AN ANTHOLOGY OF THOUGHT & EMOTION... Un'antologia di pensieri & emozioni
הידע של אלוהים לא יכול להיות מושגת על ידי המבקשים אותו, אבל רק אלה המבקשים יכול למצוא אותו

Friday 28 December 2018

ANOTHER GREAT ONE'S GONE...

(OBITUARIES)
Amos Oz in 2016.
Amos Oz, Israeli Author and Peace Advocate, Dies at 79
He was known for his deeply observed fiction and liberal politics.

By Isabel Kershner  (NYT, 28 Dec. 2018)

JERUSALEM — Amos Oz, the renowned Israeli author whose work captured the characters and landscapes of his young nation, and who matured into a leading moral voice and an insistent advocate for peace with the Palestinians, died on Friday. He was 79.

His death was announced by his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger, who wrote on Twitter that he had died after a short battle with cancer, “in his sleep, peacefully.” She did not say where he died.

In recent years Mr. Oz had been living in Tel Aviv.

One of Israel’s most prolific writers and respected intellectuals, Mr. Oz began storytelling in his early 20s. He published more than a dozen novels, including “My Michael” and “Black Box,” as well as collections of short fiction, works of nonfiction and many essays. His work was translated into more than 35 languages.

His acclaimed memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” was first published in Hebrew in 2002 and became an international best seller. A movie based on the book, directed by and starring Natalie Portman, was released in 2016.

Among a generation of native Israeli writers that included A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, Mr. Oz wrote richly in modern Hebrew. The revival of that ancient language was extolled by the founders of the state as a crucial element in forging a new Israeli identity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Brazil on Friday, described Mr. Oz as “one of the greatest authors” Israel has produced and said that he “deftly and emotionally expressed important aspects of the Israeli experience.”

Alluding to Mr. Oz’s piercingly eloquent left-wing advocacy, Mr. Netanyahu, a conservative, added, “Even though we had differences of opinion in many fields, I greatly appreciate his contributions to the Hebrew language and the renewal of Hebrew literature.”

Mr. Oz came into the world nine years before the state of Israel was established, in what was then Palestine under British rule, and his life spanned the country’s history. He weathered its upheavals and pried into its divisions like an angry, secular prophet.

His own soul was scored by early tragedy after his mother committed suicide when he was 12. Much of his writing revolved around intimate portraits of Israeli life laced with a sense of loss and melancholy.

“Without a wound,” he once said, “there is no author.”

Though a passionate voice for peace, Mr. Oz was not a pacifist and had no illusions about the hostile neighborhood in which Israel exists. He served in the military, fought in two wars as a reserve soldier in a tank unit and said it was sometimes necessary to use force in order to fight aggression, in the tradition of pragmatic Labor Zionism.

Soon after the 1967 Middle East war, in which Israel conquered the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Mr. Oz began advocating for withdrawal and a two-state solution, meaning the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, long before the idea became mainstream.

In the late 1970s he helped found Peace Now, a left-wing group that formed during the negotiations for a peace treaty with Egypt.

With the weakening of the Israeli left in the wake of the violence of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which broke out in 2000, and the national shift toward the right, Mr. Oz’s voice seemed to become increasingly anachronistic. Critics on the far right called him a traitor.

Mr. Oz said there was nothing new in that. In a 2014 interview with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot on the occasion of the publication of his novel “The Gospel According to Judas,” published in English as Judas in 2016, Mr. Oz said that he was first branded a traitor as a child when he was seen associating with a British sergeant, and that he had been called a traitor since 1967.

“Sometimes — not always, but sometimes,” he said, “the title, traitor, can be worn as a badge of honor.” He suggested that he was in good company, citing others who had been so branded, including Winston Churchill, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin.

Nor was he immune to criticism from the far left. In a review of Mr. Oz’s last book, “Dear Zealot,” in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, Avraham Burg, a former politician who posits that the two-state solution is dead and calls for a single, binational Jewish-Palestinian state, wrote, “Oz, as a fanatic supporter of the two-state solution, tramples everything on the way to his expired solution.”

“Dear Zealot,” a slim volume published in 2017, is made up of three essays on the theme of fanaticism, which Mr. Oz termed the worst scourge of the 21st century. He described the book as loaded “with the conclusions of a whole life.”

Mr. Oz’s concern about zealotry in Israel and beyond was already pronounced nearly two decades ago. Days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, he wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times, “Being the victims of Arab and Muslim fundamentalism often blinds us so that we tend to ignore the rise of chauvinistic and religious extremism not only in the domain of Islam but also in various parts of the Christian world, and indeed among the Jewish people.”

While many Israelis blame the Palestinians for the impasse in the peace process, dismissing the Palestinian leadership’s willingness or ability to reach a deal, Mr. Oz held Israeli leadership accountable. And he rejected any notion of a one-state solution, saying he was not ready to live as a minority in what would inevitably become an Arab country.

