Congregation Beit Simcha

10/10/2026

Shabbat Morning Breisheet 10 10 26

10/10/2026

Shabbat Celebration Services 10 9 26

10/04/2026

Simchat Torah Celebration 5787 10 3 26

10/03/2026

Shabbat Shemini Atzeret Yizkor 10 3 26

10/03/2026

Shabbat Shemini Atzeret Celebration Services 10 2 26

09/30/2026

https://beitsimchatucson.org/blog/finding-gratitude-1
Finding Gratitude
Sermon Shabbat Sukkot 5787, Rabbi Sam Cohon
Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Sukkot is our great holiday of thanksgiving and the week when we offer our prayers of gratitude to God. But that’s not always such a Jewish way to approach the world.

You might remember the classic Jewish joke about a Jewish bubbie walking on the seashore with her grandson. Suddenly a huge wave comes in and sweeps him out to sea.

“Please God, bring him back,” she cries, “I’ll do anything, pray three times a day, keep strictly kosher, give 10% of what I have to tzedakah, I’ll be nice to my son-in-law, anything, just bring him back!”

At that moment another wave crashes in to shore, depositing the boy, unharmed, at her feet.

The bubbie looks up at heaven and says, sternly, “He had a hat.”

As the joke demonstrates, it’s easier to find chutzpah than gratitude in Jewish life—probably, in all life. And so, to aid us in the process of finding our way towards gratitude, autumn is the season designated for thanksgiving in our society. All three major thanksgiving festivals from October to December—Sukkot, American Thanksgiving, and Chanukah—are based on the original commandment establishing this holiday of gratitude, the “Feast of Tabernacles”, in the Torah. But thanksgiving is much more than a holiday. It is at the very core of what it means to be human.

Gratitude is the essential religious emotion. When we give thanks for what we have, and for what we receive, we convey a profound message of connection, interdependence, and even holiness. Saying “thank you” can be no more than an automatic gesture, but it can also be the key to unlocking our hearts and opening them to other human beings. When we say “thank you” with all of our souls, we create a quality in ourselves that allows for real communication with others, for building respect and honor between people.

That’s also true for the process of thanking God. Traditionally we are to begin each day in Jewish tradition with the prayer Modeh Ani lefanecha, “I give thanks before You, my God”, thanking God for giving us life, a pure soul, and a new opportunity to begin each day. Each Amidah in every service includes the beautiful prayer Modim anachnu lach, offering gratitude to God for the ordinary miracles that God does for us morning, noon, and night. Opening that stream of gratitude is one of the keys to creating a life, and even a world, of mutual respect and goodness.

The Dalai Lama has said “Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.” And Sukkot is here to remind us to express that gratitude in meaningful, positive ways.

The rabbis thought this was certainly a very important holiday indeed. In Biblical and Mishnaic times Sukkot—also called Succos—was referred to as HeChag, “The Holiday,” as though it were the only Jewish holiday—imagine that!—and likely it was the most observed of all the festivals ordained in the Torah.

The reason Sukkot was the most observed of all ancient Jewish festivals was likely because it came at the right time of year. While the Torah specifies three separate pilgrimage festivals in which the ancient Israelites were to travel to Jerusalem to make offerings to God, Passover in the spring, Shavu’ot, the feast of weeks, in the early summer, and Sukkot in the autumn, there must have been major challenges to farmers inherent on walking to Jerusalem for the first two of these. Springtime, when Passover occurs, is a time of planting, weeding, fertilizing, and doing all the hard work that eventually results in a good crop. Early summer, when Shavu’ot falls, is the time of the first fruits and the early barley crop, which must be harvested, but there are many other crops still growing that need to be tended in the diverse Mediterranean agriculture of Israel. But Sukkot comes in the fall, when all the crop yields are complete, and the harvest is in. It is a time of plenty and was an easier time to take a week to travel to the capital and celebrate.

Sukkot must have been when the greatest crowds arrived in Jerusalem, bringing their agricultural bounty, making sacrificial offerings but enjoying feasts each night of the festival. The temporary huts they erected, the Sukkot they built, would have been much like the huts that they used when they stayed in the fields near the crops they were harvesting. It was a time of great joy and celebration, of food and drink and conviviality. Our ancestors feasted every night, and celebrated special days, extra holidays, that we don’t even really observe today, including something called Simcha Beit HaSho’eivah, a water festival of some kind that included parades, music and dancing in the streets.

