Michael Cohen
(for security purposes, no picture is provided)
"An ox knows its owner, and a donkey its masters manger, {but} Israel does not know, my people do not understand." (Isaiah 1:1,NAS) Unfortunately, this is the scripture that sums up my childhood as the son of Harvey and Sheila Cohen. Both my father and my mother were raised in the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York. Yet, both sides of my family are sorely ignorant in Jewish training and understanding. Neither possesses a reverent view of the Holy Scriptures nor of God. Ironically, when my parents moved to Los Angeles, they saw the necessity of a formal Jewish education for my sister Jill, my brother Richard and I. I spent eight years at Congregation Beth Kodesh learning Hebrew and Jewish Customs, preparing for and receiving my Bar Mitzvah. What should have been both the spiritual and personal highlight of my life, paled compared to the trauma developing within my family. My mother and father were engaged in a bitter divorce battle that ravaged the family for decades. After my Bar Mitzvah, I wanted to press on in my Hebrew education, but without my parents’ guidance I squandered away the opportunity.
Throughout my high school and college years, I had many opportunities to develop lifelong friendships, aptitudes and proper perspectives for living. Instead, I scorned most of my peers as fake and superficial. The friends I did have were partygoers. I turned to alcohol, drugs and anger to satisfy the hole in my heart. After College I accepted a job working for a rental car agency. Most of the people I worked with were my age, so I had constant companionship on Friday and Saturday nights, as well as most of the work nights. Along with working grueling ten-hour days, my drinking after hours participated in an overall decline in work habits, physical strength and mental acuity. I also started to become extremely cynical to go along with the bitterness that began during my high school days. I started to ponder the meaning of life.
During this time in my life I briefly reinvestigated Judaism. Several weeks spent trying to be Jewish was all I needed to bring me back to my irreligious senses. With the failure of both my religion and my secular lifestyle complete, I truly had nowhere to turn. I recall lying on my bed one night desperately analyzing my circumstances and pondering "the pain of the next sixty or so years" I thought "there must be more to life than this!" About this time several miles away, a Jewish believer in Jesus was in a car accident. Amazingly, while her car lay in ruins, she was unhurt but in need of a new car. The next day, she came to my rental car office. I actually was intrigued with the idea of a Jew who believed in Jesus and needed to know how it was possible. We agreed to meet and talk about Jesus.
At our meeting, she listened as I poured out my heart. She then told me that it sounded like I needed a reliable role model and that I should read the New Testament to learn about Jesus. She explained that he is the promised Jewish Messiah sent by God to reconcile the Jewish people. My heart was ready for the gospel. She gave me a new testament and I read through the gospels checking them against the Messianic prophecies. Within three weeks, I prayed to receive Yeshua as my Lord and Savior.