In addition, Mr. Oz wanted the character of Israel to be defined by humanistic Jewish culture, not only by Jewish religion and nationality.

He was born Amos Klausner in Jerusalem on May 4, 1939, and his early years were spent in an atmosphere that was both scholarly and militant. His father, Yehuda Arieh Klausner, a librarian, and his mother, Fania Mussman, had immigrated from Eastern Europe. They met in Jerusalem. Though polyglots themselves, they insisted that their son speak only Hebrew.

Amos spent his childhood in the city in a suffocating, book-crammed apartment with a steady diet of what he called “blood and fire,” referring to his parents’ belief in the necessity of strength and power to establish and maintain the Jewish state. As a young teenager, two and a half years after his mother’s suicide, he rebelled and moved to Kibbutz Hulda, swapping his urban home for fresh air and a communal life. It was there that he changed his surname to Oz, Hebrew for courage.

He said he “decided to become everything his father was not.”

He completed his secondary education in Hulda and worked in the rolling farmland between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The hardy, pioneering characters of the Socialist kibbutz movement would later inhabit some of his novels.

In Hulda, he met Nily Zuckerman. They married in 1960. She and their three children, Fania, Galia and Daniel, survive him, as do several grandchildren.

After Mr. Oz completed mandatory military service in 1961, the kibbutz assembly sent him to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a B.A. in philosophy and literature.

Returning to Hulda after graduation, he settled into a routine of writing and farming. He also did guard and dining-room duty and taught in the kibbutz high school.

He fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars and spent a year as a visiting fellow at Oxford University.

After returning to Israel, the family moved from lush Hulda to the southern desert town of Arad, where the dry air was considered beneficial for their son, Daniel, who suffered from asthma. They made Arad their home for decades.

There, Mr. Oz described a daily routine of rising at 5 a.m., drinking coffee and going for a walk to breathe the desert air before settling down to write in his small basement study.

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, he said he marked the separation between his political and literary writing by using pens with two colors of ink, one blue and the other black, that sat on his desk.

“I never mix them up,” he said of the pens. “One is to tell the government to go to hell. The other is to tell stories.”

Mr. Oz also became a professor in the department of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba.

He won some of the literary world’s highest honors, including the Goethe Prize and the French Knight’s Cross of the Légion D’Honneur. He was perennially considered a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In awarding him the prestigious Israel Prize in 1998, the judges wrote, “For some 35 years, in his writing he has accompanied the realities of Israeli life and expressed them uniquely as he touches upon the pain and ebullience of the Israeli soul.”

Politics often infused his literary efforts, and he sometimes used literature to explicate politics.

Torn by the 100-year conflict with the Palestinians, Mr. Oz told The New York Times in 2013: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of right and right. Tragedies are resolved in one of two ways: The Shakespearean way or the Anton Chekhov way. In a tragedy by Shakespeare, the stage at the end is littered with dead bodies. In a tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is unhappy, bitter, disillusioned and melancholy, but they are alive. My colleagues in the peace movement and I are working for a Chekhovian, not a Shakespearean conclusion.”

Two years later, as an act of protest against the government, he said he would no longer participate in Foreign Ministry events at embassies overseas.

Still, the strong feelings he professed for Israel never faded.

“I love Israel even when I cannot stand it,” he wrote in his last book. “Should I be fated to collapse in the street one day, I want to collapse in a street in Israel. Not in London, nor Paris, nor Berlin, nor New York. Here strangers will come and pick me up (and when I’m back on my feet, there will certainly be quite a few who would be pleased to see me fall).”

He added, “What I have seen here in my life is far less and far more than what my parents and their parents dreamed of.”

Nily Oz and Amos Oz in New York City 2008

Amos Oz, a Writer Who Loved the Dream of Israel and Charted Its Imperfect Reality

By Gal Beckerman (NYT, 28 Dec. 2018)

Israel, born out of a dream, a yearning, and then forced to face, for better or worse, what reality brings, found in Amos Oz a writer who combined both the country’s essential idealism and the ability to see the cracked nature of what had been wrought.

Mr. Oz, who died on Friday at the age of 79, was Israel’s most significant cultural ambassador for nearly 50 years, perennially mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But what he most proudly championed was modern Hebrew itself, the form of the language that Zionism revived.

Mr. Oz never stopped professing an enduring love for its mongrel qualities. He thrilled at the chance to work in a tongue that had deep biblical references embedded in the root of nearly every word, but that also borrowed heavily from Yiddish, Russian, English and Arabic.

This new-old language was the perfect vehicle for the role Mr. Oz came to embody, a sort of sociologist and psychologist of the Israeli soul. “I bring up the evil spirits and record the traumas, the fantasies, the lunacies of Israeli Jews, natives and those from Central Europe,” Mr. Oz said in a 1978 interview with The Times. “I deal with their ambitions and the powderbox of self-denial and self-hatred.”