Today, Sukkot is called zman simchateinu, the time of our joy, and it is filled with food, friends, and music as well as rituals that pay tribute to our reliance upon God for the many good things in our lives. After the serious self-examination of the High Holy Days, it is time to rejoice.

Now, back to that idea of finding your own gratitude. In Jewish tradition we are not supposed to offer thanks only on Sukkot. In fact, if possible, we are ideally supposed to say 100 separate blessings every day—that is, we are to offer thanks pretty much constantly for all that we are, and have.

So won’t you take a few moments tonight to thank someone you would not normally thank, and to offer gratitude to God for what you have? It can change your life—and surely, also the lives of the people all around you.

Now, from Sukkot this week, and its concluding festival of Shemini Atzeret next Shabbat, we go immediately to Simchat Torah, which we celebrate Saturday night next week, the final holiday in this long fall cycle. Simchat Torah is the great, fun festival when we complete the reading of the Torah and then, immediately, begin reading it all over again. We sing and dance in 7 great hakafot, parading around the temple—and spilling out into the street—as we celebrate our greatest document, the Torah, the heart of all Jewish learning and ethics.

Simchat Torah always reminds me of when I started as a student at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and they asked me to lead Simchat Torah services. I sat through the first few Hakafot, the parades with the Torah, just listening to the dull, plodding songs they were doing there. Finally I turned to the Dean of the College, Rabbi Ken Erlich, and asked him what was going on. Like me, he is mostly descended from Eastern European Jews who do their Simchas Torah singing and dancing with great enthusiasm and energy--it's almost a wanton celebration, to be honest. Ken explained that when he first came to the college the Torah hakafot for Simchat Torah were done in a slow, stately procession, accompanied by plodding organ music, and he himself had turned to a professor and asked "it's Simchas Torah—how come they are marching not dancing?" And the professor answered "They are German Jews—they are dancing..."

No, we are not supposed to march, either on Sukkot or Simchat Torah: we are supposed to rejoice, fully, in this whole season. And the best way to do this is to begin from gratitude, by thanking those people who make our lives good. And by thanking our God, who gives us the strength to celebrate.

These z’man simchateinu, this time of our joy, has a greeting that captures the wonderful elements of both Sukkot and Simchat Torah: you say, mo’adim l’simcha, festivals of joy; and the other person answers, chagim u’zmanim l’sason holidays and times of celebration.

May you be blessed with festivals of joy and holidays of celebration; but even more, may you find your way to the feelings of gratitude and thanksgiving that make these days truly filled with simcha.

Sermon Shabbat Sukkot 5787, Rabbi Sam Cohon Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ   Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameiach !  Sukkot is our great holiday of thanksgiving and the week when we offer our prayers of gratitude to God.  But that’s not always such a Jewish way to ap

09/28/2026

http://beitsimchatucson.org/blog/a-donation-saving-and-treasuring-life
A Donation: Saving and Treasuring Life
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Yikzor 5787, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Life is precious, my friends. Above all, this amazing gift we have each received is a sacred trust, simply to be, is given once to each of us. It is sacred. When those we love are threatened with its loss the feelings can be overwhelming.

Life and love. In many ways, these are all we have to treasure in this world.

I recently learned an old story from a member of our congregation, Sherry Cunial, a cancer survivor. She told me about a Jewish oncologist, Dr. Stephen Forman, who treated her own cancer years ago at The City of Hope Hospital in California, and had a most unusual patient and family, an extraordinary, unique experience that speaks to the holiness of life.

You may or not be familiar with The City of Hope; long ago, during rabbinical school in Los Angeles, I had the privilege of serving a chaplaincy internship at that remarkable facility, visiting bone marrow transplant patients in the suburb of Duarte, in the San Gabriel Valley outside of LA. The City of Hope does incredible work, and I will always be grateful for what I learned there.

The hospital was founded in 1913 by the Jewish Consumptive Relief Association as an institution to care for destitute patients suffering from tuberculosis, TB, which was a common and uncurable disease in those days. Its Los Angeles Sanatorium opened its doors in 1914, treating its first 31 patients in canvas cottages. It became the premier TB treatment location in the west. In those days, the dry western air was considered a panacea for those suffering with tuberculosis, as was the bright sun; like Tucson, Southern California became a magnet for urban easterners seeking a chance to breathe again. Often those people were Jews, usually recent immigrants; many of our original Tucson Jewish community members came out to try to cure TB with sunlight and desert air. Both St. Mary’s Hospital and the VA Medical Center were originally built as TB hospitals.

