A Chat with Retiring Rabbi Steve Cohen

I’ve had many rabbis in my life – people who have given me spiritual counsel, friends, family members, and yes, clergy, who have been there with me and for me in life’s big and small moments – people whose wisdom I depend on when mine is hard to find. Rabbi Steve Cohen is the senior congregational rabbi at Congregation B’nai B’rith in Santa Barbara. Before that he was the Rabbi and Executive Director at UCSB’s Hillel Foundation. He’s also one of my own most cherished rabbis. And while he’s set to retire in June, after 21 years of service at CBB and 19 before that at Hillel, I’m hoping he will continue on in that role for me.

Upon the occasion of his retirement, I wanted to talk to Rabbi Cohen about his journey as the religious and moral leader of a large Jewish congregation during a uniquely challenging moment where its members are, in many ways, as divided as the rest of our country. 

After spending an hour or so with Rabbi Cohen in his study at CBB, reflecting with him on his decades of service, I’m reminded of why this religious leader and cherished community treasure is someone I proudly call my friend.

Here is our conversation:

Gwyn Lurie (GL). I wanted to talk with you about your impending retirement, which is a big deal.

Rabbi Steve Cohen (RC). It’s a big life transition.

GL. It’s a big life transition for you, and it’s a big life transition for the community. So let’s start with a big question, which is: What have you learned over your 21 years as CBB’s rabbi – about leadership, about faith, and about yourself?

RC. These are great questions, and of course… they’re big. I would say in the realm of leadership, the first thing that I’ve learned is the importance of really investing in people and my relationship with people. A leader at a different synagogue once told me, “We go the extra mile for our members and so they go the extra mile for us.” I have really learned that if people have a sense that I care about them and their families, that when I ask them to do something for the community they’re very likely to say yes.

Connected to that is my having learned the importance of asking for help and not feeling like I needed to do it all, and in fact realizing that I could not do everything that needed to be done and that it was actually a sign of strength to be able to ask for help. This plays out in many different ways, but for me to understand that when I’m asking somebody to opt to bring their time, their skills, their money, whatever it is, I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking for the collective, and that that’s probably my biggest role as a leader is to invite people to bring their gifts to the community.

GL. What have you learned about faith? 

RC. Faith is such an interesting and complex and fluid word. But for me, I do think of faith as being bound up with courage, and thoughtful, realistic optimism. During the pandemic, I came to see that my most important role as the rabbi was to dig deep within myself to find a sense of hopefulness about the future, and to be able to convey that in a way that was true for me and could be true for people to look into the future and not be frightened or despairing. To me, that is deeply related to faith. It’s not something that one can make a rational argument for – an optimistic view of the future. It has to be rooted in some sense of faith.

GL. It’s a leap.

RC. It is a leap, right. It’s a decision, and it’s complicated because you can’t just force yourself to have that kind of optimism, and so it’s more about finding strategies for myself. My strategies for combating my own sort of pessimism, my own despair. My strategies range from prayer, to hiking – going out into nature – to listening to music, to immersing myself in Torah study. These are all really powerful strategies for me for grounding and centering, and eventually coming to a feeling of hope, that the world and I, and we, are going to be okay.

GL. So finding optimism in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary is really hard, and I think that describes precisely where so many of us are in this moment. History is filled with all sorts of examples, the Holocaust being one of them, which is what I always think about when people say everything happens for a reason, and I always go, “Really? I’m not so sure that everything happens for a reason.”

RC. Right. That’s not my sense of what faith is for me. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason if that means that everything is ultimately for the best. I don’t feel that. I don’t believe that. But I do believe that we human beings can be a source of strength and encouragement and support for each other. So for me, faith – to a large extent – boils down to a belief in our connectedness to each other. 

GL. Are you in a way saying that there’s a power in the way we think about things in impacting the outcomes of things? 

RC. Yes. I would say that I believe that. My own sense of hope in the future emerges from my relationships with people… my relationships with people in my inner circle, my family, my friends, but also my relationship with nature, and my relationship with greater humanity. For example, music gives me a sense of connection to people who lived a long time ago or people in different parts of the world. So by looking for those opportunities to feel connected, I become braver and stronger and more courageous. 

GL. I remember a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert on faith. The context of the conversation was Anderson Cooper culling through the remains of reliving these memories, and it was on grief; the whole thing was on grief. At one point Stephen Colbert talks about how as a boy, his father and his older brothers died in a plane crash. Which was obviously very traumatic. And they were talking about faith, and Stephen Colbert says that he’s grateful for it all, and Anderson Cooper said, “Really? You’re grateful for it all? And Colbert said, “I’m not happy my brothers died. But I believe that if you’re grateful for life, you have to be grateful for it all, because life comes with the good and the bad, and all of that makes us who we are.” What do you think of that?

RC. It’s reminding me of a moment in this office when I was sitting with a young woman whose husband was dying, and she was asking just for whatever I might have to offer. It was a very scary moment for me as a rabbi. And what came to me was maybe to start with gratitude, gratitude for the love that you have shared, the gratitude for the family that you have created together, gratitude for your marriage. I do think that gratitude is intimately bound up with faith. Like faith, gratitude is not something that you can just make yourself have. You can’t just make yourself be grateful, but somehow there is a way that we can cultivate gratitude within ourselves, and I do think that then spills over into everything about how we relate.

GL. What have you learned about yourself?

RC. I would start with the fact that I’ve learned that I’m not perfect. And that I don’t need to be perfect.

GL. Did you think you were perfect?

RC. I grew up being the firstborn in my family, being good at school. 

GL. You went to Harvard?

RC. Yes. And I grew up with a strong sense of expectation. Lots of pats on the back, and a lot of confusion about what I should expect of myself and what other people expected of me. And so, I have learned really through a lot of painful experience that I am not a perfect son, I’m not a perfect husband, I’m not a perfect rabbi, I’m not a perfect father, and that that’s okay.

GL. Did your view of yourself as imperfect help you in your job?

RC. I think it really has helped a lot because it means that, first of all, I don’t have to have all of the answers. That is something that often as a rabbi I feel. I go into a hospital room where somebody’s really sick or I’m with a family and somebody has just died, and it feels at first like everybody’s looking to me for the answer. When I was first starting out, I was really tormented by that and how am I going to possibly know the answer? But what I’ve come to realize is that that’s not what people are really wanting or needing from me. What they really want is just for me to be there with them.

GL. It’s a good lesson in parenting too, isn’t it? 

RC. Yeah. And everything.

GL. What have you learned about this community, meaning Santa Barbara?

RC. I’ve learned that it’s an extraordinary community on the one hand, just by virtue of the fact that people have come from all over the world to live here; and I’ve also learned that like every community, there’s a lot of suffering here at every level of the economic, socioeconomic stratum. Learning that has really given me a lot of compassion for all of us. I have certainly discovered how generous this community can be, but I’ve also discovered how protected and sort of frightened people in this community can be also. I just feel Santa Barbara is unique and different in some ways, but also exactly like every other place.

GL. Why – of anything you could have done – did you want to be a rabbi?

RC. I became a rabbi when I came to realize when I was in college that being Jewish was the most central piece of my identity, and in part I went to rabbinic school because I wanted to explore that side of myself and my past – my heritage – as deeply as I could.

I also came to see that a rabbi gets to be close to people at very profound moments in their life: death, marriage, bar mitzvah, the birth of a child, or just in a counseling in a pastoral setting, and I was very drawn to being able to get close to people in those profound moments. I also liked the variety. I was really drawn to the wide range of roles a rabbi has. I’m a teacher, I’m a counselor, I’m an administrator, I’m a community leader, and I’ve always had a lot of interests and have liked the opportunity to kind of exercise all of these different muscles, sometimes in the course of a single day.

GL. There are so many moments where you are expected to be there for so many people. How did that impact your personal life? Were you able to show up for the people you love the most in a way that you feel good about, or did it impair that?

RC. On the one hand, I have really tried to prioritize my marriage and my family and not allow my work to prevent me from being a good husband and father and son and brother. On the other hand, I’m very aware that I haven’t succeeded all the time. And I worry about whether I have shortchanged any of those relationships. I don’t think I have, but I worry about it.

