The atmosphere in Israel in the early ‘70s wasn’t just about the Euphoria following the victory of the Six-Day War and returning to reconquered ancestral sites. A new age was dawning in rock music, pants were flaring out, girls were sunbathing on the beaches, blockbusters were teaching audiences new Israeli slang, Israel was seeping technological advances and television was catching on and, even without of peace, Sharm al-Sheikh had become our new paradise.
The Dark Side of the Moon was in its final stages of production. To follow the troubles lying ahead such as hyperinflation and the bloody war, we can look at Jewish-Canadian troubadour, Leonard Cohen and what he was doing: At the time, he was experimenting in a variety of artistic and spiritual back-alleys.
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The Greek island of Hydra. Cohen made it his home in the late 1960s
(Photo: AP Photo/Elizabeth Holliday Burpee)
Fueled by quite a bit of LSD, his work is replete with the abundance of youth and the pure joy of daring young people. He produces a fountain of writing, a broad variety of novels expressing the sexual appetite and optimism he employed to overcome clinical depression - as he aspired to live out his comforting dreams, distant as they were from the ways of the world.
Leonard Cohen and his beloved Suzanne Elrod hold their new son, Adam, in their arms. The two find comfort in their unpolluted love, endeavoring to lay the foundations of family life. Cracks soon develop in the couple’s love while on the Greek island of Hydra, Cohen’s symbol of freedom and, as Matti Friedman writes in “Who By Fire” (Kinneret Zmora Dvir), the only place on earth Cohen can spend long periods of time in complete isolation entrenched in creative inspiration.
01/Stop the bullet and bursting bubbles
It’s the fall of 1973. Cohen, now approaching 40, is rocking a baby in a cradle. He feels trapped and feels his artistic success isn’t bringing him happiness. By his own standards, he’s a failed author and poet. He’s angry, enveloped by a lack of meaning and he descends into a deep depression. Creative silence drapes over his life and he stops writing or creating music.
It's evening. The fishermen on the pier are gathering for a meal. The sun is gradually setting. A few more moments of daylight remain. For Cohen, gazing out of his window, dragging on a cigarette, lost in thought, sky blue and gold merge into one. As darkness falls on the island, Cohen breaks down and feels something closing in on him.
Thousands of miles away, a siren cuts into the merry celebrations of the early ‘70s, proclaiming a combined attack on Israel. The shrieks of “Allahu Akbar” sound out from the grating transistors of Israel’s neighboring Arab countries. The radio frequencies come alive all at once, like a wake-up call before its time, heralding the magnitude of the hour: First we take Tel Aviv. Then we take Jerusalem.
A moment later, an Egyptian cruise bomber lands on Tel Aviv and on Hydra, flaring fireballs land on the fields of Leonard Cohen’s life. The Syrian and Egyptian armies are advancing at full force to dissect Israel while Cohen and Suzanne descend into their own crisis: “Because it is so horrible between us, I will go and stop Egypt’s bullet” Cohen says to Suzanne. He puts on a shirt and leaves. As he walks across the doorway holding a small suitcase, Suzanne takes a small blue ribbon and pins it to his jacket, over his heart.
Without a guitar, Leonard Cohen boards a plane from Athens to Tel Aviv to fight alongside his distance brothers. He says that a woman will let you leave the house for two reasons - making money and going to war. He lands in Tel Aviv, leaving the air-conditioned airplane for the scorching heat rising from the asphalt in the Land of Israel, the place he describes as his true home – despite not speaking Hebrew. "If your brother is in crisis. You can’t stand by.”
02/What kind of conquest? Uniforms or undressing women?
Cohen doesn’t know anyone in Israel. He meets a couple who offer him a place to stay with relatives in Herzliya. He politely declines. He doesn’t have plans so much as a vigorous need to flee his personal predicament. He’s confused and chaotic. Despite coming to fight shoulder to shoulder with his brothers to stave off the surprise Egyptian attack and save his home from going up in flames, and despite his clear declarations, Cohen is now thinking about how to stave off his own loneliness and save his soul by wandering the streets of Tel Aviv, launching a quite differing campaign of conquest: women.
Cohen tries asking out a waitress and talking to women selling cigarettes outside his modest hotel. “I couldn’t find anyone to have dinner with,” he writes in his diary. He’d stand in front of the hotel room mirror, alone, looking into himself, trying to fix his hair, and his heart is flooded with asking himself: Who is he now? Who he is at all? How can a man suddenly be a stranger to himself?