By the 1940s, as new antibiotics successfully treated and cured tuberculosis, the City of Hope redirected its mission to treating cancer and other life-threatening diseases, with great success. Scientific medical developments allowed its doctors to pioneer new and effective treatments. It was one of the pioneering centers of bone marrow transplantation for leukemia and other blood cancers, and it has saved the lives of many people over the decades. In bone marrow transplantation the donor is not harmed, and if the matching bone marrow is accepted by the recipient they can, essentially, be cured and live a long, healthy life thereafter.

For those who don’t know, blood cancers, like leukemia and lymphoma, are extremely difficult to treat, since they start in the bone marrow and lymphatic system where blood cells are made, meaning abnormal cells circulate through the entire body instead of forming a single, localized tumor that can be removed by surgery. Bone marrow creates the white blood cells that fight off infections. When it goes wrong, is changed by cancer, instead of producing infection-killing white blood cells it spreads the malignant cells throughout the patient.

The standard medical treatment for blood cancer is to literally kill all the bone marrow in the body of the affected patient and then transplant healthy bone marrow from a matching donor into the patient. It is delicate work that requires full isolation of the patient from any and all germs, since until the new, healthy bone marrow has taken hold the patient has essentially no immune system to ward off infections. A minor cold or flu, even an infected cut, is likely to kill the patient. As student chaplains this was our first experience of what they later called PPP, and we had to learn how to communicate compassion and caring with bone marrow transplant patients while completely gowned, masked, and covered up. It was a powerful learning experience.

The story that Sherri told me when I visited her in the hospital recently—she has, thank God, recovered from that episode—took place 35 years ago, and involved a teenage girl who developed leukemia. She was treated at the City of Hope hospital by a Jewish doctor, Dr. Stephen Forman, originally from Galveston, Texas—Sherri’s doctor at around the same time. The problem for Dr. Forman and the teen patient and her family was that there was no matching donor for the 16 year-old girl, Anissa Ayala. When there is no matching donor, the patient’s survival rate is essentially nonexistent.

Anissa’s parents decided to take a series of long chances to save their daughter. There were no outside matches in the database for her bone marrow, and neither parent was a match for donating bone marrow to their child. But there was a chance—perhaps one in four, the doctors calculated, 25%, 4 to 1 against if you are betting person—that a sibling would have the matching bone marrow, and could serve as a donor. Unfortunately, the girl’s only sibling, the Ayalas older son was not a match.

And so they decided to try to get pregnant. They had to overcome a series of obstacles. The husband had had a vasectomy, and that had to be reversed, a standard procedure that often works, but not always, to restore fertility. Then, her mother was 43 years old, making pregnancy a far from certain thing. And of course, Anissa needed to survive and be strong enough for the operation to take place.

The Ayalas were given a 10 percent chance to conceive. Time was running out. They weren’t sure if Anissa would live long enough to receive a transplant. They took her on vacations to Yosemite and Hawaii.

Against the odds, a new baby was conceived, and born, and named Marissa. Against the odds, her bone marrow matched her sister’s. When she was 14 months old and weighed enough to be a donor, Dr. Forman transplanted the bone marrow from the baby—who had a sore hip for a few days but otherwise was unaffected by the surgery—into the now 19 year-old young woman. The transplant was accepted, and the recovery, which is not instantaneous, was completely successful. Anissa recovered, married, had a career and a family. Marissa grew up, graduated from college, and became a speech pathologist. Her parents raised her with love, and she remained close to her older sister, even moving in with her after college for a while. This time, we know that there was a happily-ever-after.

It is a beautiful true story, a near-miraculous one.

There was much criticism at the time this story came out in the media of that day: how could you have a child just to save another child? Isn’t it wrong to have a child just to save another child? Isn’t that like harvesting one human being to save another? Are we on the road to an immoral world of choosing one life over another, manufacturing human beings to save or elongate the lives of other human beings?

And so on.

The ethical implications were complex and raised an entire constellation of issues that our society hasn’t fully grappled with yet, three decades later.

