Top Priority

“There is no greater pleasure in this world than to elevate the lives of Hashem’s children,” he says with a combination of humility and satisfaction. “I can listen to tzaros all day long, because if I can move people just a little bit in the right direction and see results, there’s nothing like it.”

As rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Zichron Aryeh and Kollel Ner Yehoshua in Bayswater, New York, and founder of Priority-1 and the newer “Teach to Reach” initiative, Rabbi Cohen is a popular address for parents and mechanchim in need of guidance as they face uncharted challenges. Priority-1 and Teach to Reach may not have been the first initiatives to deal with chinuch issues, but Teach to Reach is perhaps the first to offer a multi-pronged approach that incorporates hashkafah, Torah psychology, and chinuch methodology into one holistic, integrated approach that addresses both the head and the heart.

Of course, Rabbi Cohen points out, you cannot engage the head until you’ve connected to the heart. Today many educators complain that students’ attention spans have attenuated, yet he notes encouragingly, “Attention spans can be increased when there’s a strong rebbi-talmid relationship. It makes the student want to engage, because he knows he has a friend.”

Rabbi Cohen isn’t a person who likes to talk about himself. Instead, he gives the credit to his parents for instilling in him the values that have propelled him. He describes his father as having been possessed by a fiery passion for truth. “In his eyes, lying and cheating were the worst sins a person could do,” he says. From his mother, whom he describes as “a sensitive soul who would do anything for anyone, who felt their pain and did chesed for them,” he absorbed the ability to listen to others’ problems and the desire to help unconditionally.