Like inner conflict of whether to bolster his fighting brothers or conquer the women he meets, he also feels a duality taking root regarding this war. He says in a local interview: “I’m joining my brothers fighting in the desert. I don’t care if the war’s right or not.”
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ati Caspi, Oshik Levi and Leonard Cohen
(Photo: Ron Ilan, IDF Spokesperson's Unit, Courtesy of the IDF Archives)
However, in a chance meeting with Israeli musicians, Oshik Levi, Matti Caspi and Ilana Rubina at Tel Aviv’s “Café Pinati”, when invited to join them in entertaining the troops at air force bases, he’s hesitant, and gives excuses about being a pacifist, not having a guitar and “who’s interested in listen to my sad songs?”
He writes: “I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight I knew that they weren’t wrong. I knew that they weren’t right. But bones must stand up straight and walk. And blood must move around. And men go making ugly lines across the holy ground.”
And on another occasion, when asked why he had come to Israel, he was heard somewhat denying his intentions, saying he intended to volunteer on a kibbutz, helping out with the harvest to allow the local men to go to war. The Israeli musicians quickly explained that although he knows how to hold a pen and paper, the sickle and scythe time of year has long passed.
Leonard Cohen exudes an old European kind of charm. He’s a gentle and delicate man, yet full of charisma. Not only because of his pure instincts or his education. His gentlemanly qualities, coupled with his dark traits, are tested by his personal journeys as he encounters society. As he matures, he tests man’s strength to easily debate and conquer his environment, but not before conquering one’s own lust for control - even on a subconscious level.
His ability to talk about both the dark sides and the zeniths of the soul, his understanding that if you’re controlled by desire, you’re not free – all of this helps him break down social and gender conventions. These serve to make him the hero of the journeys an artist travels throughout his lifetime.
Cohen who, en route to Israel, struggled between stopping the Egyptian bullet and harvesting on a kibbutz, and between uniforms on the Suez Canal and undressing women in Tel Aviv, ultimately chose his brethren on the front. His ability to, simultaneously, be at two completely different perspectives, perhaps explains this contradiction. It forever takes hold of his being. Attempting to explain the changes in his political stance, Cohen says: “A Jew remains a Jew. Now it’s war and there’s no need for explanations. My name is Cohen.”
He didn’t have a guitar, but they soon arranged one for him and Matti Caspi, Ilana Rubina, along with their Canadian guest crammed into Oshik Levi’s Ford Falcon and set out to Hazor where they held their first performance. With no rehearsals, and the improvisational skills of troubadours, all reservations melted away when Cohen and the team took to the stage.
In the coming weeks, Cohen and his posse crisscross the country. Traveling mostly in trucks, jeeps and military tanks to remote outposts, camps, aircraft garages and field hospitals, they meet soldiers and sing for them, giving up to eight performances a day, sometimes to only a handful of soldiers.
As the shelling isn’t letting up and the smell of death, oil and gunfire fill the air, without realizing it, Cohen is desensitized to the reality around him. The team heads south, deep into Siani. Cohen, who had only recently gotten himself off amphetamines, finds himself starved, far from home, in a place where his supplies can’t reach him. Late at night, as he’d even stopped writing for distraction, he’d lie down to sleep in makeshift tents, without taking off his shoes.
It was all dark on the southern front. The soldiers were hungry for food, thirsty for water and desperate for oil tankers. Cohen is thoughtful and certain that we’re right, that the war had been forced on us, but there comes a moment when he breaks: Dying soldiers are undergoing surgery at an air force base as he’s performing for the troops. It’s hard for him to see. He’s upset. “Don’t worry” the Israeli soldiers tell him, “They’re Egyptians.” Cohen calms down. But then, this calm shocks him.”I calm down because they say they’re Egyptians? The blood is on my hands!”
Cohen would later describe how the war affected him: “It catches you. You get caught up in the thing. And the desert is beautiful and you think your life is meaningful for a moment or two. And 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.”
03/The Adolescence of the ’73 war in the shadow of the ’39 war
Cohen ranks among the most respected Jewish and authors and poets of the twentieth century. Through his diverse career, which started with poetry booklets and writing novels, he sold millions of albums and performed hundreds of concerts, mainly in Europe.
In hindsight, much of the creative corpus of songs and writings of this genius poet were influenced by the terrible war of 1973, an event that left an impression on him and connected him historic Jewish, particular and collective components – to love and hate, passion and war in all their manifestations.
