Warm-Up: A Miracle Just for Me

On October 22, 1995, I had an experience that changed everything.

The head of Pop Warner (like Little League football) in Sharon approached me. “I need you to coach a team,” he said. “But I have to tell you… they’re terrible. They didn’t score a single point last year. And the quarterback, their best player, is a girl.”

I reminded my team of their previous game, a loss against the worst team in the league. “You lost, not because you’re the worst team in Massachusetts, but because you have the combined heart of a field mouse! Absolutely no fight, no character, no nothing!” I asked for 100 percent commitment for the upcoming week of practice, for them to give it their all. They did, and we had a great week of practice.

And then something unbelievable happened. We won 13-12. Against the best team in the league. The defending champs. It felt like a classic Disney underdog movie.

Why am I possibly boring you with a decades-old mildly amusing anecdote?

Because that game changed my life forever.

That game is why I became frum.

F

or some reason that I still can’t put my finger on, the speech I gave my team came back to me: I was a Jew, I knew that, but I’d also copped out on my people, my team. As a Jew, did I have the heart of a field mouse?

If you get a beatdown, you can either quit on your team — or you can come back. You can quit, or you can fight. It’s easier for most people to quit, but what drives a team to come back from a loss and try harder? It’s a certain perseverance and strength of character. When I looked at the Jewish People, I saw the Holocaust. That was a brutal beatdown — in football terms, we got destroyed in a horrific game. How do I respond to that beatdown? Do I run away and assimilate, or will I stand up and come back, and be a man of character and fight for my nation? I realized that I was not being a fighter; I was running away. I was trying to hide, trying to look Italian, trying to be anything else but what I am, which is Jewish.

When I looked at the Jews as my team, I rated pretty poorly as a teammate. I was running away and throwing in the towel instead of giving my best effort to help the team rise up. If I were judging myself as a football player, how would I rate? And the answer was horrible. I felt like, even if I did care that we were losing, what could I do about it anyway? Might as well just give up.

I never even tried. And when I was finally honest with myself, that was what really got me —I didn’t even try; not only didn’t I give my best effort, I had given no effort at all.

Then I asked myself a question: How many Jews would need to die for me to become motivated to be a good Jew? And I started counting. One? No. Ten? No. A hundred? No. A thousand? No. Ten thousand? No. A hundred thousand? No. A million? No.

I’m in utter disbelief as well as cringing at the pain of that question. Thank G-d, my number didn’t get to six million. But that’s where the identity shift happened for me. I get tears in my eyes when I think about how pathetic I was.

That I was mechallel Shabbos before I knew differently doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that I was such a callous Jew. I just didn’t care. I just wanted to have a good life and have fun. I was once offered a free trip to Israel but my attitude was, “I’d rather pay $1,000 to go to Cancun and have fun than take a free trip to Israel.” And I did.

So my next question to myself was, what am I going to do to fix the problem? At that moment I decided to turn myself around and go back to Hebrew school. I wasn’t going to go to the grave being that callous, uncaring Jew.

Kickoff: Alef-Beis

I was 29, and, “Ha ha, you’re like Rabi Akiva!” people were telling me. I didn’t actually go back to the kids’ Hebrew school, but I did take the alef-beis classes with all the Yiddish speaking ladies at Kehillath Israel in Brookline — “Ah, ah, ba, ba.” And then I went to Chabad and they gave me a bunch of children’s coloring workbooks, and then I went to Congregation Chai Odom, Rabbi Dovid Moskowitz’s yeshivah in Brookline, where the eighth-grade kids taught me Mishnayos.

I remember the day I read Mein Kampf. I’m a coach and I also work in sales. If a guy leaves his playbook lying around, I’m going to read it. So I read “the playbook.” If you look at the number one assumption of Adolf Hitler yemach shemo or of any anti-Semite, it’s that the Jewish People are liars. They all say that we as a group are incredible liars and manipulators.