His biography suited him well for this job — he was in many ways the quintessential new Jew that Zionism had hoped to create. As a teenager, he left Jerusalem on his own, changed his last name from Klausner to Oz, which means courage in Hebrew, and moved to a kibbutz, one of the socialist farming communities where Israelis lived out their truest fantasies of cultivating themselves and the land to become robust and hearty.

Inspired by Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson’s collection of realist stories about small-town life, Mr. Oz began writing in his twenties about the characters he saw around him in his kibbutz. Those stories eventually made up his first collection, “Where the Jackals Howl,” published in 1965. Anderson, he would later say, “showed me that the real world is everywhere, even in a small kibbutz. I discovered that all the secrets are the same — love, hatred, fear, loneliness — all the great and simple things of life and literature.”

As a writer, Mr. Oz kept returning to the rural, communal life of the kibbutz in a spare, modernist style that focused on the complexities of interpersonal relations, from his 1973 novel, “Elsewhere, Perhaps,” to his 2013 story collection, “Between Friends.”

But his breakthrough, both in Israel and internationally, was a far more psychological work, My Michael,” a 1972 novel, his first book to be translated into English. It is told from the perspective of Hannah Gonen, a young woman misunderstood by, and alienated from, her husband. Mr. Oz follows her sexual obsessions, which seem to emerge from a need to be seen — creating a sort of Madame Bovary set against the backdrop of white Jerusalem stone. Hannah describes one moment early in her relationship with Michael, her then-boyfriend, when he unbuttoned his coat and drew her inside it to the warmth of his body: “He felt very real. So did I. I was not a figment of his thoughts, he was not a fear inside me.”

Mr. Oz’s masterpiece is his 2004 memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” It was unlike anything he had ever written, telling the story of his own coming of age in Jerusalem with precision and brutal honesty. He captured the mystical air of the city, how it was transformed with the birth of the state, his own bookish youth and his mother’s depression, which led to her suicide when Mr. Oz was 12. In the memoir, he remembers his mother telling him: “I think you will grow up to be a sort of prattling puppy dog like your father, and you’ll also be a man who is quiet and full and closed like a well in a village that has been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Like me.”

It’s an extraordinary book that will endure as one of the greatest works in modern Hebrew. In many ways, through this memoir, Mr. Oz perfected what he had tried to do again and again in his fiction — to capture the coming together of the personal and the political, with neither of the two elements suffering from the collision.

Mr. Oz’s politics defined him to the international audience he often dazzled with his metaphors to explain the conflict (“the only solution is turning the house into two smaller apartments”; “I would say that the patient, Israeli and Palestinian, is unhappily ready for surgery, while the doctors are cowards”). He became a critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War, and was a mainstay of the left who insistently argued, in essays and opinion pieces and speeches, that the only solution to the conflict with the Palestinians was to create two states for two peoples.

Given how he envisioned the future of his country, his voice became an increasingly marginalized one in Israel in recent years, even as his stature continued to grow around the world. The native-born, kibbutz-influenced, adamantly secular, left-leaning Israelis of European descent who dominated Israel throughout much of Mr. Oz’s life have had to make way for Sephardic and Russian Jews, and the Orthodox, putting Mr. Oz increasingly in the position of an aging lefty, a prophet with fewer people willing to listen to him in his own country.

In his last novel, “Judas,” shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, he explored, by revisiting the story of the New Testament traitor, what exactly it means to be out of step with your own society. “Anyone willing to change will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don’t understand it and loathe change,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2016. He felt himself a man possessed of moral clarity but denigrated for it in a country that could not make the difficult decisions he thought were necessary.

For all his frustrations with Israeli society and its direction, he was always an optimist, a man who had gone all in on the Zionist experiment and saw no reason to believe that perfection was ever on offer.

In his final essay collection, “Dear Zealots,” published at the end of last year, he wrote that he was, “afraid of the fanaticism and the violence, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in Israel, and I am also ashamed of them.” But this didn’t get in the way of his love of Israel. “I like being Israeli. I like being a citizen of a country where there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, eight and a half million messiahs. Each of us has our own personal formula for redemption, or at least for a solution. Everyone shouts, and few listen. It’s never boring here.”

Amos Oz in his studio

Amos Oz
Leading Israeli writer, political activist and peace campaigner
by Julia Pascal  (The Guardian, 28 Dec. 2018)

A child of European Jewry, the Israeli writer Amos Oz, who has died aged 79, became the father of a Hebrew literature where the personal and the public overlapped. Oz was prominent as a supporter of the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s and in the debates that followed. Although he was a frequent critic of Israeli politics, he was shamelessly in love with the newly emerging modern Hebrew. “I feel for the language‚” he said, “everything that perhaps I don’t feel for the country.”

Oz was born into a Jerusalem household bursting with failed literary and intellectual ambitions, chiefly those of his father. His parents had arrived from eastern Europe in Palestine in the mid-1930s, when the country was packed with a highly competitive, multilingual European Jewish intelligentsia. Oz’s upbringing was coloured by this hothouse of debate and the rebellions against the British at the end of the Mandate. He was also imbued with the heroic ideal of “the new Jew”.

