things completely using his own investigation if his master does not help and support him in what he investigates and contemplates.” I had such a master. I cherished him and miss him achingly.

What he taught me ranged far beyond Aramaic verb conjugations and talmudic technical vocabulary. He showed me what it meant to be a scholar. In our hearts and brains, something lies deeper than erudition, beneath disciplined study, anterior to memory and intimacy with texts: sincerity and passion. Neither of these is popular today. Sol was old school, in the best possible way.

***

We were an unlikely pair. When I met him he was seventy-nine years old, a retired Judaica librarian. He was a strictly observant Jew. I was a thirty-year-old graduate student and my fidelity to Jewish ritual then, as now, was selective. Sol was born and raised in Brooklyn and Yiddish was his native language. I was born in a suburb of Boston and grew up speaking only English. I’ve never seen Sol, in person or over videoconferencing, in anything other than slacks and a crisp button-down shirt, usually covered with a blazer. I often attended our study sessions less formally dressed.

I went to Sol to supplement my education. Although I had done the best I could through years of hard work to augment my limited childhood exposure to Judaica, there were certain areas of the Jewish literary and spiritual tradition alien to me: the Talmud and rabbinic responsa (legal rulings). Towards the end of my graduate work in the history department at Penn, when I was working on my dissertation, I asked my advisor, Professor David Ruderman, how I might improve my facility reading responsa. “Go speak to Sol Cohen,” he suggested. And so I did.

There are three meta-lessons I learned from Sol: what it means to take language seriously, why experience matters, and what is worth paying attention to.

Language: It is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to study Jewish texts meaningfully in translation. Rabbis from antiquity until modernity knew the entire Bible by heart, as well as massive amounts of law and lore. They deployed all of this with dazzling creativity and nuance, and wordplays are ubiquitous in Jewish texts. Though these rabbis spoke other languages, they thought in Hebrew and considered the Hebrew language itself to be the DNA in which the whole world was encoded. Sol would often exhort me, in a pronounced Brooklyn accent, “We’re not saying tehillim [psalms] here!” By this he meant: true study is not rote recitation. It is strenuous work, and you need to know what every word means.

Experience: When we studied biblical verses or rabbinic statements, Sol would often say to me, “Do you notice the syntactic irregularity there?” Or, “Why do you think the Bible uses this word and not that apparent synonym which is more common?” He was able to ask these questions because after decades and decades of study, both as a man of faith and as a scholar, he knew the patterns—and when they break down. Those moments of rupture lead to the rapture of insight. There is no shortcut, no four-hour hack to arrive at pattern recognition. It takes years of discipline. When I began studying with Sol, I figured that in a year’s time, working with him once or twice a week, I’d be an expert. Fourteen years later I am embarrassed to even write that line. I’m still a mere apprentice, and always will be.

What we pay attention to: Once, in 2012 when my wife and I were living in Italy (I had a year-long fellowship at Harvard’s Villa i Tatti), I had to cancel a session with Sol. I called him from the landline in my apartment and asked if we could reschedule. He said sure, no problem. I asked him if he was upset. After a brief pause, he said, “I’m upset that we couldn’t figure out what the Rambam was saying in our last session.” Referring to Maimonides by his traditional Jewish acronym, Sol remembered that in our previous meeting I couldn’t correctly explain one of the Rambam’s explanations of an obscure law. The point was clear: I shouldn’t waste time or energy thinking about having to reschedule a study session. Rescheduling an appointment was inconsequential. Understanding a medieval titan was not.

***

Last Friday, I was at my university office late in the afternoon, trying to squeeze in a couple of hours’ work before Shabbat. From deep in a filing cabinet, I exhumed a large red folder bursting at the seams, with a faded yellow sticky note on the front that says simply, “Sol, 2010–2013.” It’s a collection of photocopies of Hebrew texts, and my notes. Thumbing through these pages instantly teleported me back to the magical library at the Katz Center, where shelves groan with classical Jewish texts and modern interpretations of them. I would procure material and scurry down to the third floor, where the Jewish Quarterly Review had its offices and Sol Cohen had a cubicle bursting with books in a profusion of languages, festooned with maps of the ancient Near East.

On one page of those notes from years ago, I had transcribed a quotation from Sol: “Once he smiled at me and it made me very happy.” Under this I’ve scrawled “the rav.” Sol must have been telling a story about the one time he impressed his teacher. I cannot remember Sol ever using the word “happy.” Tears rushed to my eyes, and my heart ached.

The tears and the ache are not only for a man; they’re for the loss of a world he represents. Sol embodied the most thorough knowledge of traditional Judaism combined with a humanistic receptivity to other, complementary worlds: Greek and Latin (he was a classics major in college) and above all his beloved Sumerian, which he studied at Penn under professors S. N. Kramer and E. A. Speiser, and whose texts and myths inspired him throughout his life. It’s hard to imagine a future scholar joyously announcing that the Aramaic of the Targum preserved rare Sumerian terms, or that the editors of our modern editions of midrash mangled Greek and Latin words, or that, as Sol was fond of saying in his flawless German, “Wir brauchen eine wissenschaftliche Auflage [we need a scientific edition]!” 

***

It was the honor of a lifetime to study with Sol. We met in person as frequently as five times a week, and in more recent years, once a week on Monday afternoons. As the Talmud records Rabbi Eliezer saying, I have taken from him only as much as a dog laps from an ocean.

Many times I asked Sol, “How can I repay you for this?,” referring to the thousands of hours of his time he had given me—for free, I might add: he never asked for, or accepted, payment. Usually he didn’t deign to respond. Once or twice he whispered, quietly looking away from me up towards the ceiling, as if to the future, “Pass it on.” I try. I try in my teaching, in my writing, and in my relationships. I’ll keep trying as long as I live. 

In the commentary by Abravanel I was reading on the day of Sol’s funeral, the fifteenth-century sage expatiates on a rabbinic statement comparing Moses to the sun and Joshua to the moon. Just as the moon emits no light of its own but merely reflects the rays of our own solar system’s star, Joshua has the merit of transmitting Moses’s teachings.

I hope someday I’ll have the merit to pass on a few stray rays of the bright light of Torah that Sol Cohen illuminated for me.