The Village He Built: A Tribute to Rabbi Jonathan Cohen, z”l
Courtesy of Rabbi Dovid M. Cohen
It felt like the longest flight of my life.
I was flying to Israel with my nephew, hoping we would arrive in time to say one final goodbye to my younger brother, Jonathan. About an hour into the flight, the message came. He was gone.
For nineteen months, Jonathan had battled a relentless illness. The entire time, I refused to think about what I would one day say in a hesped. As long as I didn’t prepare those words, perhaps I could postpone the reality they represented.
Suddenly, I had no choice. How do you summarize fifty years in fifteen minutes? How do you explain a younger brother?
I did my best, standing there trying to fit a life into a eulogy the way you try to fit too much into a suitcase—you just close your eyes and press down. Looking back, I realize it’s not about finding the correct verbiage.
The weeks that followed have already started to blur together—the levayah, shivah, sheloshim, hundreds of visitors, hundreds of embraces, hundreds of conversations. I remember surprisingly little. People searched for the right words, quoted Chazal, shared stories, hugged us. I know many of those conversations were substantive, but I don’t remember most of them.
What I do remember is who showed up. People interrupted their lives, boarded airplanes, canceled meetings, changed plans, drove hours for a visit that lasted only minutes, stood quietly in line just to embrace us.
Grief taught me something I had never fully appreciated: Words matter, but presence matters more. Perhaps that is why Chazal understood that nichum aveilim begins not with speaking but with showing up. Before we offer comfort, we offer ourselves. We aren’t even permitted to speak until the mourner speaks first. Presence is the first language of consolation.
One appearance and conversation during shivah anchored the entire week. I was speaking with Rabbi Dovid Miller, one of the roshei yeshivah of Yeshiva University in Israel, about his younger colleague, Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz of North Woodmere. When Rabbi Lebowitz heard that Jonathan had passed away, he dropped everything, boarded a plane to Israel, came to shivah, and flew straight home. A round-trip flight across the ocean. Coach. Simply to be present.
Almost instinctively, I asked Rabbi Miller, “Who would do such a thing?”
Rabbi Miller looked at me without hesitation. “Your brother would.”
The conversation stopped me for a second. I struggle just to drive to Lakewood, New Jersey. Jonathan might have gotten on the plane.
Only then did I begin to understand what I had been witnessing all week. Jonathan had spent his life doing exactly that: interrupting his own plans for other people’s emergencies. He celebrated their simchahs and comforted them in their losses. He called just to check in, remembered birthdays and other minutiae. Most of all, he made people feel that they mattered.
The people filling the shivah home weren’t responding to Jonathan’s death. They were responding to Jonathan’s life.
A few weeks later, my wife said something that has stayed with me ever since.
“To have a village,” she said, “you have to be a villager.”
That was exactly what I had witnessed. Villages aren’t assembled in moments of tragedy. They’re built quietly over decades—one relationship, one visit, one phone call at a time. Jonathan spent fifty years building his village. During the levayah, shivah, sheloshim and beyond, that village came home.
My brother had more than twenty-two thousand contacts stored in his phone. Twenty-two thousand! Out of curiosity, I checked my own which has a little over two thousand. I know a fair number of people. He knew more than ten times that number.
Then I spent the last little while watching those contacts reach out: students, parents, rabbanim, neighbors, friends from every stage of his life, colleagues, extended family. The number no longer surprised me. Those weren’t contacts. They were relationships.
One of the most moving experiences wasn’t hearing the stories myself; it was watching his wife, Tzivia, hear them. No one knew Jonathan better than she did. She shared his life, raised six children with him, stood beside him through nineteen unimaginably difficult months. Yet many visitors told her stories she had never heard. A student whose life had been changed. A quiet act of kindness. A phone call at exactly the right moment.
It wasn’t because she didn’t know her husband. It was because no one person could.
We each know only the chapters of another person’s life in which we appear. The complete portrait exists only in the collective memories of everyone whose life that person has touched.
