The main purpose of our trip from Marquette to San Francisco has been achieved, so I’d like to make a brief summary now. A year ago, my friend Ken Cohen passed away. He was 76, but we all expected him to be around a lot longer. Ken made quite the mark for himself in the Jewish community of Contra Costa County (San Francisco Bay Area) and the community wanted to celebrate his memory with a gathering. Because Jews generally bury the dead within a day of passing, there is often not enough time to have a proper send-off, and instead, we do something a year later when it is easier for all to get together. The community honored me by asking that I be the main speaker for the event.
Initially, the suggestion was that I do a study of a passage from the Torah, but as I thought it over, I decided to do something a bit less Orthodox, so to speak. I made Ken’s acquaintance when he enrolled in my Biblical Hebrew course. At the time, he was a vice president of the Oracle Corporation. In addition to learning his Hebrew very well, he donated a license for the use of the Oracle database to my empoyer, the Hillel Foundation of Berkeley. As life turned out, that was key to my career when Terri and I moved to Ann Arbor–my experience with Oracle allowed me to get the job I would have for the next twenty-five years.
Ken was a brilliant engineer. His first employer was the IBM Corporation, and he designed the first 8-bit memory chip for them. But even more than engineering, Ken had the “gift of gab.” At Oracle, he took the role of the head of marketing, and he deserves a lot of the credit for how dominant Oracle would eventually become in the database market.
But Ken was restless, he wanted to do more with his life. After my Biblical Hebrew program, Ken left Oracle and enrolled as a graduate student in Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and received a Master’s degree there. He then began a career in teaching the Hebrew Bible which he pursued for the rest of his life.
This was by no means the end of our relationship. We became close friends and when Terri received an offer from the University of Michigan, I had to remain behind in Berkeley for a month to finish teaching my Summer session course. Ken decided that I shouldn’t drive to Michigan alone, so he, my dog Lucy and I boarded my un-airconditioned pickup truck and drove together from Berkeley to Ann Arbor. He was on the phone with me shortly after his return when he suddenly had to terminate the conversation because the ground was shaking under his feet–it was the Loma Prieta earthquake. In 1991, Ken flew to Ann Arbor in time to accompany me for Ephraim’s circumcision.
As I thought about all this, I decided that instead of a Torah discussion, I would expose the audience to the teaching Ken received in my Biblical Hebrew course. I couldn’t assume that any in the audience would know Biblical Hebrew, so I confined my remarks to explaining some of the mysteries of the correct (to the extent we can figure it out) pronunciation of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and characteristics that differentiate Semitic languages from other language groups.
I’m happy to say that my approach seemed to work. The audience was enthusiastic and asked lots of great questions—to the extent I only covered half what I planned to teach. Fortunately, I designed the session to make it possible to be more or less inclusive. And when we finished, I think they did have an idea of why Ken became such an enthusiastic teacher in his own right.
זִכְרוֹנוֹ לִבְרָכָה
May Ken’s memory be reckoned as blessing.
בָּרוּךְ דַּיַּן הָאֱמֶת
Praised is the True Judge
