by Holt, Jason
against our will,
comes wisdom. . . . .
Note the interplay between physical and cognitive elements. Even when we sleep—even when we’re unconscious—emotional pain persists, falling like drops of rain upon the heart. Yet from this despair, over time and through reflection, even against our conscious will, comes insight and wisdom. Cohen often notes the wisdom that can come from emotional trauma. In “Paper Thin Hotel,” for example, he suggests metaphorically that one can only reach heaven after going through hell. Indeed, some of the most profound lessons any of us learn in this life come from situations that evoke powerful emotions, emotions from which we learn and grow.
De Sousa (in his article “Emotions”) suggests thinking of emotions in terms of “parallel systems of control” where the older, faster, not fully conscious mechanisms emphasized by body theorists are guided, interpreted, assessed, and reassessed by the newer but slower and more discerning systems of conscious judgment and reflection. Emotions, then, provide information about things we care about, things we value, and this is reflected at the deepest, primordial levels in the states of our bodies. I believe that Leonard Cohen’s musical compositions nicely reflect the rich complexity of this interchange between mind and body, for while emotions are indeed evaluated by the mind, they are also written in the flesh.
VI
Songs of Religion
18
The Prophetic Mr. Cohen
TIMOTHY P. JACKSON
Leonard Cohen is not the New Moses or the Second Coming of Christ or a Reincarnation of the Buddha. Moreover, Marc Chagall can rest easy; Mr. Cohen is an average visual artist. (I, at least, can take or leave his drawings and paintings.) Cohen is, nevertheless, the closest thing we have today to a Biblical prophet. He was born and remains a Jew. He was involved for a time with Scientology. He sustains a long-term love affair with Christian imagery and ethics. He is an ordained Buddhist monk. He has studied with a Hindu mystic in Mumbai. And he is a sincere admirer of Taoism and Sufism.
Shall I call him a chameleon, then? If a chameleon alters its skin color to hide in safety, Cohen wears a coat of many colors and says, “Here I am, send me” (Isaiah 6:8). His combination of sublime lyrics, soulful music, and trenchant social commentary makes him, as I say, prophetic. A prophet embodies revelation and critique rather than concealment and comfort. Cohen has received many prestigious awards—even in his own country—but in the end he’s a spiritual witness rather than a popular hero. Is he, then, a second Jeremiah, a fourth Isaiah, or even another John the Baptist?
If the original Baptist lived a simple and disciplined life, full of askesis (self-denial) to please God, Cohen was no divine “askeser,” at least not early on. He evidently led a rather Bohemian existence: sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. If John called for repentance, Leonard suggests that we don’t know what the word “repent” means. If John marked the beginning of a rift between Judaism and Christianity, Cohen may yet help heal that old and painful wound. In the end, though, Cohen is not a Zen koan for someone or something else; he’s himself. To borrow from Eliot’s Four Quartets, “there is no competition.”
Cohen’s maternal grandfather was a rabbi and Talmudic scholar, and he takes seriously the Hebrew meaning of his last name: “priest.” I am told that he closes his e-mails with an image of two open hands, palms out, thumb tips touching, fingers opened to a V between middle and ring fingers on both hands.
This is the Jewish symbol of priestly blessing. Cohen spent five years (1994–1999) at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California, studying with Joshu Sasaki Roshi, and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996. It’s tempting to say that, in spite of these Eastern digressions in the American West, he continues to self-identify as a Jew. This would blur an important point, however. Even though Cohen himself at times dismisses his Buddhist practice as merely a relaxation technique, a means of mastering depression, it’s clear that it’s also provided him another window on cosmic order (Dharma). I don’t doubt that Judaism provides his most formative principles and stories, and so remains the deepest shaper of his spirit, but part of the man’s genius is to refuse to allow traditional boundaries to stifle insight. With admirable epistemic humility, he takes wisdom and symbolism where he can get them. A lesser mind might degenerate into a vapid, new-age eclecticism, but Cohen doesn’t appropriate a metaphor unless he’s lived in it long enough to test its truth and make it his own.