A résumé tells the story of a career. Shivah and beyond tell the story of a life and legacy. His résumé listed two principal roles: director of Undergraduate Admissions at Yeshiva University and director of Professional Recruitment for NCSY, positions he fulfilled with extraordinary dedication. But it wasn’t his legacy. His legacy doesn’t fit just on a page.
If there is one conversation I now treasure above all others, it happened just two weeks before Jonathan passed away. I had come from America to visit him. It was our last in-person conversation as I was departing for the airport. I didn’t realize then how quickly I’d return or that this was our last encounter. As I was leaving, he looked at me and said, “You’re doing an amazing job.”
I smiled, assuming he meant professionally. We had spoken for years about leadership and work.
He corrected me immediately. “No. With your family. As a husband and father. Your kids.”
That was it—no long speech, no dramatic farewell, just those few words.
At the time, I received them as a compliment. I hear them differently now. I hear a charge. His final message wasn’t about professional accomplishment or recognition; it was about the people waiting for me at home. Maybe that was never separate from the village he built. Maybe that was where the village began, even when balancing the two wasn’t always easy or smooth.
Jonathan’s final nineteen months also revealed a resilience that humbled everyone who knew him. He went through treatments, disappointments, and the return of hope only for it to disappear again. Yet through it all, he remained remarkably interested in other people. Even carrying his own burden, he found room to ask about someone else’s.
I don’t think the illness created his character. I think it just stripped away everything that wasn’t it, until all that was left to see was who he’d always been.
Not long after shivah, I returned to New York, and that transition may have been harder than I expected. For weeks, Israel had become a world suspended in grief. Then I landed. Children needed to be sent to camp. Meetings resumed. Encounters were mundane.
My world had stopped. Everyone else’s, it turned out, had not.
At first, that felt almost unfair. Over time, I’ve come to grasp it differently: The world keeps moving because the people we love leave us the job of carrying their values back into ordinary life, back into camp forms and traffic and everything else.
One final image has stayed with me vividly. Toward the end of Jonathan’s life, he was cared for by an aide from India. Like many caregiving relationships, it wasn’t always easy. There were moments of frustration, especially during the long nights when he was in agony.
Then one day, the aide surprised everyone. Without saying much, he presented Jonathan and his wife with beautiful hand-drawn portraits he had made of them. He turned out to be an extraordinarily gifted artist. Somewhere along the way, despite different backgrounds, cultures and faiths, Jonathan had built another relationship. He had made another person feel seen.
After my brother passed away, I hung his portrait in the shivah house. Throughout the week, I kept noticing my mother looking up at it. Again and again, she would quietly say, “He looks so beautiful.”
She wasn’t looking at the suffering of his final months. She was looking at her son. Smiling.
In the deepest sense, it wasn’t the drawing that comforted her. I think it was what the drawing came from, the fact that it existed at all. Even that portrait was part of Jonathan’s village. It existed because somewhere in those long, hard nights, he’d formed a bond with someone from halfway around the world, someone who ended up wanting to thank him the only way he knew how.
As someone whose life revolves around words, that realization has lingered with me. I write, I speak, I interview, I edit. I believe deeply in the power of words. But the past months have taught me that, in life’s holiest moments, something else often speaks louder. A visit. A hug. A round-trip flight across an ocean. A portrait drawn by an unlikely caregiver. A brother’s final blessing.
I remember little of what was said since his passing. But I remember who came and the house filled with people responding to a life well lived. I remember the village Jonathan spent fifty years building, and I have come to understand that the truest measure of a life is found not in the words spoken after we are gone, but in the people who cannot imagine not showing up, because somewhere along the way, we showed up for them.
My mother still looks at that portrait and says the same three words.
He looks so beautiful.
Long after the words are forgotten, presence remains.
Rabbi Dovid M. Cohen is the CEO of the Algemeiner, a leading Jewish and pro-Israel media platform. He is the author of two books published by Mosaica Press and the host of the Algemeiner J100 podcast and the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast.