One of Rabbi Helen Cohn’s goals when she started Congregation M’kor Hayim in 2008 was to have a personal relationship with every member.
On the cusp of her retirement from the pulpit at the end of June, it’s a goal she can say she’s met. Her congregants and friends in the clergy agree.
“I’ve known a bunch of rabbis in my life, but I have never had one [before] that I call ‘my rabbi.’ I found a teacher in her,” says Judith Weiser, a founding member who serves as the congregation’s treasurer.
Board President Carol Weinstein remembers her delight in Cohn’s approach, which contrasted sharply with the “endless, meandering sermons” of her former rabbi in New Jersey: “Rabbi Helen was personable, accessible, knowledgeable (but not pedantic), and authoritative (but not dictatorial). Her sermons weren’t sermons but drashes, a term I hadn’t heard before. And she invited interactions — something I had never witnessed in a Shabbat service.”
Rabbi Thomas Louchheim, rabbi emeritus at Kol Ami, says Cohn “took her role as rabbi to her congregants and the community absolutely seriously, and I really appreciated that.”
At local rabbinic gatherings, “she has been a tremendous voice of reason and also collaboration,” Louchheim says, adding, “Whenever I see her, it just brightens my day. I just have such respect for her.”
The Rev. Adele Resmer, a retired Lutheran pastor, met Cohn when she was seeking someone to speak about Judaism to her congregation in Tucson. They hit it off immediately, Resmer says, becoming personal friends as well as participating together in interfaith services.
Cohn, she says, “has a particular gift for being deeply devoted, deep loving of her own faith tradition, of Judaism, and at the same time an openness and a curiosity about other traditions that allows her to make meaningful relationships with people outside the Jewish tradition. I think that’s remarkable.”
For the past five years, Resmer, who now lives in Fountain Hills, Arizona, has been part of M’kor Hayim’s Torah study group, which went online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another retired clerical friend, the Rev. Debra Asis, became fast friends with Cohn after they met at a Sister José Women’s Center fundraiser. She enjoyed trading pulpits with Cohn and they would join each other’s congregations for celebrations such as Purim at M’kor Hayim or Lenten meals at Asis’ church.
“One of the things that I love about Helen and that also came through very strongly when our communities were together — Helen would always have great questions and questions that made me stop and pause and think,” she says.
Reflecting on the congregation she led for almost 18 years, Cohn enumerates some of the programs she is especially proud of, including Elul retreats in anticipation of the High Holidays, a Torah study group that included other readings such as Thomas Mann’s “Joseph and His Brothers” and “The Magic Mountain,” and four adult B’nai Mitzvah groups.
Weinstein, who decided to become a Bat Mitzvah at age 70, recalls that in addition to learning Hebrew and discussing “Voices of Wisdom: Jewish Ideals and Ethics for Everyday Living,” the class learned about the structure and content of Shabbat evening services.
“It was like a veil had been lifted from the Shabbat liturgy. I now understood why we said each prayer and why they were in a particular order,” Weinstein says.
Cohn also highlights M’kor Hayim’s Mussar group, which has been meeting for 16 years. The congregation’s website says the intention of Mussar, roughly translated as “ethics,” is “to help us become a more whole and a more holy human being” through the exploration of character traits (middot) such as patience, humility, generosity, and honor.
“Mussar significantly influenced my life and helped me change thinking and behaviors that had been resistant to many years of therapy,” Weinstein says.
Social action has also been a core value at M’kor Hayim, with the rabbi participating hands-on alongside her congregants, whether packing food bags for students at Homer Davis Elementary School, calling bingo at Tucson Interfaith HIV/AIDS Network’s Poz Cafe, or making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for Casa Maria Soup Kitchen..
Members always intended to keep M’kor Hayim small and “heimish,” says Holly Harper, another founding member, using a Yiddish word that translates as “homey, warm, cozy, and unpretentious.”
“We wanted to make sure that people knew each other, and that we really felt like a cohesive community, and that was more important than filling the seats,” Harper says.
During the COVID-19 shutdown, when all of M’kor Hayim’s services were online, it attracted dozens of additional followers, some from far afield.
Weiser says M’kor Hayim’s local members are largely empty-nesters who decided early on that the congregation would not include a religious school.
Deciding to Disband
This year, they made another big decision, to disband when their rabbi retires.
After 18 years, “we had aged ourselves out of leadership,” Weiser says.
“It was done very mindfully, thoughtfully,” Cohn says, explaining that she announced her intention to retire to the M’kor Hayim board in December, and soon after M’kor Hayim held a congregational meeting, followed by a vote on Jan. 12, which was unanimous.
Asis, who has stayed in touch with Cohn despite moving to New Mexico, says she is impressed with how the congregation heeded the famous verse from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season.”
“The season around Helen was rich and wonderful and nourishing to the community and to Helen and to the wider Tucson community,” she says, yet the congregation had “the wisdom to say, and now it’s a new season and to gracefully let go.”
Harper adds that the rabbi’s enthusiasm for learning and exploring together inspired congregants to become “fully responsible Jews.”
Cohn echoes this, noting that when she was laid up after surgery this spring, congregants handled everything to keep M’kor Hayim going. In a March 23 reflection she shared in a weekly congregational email, Cohn wrote, “Rabbis are teachers, not priests. I am tremendously proud of our congregation which carried on every teaching, ritual, administrative and liturgical function when ‘the rabbi’ was not available. This, for me, is the greatest wish a rabbi could have for a congregation.”
Board President Carol Weinstein says the board divvied up “all the tasks involved in dissolution: dispersal of assets, establishing an archive, planning a retirement party, filing dissolution papers with the state, planning final services. We are all sad, but we feel that this is the right decision …. I feel very good about the process we have followed.”
The dispersal of assets includes the transfer of the congregation’s two Torahs.
One is a Holocaust Torah that Weiser and her mother bought on eBay back in 2009, which has water damage, says board member Jane Levin, who was tasked with finding homes for both. The Holocaust Torah will be sent to the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London, which will make repairs before loaning it to another synagogue.
The congregation wanted its other Torah to go to another inclusive Reform/Progessive synagogue. Working with the Union for Reform Judaism, they found a match in Beth El Bineh in Dallas, where Rabbi Holly Levin Cohn – no relation to Jane Levin or Rabbi Helen Cohn – is overjoyed, Levin says.
Beth El Bineh’s rabbi and another congregant will fly to Tucson for M’kor Hayim’s June 20 Shabbat service, after which the congregant will drive the Torah to Dallas.
The congregation will hold its final service on June 27.
Congregants need some time to process the ending of M’kor Hayim, Harper says, and are hoping Cohn will continue her Saturday morning Torah study group.
“That will be one way for people to stay connected and connected to her,” she says.
Cohn, who was ordained in 1994 after a 20-year career in the computer field, served as one of four rabbis at a large synagogue in San Francisco for 12 years before moving to Tucson in 2006. She was an interim rabbi at Congregation Chaverim before starting M’kor Hayim.
Now, she says she is open to the occasional gig as a “rabbi around town,” leading a retreat or teaching a class.
But she isn’t rushing her post-retirement decisions.
“Conventional wisdom says, take a little time and look around and see what would appeal to my strengths and my interests,” she says.