All religion can be seen as the effort to overcome the distance “between the Nameless and the Name,” to borrow a phrase from Cohen’s “Love Itself.” Nevertheless, Cohen leans towards a theism that outstrips most, if not all, forms of Buddhist cosmology. A purely negative or impersonal vision of the universe is usually not enough for him. (In this respect, he’s like Thomas Merton, who remained a Roman Catholic while studying with Buddhist sages in Asia.) Cohen longs for a personal Deity with a loving heart and a creative will, so his main preoccupation is with Judaism and Christianity. He is an observant Jew, but he takes us back to that pregnant moment when Christianity was a form of Judaism. He wants to be shown “the place / Where the Word became a man . . . the place / Where the suffering began.”
For centuries, Christian theologians have appropriated Hebrew texts, awkwardly, as pointing forward to Jesus as the Messiah. At last, with Cohen, we have a Jewish thinker who quotes Christian texts, deftly, as harkening backward to their Hebraic origins. This is enormously courageous and profoundly therapeutic. He helps lead the Biblical tradition toward wholeness and the soul to something higher. Even when he describes, on YouTube, “The Window” as “a prayer to bring the two parts of the soul together,” he ends up celebrating something larger than human personality.
Divine Disconsolation and the Perils of Double-Mindedness
Much of Cohen’s most inspired work is either a gesture of gratitude for an unspeakable grace or an act of solidarity with those unjustly afflicted. Although exquisitely sensitive to the pain and suffering of life—he has been labelled “The Prince of Bummers”—he still manages to escape both delusion and despair. His favorite word is “broken,” with “cross” and “crack” not far behind, yet recovery and hope typically hover nearby. “Come healing of the spirit / Come healing of the limb.” “From this broken hill / All your praises they shall ring.” “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” I would call this the gift of divine disconsolation, the ability to bless without dishonesty—or, perhaps, to bless in confessing dishonesty.
I have called Mr. Cohen a prophet, but at times he is so disconsolate and disconsoling that he sounds more like a seeker, a skeptic, even an atheist. Cohen’s public words are frequently addressed to God, but the dialogue sometimes falters. One of the stanzas of “Hallelujah” is a complaint that God (addressed as “you” but pronounced “ya”) no longer shows him “what’s really going on below,” and we are left to speculate on a more mystical or religiously revelatory phase of the author’s life. How was he moved, and what made this intimacy with the Deity stop? In “Everybody Knows,” Cohen sings to God, or more specifically Jesus, in the second person. These lines, about what Christ has gone through, from Calvary to Malibu, can be read as a continuance of the “God is dead” debate he commented on in his novel, Beautiful Losers. “God is alive,” he declared there, “God never sickened. . . . God never died” (p. 157). But if so, what does it mean to say that the Christ is in trouble and to suggest that the “sacred heart” is about to “blow”? In “Suzanne,” Jesus is described as having sunk “beneath your wisdom like a stone.” In “Democracy,” Cohen calls the Sermon on the Mount “staggering,” but he doesn’t “pretend to understand” it. In “Who by Fire?” the counterpoint of religious faith and doubt intensifies. There Cohen asks the haunting question of death or death’s god: “And who shall I say is calling?”
This is what I mean by “epistemic humility”: the effort to live between dogmatism and doubt, to know one’s limits but not be paralyzed or embittered. Perhap
s “no one knows where the night is going,” but “everybody knows the deal is rotten.” Cohen isn’t afraid to live on that knife’s edge. Even while “waiting for the miracle,” he’s only “passing through,” hoping that the light will “shine on the truth someday.” A Biblical expression of this finitude is 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.”
A provocative melding of Biblical languages and liturgies has multiple perils of double-mindedness. Given the troubled relations between Christianity and Judaism—from forced conversions to bloody pogroms to the Nazi Holocaust—the embracing of any New Testament vocabulary by a Jew can seem insensitive, if not murderous. In reference to Cohen’s third book of poetry, why pick flowers for Hitler? So many political, economic, and cultural issues are raised even by talking about the “Old” and the “New” Testaments, that it may seem wise to accept the permanent alienation of the two faiths. To our benefit, Cohen is too strong a poet to resign himself to such impoverishment. He typically finds language that reconciles, if not synthesizes, the best of both scriptural perspectives.