Now, my friends, people have children for so many reasons: to perpetuate their family traditions; to fulfill religious doctrines; in order to have an heir, or even a spare; to try to save a failing marriage; by complete accident, against their own preferences; because they think it will be easy, or fun. Giving life is a powerful thing indeed, a beautiful and sacred thing, but many people—more than we would like to think—do so without anywhere near enough thought about just how it will all play out, about the responsibility and care that are essential to creating not only another being but a good life for that child.

Giving life is—should be—a kind of sacred trust.

But saving a life is more than that. Treasuring a life—treasuring life—so much that you willingly take long, even crazy chances in order to rescue that life, that is something else. That is uniquely holy. That sanctifies life in a way we must not only respect but revere.

Because, you see, it is life itself that is sacred, unique. That is the gift God has given us, that we have the capacity to make valuable, meaningful, special, even holy. That is what we have prayed for throughout these High Holy Days—to be written in the metaphoric Book of Life.

As we enter this time of Yizkor, the service in which we remember the lives of all the people who have touched us, and whom we have touched, in which we bring back their memories and our feelings of love and care, may we also take this gift: that our lives, like theirs, have the innate spark of the divine that can create and give life, but also save life. That our ability to treasure this amazing gift we have received, our very lives, is something we must know, always.

That is what Yizkor can mean: a time to celebrate the lives of those we have loved but can no longer touch, or save. And a time to embrace the reality, and the goodness, of our own lives.

09/26/2026

Shabbat Sukkot Morning Services 9 26 26

09/26/2026

Shabbat Sukkot 9 25 26

09/22/2026

A Donation: Saving and Treasuring Life
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Yikzor 5787, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, Arizona

Life is precious, my friends. Above all, this amazing gift we have each received is a sacred trust, simply to be, is given once to each of us. It is sacred. When those we love are threatened with its loss the feelings can be overwhelming.

Life and love. In many ways, these are all we have to treasure in this world.

I recently learned an old story from a member of our congregation, Sherry Cunial, a cancer survivor. She told me about a Jewish oncologist, Dr. Stephen Forman, who treated her own cancer years ago at The City of Hope Hospital in California, and had a most unusual patient and family, an extraordinary, unique experience that speaks to the holiness of life.

You may or not be familiar with The City of Hope; long ago, during rabbinical school in Los Angeles, I had the privilege of serving a chaplaincy internship at that remarkable facility, visiting bone marrow transplant patients in the suburb of Duarte, in the San Gabriel Valley outside of LA. The City of Hope does incredible work, and I will always be grateful for what I learned there.

The hospital was founded in 1913 by the Jewish Consumptive Relief Association as an institution to care for destitute patients suffering from tuberculosis, TB, which was a common and uncurable disease in those days. Its Los Angeles Sanatorium opened its doors in 1914, treating its first 31 patients in canvas cottages. It became the premier TB treatment location in the west. In those days, the dry western air was considered a panacea for those suffering with tuberculosis, as was the bright sun; like Tucson, Southern California became a magnet for urban easterners seeking a chance to breathe again. Often those people were Jews, usually recent immigrants; many of our original Tucson Jewish community members came out to try to cure TB with sunlight and desert air. Both St. Mary’s Hospital and the VA Medical Center were originally built as TB hospitals.

By the 1940s, as new antibiotics successfully treated and cured tuberculosis, the City of Hope redirected its mission to treating cancer and other life-threatening diseases, with great success. Scientific medical developments allowed its doctors to pioneer new and effective treatments. It was one of the pioneering centers of bone marrow transplantation for leukemia and other blood cancers, and it has saved the lives of many people over the decades. In bone marrow transplantation the donor is not harmed, and if the matching bone marrow is accepted by the recipient they can, essentially, be cured and live a long, healthy life thereafter.

For those who don’t know, blood cancers, like leukemia and lymphoma, are extremely difficult to treat, since they start in the bone marrow and lymphatic system where blood cells are made, meaning abnormal cells circulate through the entire body instead of forming a single, localized tumor that can be removed by surgery. Bone marrow creates the white blood cells that fight off infections. When it goes wrong, is changed by cancer, instead of producing infection-killing white blood cells it spreads the malignant cells throughout the patient.