"Cohen makes the analogy between the Yom Kippur War and the horrors of the Holocaust. Now, the events of 1973 and 1939, in a mixture of Bible verses he remembered and the characters dancing in his head – Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan and the blood of priests flowing through the street of Jerusalem during the destruction of the second temple – with all of this mix, Cohen writes many of his songs"
Although it started out with a tremendous failure and ended with a changed Israel, the October 1973 war was a critical event in the modern history of the Jewish people. Leonard Cohen was there, inside, within the symbiotic relationship between human memory and collective imagination, the flickers of memory and the delusions of imagination. War is an extreme and dramatic event and if you’ve not been there, you won’t understand how extreme or how dramatic. Cohen who never loaded a gun or pushed a jeep out of the mud, tasted from every part of the war, to its depth, historical meaning and the Biblical verses through the movement of a lone tank and the ethical dilemmas and anxieties of the soldiers he met.
Cohen makes the analogy between the Yom Kippur War and the horrors of the Holocaust. The horrors on which he grew up and the crisis of sovereignty his people are experiencing in their land. When he was a child, Cohen’s grandfather, who was a great rabbi, would read him the Book of Isaiah at bedtime. Now, the events of 1973 and 1939, in a mixture of Bible verses he remembered and the characters dancing in his head – Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan and the blood of priests flowing through the street of Jerusalem during the destruction of the second temple – with all of this mix, Cohen writes many of his songs.
Dance Me to the End of Love, for example, was borne out of knowing that string quartets were sometimes forced to play classical music beside crematoria in the Holocaust death camps. “So, that melody, ‘Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin’, meaning the beauty thereof being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved”
With Cohen, what happens in great wars is very much what happens in love: The lovers always embrace in front of the burning ruins. Wars can be between nations. They can be between a man and a woman.
04/“New skin for an old ritual” Return to Suzanne in the midst of the war
At the end of the day, it all comes back to love for Leonard Cohen. In 1974, in the midst of the battles and the erection of thousands of fresh gravestones in military cemeteries, each person must find a place to start over. A clear voice told him: You can go back to singing only if you relinquish your lust. And maybe the day of reckoning came to his inner longing to discover love anew.
He returns to Suzanne. If wars always return, old friends and lovers can also return to one another. “I tried to leave you. I don't deny. I closed the book on us, at least a hundred times” he sings about his beloved – and as he goes back to Suzanne and his baby son, he finds a fresh opening in his music and records a masterpiece album named after his desire to be reborn.
That year, when Cohen and Suzanne were in the United States, another baby was born to the couple. She was named Lorca, after the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, who had deeply influenced Cohen. The pair lived flying between Montreal, the United States and Hydra. Leonard split his time between working from home on his creative endeavors and Suzanne and their children. He writes poetry and music, and occasionally releases a record.
In 1978, shortly after the death of his mother, Masha, Cohen and Elrod’s relationship, once again, becomes strained. Although Cohen gives Suzanne a Jewish wedding ring, their marriage was never official and Cohen never married under a chuppah.
Leonard Cohen tries to be a perfect partner and a better father, but it doesn’t last long. The couple split once again. Suzanne takes the children to live near Avignon in the South of France. “I believed in him,” she says. “He had moved people in the right direction, toward gentleness. But then I became very alone.”
This rift looms over the man who never stops struggling for his life, and as one who cleaves and grasps in the Jewish language, Cohen sees it as a crack through which light will shine. He always operates from the standpoint of a Jew where he reveals his writing ability to grow out of difficult circumstances. “I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible,” he writes in his song, The Future:
“Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room, my secret life
It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
Stuff it up the hole
In your culture”
05/Messenger of the people/Father change my name
After parting from Suzanne and their two children, Leonard Cohen is a broken man. In a mystical way, all the decisive events in his life occurred on the seam between summer and winter – in the months of September – October. He was born at this time – September 21, 1934. In an early interview in the ’60s, he said he would joke with himself about changing his name to “September”. During his visit to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, he asks to be addressed as “Eliezer” rather than Leonard – his Hebrew name, Eliezer ben Nisan Hacohen.
The name-change motif returns in his song about Marianne: So Long Marianne:
“O you are really such a pretty one
I see you’ve gone and changed your name again
And just when I climbed this whole mountainside
To wash my eyelids in the rain."
There are Jews who change their names and there are Jews who intermittently change their souls and want it articulated. In light of the war, Cohen subconsciously experienced something he never would again. In his proximity to heroic death and the insights he cultivated on the condition of man overcoming fear, repeatedly exposing himself to the dangers of battle for the sake of his people and for the sake of a cause embedded in his consciousness, Cohen polishes up the song, conducting a more mature dialogue with God and with the reality around him.
It had been over a year now since the war in the Middle East, and now Leonard Cohen is reworking the scribblings on scraps of paper he wrote in the desert at the height of the war, that he had already made soldiers coming to and from the battle tremble as he sang them perched on ammunition crates.
As he wrote Lover Lover Lover, Leonard reportedly sinks into a trance. Disassociating himself from his surroundings, he dives inwards to the words and his message as a prophet. He sits alone with his guitar, writes a melody to the words, writes and erases, writes and erases, changes the chords, changes the order of the stanzas, tries different variations, takes a line from here or there, struggling to collate it into a sort of new Biblical chapter inspired by the Dry Bones Prophecy.
There are Jews who change their names and there are Jews who intermittently change their souls and want it articulated. In light of the war, Cohen subconsciously experienced something he never would again. In his proximity to heroic death and the insights he cultivated on the condition of man overcoming fear, repeatedly exposing himself to the dangers of battle for the sake of his people and for the sake of a cause embedded in his consciousness, Cohen polishes up the song, conducting a more mature dialogue with God and with the reality around him
In the song’s early versions, it also referred to the desire to help his brothers fighting in battle, but Cohen ultimately omitted these verses, apparently not wanting to appear to be taking sides, understanding that his music and poetry hold a universal nature. He improved the song in the released version in which in a dialogue between Man and God – he calls on God, to change his name. A kind of sinful plea reflecting his experiment in self-identification and verbal creation, to receive a new soul in this Sisyphean world.
“I asked my father
I said, father change my name
The one I'm using now it's covered up
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame.
Then let me start again, I cried
Please let me start again
I want a face that's fair this time
I want a spirit that is calm”
Cohen asks, as a son asks his father, who is also the great god, and the great lover, that he should grant him a new name. For Cohen, name is about identity. He asks for a new body and to be released of guilt and pride. He asks God to reveal himself to him, that he should stop concealing himself. And now, the Heavenly Voice replies:
“I never never turned aside, he said
I never walked away
It was you who built the temple
It was you who covered up my face.”
Great songs are borne out of prayer. “Prayer poems” would be a fitting description of Leonard Cohen songs. He writes and formulates prayers and sings them as a Messenger of the Community (Shaliach Zibbur). His songs weave between the most forceful Jewish undertones between Man and God. For Leonard Cohen, prayer is the position of a man coming from a long tradition that never tires and never surrenders.
Cohen’s search comes from a never-ending faith, coupled with accusations, questions and agony along the journey, long years of suffering and loneliness, harsh self-education and tedious laboring toward spiritual ascension. The dialectic of the Great Spirit and the dark passion were constant motifs reflecting the revelation of the light inherent in charged speech and how, by this path, he always tried to reach God. The Jewish model becomes more and more apparent in his songs – including the last song he released, You Want it Darker (Hineni) - like in the Binding of Isaac (The Akeda) as Abraham responds to God's voice, surrendering himself to Him.
Rabbi Mordechai Finley of Or HaTorah Synagogue in Los Angeles, who Cohen would visit a few times a year, once mentioned to him that he thought his songs always contained some element of Jewish prayer. “Were you at all conscious of that? Something like a prayer? “ Rabbi Finley asked Cohen. Leonard replied: “That’s what I thought I was always writing: a prayer.” And no one can articulate like Cohen, with his soft, delicate voice what only a refined person can do, wisely, with sensitivity, in the presence of the Holy of Holies, with the movement of the soul inviting one’s attention to both the finest voice of soul and the lightening echoing from Heaven above.
Leonard Cohen lived in a consciousness (and he even said so himself) that he was a direct descendant of Aaron the Priest, fruit and branch of the priestly line. The symbiosis of the Levite poets and the priests carrying out their duties as a link connecting Man to God, the temporal world to the spiritual. Perhaps this is what gave Cohen the charisma that occasionally reveals itself as a partial prophecy. At the outset of his career, his family didn’t understand his attraction to creative work. He later mentioned that his father’s death when he was nine lead him to pursue a career as a poet. In poetry, Cohen found his purpose and the tool to reach high above the ground and open up the gates of Heaven for redemption, purpose and giving.
06/ Unetanneh Tokef: The closest between man and God
“And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling”
The bloody Yom Kippur War is known in Arabic as “Harb Tishrin.” The war fell close to Leonard Cohen’s Hebrew birthday. God commands Moses on Mount Sinai and teaches us about the time of atonement and fasting on this day each year.
From a considerable distance, Leonard Cohen sees the mountain identified with this revelation in Sinai. In a small bay, the soldiers take a short break from the bombings and jump into the water for a swim. Cohen doesn’t see their naked bodies with their sunburned and scarred arms and shoulders. In his mind’s eye, he envisions the lines from the prayer book and the Torah in synagogue and the historical scenes emerging from them.
Half vision, half imagination, he drifts between the piyyut “Unetanneh Tokef” describing God sitting in judgment and the nothingness of man pleading for another cycle of life, the priests spreading their hands, commanded to bless the Children of Israel with a blessing of peace and protection, a blessing with which he would sign off his final visit to Israel. He becomes more and more distant from the soldiers frolicking around the bay – and dives into the story of Jonah, the prophet in the Bible who fled God’s call to warn the sinful city of Nineveh, and to the Akeda when Abraham was freed from human paralysis, flawlessly devoting himself to God with his response “Hineni” (I am here).
Cohen, a descendant of the priests, returns for a moment to the purpose of priesthood. He was, as yet, undecided as to what that purpose would be, but he is a priest in essence. And this is his time, like the six days of creation. He understands that he has come here to reveal something, to announce something. And in such a symbolic way, Yom Kippur, when we desist from everything and devote our every tiniest action to purifying the body and praying in the synagogue. Our bodies are weak, our souls are uplifted beneath the white tallit. Nothing else exists. Just Man and God – at this time, the priest will ask to start a new chapter in his life, a decisive time that will find expression in his work for the rest of his life.
Leonard Cohen, the author, poet but primarily singer who was welcomed as his voice warmed and his facial features softened, conquered (almost) every moment of his life and spent much of his time in the spotlight as the man who came to, once more tell men about men and about men and women. And he just wanted to find a quiet place to keep warm in the cold winters of the soul to the candlelight of love. He regarded the connection between man and woman as a minute seal in the world below distracting from the spiritual connection between Man and God.
He was nourished by the sweet-toxic syrup of the “muse”. When asked about his turning women in his life into songs, he replied: “If that was the only way I'd exploited a relationship then I'm going straight to Heaven.“ That’s what’s so touching about Leonard Cohen – he could present an honest artist’s picture. His life story is full of romance, how close the love with a woman is to the cherubim standing face to face in the Holy of Holies. Any woman would feel flattered to be at the heart of the soul of such a spiritual, artistic, intellectual man.
Leonard Cohen did all he could so that the people in his life wouldn’t undervalue themselves - even if he projected the spirit of a cunning, sometimes restless wanderer. He knew how to turn self-deprecation into self-confidence, scars into beauty marks and how to mythologize transience.
For Cohen, beginnings are always modest and sweet. But sometimes, maintain it was a failure. When he boards a ship to travel the world and discovers cities, countries and people – without really choosing to do so – all this could arouse in him more glamour and lust. But he didn’t always know how to deal with them and chose to preserve them in the best way in memory and word. His pursuit of the aesthetic, his admiration of beauty, the ways he finds comfort, he desired, longed, sobbed, muttered and laughed his angelic laugh He sought to bring the sublime down to earth.
As music transcends time, and reincarnation allows us to transcend beyond a certain chapter within the body, he arranges his parting from this world by devoting himself to God, as he closes his eyes, saying “Hineni” – Here I am. He returns to Jewish language, roots, essence in which God created the world. And here, language is not only terminology, its essence. “You want it darker, we will kill the flame”, but you should know, he suggests, we’ve done our best.
And so, like a bird on a wire, wavering as close as possible between Man and God, between the troubles below and the freedom above, for 82 years of heroism and kindness, Leonard Cohen holds a catalog of deaths and slow decline against the smiling blossoming of Man, knowing that all he can do is ask: “As I long and cry out to God, is there something, someone, there calling out our name? “
- The influence of the works of Leonard Cohen on writer, poet and singer-songwriter Nachi Weiss is outlined in his latest book “Sweet Darkness – Poems, Longings and Journeys” (2022). In his performances, Wiess includes cover versions of Leonard Cohen’s songs. Many of the details and references in this article were first published in Matti Friedman’s book “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” (Kinneret Zmora Dvir)
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