In Book of Mercy, Cohen refers to “Our Lady of the Torah” and notes that “the Christians are a branch of the tree” (psalm 27). In the song, “The Law,” he suggests that Torah and Grace are one. Elsewhere, he sings of the Exodus (“Born in Chains”); he allows that Abraham was “strong and holy” (“Story of Isaac”), even as Jesus was “forsaken, almost human” (“Suzanne”). In Cohen’s lyrics, in short, Jew and Christian are again potentially united—depending on how we as listeners respond. No prophet, including Cohen, can compel inclusive love of neighbor, but he or she can invite it by beautiful example.
This is what I mean by calling Cohen a strong poet: one who transcends the anxiety of being influenced by others and builds something better out of both old and new bricks (see Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence). A strong Rabbinic scholar will learn from Kabbalah; a strong Christian theologian will learn from Gnosticism; a strong empirical scientist may even learn from alchemy. Leonard Cohen learns from all three, and his meditations become prayers. A chameleon uses his ten-inch tongue to capture and kill. When necessary, the prophet skewers others, verbally, and could be a chameleon if he wanted to. But Cohen typically uses his tongue of ten letters to liberate and enliven, with nothing, as he sings, but “Hallelujah” on that tongue.
Cohen’s 1992 song, “The Future,” is a compelling indictment of mass murder, economic exploitation, torture, abortion, and other social injustices, even some that hadn’t yet occurred. It ideologically opposed, before the fact, both the terrorism perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists on 9/11 and the subsequent torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Cohen’s call for healing (2012’s “Come Healing”) can teach us, yet again, that if we are to have peace, we must recognize that the eternal Good transcends any temporal liturgy, creed, or nation. To be the bearer of such a message comes with a price. For hearers, as Cohen writes in Book of Longing, “the sadness of the zoo will fall upon society” (p. 34).
Profane and Sacred Love
Another Cohenesque duality, already alluded to, is his need and ability to live a rather worldly life, even as he praises heaven. He is famous for relishing the pleasures and comforts of sex—the Song of Songs meets the Sisters of Mercy—and he has a stunning capacity to weave together sacred and profane desire—as in “Light as the Breeze.” Put more bluntly, “naked” is another of his favorite words, and he was apparently “a fearful girler” for much of his youth and middle age. In “Chelsea Hotel #2,” he announces, unabashedly, the pursuit of wealth and sex. He makes no secret of his inability fully to commit to any female—he never married, because of “cowardice” and “fear”; the “ladies’ man” admits to driving away many beautiful women who cared for him. Whether this was due to a jealous guarding of his personal literary calling or to a more simple narcissism that could not give back, is hard to say.
In “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” Cohen refers to things that can’t be untied. But love’s being tantamount to bondage and limitation isn’t the whole story for him. In more candid moments, romantic love seems not so much undesirable as too difficult. “I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch,” he observes in “Hallelujah.” In the end, one would have to ask Marianne Ihlen, Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Elrod, Dominique Issermann, Rebecca de Mornay, and other women in Cohen’s life about his capacity to give and receive. Cohen is currently in a stable domestic relationship with his artistic collaborator Anjani Thomas—see “Crazy to Love You”—and, in any case, a prophet isn’t the same thing as a saint. Furthermore, roués may grow over time into saints, a theme Cohen has explored variously in fiction and in song.
As articulate as Cohen is about the volatility of romantic love (eros), his richest talent is for seeing “with Love’s / inhuman eye,” as he says in Book of Longing (p. 42). Such steadfast love Judaism calls ’hesed and Christianity agape. (Buddhism calls it karuā, I believe.) If eros appraises the value of an object in how it benefits me, ’hesed and agape bestow worth upon an object without insisting on reciprocity. There’s great potential for hypocrisy in extoling unconditional love, for who is capable of such virtuous promiscuity? As Cohen concedes, even great masters get beaten up by sacred texts. Nevertheless, both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible see neighbor love as commanded (Leviticus 19:18 and Matthew 22). A self-giving and creative love is at the very heart of God’s holiness, and we are to be holy as God is holy (Leviticus 11:45).