Writing of this in detail in his 2004 autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness, he poignantly described the birth of the new Hebrew language and the modern Hebraic state of mind. He also showed how the Jewish culture of the enlightenment fizzled out in the 30s and 40s. If the Palestinian Jews were at war with the British, they were also at war with themselves.

Oz observed this political and personal Jewish trauma, which was to become the seedbed of his own writing career. The Yiddish mysticism and romantic melancholia of his mother, Fania (nee Mussman), collided with the European rationalism of his father, Yehuda Klausner. When his mother took her own life, Amos was 12, and it is the death of a rebellious woman locked into a sterile marriage that haunts his memoir. After his mother’s death, Amos Klausner changed his surname to Oz, the Hebrew word for strength.

Oz, witness to his parents’ failed marriage and to the failure of the European diaspora dream, did not belong to their internal landscape. Where they were Jews, he was an Israeli. Where they brought the values of the 19th century to Jerusalem, he adopted the values of the socialist kibbutz, as a tractor driver, security patrol and canteen worker. Where his parents were ill at ease in Hebrew, he was to become its champion. Where they were of the right and admired Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, he was the prince of the left and the Israeli NGO Peace Now.

He reinvented himself, discarding the stereotype of the ghetto Jew as a pale, urban weakling. Klausner became Oz, the rugged, outdoor, tough guy. He left Jerusalem for Kibbutz Hulda at the age of 15, by which time he had already decided to be a writer. When he was six he had posted a sign on his bedroom door – “Amos Klausner, author”. His early works in Hebrew publications included the story A Gift to Mother (1953) and a variety of poetry (1959). It was when his fiction was translated into English in 1969 that his international reputation was established.

Oz’s public image was not just that of a great Hebrew writer but that of an author-politician. He acknowledged that he was part of a “Judeo-Slavonic tradition” where writers are also expected to be prophets for their people. He longed for a two-state solution. “It will come, everyone knows it will come,” he told me in 2004. “The question is when.” Always recognising Palestinian desire for sovereignty, he asked: “Why can’t we just divorce like the Czechs and the Slovaks. Without blood?” In 2004 he published Help Us to Divorce.

During the hopeless period of the Lebanon war and the intifadas of the late 20th century, Israel needed voices that spoke to the outside world offering a more humanitarian face than that of Ariel Sharon. Oz and his contemporaries – the novelist AB Yehoshua and playwright Joshua Sobol – became Israel’s alternative spokesmen. They were the artist-politicians, much as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre and George Orwell had been in the first part of the century. But, if Oz was fighting the bullish Sharon he was also the self-declared enemy of the orthodox and the fundamentalists.

Oz had a huge literary and personal following. Of all his artistic peers, he was the most photogenic and won admirers of all generations. Wounded in the 1967 and 1971 wars, he was Israel’s most beloved peacenik. At Kibbutz Hulda, where he lived for more than 30 years, he learned his socialist politics. His fellow kibbutzniks inspired many of the characters in his writing and, in return, his royalties went to the common budget.

His best known works are My Michael (1968), The Hill of Evil Counsel (1976), A Perfect Peace (1982), To Know a Woman (1989), Don’t Call It Night (1995), Black Box (1988) and The Same Sea (1999). But an Israeli novelist cannot escape the political crucible. One newspaper editorial criticised My Michael because “no nice Jewish girl would dream of falling in love with an Arab”. Even prime ministers telephoned Oz in the middle of the night to ask for his political advice. But, as Oz pointed out, “of course, they never took it”.

After leaving the kibbutz in 1986, Oz became professor of Hebrew literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (1987-2005), living far from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, at Arad, one of the driest places on earth. He was a visiting professor at Berkeley, Oxford, Boston and Princeton.

Oz was not only a novelist but also a provocative non-fiction writer. With In the Land of Israel (1983), he produced a striking collection of hard-hitting monologues by Jews and Arabs from wildly differing political standpoints. To many reading him in English translation, his non-fiction carried the greatest weight. Israel needed champions and it was in these direct narratives that Oz explored the complexity of a country so often depicted in the western press as a rogue state.

In 2012 he wrote Jews and Words, “a conversation” with his daughter Fania exploring language, Jewish culture and gender. Three years later came Natalie Portman’s movie of A Tale of Love and Darkness.

If his essays and political interventions were positively received, the often lyrical style of Oz’s novels had much less impact abroad. Either way, he was a bestseller in Israel, often topping sales of more than 10,000 copies a day.

In Judas (2016), his first novel in 10 years, he challenged the central Christian trope of the Jew as traitor as embodied in the New Testament figure. His volume of essays Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land (2018), maintained his reputation as a major interlocutor in Jewish political history.

Among many honours, he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (1997), received the Bialik Prize (1986), the Israel Prize for literature (1998) and the Franz Kafka Prize (2013).

In 1960 he married Nily Zuckerman. She survives him, along with their son, Daniel, and two daughters, Fania and Gallia.

Amos Oz

Thursday 1 November 2018

THE LEONARD COHEN MEMORIAL


On this blog of mine, among other  topics, I've dedicated a few pages and posts to my beloved and much missed friend Leonard Cohen, poet, novelist, songwriter and singer.

These texts include an anthology of his poetry excerpted from The Spice-Box of Earth, a full dissertation (ca. 160pp) of Cohen's early work up to 1970, more poems and their translation into Italian by yours truly, photographs and various other images from his life, a couple of critical pages on Facebook, etc.

Here's the relative Index (you can click the links and new windows will open).  From time to time, I'll add further material as I see fit.

CONTENTS
  1. A CRACK OF LIGHT — A critical appreciation of Cohen's poetical work
  2. SO LONG, LEONARD — A commemoration of his life
  3. "I AM THE LITTLE JEW WHO WROTE THE BIBLE" — An interview with Cohen by Arthur Kurzweil (1993)
  4. NEW JERUSALEM GLOWING: SONGS AND POEMS OF LEONARD COHEN IN A KABBALISTIC KEY — An essay by Elliot Wolfson
  5. The Worlds of Leonard Cohen: A Study of His Poetry — A master's dissertation on Cohen's work up to the early 1970s, by Roy Allan
  6. "THE SPICE-BOX OF EARTH", poems selected from this book
  7. LINES FROM MY GRANDFATHER'S JOURNAL, excerpted from The Spice-Box of Earth
  8. IL GIOCO PREFERITO —  In italiano, poesie e parole di Leonard Cohen in originale inglese e da me tradotte liberamente in italiano
  9. UNA CREPA DÀ LUCEIn italiano, poeticizzando ancora con Leonard
  10. LAWRENCE BREAVMAN, My Facebook page on Cohen's life and work
  11. Lawrence Breavman, My Facebook Timeline on Leonard Cohen
  12. THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF LEONARD COHEN
  13. COHENCENTRIC: LEONARD COHEN CONSIDERED — a critical website on Leonard's work etc.
  14. THE LEONARD COHEN FILES — An tribute website to the music and poetry of Leonard

Leonard Cohen in the 1970s

Saturday 29 September 2018

IT'S ME, ISN'T IT?

If I push you,
shove you,
what will I find?
Does the sky in your mind
have a limit?
Can you hear what
you are thinking
under what you are reading?
Does it at times drown
the reading out?
Where do the words come from?
What if we drained them of their meaning
just to see what remained?
Do the words fold,
fold back?
How is it with all this language
there is still this thing
so vast that we have
no name for it,
even if we sense it as a thing
we have seen?
Were the words
trapped in the pen,
just waiting?
Did they burst, sperm-like,
into meaning in our mouths?
Can you taste it? Can you feel it?
What about it?
Is it time to think time?
Do the words time?
How many times?
Is it locatable?
Has it a space?
Does it have a secret?
When will you tell it?
Are you anxious?
Are you ready?
Is it simply because you do it?
Are we inside it
Or is it in front of us?
What if we said that we had done this thing?
Can you give a yes or no answer?
Can you say it in a few short words?
Did you go into that phase and go through it?
What is it like to not work?
Would you just go out to the ocean one day
and begin to swim,
outward without limit
toward a vague conclusion?
What of a poem that
stretched from summer to summer?
Will the sun grow cold?
Or will the clouds burn off?
What kept you here?
Are you with me?
Or against me?
It’s me,
Isn’t it?
Artwork by Jantina Peperkamp

Friday 28 September 2018

A CRACK OF LIGHT

We were close friends and I had a tremendous admiration for him as a writer, poet, and singer – as a man. I didn't sit at his feet or anything like that, but I learned a great amount from him because I had the opportunity of a close friend who was a generation older than me, and so in a very effortless way I was able to see how he got through his years, his life.

Thanks Leonard for contributing to the soundtrack of our lives for half a century. As the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inscribed in 2008:
"For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the world through poetry and song—his deep and timeless humanity touching our very core. Simply brilliant. His music and words will resonate forever. "
And here's a loving, beautiful commemoration of my friend Leonard by Rabbi Brian Field...
Leonard Cohen
"Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free." L.C., Bird on the Wire

Leonard Cohen: A Loving Appreciation

By Rabbi Brian Field (2017)

On November 7, 2016, Leonard Cohen died. He was 82. As most who have participated in our High Holy Day services know, we have included songs of Leonard Cohen for the past several years. But the very first work of Leonard Cohen that we included was not one of his songs, but a poem that evokes so eloquently the central theme of the High Holy Days – turning, or in the Hebrew, teshuvah:

I lost my way
I forgot to call on your name.
The raw heart beats against the world,
And the tears were for my lost victory.
But you are here.
You have always been here.
The world is all forgetting,
And the heart is a rage of directions,
But your name unifies the heart,
And the world is lifted into its place.
Blessed is the one
Who waits in the traveler’s heart for his turning.


(Poem #50, from The Book of Mercy)

In the weeks since his passing, there has been an outpouring of tributes to Leonard Cohen, and particularly in the national Jewish press, a highlighting of his most Jewish songs. I’d like to add my own perspective about his songs that strike me as having a particularly powerful Jewish spiritual voice. Some of these songs we’ve sung at JYW services, but not all. Some are well known and some less so.
Leonard Cohen

Of course, the first song of Leonard Cohen that most people think of is Halleluyah. The song begins by evoking the Biblical King David, the traditional author of the Book of Psalms, in a very mystical way–

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.

But my favorite verse is one that is often not included in performances of the song:

You say I took the name in vain.
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, then really what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard.
The holy or the broken Halleluyah.

To me, “the name” is a reference to the Jewish way of speaking of God – Ha-Shem, Hebrew for, the name, or The Name. In Jewish spirituality, Ha-Shem refers to Y-H-W-H, the deepest sacred name for God – which conventionally gets pronounced Adonai, meaning, My Lord. In ancient times, this Name was pronounced once a year by the High Priest on Yom Kippur in the Holy of Holies, the very center of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. But following the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the dispersion and exile of the Jewish people, the knowledge of how to pronounce The Name became lost. Perhaps that was the secret chord that King David played.
But, as Cohen sings, not knowing how to pronounce Y-H-W-H, is not the point. For there’s a blaze of light in every word. This evokes the Jewish mystical teaching about creation – that in order for the Sacred to make room for the Universe, it contracted, placing the Divine Light into vessels. But the vessels shattered, and our resulting world is a mixture of the shards from the shattered vessels and the sparks of the Divine Light. The task of human beings is to repair the broken world by liberating the hidden spark, “the blaze of light,” in each thing, in every moment, in every word.

This is an insight that is deeper than thoughts or feelings or beliefs. It’s even deeper than good or bad. There’s a blaze of light in it all. And in that insight, we see that the holy is the broken. It is all one.

2. "Night Comes On" (Various Positions)

I have always found “Night Comes On” to be deeply spiritual and mystical in a Jewish way. However, perhaps because the song contains nothing that is explicitly Jewish, it has never been included in lists of Cohen’s Jewish songs. Here’s my case for why it should be:
Let’s start with the first verse:

I went down to the place where I knew she lay waiting 
Under the marble and the snow I said, 
Mother I’m frightened, the thunder and the lightning 
I’ll never come through this alone. 
She said, I’ll be with you, my shawl wrapped around you 
My hand on your head when you go 
And the night came on, it was very calm 
I wanted the night to go on and on 
But she said, go back, go back to the world.

This song evokes for me two deeply Jewish spiritual tropes. The first is the figure of the Mother, the Divine Feminine or, in Judaism, the Shechinah. She wraps her shawl around the singer, the way Jews wrap ourselves in the tallit. She places her hand on his head, the way Jewish parents bless our children on Shabbat.

Secondly, the singer wants “the night to go on and on.” In other words, he seems to want to escape, to cloister himself, to use his spirituality to disengage from the world. This theme pervades much of the song: In the third verse, the singer admits that “I needed so much to have nothing to touch, I’ve always been greedy that way.” In the fourth verse, the singer, “lost in his calling” and “tied to the threads of some prayer,” wonders when She, the Shechinah, will come to him. And in the final verse, the singer cries out, “I want to cross over, I want to go home, but She says, “Go back, go back to the world.”

That’s precisely the Jewish way – to “go back to the world.” There are no monasteries in Judaism. Jews have always been encouraged to engage the world rather than retreat from it. And even when it comes to the study of Jewish mystical texts, Jewish tradition requires that one be at least 40 years old, employed and married with children, that is, fully engaged in the world, before one is permitted to begin.

3. "If It Be Your Will" (Various Positions)

In my opinion, “If It Be Your Will,” Cohen’s prayer for healing, is one of his most tightly written and musically exquisite songs. With verses like, “Let the rivers fill, let the hills rejoice,” Cohen has grounded his prayer in the imagery of the Biblical psalms.
“If It Be Your Will” rests in an awareness that we humans are not in charge, an insight that is both obvious when one stops to think about it, and at the same time, something of which we are usually in deep denial. But not Cohen:

If it be Your will
that I sing no more
That my voice be still
as it was before.
I will sing no more.
I shall abide until.
I am spoken for.
If it be Your will.


As Rabbi Maurice Lamm writes in his book, The Jewish Way of Death, life is a day that lies between two nights – the night of “not yet,” before birth, and the night of “no more,” after death. We emerge out of the eternal silence of the “not yet” into life. And at death, we slip back into “no more,” our voices silent as they were before.

But healing does not only imply making peace with one’s mortality. Healing is also our response to frailty in life, both physical and moral. The deepest prayer and the most powerful art for that matter must, in some way, speak the truth.

If it be Your will, that a voice be true
From this broken hill, I will sing to You.


When I heard that Cohen had died, “If It Be Your Will” was what first came to mind.

4. "Who By Fire?" (New Skin for the Old Ceremony)

Similar to “If It Be Your Will,” “Who By Fire?” is based on the awareness that we are not in charge – an insight most eloquently expressed in the High Holy Day prayer Unetaneh Tokef.” Here’s how the traditional prayer puts it:
You set a limit for every creature’s life
And determine each one’s destiny.
On Rosh HaShanah it is written
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass away
And how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die
Who in the fullness of years
And who before her time.
Who by fire and who by water…


This last line of the traditional liturgy is how Cohen begins his song. And the list of fates he describes is a contemporary update to that found in the traditional liturgy. But “Who By Fire” is not just an update on the tradition. At the conclusion of each of the three stanzas, Cohen adds a line not found in the liturgy but reflects a question that so many of us are asking, a line that, in my mind, can be read three ways: casually, agnostically and mystically:

Who shall I say is calling?

One can imagine a secretary answering the phone and taking a message, in response to the Divine decree: “Hello…no, he’s not here…is there a message? And who shall I say is calling?”

Is there a God who is calling? If not, then who is? Or perhaps more to the point, who shall I say it is? Cohen revisits the mystery, the not knowing the Sacred Name that we already observed in "Halleluyah".

Finally, one can read this from a mystical perspective. In the Kabbalah, Who is a name for God, a name that points to the emptiness (in Hebew: Ayin) out of which everything arises, and into which everything falls.

5. "Born in Chains" (Popular Problems)

For some reason, this song tends not to make the “most Jewish” lists. But it most definitely makes mine!
The song begins with imagery out of the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the foundational story of Jewish spirituality and peoplehood:

I was born in chains but I was taken out of Egypt.
I was bound to a burden, but the burden it was raised.
Oh Lord I can no longer keep this secret.
Blessed is the Name, the Name be praised.
I fled to the edge of a mighty sea of sorrow.
Pursued by the riders of a cruel and dark regime
But the waters parted and my soul crossed over.
Out of Egypt, out of Pharaoh’s dream.

The song continues with a chorus grounded in Jewish mysticism:

Word of word and measure of all measures
Blessed is the Name, the Name be blessed
Written on my heart in burning letters.
That’s all I know. I do not know the rest.


So much Jewish spirituality is packed into these four lines: The second line of the chorus evokes the Barchu – "Blessed is the One who is to be blessed.” In the third line, the phrase “written on my heart” evokes the passage in the Torah known as the V’Ahavata – “… and these words which I command you this day, shall be on your heart.”

But notice that the letters written upon his heart are burning, evoking both a sense of deep passion but also reflecting the mystical teaching that the Torah is not simply black ink written on white parchment but black fire inscribed on white fire. The image of burning letters evokes other images out of Jewish spirituality – the sacrifices through which ancient Jews expressed their connection to the Sacred, the ner tamid, the eternal flame, burning continuously in front of the Holy Ark in which the Torah Scrolls are housed, and of course, the burning bush out of which Moses encounters God near the beginning of the story of the Exodus, the bush that burned but did not burn up.

Interestingly, in a departure from “Halleluyah” and “Who By Fire,” Cohen now claims to know the Name, which he has discovered on his heart. But that’s all. The rest of the Mystery remains.

Having crossed the sea, the burden lifted, the singer searches for a spiritual path to follow. He meets with challenges. As he sings in the third verse, “I followed very closely but my life remained the same.” In the fourth verse, he is confused, lost on the road. His teachers tell him that he only has himself to blame. But eventually he gets it. Confusion and brokenness are not obstacles on the path. They are the path. In another nod to the Kabbalah’s teaching of the shattered vessels and the hidden sparks, he realizes that “in every atom, broken is the Name.” Ultimately, he allows a “sweet unknowing” to unify the Name.

6. "Anthem" (The Future)

The song “Anthem” has been a Judaism Your Way High Holy Days favorite for several years. Like his poem from Book of Mercy, “Anthem” lifts up the path of teshuvah (turning):
The birds they sang at the break of day
Start again, I heard them say.


At the heart of the song, once again, is the awareness of brokenness in our lives, the reason we need the practice of teshuvah in the first place.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.


Many of us turn to spirituality as a last resort. It feels that because we are broken there must be something wrong with us. But brokenness is not an anomaly. Brokenness is the state of the universe. That is the insight of the Kabbalistic teaching of the shattering of the vessels at the start of Creation. Listen to these lines from the chorus:

There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.


Teshuvah is the name Judaism gives to the practice of noticing the crack as it expresses itself in our lives, and through humility, forgiveness, and courage, allowing the light back in, not in spite of the brokenness, but through the brokenness. I can think of no purer description of the experience and goal of Yom Kippur than these final lines in "Anthem":

Every heart to love will come
But like a refugee.


Leonard Cohen’s death left a huge crack in the hearts of many throughout the world. May the light of his music and poetry bless us with the wisdom, humility and courage to sing our own holy and broken Halleluyah.
Brian Field
Leonard Cohen and guitar
"I don't think of myself as a singer, writer, or any other thing. The job of being a man is much more than any of that." L. C.
Some magic lyrics, written by Leonard Cohen with music by Buffy Sainte-Marie, who also sings it here:
God is alive, Magic is afoot
God is alive; Magic is afoot
God is afoot; Magic is alive
Alive is afoot.....

Magic never died.
God never sickened; 
Many poor men lied
Many sick men lied
Magic never weakened
Magic never hid
Magic always ruled
God is afoot
God never died.
God was ruler
Though his funeral lengthened
Though his mourners thickened
Magic never fled
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
Though his words were twisted
The naked Magic thrived
Though his death was published
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe
Many hurt men wondered
Many struck men bled
Magic never faltered
Magic always led.
Many stones were rolled
But God would not lie down
Many wild men lied
Many fat men listened
Though they offered stones
Magic still was fed
Though they locked their coffers
God was always served.
Magic is afoot. God rules.
Alive is afoot. Alive is in command.
Many weak men hungered
Many strong men thrived
Though they boasted solitude
God was at their side
Nor the dreamer in his cell
Nor the captain on the hill 
Magic is alive
Though his death was pardoned
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe.
Though laws were carved in marble
They could not shelter men
Though altars built in parliaments
They could not order men
Police arrested Magic
And Magic went with them,
For Magic loves the hungry.
But Magic would not tarry
It moves from arm to arm
It would not stay with them
Magic is afoot
It cannot come to harm
It rests in an empty palm
It spawns in an empty mind
But Magic is no instrument
Magic is the end.
Many men drove Magic
But Magic stayed behind
Many strong men lied
They only passed through Magic
And out the other side
Many weak men lied
They came to God in secret
And though they left him nourished
They would not say who healed
Though mountains danced before them
They said that God was dead
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
This I mean to whisper to my mind
This I mean to laugh with in my mind
This I mean my mind to serve 'til
Service is but Magic
Moving through the world
And mind itself is Magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is Magic
Dancing on a clock
And time itself the magic length of God.


...and some great quotes by Leonard Cohen.

Hear this song too, and d'you really want it darker?
Lyrics:
YOU WANT IT DARKER      (הִנֵּֽנִי‎ = Hineni, "Here I am")
If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni [הִנֵּֽנִי‎ = here I am]
I'm ready, my lord
There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame
They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame
If you are the dealer, let me out of the game
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
Hineni
Hineni, hineni
Hineni

(
Also listen to a vibrant commentary of this song by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on video here: https://youtu.be/2s3kQSZ_Qxk)

Leonard Cohen's Greatest Hits:
See also my posts:
and my page with Elliot Wolfson's article:
In 1967-70, Roy Allan of Simon Fraser University wrote a master's thesis entitled—
You may email me requesting a free copy (either in PDF or DOCX - please, specify).
In italiano vedi anche le mie pagine:
Three websites on Leonard:
  1. The official one: Leonard Cohen
  2. Cohencentric: Leonard Cohen Considered
  3. The Leonard Cohen Files

Appropriately, I wish to conclude with the complete lyrics from ANTHEM, also translated freely in Italian / Voglio concludere con le parole della canzone ANTHEM (Inno), tradotte anche in italiano:


The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government —
signs for all to see.


I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in...


Gli uccelli cantavano
sul fare del giorno
comincia daccapo
li sentivo dire
non indugiare
su ciò che è passato
o su ciò che deve venire
Altre guerre
saranno combattute
la sacra colomba
sarà ancora imprigionata
comprata, venduta
e ricomprata
colomba mai libera.

Fai suonare le campane che ancora lo possono
scordati la tua offerta impeccabile
c’è una crepa in ogni cosa
ma di lì entra la luce.

Chiedemmo dei segni
e ci furono inviati:
la nascita rinnegata
il matrimonio esausto
sì, la vedovanza
di ogni governo —
segni visibili a tutti.

Non posso più stare
con quell'orda senza leggi
mentre là in alto gli assassini
recitano le loro preghiere ad alta voce.
Ma hanno evocato
una nube di tempesta
e mi sentiranno, eccome.

Fai suonare le campane che ancora lo possono...

Puoi sommare le parti
ma non avrai il totale
puoi dare il via alla marcia,
ma non c'è il tamburo
ogni animo, ogni cuore
giungerà all’amore
ma lo farà da profugo.

Fai suonare le campane che ancora lo possono
scordati la tua offerta impeccabile
c’è una crepa, una crepa in ogni cosa
di lì entra la luce.

Fai suonare le campane che ancora lo possono
scordati la tua offerta impeccabile
c’è una crepa, una crepa in ogni cosa
di lì entra la luce
di lì entra la luce
di lì entra la luce...