My friend and teacher Joseph Cahn died yesterday morning. Even if your Hebrew is non-existent, you comprehend the meaning when I say a tzaddik has left our world.
His funeral was last evening on Venice Beach, and during the present hours his body is being flown to the Land of Israel for burial.
Even though none of you knew him, life lessons are to be gained from knowing about the impeccably modest Mr. Cahn.
A rock for me during the 10 darkest years of my life, Mr. Cahn was the unusual covert teacher who inspired, changed and solidified persons merely by his presence rather than by instruction.
“Gold on the inside and gold on the outside,” Rabbi Raphael Lapin said yesterday at the Pacific Jewish Center, and none who have met Mr. Cahn one time dared doubt the precision of an appraisal inapplicable to 99 percent of us.
Southern by birth, heavenly by the way he lived and died, Mr. Cahn’s thirst for learning Torah was incapable of quenching, even in his early 90s when he no longer was capable of matching his brisk inland-to-the-beach strides of the 1980s and 1990s.
In a home as familiar to community members as their own families, the Cahn living room is stuffed with a regularly replenished supply of instructive, inspirational texts that mapped the way Mr. Cahn and his widow Betty unobtrusively have trod their lives.
Even more familiar is the old-fashioned dining room where the Cahns hosted Friday night and Shabbat day meals for 30 years.
Stranger or longtime friend, to enter the quiet, sanctified Cahn home was to preview the spiritual life many believe awaits us after death.
I don’t remember whether it was Rabbi Zvi Hollander, his final visitor hours before death, or Rabbi Eliyahu Fink who said of Mr. Cahn’s perhaps most desirable trait:
In intimate privacy or crowded public, he was the identical person, a diamond of a compliment seldom awarded in these days.
A most remarkable turn in the Cahn family life was that they came to religious Judaism relatively late, when they were 60ish. They prayed and lived as if there were earlier-life precious times and experiences that never could be duplicated.
For many years, we learned together on Shabbat afternoons. For all of those years, we stood beside each other in the first chairs to pray with the congregation.
Mr. Cahn and Mrs. Cahn, like a beloved reincarnation of our parents, presided softly, regally from the west end of the table over Shabbat meals. In a community where many veteran members address each other by honorifics, Mr. or Mrs. Cahn, with the sure touch of a certain feather, started the conversation, and it glided higher as each of the dozen visitors around the table had his say.
The gentleness of the lighting was a perfect match for the gentility of the environment.
For several hours on Friday night and several hours at mid-day on Shabbat, we bathed deeply in the spirituality and wisdom that many believe God intended for the entire world.
Traveling by wheelchair during the last decade, he would independently step away from it when he was called to the Torah each Shabbat to recite a blessing that telegraphed motivational chills when it rang through the synagogue.
He and his Mrs. Cahn were klieg lights for our creative, sturdy but thin Orthodox community. When members walk home from the Shul on the Beach on this Friday night, they will glance upward. They will be rewarded with a picture of Mr. Cahn’s shining, kindly face beaming to all of us who miss, envy and honor him.
