In the eyes of the world, Rabbi Cohen’s men have reached their rock bottom, but in the eyes of those inmates, he’s an angel sent from Above to confirm their indelible humanity

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

Between jutting boulders and slabs of rock on an isolated strip of beach along the Jaffa coast, Rabbi Avinoam Cohen sits in a circle with a motley group of men, from their twenties to their fifties. In the center, he places a pile of stones.

“Now we’re going to do our version of Tashlich,” he tells the men as he hands out pieces of paper and pens.

While grown men generally have better things to do than play a social-interaction game on the beach, for these fellows the exercise can be life-altering. They are prisoners on their way back to real life, and Rabbi Cohen, developer and director of the religious section of Israel’s Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority, is their light at the end of a dark tunnel — the last hope of many who want to find their way back to normative society outside prison walls.

How does he transform a person who’s spent years in prison and reconstitute him as a “regular” citizen? Tough emotional work, says Rabbi Cohen, is part of the process for these men who’ve committed to embark on their personal teshuvah process, and this exercise is one example.

“Each one of the men shares with the group the crime he was jailed for, and is asked to look into himself and home in on the trait that caused him to commit the crime, and to write it down on the paper,” Rabbi Cohen explains. “For example, if a person sold hard drugs and experienced a subsequent descent to the underworld, perhaps the motivating middah is atzlanut, laziness — he wanted quick cash and didn’t have the self-discipline or energy to get out there and work. Instead he tried to make easy money, which devolved into crimes and serious moral issues. So the prisoner writes ‘laziness’ on a piece of paper, chooses a stone from the pile, wraps the paper around the stone, and when everyone is done, we do a symbolic ‘tashlich’ — each one tosses his stone into the sea.”

Of course, throwing a rock is not a substitute for the real work of transformation. But this exercise is part of a bigger program — a process that calls for introspection, incremental change, and enduring commitment. And when the prisoners follow the process to its end, they succeed in rebuilding their very identities.

Lost and Found

From a small room inside the Prisoner Rehabilitation Authority in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood, Rabbi Avinoam Cohen manages programs that have changed the lives of hundreds of people. In the eyes of the world, these people have reached as low as one can go — they were imprisoned following convictions for severe crimes. But in the eyes of the prisoners, Rabbi Cohen is an angel sent from Above to confirm their indelible humanity and to help extricate them from their current straits.

“For every sin there is teshuvah, and it makes no difference what the sin is,” Rabbi Cohen emphasizes. “The mechanism of repair is different for every sin, but the principle guiding us is that there is no transgression in the world that can’t be atoned or repented for, as long as there is sincere repentance and remorse. This isn’t my original idea. Hashem said it — it’s written in the Torah.”