Elchonon Cohen, the new associate rabbi at The Community Shul (TCS), cannot really be considered “new.” Although he was only ordained this past January, he is nearly as familiar to the TCS community as his father, Rabbi Moshe, the congregation’s senior rabbi for 38 years.
Growing up in the Cohen home meant dealing with parents who had different backgrounds. “My mother, who is Swiss, is much more the disciplinarian than my father,” Rabbi Elchonon, the third of six children, explained. “Being Swiss, she has that yekkish approach — this is the only way to do it. My father is Irish. So he is much more happy-go-lucky.“ While Rebbetzin Cohen was the disciplinarian, if Elchonon was in trouble with his father, “you were really in trouble. There would be a consequence.”
One of those consequences has stayed with him. As a preteen, he admits he had turned into a lackadaisical student at Toras Emes by La Brea Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. He said he can recall it with absolute clarity because “it probably is the most impactful speech I ever have gotten.”
Rabbi Elchonon remembered that “my father sat me down here in the shul library. The elder Rabbi Cohen pointed a finger at the hundreds of volumes. “He said ‘You can become an expert in any one of these, but you have to choose to do it.’ This really has stuck with me. If you were in trouble with my father, which I was at the time, you were really in trouble.”
As he advanced through Rabbi Shlomo Gottesman’s yeshiva in Calabasas, this lesson became firmly entrenched. But his path to the rabbinate, which started the year he turned 35, “has been a little bit of a rocky journey.”
After high school, Rabbi Elchonon learned at a yeshiva in Lakewood for four years before spending a year in Israel. It was time to decide on a career, at least as far as the elder Rabbi Cohen was concerned. He asked his second son, “So, what do you want to do with your life?” “I would like to go into education, but not children’s education.”
Adult education, the Jewish variety of one sort or another.
Did the young Elchonon have any idea that the rabbinate might lie ahead? Choosing his words carefully, he said “I don’t know that you would necessarily consider that the rabbinate.”
It was a decision Rabbi Elchonon put off for many years.
With that, he explained why he makes the distinction. In the yeshiva system he grew up in, ordination is not necessarily a goal. It’s more a means to an end. If you want to go into the rabbinate, you will study and take tests. But otherwise, “I would say the vast majority of people who spend many years in yeshiva, and even post-yeshiva in kollel, are not ordained. He’s quick to add “it doesn’t mean they are not brilliant. It doesn’t mean they are not well-versed, in terms of the actual certification. They have not gone through that process because it is seen more as a technicality that one would do specifically if one were going into the rabbinate.” As the rabbi described it, in this world “the rabbinate is not the equivalent of a bachelor’s or master’s degree. It is more the equivalent of an M.D.“ As an example, he said that “a person can study biology for many years, but he is not a doctor even though he might know plenty about the human body, He has not studied specifically to be a doctor. You can say something similar here — a person can study Torah for many years, but unless he is studying specifically how to be a rabbi, then he will not become a rabbi. He may be extremely knowledgeable, but that is just not the path he has chosen.”
“A person can study biology for many years, but he is not a doctor even though he might know plenty about the human body. He has not studied specifically to be a doctor. You can say something similar here — a person can study Torah for many years, but unless he is studying specifically how to be a rabbi, then he will not become a rabbi.”
Asked if he struggled with the choice to become a rabbi, he said he was “not sure if struggled is the correct term, but avoided or skirted specifically having to become ordained because, I don’t know. There was only internal pressure.” To be clear, he emphasizes that “neither my father nor my mother ever pushed me particularly in this direction.” By his reckoning, “it was more of an internal thing. I had to choose, to come to the place where I really want to do this.”
Before he came to that place, he was an elementary school teacher in southern New Jersey, at Shalom Torah Academy, an outreach-oriented school, catering to the many Russians in the surrounding area. He taught sixth, seventh and eighth grades for three-and-a-half years.
What finally made up his mind about ordination? Rabbi Elchonon quickly broke into a broad smile. “My wife.” The newlyweds flew to Los Angeles shortly after their August 2020 wedding. “After that, my wife said to me, ‘You know you are kind of a different person when you are leading services and teaching in shul. You come much more to life when you are doing that.’” She wanted Elchonon to pursue the rabbinate “even though at the time — until that moment — I kind of had left my options open.”
She was “very much the motivating force for us to come here. I very much want to be here, but I would not put that on her without her very much wanting it.
When the Cohens married, Elchonon was not thinking of returning to his hometown. “This move was particularly difficult for my wife,” he said. Her family is on the East Coast where she has lived all of her life.” Marriage and ordination were game-changers. “My wife and I both knew we were not going to stay in Lakewood,” the rabbi said.
Fast Takes with Rabbi Elchonon
Jewish Journal: Describe what it was like to grow up in your family.
Rabbi Elchonon: It was a balance of tradition and modernity.
J.J.: What is your favorite Shabbat food?
R.E.: Cholent, but it must have kishka.
J.J.: What is your favorite activity with your wife?
R.E.: Both of us are homebodies. Given a choice, both of us would sit on a couch and watch a movie.
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