Order of the Unified Heart
In spite of—even because of—the hazards, in praising and enacting divine love the prophet’s labors achieve their fullest beauty and goodness. Here he sings both to and for God, and his words become a vehicle of universal charity. Human apprehension and imitation of God will no doubt always be tied up, ambivalently, with sexual desire and fear of death. Venus and self-love have their proper place, and Cohen sometimes pits them against “enlightenment.” Nonetheless, not by skirt-chasing, not by navel-gazing, but by being an instrument of God’s grace to others, does one enter what Cohen calls “The Order of the Unified Heart.” His original emblem of that order is two hearts—one facing up, the other down, but intertwined—symbolizing the unity of opposites:
The image is reminiscent of the Star of David:
Over time, the two-hearts emblem has evolved, by Cohen’s hand, into a figure known as The Blessing to End Disunity:
The two hands of priestly blessing hold together, from the heart below, the broken heart above (hear “Come Healing”). At the center of it all is the Jewish term Shin, a name for G-d.
The Question of Islam, Israel, and Terrorism
So far, I’ve written primarily of Leonard Cohen’s affiliation with Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. Where does this leave Islam, the third religion of the Book? And where does it leave the questions surrounding Islam’s relations with Israel and the West?
Cohen volunteered to serve in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 but ended up in an entertainment unit singing to the troops. Contemporary Israelis love him, and his performances for them often include Hebrew prayers. One might imagine, therefore, that Cohen’s Judeo-Christian accents throw down a gauntlet toward Palestine and Muslims in general. This is far from the truth, however. Cohen said some romantic, even downright silly, things after the Yom Kippur War: “War is wonderful. They’ll never stamp it out. It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother” (Pike). The camaraderie and self-sacrifice of some soldiers is real and admirable, but this is hardly the whole story of war. Brutality and death of the innocent are at least as common. Cohen knows that if everybody were truly responsible for his brother, this, in itself, would mean the end of lethal combat. For one’s brother is the neighbor, anyone and everyone, not just one’s friend or co-religionist. The remarks quoted above are balanced by “Lover Lover Lover�
�� and the last lines of “Story of Isaac.”
Much more pointedly, in Book of Mercy Cohen offers a scathing critique of Israel and all arrogant nationalisms: “Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation—none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy” (psalm 27). America, France, Russia, and Poland are also mentioned by name, making it manifest that “these lands” that are not possessed are not merely belated territorial expansions, gained at the expense of local populations (for example, the Gaza Palestinians or the North American Indians). No nation deserves any land as such; it’s given “on condition,” based on a divine “Covenant,” Cohen reminds us. And because the Covenant has been “broken,” “the righteous enemy” “has overturned the vehicle of nationhood.” I presume “the righteous enemy” here is God, who punishes “the lawless” of all countries.
Recently, Cohen put his money where his mouth was and billed his 2009 performance in Tel Aviv “A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Peace.” As reported by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times, he gave the profits of $1.5 to 2 million to a charity run by a board of both Israelis and Palestinians, to distribute to groups focused on coexistence in Israel. If Cohen’s lyrics suggest how Judaism and Christianity might be healed, after all the hatred and violence that has passed from the latter to the former, then surely it’s possible for concerted thought and action to defuse the post-9/11 world. At least one must try to curb the violent fascists of all ethnicities.
Whatever one might think about the acquisition of territory by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War, whatever one might think about the PLO or Hamas, whatever one might think about a two-state Israel-Palestine solution, it’s possible to recall a time when Muslims were the protectors of Jews hounded by Christians—as during the Crusades and, to a lesser extent, the Nazi Holocaust. It’s possible to move beyond vendetta at least to acceptance. The internal struggle within both Judaism and Islam for the hearts and minds of believers cannot take as long as the Christian Crusaders took to transcend anti-Semitism and genocide. The weapons of modern terror and anti-terror are too destructive. Cohen may be a voice crying in the wilderness to both Jews and Muslims, but he’s not alone.