A lot of liberal Jews expect Mein Kampf to be stupid and dumb, but you had all these PhDs from Germany, the smartest, most educated people in the history of the world, how did they all buy the book and think it was a masterpiece? Because it is. Hitler was the greatest salesman in the world, but I just figured, hey, I’ll outsell him and out-debate him.

I didn’t know what I was talking about.

This was near the end of February 1999, at a time when I definitely still considered myself Conservative. I was still eating nonkosher. I was also dating a non-Jew who was nearing the end of her conversion process. But there was something bothering me about the conversion that I started feeling guilty about, even though there would be no Xmas in our house. (I’m a Kohein, by the way, but I didn’t know then that a Kohein isn’t allowed to marry a convert. The only thing I knew about Kohanim was that they don’t go to cemeteries. Even when I didn’t observe anything, I knew that. And if I had heard about Kohanim not marrying converts, I would’ve just thought that Orthodoxy is closed-minded.)

When I mentioned these guilty feelings to the Conservative rabbi (who knew I was a Kohein) handling her conversion he just asked me, “Is she a good person?”

“Yes.”

“Are you assimilating?”

“No.”

“So you’re doing like Avraham Avinu, you’re bringing her into the fold. You’re adding to the Jewish People, you’re not assimilating. You can get married to her in my temple.”

I felt a little better. That was exactly what I wanted to hear: “You’re doing a mitzvah.”

But soon after this I was at a shul, and two guys in the corner were arguing over a Mishnah Berurah, holding up their Kiddush cups, arguing about how high the cup should be filled on Shabbos, and they’re going back and forth — “It’s best to fill the cup to the top. But if you don’t have enough wine to fill the cup, it doesn’t need to be all the way to the top, as long as the cup contains a revi’is of wine” and “A revi’is is 3.8 fl. oz. or 112 ml” and “Yes, but you don’t have to drink all of that, just melo lugmo, the amount of wine that fills one cheek. For an average adult male, that’s between 1.5 and 2 fl. oz., 44 to 59 ml” and “You have to drink that within thirty seconds” — and I’m watching them, thinking, This has got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen.

At this point I thought the world’s big problems were world hunger and the threat of nuclear war; these guys were acting like this is the answer to humankind’s problems. People are starving and you think G-d cares about how much wine is in a Kiddush cup? And I got angrier and angrier and then I walked out.

My girlfriend and I were supposed to go to the Kentucky Derby that week, and I was upset because the race was on Shabbos. But she kept telling me, “It’ll be okay, we’ll have a great time, we can keep Shabbos like this, and have fun like this, we don’t have to be like that” — and because of that Kiddush cup thing, I was feeling like, I can’t believe I was going to give up the Kentucky Derby for this. And I was angry, and all of sudden I realized I was in fight-or-flight mode.

And I thought, This is pretty peculiar. No one’s actually attacking me, so why am I all jacked up on adrenaline as if I’m running down the field on the kickoff?

I really wanted to know the answer to this question.

First Quarter: It’s in the Details

The first thing I realized was that I’d been assuming that G-d’s priorities are the same as mine — starvation, world peace, nuclear war… and the other things are just details. They’re nice, but not so important. I had assumed that G-d cares about the big things like human life and couldn’t care less about small things — like how full the Kiddush cup should be.

Not to be totally clichéd about it, but I really was blinded by a flash of clarity. I realized I had made a huge mistake about G-d. G-d is infinite! He can handle an infinite number of details. He can care about everything no matter how big or small. G-d has no limits, so there is no difference between the big picture and the little details. He can focus on and care about every ant and every blade of grass and every grain of sand and every atom because He’s not constrained by anything.

I had laughed at the Kiddush cup discussion, because to me, I thought it was saying G-d doesn’t care about people, just about small, meaningless details. But if He cares about the Kiddush cup, then He must care about people.