The standard medical treatment for blood cancer is to literally kill all the bone marrow in the body of the affected patient and then transplant healthy bone marrow from a matching donor into the patient. It is delicate work that requires full isolation of the patient from any and all germs, since until the new, healthy bone marrow has taken hold the patient has essentially no immune system to ward off infections. A minor cold or flu, even an infected cut, is likely to kill the patient. As student chaplains this was our first experience of what they later called PPP, and we had to learn how to communicate compassion and caring with bone marrow transplant patients while completely gowned, masked, and covered up. It was a powerful learning experience.

The story that Sherri told me when I visited her in the hospital recently—she has, thank God, recovered from that episode—took place 35 years ago, and involved a teenage girl who developed leukemia. She was treated at the City of Hope hospital by a Jewish doctor, Dr. Stephen Forman, originally from Galveston, Texas—Sherri’s doctor at around the same time. The problem for Dr. Forman and the teen patient and her family was that there was no matching donor for the 16 year-old girl, Anissa Ayala. When there is no matching donor, the patient’s survival rate is essentially nonexistent.

Anissa’s parents decided to take a series of long chances to save their daughter. There were no outside matches in the database for her bone marrow, and neither parent was a match for donating bone marrow to their child. But there was a chance—perhaps one in four, the doctors calculated, 25%, 4 to 1 against if you are betting person—that a sibling would have the matching bone marrow, and could serve as a donor. Unfortunately, the girl’s only sibling, the Ayalas older son was not a match.

And so they decided to try to get pregnant. They had to overcome a series of obstacles. The husband had had a vasectomy, and that had to be reversed, a standard procedure that often works, but not always, to restore fertility. Then, her mother was 43 years old, making pregnancy a far from certain thing. And of course, Anissa needed to survive and be strong enough for the operation to take place.

The Ayalas were given a 10 percent chance to conceive. Time was running out. They weren’t sure if Anissa would live long enough to receive a transplant. They took her on vacations to Yosemite and Hawaii.

Against the odds, a new baby was conceived, and born, and named Marissa. Against the odds, her bone marrow matched her sister’s. When she was 14 months old and weighed enough to be a donor, Dr. Forman transplanted the bone marrow from the baby—who had a sore hip for a few days but otherwise was unaffected by the surgery—into the now 19 year-old young woman. The transplant was accepted, and the recovery, which is not instantaneous, was completely successful. Anissa recovered, married, had a career and a family. Marissa grew up, graduated from college, and became a speech pathologist. Her parents raised her with love, and she remained close to her older sister, even moving in with her after college for a while. This time, we know that there was a happily-ever-after.

It is a beautiful true story, a near-miraculous one.

There was much criticism at the time this story came out in the media of that day: how could you have a child just to save another child? Isn’t it wrong to have a child just to save another child? Isn’t that like harvesting one human being to save another? Are we on the road to an immoral world of choosing one life over another, manufacturing human beings to save or elongate the lives of other human beings?

And so on.

The ethical implications were complex and raised an entire constellation of issues that our society hasn’t fully grappled with yet, three decades later.

Now, my friends, people have children for so many reasons: to perpetuate their family traditions; to fulfill religious doctrines; in order to have an heir, or even a spare; to try to save a failing marriage; by complete accident, against their own preferences; because they think it will be easy, or fun. Giving life is a powerful thing indeed, a beautiful and sacred thing, but many people—more than we would like to think—do so without anywhere near enough thought about just how it will all play out, about the responsibility and care that are essential to creating not only another being but a good life for that child.

Giving life is—should be—a kind of sacred trust.

But saving a life is more than that. Treasuring a life—treasuring life—so much that you willingly take long, even crazy chances in order to rescue that life, that is something else. That is uniquely holy. That sanctifies life in a way we must not only respect but revere.

Because, you see, it is life itself that is sacred, unique. That is the gift God has given us, that we have the capacity to make valuable, meaningful, special, even holy. That is what we have prayed for throughout these High Holy Days—to be written in the metaphoric Book of Life.

As we enter this time of Yizkor, the service in which we remember the lives of all the people who have touched us, and whom we have touched, in which we bring back their memories and our feelings of love and care, may we also take this gift: that our lives, like theirs, have the innate spark of the divine that can create and give life, but also save life. That our ability to treasure this amazing gift we have received, our very lives, is something we must know, always.

That is what Yizkor can mean: a time to celebrate the lives of those we have loved but can no longer touch, or save. And a time to embrace the reality, and the goodness, of our own lives.

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