My Friend, Yosef Cohen

 

"God don't make them any better.  And that's a fact."  So said Brigadier General Lewis Armistead of Major General Winfield Hancock in the film Gettysburg.  Of all the words in all the literature I have read, these are the ones that come to mind upon the passing of my friend, Yosef Cohen.  They come to mind quickly in association with him, for I have said them often over the years when speaking of him to others.

In 2012, Yosef, or Yossi as so many knew him, was honored by the Bureau of Jewish Education.  If you consider yourself my friend, take fewer than five minutes to watch this video about him on the occasion of that most deserved recognition.

In that video you get a sense of who he was as an educator, and but as his colleague who for many years taught in the room next to his at North Central High School in Indianapolis, I was blessed by something more, but let us start with educator.

As a teacher of Latin and occasionally Greek, I sometimes had questions about Hebrew, for that ancient language so often was intertwined with those of my discipline, Classics.  The moment I even began to ask him a question, Yosef would suggest that we meet over lunch.  We each brought out our lexicons, and the richest, headiest of conversations would begin, allowing me in a small way to count myself as one of his students.

He was also my interlocutor on matters of politics, the economy, education, world issues, and history.  Our conversations during passing periods made me want to be late for my own classes so the discussions with Yosef could continue.  He thought deeply and broadly, and this allowed him to bring civility to our conversations the like of which many would think was no longer possible.  With his passing, it very well may not be.

He played a paternal role for me as well, often pointing to his grey hair and my lack of it, perhaps being willfully blind to the increasing salt in the pepper of my beard.  He cared for my wife and my children, asking about them after we returned from every school break and especially after summer vacation, and was genuinely concerned about my future.  His advice was always sage, and it always, always aligned exactly with whatever my wife would say.  I sometimes wondered if they talked behind my back so their counsel would agree.

His humor was legendary, and I rarely took my leave of him without hearing a new joke from his seemingly endless treasury.  He lightened our department meetings with that humor and reminded us all that as important as teaching was, the business of schooling...well, not so much.

Children often have their heroes, real or imagined, that they delight in imitating, but it is rare for an adult to have, or at least to admit to having, such a model.  My wife can testify that I have said many times over the years that I would like to be more like Yosef Cohen when I grow up, and in this I know I am far from alone.

Making a Teacher Cry

Any number of things can make me cry while teaching, although I try to hide it the best I can.  More often than not, it is the depth of insight from one of my students that so unsettles me.  It is rather like snapping one's head to look at brilliant work of art or to hear a bit of sublime music while walking through the humdrum of the day, lost in a sea of less important details.  This time it happened during the last period of the day.

It was my A.P. Latin class, and before you make assumptions about my students or our school, you should know that ours is a large, midwestern, public high school with an enrollment between three and four thousand students.  This particular class is evenly split between boys and girls and is ethnically diverse.  As you read the rest of this story, I don't want you to assume it is set in an ivory tower.

Class started with us talking about accents, what connotations are associated with them and whether those same connotations exist for all people.  Do the flowing vowel sounds of Italian or the sharp consonants of German produce the same effects in you as they do in me?  Do they conjure the same feelings in other non-Italian- or non-German-speaking people as they do in many English speakers?

We are still in all-virtual instruction, and one of the benefits of Zoom is the private chat function.  Not a day passes when at least one student in nearly every class messages me privately a question or comment that I can then address with the whole class without revealing that student's name.  It is a help like no other for quiet students and those who like to process more deeply before they speak.

In this particular A.P. Latin class during the last period of the day, one of my students texted the following in response to our discussion about accents.  "The best way to tell the beauty of an accent is if it enthralls you, even if you don't understand a word."  This time I did a horrible job of hiding my tears.  When I shared the comment aloud, others in class commented that we had a true wordsmith or even a Shakespeare among us.  

Just as I had no time to ponder the depth of that comment or the beauty of its expression in the moment, I will leave you no time to do so, but will move on to what happened next.  As you read, let these powerful moments build up and wash over you.  Quick warning, however.  This next part gets a bit deep, but hang in there.

From there, we dove into our text, starting at Aeneid I.561.  As we read the line "Tum breviter Dido vultum demissa profatur," I had to stop to share with them something that had occurred earlier in the day during Latin III.  That class had been reading Sallust's Bellum Catilinae and were at the part where Catiline, the infamous conspirator of the late first century B.C., prepared to address the senate demisso voltu.  Even people without Latin can pick out the two similar phrases, vultum demissa in Vergil and demisso voltu in Sallust.  I pointed that both expressions contain the same words and mean the same thing, "with a downcast expression," but that they used different grammatical structures.  Vergil opted for a purely adjectival function of the participle demissa and an accusative form of vultum expressing respect.  She was literally downcast with respect to her face.  Sallust, on the other hand, had put both words in the ablative case, using an incredibly common construction known as the ablative absolute.

One of my students asked what, if anything, was being conveyed by Vergil's grammatical choice, and I pointed out that it was in clear imitation of Greek, for Greek likes to use the accusative of respect.  My student pressed on to ask why he would do that, and this led us to a brief discussion of the King James translation of the Bible.  One of the notable features of that translation, itself drawing heavily on previous English versions, was its casting into English certain Hebraisms.  For example, where English might more readily say, "God's son," the King James translators used "son of God," for the pattern "X of Y" is common in Hebrew.  In a similar way, I explained, Vergil clearly imitated Homer without slavishly aping him, and this connected his new epic with the Homeric works from a millennium prior.

Still without time to pause, I had to end that session with my Latin IV students and switch over to a breakout room in Zoom where my Latin V students deciding what they wanted to study next.  Latin V at our school provides a rare opportunity for students to explore topics of interest, and as we were starting a new quarter, it was time to see where they wanted to go.  One student began by saying she had been reading recently about rhetorical and logical fallacies.  I nearly stumbled going to the board to write her ideas and asked if she were reading such things for a class.  She said she was not, but had been inspired by other classes to look into the topics.  She thought she might want to pursue something with logic, rhetoric, or philosophy in her next Latin V project.  Another said she wanted to revisit some medieval studies we had pursued in Latin III, and another talked of pursuing medical topics, including mental health issues and quality of life for women in ancient Rome.

Now you can pause to consider what you have just read.  These are utterly extraordinary, ordinary students.  They are perfectly ordinary in that they, like the rest of their peers, follow fashion trends and enjoy popular entertainment.  They care about their friends and about what people think of them.  They are simultaneously excited and apprehensive about college, and they love to goof around.  Yet they are extraordinary in the depth of their curiosity and willingness to pursue it.  Because they are ordinary, however, I would argue that what makes them extraordinary could well be experienced by many more their age.  Depth, breadth, curiosity, eloquence...these are not the things of the rare few, but are the gems common to the human treasury, and when my students hold them up to the light, the sparkle quite often brings a tear to my eyes.