I thought, Okay, I made a mistake, G-d can care about the Kiddush cup and about all the other things, too; it’s not one or the other. But still… why am I so angry?

And then it hit me. I realized that when those Orthodox Jews were arguing over how high the wine should be, I started subconsciously thinking that if G-d cares about something so seemingly insignificant as how much wine is in a Kiddush cup, He must care about marriage laws and conversion laws.

And suddenly I imagined myself one day in the future, the community guy everyone loves, having a nice house, the day of my kid’s bar mitzvah in the Conservative temple, and someone comes up to me and says, “Mr. Cohen, mazel tov on the awesome bar mitzvah, your family is wonderful, best family in the whole temple, but by the way… your kids aren’t really Jewish.”

That would make me really angry.

I already knew this conversion wouldn’t be considered halachic according to Orthodoxy, because I was davening in the Modern Orthodox shul at that time, and the people I spent most of my time with were other baalei teshuvah and Chabadniks.

I had just thought, You can be narrow-minded and say my kids won’t be Jewish, what do I care what you think? I’m open-minded. But then I realized that the anger I was feeling was because I couldn’t say that.

That I must know it’s true. That I realized Orthodoxy was true. That I also believed my kids wouldn’t be Jewish.

And that was it. I was out of the relationship by the next day.

I

had to tell my girlfriend it was over, that there was nothing to talk about. Then a flash hit me: It was too important to me not to fail, so I’d wear tefillin while I spoke to her.

At that point, I was using my grandfather’s old tefillin, and since he’d passed away in 1971, I doubted I even owned kosher tefillin. I sped to the Israel Bookshop in Brookline, and with my last $300, ran into the store and begged the owner — himself a survivor — for kosher tefillin for $300. He looked at me, smiled, and brought me out a pair he assured me were kosher.

What was my thinking? If I wear tefillin, I told myself, I’ll remember the people who died in the Holocaust. I thought of that photo of Rabbi Hagerman that I used to look at before games, and as I imagined speaking to my girlfriend, I thought, That photo will be in my head, and I’ll remember him, and I won’t sin. Like Yosef picturing Yaakov; Rav Hagerman was my Yaakov Avinu.

I pulled up in front of her apartment, got out of the car, and put my new kosher tefillin on, saying everything the ArtScroll siddur said to say, with tears in my eyes and a rush of adrenaline, like I used to have before a game. Then I started praying to Hashem, “Please do not let me trip up. Please let me be real for once in my life. Let me do something really right for once in my life.” Tears rolled down my face as I thought about all the Jews who had suffered, about all the tragedies, and I wanted for that one moment to make it right for them, right for us.

I put the tefillin on as a shemirah. I went on the offensive. That’s a different level. Let’s do it for those who died al kiddush Hashem.

She was shocked and very angry, understandably so. Then came the accusations: “You’ve lost your mind and joined a cult!”

But thank G-d, I looked her in the eyes without hesitation and said, “I made a mistake, and I’m sorry. But because I made one big mistake, I am not going to make a second one.”

It was both the best day and one of the hardest days of my life.

Second Quarter: Winning Formula

Two weeks after the breakup, I was handed a $6,000 check from sales commissions, and decided to take some of my accrued vacation days and go to Israel. Within a week, I was at the Kosel, looking at it in disbelief. I stayed with wonderful people, took some great classes at Aish, and I was torn: Should I stay in Israel or return to my job? But I owed money, and wasn’t financially independent, and I knew I had to go back.

A few years later, I was back in Israel learning Torah. I was committed to learning in yeshivah in Israel, so committed that I gave up a job offer in sales with a salary of about $250,000 to do it. I’d met some guys in Boston who had learned at Machon Shlomo in Har Nof, and they were so confident and sure of themselves. “If you’re serious about learning Torah,” they told me, “this is the place to go.”

“Everyone says that about their place,” I replied. But my rabbis agreed that it would be a great place for me. I was off to yeshivah in Israel.