“Faith is such an interesting and complex and fluid word.
But for me, I do think of faith as being bound up with courage,
and thoughtful, realistic optimism.”
– Rabbi Cohen

GL. So, the other part of yours being a challenging job is that you’ve led a large congregation during a very challenging moment in history, including from a discourse perspective. I suspect this impacts clergy in every faith, and you’ve led the CCB congregation at a moment when everything has become political. It used to be much easier to separate out the religious aspects of our lives from the political aspects of our lives, and church and synagogue is where people talk about life and suddenly it’s all political. How have you managed a congregation that in many ways is a microcosm of the world with such deep divisions it’s difficult, if not impossible, to build consensus and therefore community?

RC. With difficulty, for sure. I’ve tried to lean into personal relationships as the way to stay connected even in a time of division, and have worked with members of the congregation on a number of different projects over the course of the past 10+ years; projects that were attempting to bring together people with different points of view to learn, to learn to listen, and to share with each other without bitterness and divisiveness. Those efforts have felt very important, and they’ve also felt very incomplete. It’s been very difficult to get people to show up for that work.

So, I’ve tried leaning into personal relationships. I’ve tried learning from national programs. I’ve also tried so hard from the pulpit to be a voice of reason and of listening to multiple points of view, but I also do have my own perspective. I’ve really struggled with finding the right balance of when should I express my own point of view clearly and strongly and stand up for the principles that I hold so deeply, and when is it my job to step back and try to make room for a diversity of views. It’s been a very difficult season, and one of the few comforts that I take is that I don’t think I’m alone in struggling with this.

GL. Sometimes I feel like faith is both a villain and it holds the possibility of being an important tool. Does that speak to you at all? 

RC. What I think of is the importance of having faith in the other person sitting across the table from me, who seems to have a completely different worldview from me and yet is also a human being. And so, there’s a faith in the other person and in the possibility of real communication and real relationship, even in the face of difference. That to me is the faith that is necessary. So it’s less faith in God, and more faith in our ability to connect with each other. And maybe that is the same thing as faith in God at the end of the day. When you talk about faith sometimes being the villain, I think that faith does become the villain when our faith, whatever it happens to be, becomes a barrier between us and another person.

But another effort that I/we made was after the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, when it suddenly felt urgent to try to reach out to other religious communities and reach out beyond our Jewish community and find other human beings in our community – those that we were perhaps not in communication with – and get to know them. So, this idea of the human family, that was another project that I’ve put a lot of time and energy into, trying to break down the barriers that sometimes exist between different religious groups.

GL. In this community you have played an important leadership role in interfaith efforts. What is your takeaway from that? 

RC. First of all, I’ve learned how profoundly important religious upbringing and religious communities are to people. I’ve come to see that religion is not something that is going away at all. It’s as potent a force as ever, and I know that it has the potential to lead to a kind of tribalism, and people fall into thinking about the world in terms of us and them, and religion often plays into that. I’ve come to believe that religious leaders have a huge responsibility to help people overcome those impulses to sort of separate into their own communities, and to lead people toward a sense that it’s possible to both be a proud and active and committed member of their own religious community, and at the same time to be curious and connected to people in other religious communities. 

GL. You’re ending your formal rabbinical career at B’nai B’rith but you started your career at UCSB’s Hillel. I suspect that your having had that experience gives you some insight into what’s going on with young people at this moment on college campuses. What is your 10-mile-high observation of what’s going on with college campuses?

RC. Well, first of all, I’m really glad I’m not working on a college campus right now. 

What I loved about working on a college campus was the idealism and the youthfulness, the insistence on authenticity. There was no way that I could succeed as a rabbi on campus without being completely just myself and authentic and real. I think that that was what made it so fun to be a rabbi when I was young, that I was working with young people who demanded that I be real and that I engage with their idealism and their intensity.

I think that part of what we’re seeing right now is sort of the flip side of that. This sense to be young … this sense that I think many students – both non-Jewish and also some Jewish – feel that this moment calls for activism and for an energetic fight against the evils of the world, and what’s so frightening for me and I think for many of us as Jews, is a sense that Israel and we have been sort of lumped together in the basket of the evils of the world.

GL. Certainly, we’ve seen in this moment on college campuses this black and white view of things. But that’s true in our world generally, and clearly social media has played a big role in that. Do you see a path forward?

RC. Well, our job is to create the path. Probably the thing that I was proudest of when I was working at Hillel was that on Friday night in Isla Vista, a party town, we had between one and 200 students choosing to come to services, come to Shabbat dinner, and that felt to me very counter-cultural and deeply meaningful. We were creating, together with the students, an oasis of beauty and meaning in the midst of this sort of crazy town of Isla Vista. And I think that that’s what the university potentially can be. It potentially can be a place where the most profound human values find expression in a way that they don’t necessarily do in the broader society. So I hope that a place like UCSB, and all of our universities, can find a way back to being places where students can, first of all, meet people from very different backgrounds from their own. That’s one of the unique things about the university. You’re meeting people from very different backgrounds in a way that becomes harder as we go on in life. But at the university you’re sitting in class with people from very different points of view. I think that there’s a responsibility on professors to create a vision of the university as a place for real human interaction and a place for community rather than a place for anger and division. A place for teaching in its highest sense. 

GL. If you could prescribe one thing for our society right now, what would it be? 

RC. At least one day a week screen free would be a big thing.

GL. That’s a big thing in your life.

RC. It’s a big thing in my life, right, Shabbat, but you don’t need to be Jewish at all. For everyone, access to nature and going out into nature and even the wilderness; those would be big things for me. I really believe that wilderness and nature is healing. It allows us to return to our bodies, our animal nature, the sources of our health – air and water and earth.

GL. Any regrets?

RC. That’s a good question. Really none. But there were kind of two roads not taken for me, both of which represent questions. One is the possibility of moving to Israel which – when I was a rabbinic student, in my mid- and late-twenties – I was seriously thinking about settling in Israel, and my college roommate made that choice. He raised his family in Jerusalem. And so part of me does wish that I had made the decision to raise my family in that Jewish place as opposed to in this place of exile. I made the decision to settle in the States and to live in Santa Barbara for good reasons, but that’s one road not taken.

And then the other is to live in a small Jewish community, even though, yes, I think we have a vibrant Jewish community. It’s not like being in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago, Boston, or any of those large Jewish communities,. And so I have kind of made my career on a much smaller stage which I do think has allowed me to have more of a family life. But it does mean that I have not had the kind of impact on a national level that I might’ve had if I had been the rabbi of a congregation in a big city.

GL. What would you like the broader community here to know about CBB and about the Jewish community here in Santa Barbara?

RC. Well, first of all, I would like them to know how deeply committed we are as a congregation to freedom of thought and freedom of speech and to questions more than answers. I really do feel like I and we have to some extent succeeded in creating a community that is committed to exploration and to learning. I would love for everybody to understand that about our Jewish community, that this is a place of openness and commitment to caring and relationships. The other thing that I would like especially non-practicing Jews to know is that it’s a place that is just as much for people who don’t see themselves as religious, that actually the majority of our members are not regular worshipers, for example, and are not regular attendees at Torah study; but that it’s a place that is really organized around community and culture. Those are things that I think are often not understood.

GL. What are you going to do next?

RC. Well, I always think of my teacher and friend, Rabbi David Ellenson, who had been the president of Hebrew Union College when he was asked, “What are you going to do after you retire?” And he said, “The dishes.” So part of the answer is I’m going to take a break and take some time for myself and for my marriage and for my family. I’m going to explore sides of myself that I haven’t had a chance to – maybe do some art, some music, but definitely more hiking. And then also, I have a book in mind, and I hope to do some writing.

GL. Is there anything I am not asking you that you would want as a capstone to this moment?

RC. I think the one thing that occurs to me that is both challenging and also wonderful about this job is the opportunity and the need to relate to people from age two to 100 or over. I talked earlier about loving the diversity of the job, and that diversity really has challenged me, and also really deeply fed me, the need to be one moment with preschoolers and then the next moment with teenagers and then the next moment with seniors. That’s another aspect of the work that I just feel very grateful for.

GL. Do you worry about the next generation of Jewish people?

RC. I definitely worry about our Judaism fading away. I’m not worried about the ultra-Orthodox. They’re going strong and they’re having lots of babies, and so I know they’ll be around. But I do worry about the more liberal, open-minded Judaism that I received from my parents, and that I’ve tried to transmit to the next generation here. I worry about the power of assimilation… But that’s another way of understanding what my mission has been for past 40 years – to try to be a force for not only preservation but renewal and continuity in the face of the forces of assimilation.