T

here’s a formula for turning a losing team into a winning team: fundamentals, commitment, repetition.

Fundamentals can be gained through apprenticeship and from a great coach, and because I knew something about coaching, my goal was to find the Greatest Jewish Coach of all time. For some reason, I decided that this was Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka. I first heard about the Alter at Machon Shlomo, from Rav Beryl Gershenfeld, who spoke a lot about him, and described the Alter as his own source of how he teaches.

The more I heard about the Alter — the things he said, how so many great rebbeim of today are talmidim of talmidim of his, how great his influence was on the Torah world today, the more I wanted to seek out what made him so influential.

There’s something called a “coaching tree” in the National Football League, and most NFL coaches can trace their success back to a certain head coach they previously worked for as an assistant. The phrase “coaching tree” now refers colloquially to any idea or set of ideas originated by an individual or group. So if you’re a coach, you think, gosh, this guy’s coaching tree is phenomenal, I’ve gotta find out what he had, so I’m going to examine one of his branches to figure that out.

The idea of commitment is striving to be the greatest — whether the greatest player or the greatest Jew — and if you see that this man made all these great Jews, you recognize that this is the greatest coaching tree of all time.

And that’s why, after completing the two-year program at Machon Shlomo, I applied to mainstream Yeshivah Ateres Yisrael. Rosh Yeshivah Rav Boruch Mordechai Ezrachi was a talmid of the Alter, as was his father. Rav Chaim Raff had been a talmid of Rav Meir Chodosh, a son-in-law of the Alter. This yeshivah, I decided, was my English-language access door to the Alter.

When I sat with Rav Raff to be interviewed, he said to me, “I see the more I try to dissuade you, the more committed you become. So you’re in.”

So despite not knowing alef-beis until I was 29, at 32 I began learning in Ateres Yisrael, and was there for seven years. I sat in the front row for shiur and the rosh yeshivah, Rav Boruch Mordechai Ezrachi, used to come over to me and say, “If you’re willing to be moiser nefesh for football, kal v’chomer l’Toireh!” And I really did that. That was my approach.

I had coffee with my rav, the mashgiach Rav Chaim Walkin, every day for almost seven years. The first time I went up to him, I introduced myself, told him where I was from and about myself, and then repeated something my brother-in-law, Rabbi Reuven Lauffer, stressed to me: “If I’m not close with the mashgiach, then I’m wasting my time here.” He smiled and told me that just like there are many coaches with many systems, and they can all be paths to greatness, I have to accept his system. I did this, no problem.

And you don’t have to be a genius. The secret is repetition. When I started Ateres at age 32, I was struggling in learning. What, I’m going to be great in shiur with guys who have been doing this all their lives? So I asked the best learner, “How many times do you do chazarah?” — and then I made sure I did chazarah five or ten times more than that. Then, when the maggid shiur would talk, I wouldn’t have to think, what was that Tosafos? What was that Rashi? Because I had drilled the whole thing so many times.

Once after shiur in Ateres, Rav Raff explained a Tosafos that I finally understood, and I reviewed it with him, and then wanted to see if I could get it on my own. I said to him, “I’ll go play with this Tosafos,” and he immediately called me on it, saying, “It’s not a game but our life.”

I didn’t want the rav to misunderstand me, so I tried to explain myself. I described to him how, in the past, I had played football with broken fingers, dislocated shoulders, dived into the stands, did anything, made any effort to help my team, but in the other areas of my life I hadn’t been trying. And that eventually I began to tell myself: Switch it around — make your life your game and give it the same effort you give in sports.

Rav Raff smiled at me and said, “Got it. Go play with the Tosafos.”

I finished masechtos with the group, all the really hard ones, all the yeshivish ones, and I did chazarah four times on everything, pshat and Rashi. Just kept pounding away. I finished Bava Basra four times in the zeman, and I remember Rebbetzin Kleinerman crying when I told her I finished. She even made me a big cake. I look back and I don’t know how I did it.

Third Quarter: A Football Jew

I got married at 32, right after Machon Shlomo, before Ateres. Rabbi and Rebbetzin Gershenfeld made the shidduch. My wife, Osnat, is from Bnei Brak, totally Israeli, her father even went to Ponevezh, and she had no idea what American football was, what coaching in sports was, not a clue.

But I didn’t need someone who understood football, or my coaching shtick. I was looking for a wife who was idealistic like me, tough like me, looking for a ben Torah, who wanted to go on a journey, who was forward-moving. Who would believe in a long shot in Torah. Baruch Hashem, I found her.

My wife is a stay-at-home mom to our six wonderful kids, ages 19 to 9, and that I can make that happen is one of the things I’m proudest of.

When you learn, you give up a lot of gashmiyus, and my wife obviously pays the biggest price for me not being a full-time sales guy. That’s why sometimes I take pictures of my Gemara and send them to my wife.

After we moved to Beit Shemesh, a funny thing happened.

The Judean Rebels, a men’s American tackle football team in the league founded by Robert Kraft (owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots) moved to Beit Shemesh, and they asked me to coach, having heard I’d coached Pop Warner in America.

When I started on my journey, I thought that the personality of Charlie Cohen needed to die, and that Chaim Cohen needed to be born. But as I learned from my rebbeim in yeshivah, G-d wants Charlie to stay alive. He wants Charlie to be Charlie in a holy place, doing holy things, but being true to his real self. And that could not be clearer to me than seeing football come back to me full circle.

When I introduced myself to the football team, I said, “There are many different types of Jews. There are chassidim, Litvaks, Chabad… I’m a football Jew. I don’t mean football is my religion, but I translate it into my hashkafah and my derech. It’s how I look at my avodas Hashem, and how I would ask someone playing for me to behave.”

I’ve been asked if I work sports into my Gemara teaching and Gemara into my coaching, and really, they’re quite in line. In my house, for example, if you asked my children how many divrei Torah I have told them about the importance of Torah, the answer would be zero. That’s because I believe in leading by example and not just by talking about it.

I’ve never improved any player’s performance unless I got them to see themselves differently. To quote famed psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson, “Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.”

I approach learning — and life — the way I approach coaching and sports. It’s very process-oriented. One thing at a time, break it down, solve your problem, and review. Lots of review. Succeeding at sports is all about work ethic and repetition. So is learning.

One time, I showed up at Rabbi Moskowitz’s yeshivah in Brookline, sick as a dog. I must’ve been running a 104° fever. When I walked in, everyone looked at me and said, “Wow. What is wrong with you?” and I said, “I’m just a little under the weather.”

And Rabbi Moskowitz took one look at me, felt my forehead, and said, “What are you doing here?!”

And I said, “If I had a football game today, I’d be there. I think I should work equally hard in ruchniyus.”

He pulled me aside and said, “Look, when you play sports, that’s it. They want to win now or die. With G-d, He wants you to be healthy, and it’s more of a long-term thing. Go home and take care of yourself. G-d doesn’t want this from you. He wants you to take care of yourself. That’s the difference between sports and Yiddishkeit.”

I have a player in Israel who told me how important football was to him, helping him deal with some personal issues. Before one game, he told me that his wife, his dad, and his grandfather were all there that night to see him play.

Right before halftime, the other team had the ball on the 50-yard line and there was almost no time left. I said to this player, “Get back, do not get beat deep, challenge his arm, make him throw it 50 yards, but do not let the other guy behind you.” The ball is snapped, my player stands still, the other team’s receiver goes right by him, the pass is in the air… Touchdown.

I could hear the crowd’s shock and the comments about how stupid the coach (me!) was to give up a score in such a moment. I saw my player come off the field and felt like I wanted to yell at him to own up, to let the crowd know it was his fault, not mine. But I just smiled. After all that time with Rav Walkin, how could I not do that? This was a person, not a football machine. So gently, I just asked him what happened. He said he froze, then the other team’s guy was past him, gone. I told him, “You learned a very important lesson. The worst thing that could happen is that they score. And if they score, so what? We’ll live.”

That’s the Torah, that’s the years and years of learning mussar. He’s here to play, to let off steam, his whole family is here. Okay, so I looked stupid. So what? I can hear all the comments: “The coach is an idiot! How could he not have known that was coming?”

And I realized — that’s why I wanted to yell, so everyone would know it was him, not me. But by that time in my life, after the years and years of Torah and mussar, it wasn’t even really a test, it was more an observation that I had about myself. I didn’t even have a yetzer hara to yell at him. In the old days, I would have let him have it, without even thinking about what was motivating me. I realized then that a lot of coaches yell to make themselves not look stupid. It’s true of many authority figures, parents, teachers, bosses. They throw the other person under the bus. I never wanted to be a person like that — I’d rather take the fall than live with myself being like that.

My son was very upset about the loss. So I reminded him, “I’m not really a football coach, I’m a mashgiach looking for a job. And if you keep this attitude up, I’ll never get a mashgiach job.”

It was pretty funny. But it’s true.

Fourth Quarter: You Can Do It

Right now I’m teaching at Ateres Yaakov in Ramat Beit Shemesh (I also work selling software for an Israeli company). I especially love teaching about teshuvah. Rav Walkin and I used to discuss the similarities between turning a player around in sports and in spiritual life, and the misunderstanding about what teshuvah is. And that’s why we say before the Yamim Tovim, “Teshuvah, teshuvah, teshuvah,” and people think, I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad.

But if you think about those movies where the coach comes in at halftime, when the team is losing badly… if the coach says, “You’re the worst football team I’ve ever seen, you stink!” that just beats the guys down more, the way we can beat ourselves down when it comes to our pasts, when we tell ourselves how bad we are.

But if the coach comes in and says, “You guys are awesome! Why are you playing like this? You can beat those guys!” then the players can look at themselves and reach deep inside themselves, and decide, “We’re better than this, we want to win, and we can.”

That to me is the teshuvah process. To tell ourselves, “G-d gave me some gifts, and I can do it, and He wants me to do it. I’ve made some mistakes so far, but that doesn’t make me bad, I’m much better than I’ve been doing so far, and I want to do great for this Coach who really believes in me.”

Rav Meir Chodosh, the Alter’s talmid muvhak, his whole thing was ayin tovah. As a good coach or a good rebbi, you have to have a good eye. To have your players or students feel, “I don’t know what Rebbi/Coach saw in me, but he brought it out.”

I’ve learned something incredible from teaching and coaching: People perform where their self-esteem is. If I think I’m a loser, I behave like a loser. If I think I’m a champion, I’ll get myself up there.

I’M

not coaching tackle football right now. At least half of my tackle team is in the army, lots of them on the front lines. I’m in touch with them, but they don’t need me as a coach now. Those commanders, they run into bullets. The “coaches” of these groups, they run in first. The Israeli way, “Acharai! Follow me!”

I learn with guys in the yeshivah, and I tell them what an honor it is to be here. If I’m not on the front line in Gaza, then I’m on the front line in yeshivah. In sports it’s a game. In life, it’s real.

Someone asked me what message I would give to my students or my players if I could only give them one message. That’s an easy answer: If I could do it, you can do it.

Because there’s nothing in my life, nothing in my background that could have ever suggested that this is where I’d end up and this what I’d be able to accomplish. I’m no big genius, and the only reason I can say that if I can do it, you can do it, is because I’m seemingly such an average guy with such average abilities. I was a C+ student, joker, frat boy. And sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten blood out of a stone.

If I, Chaim Cohen — who didn’t know alef-beis until I was almost 30 and was “the worst Jew ever” — turned himself around… well, if I could do it, you can, too.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1005)