Brokenness, Estrangement, Healing and Hallelujah
An essay in honor of Leonard Cohen on the anniversary of the artist's death, and a tribute to Rabbi Mordecai Finley, who carries forward the legacy of his late congregant
In honor of the Yahrzeit of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, Ohr HaTorah Synagogue played a recording of their own rendition of the late poet’s “Come Healing” as part of this past Saturday’s Shabbat service.
Prior to his death, Cohen became an Ohr HaTorah regular. He did so in the mid-2000s after meeting Rabbi Moredcai Finley, Ph.D., who co-founded the synagogue circa 1993.
On the anniversary of his late congregant’s birthday this year, Finley concluded a five-week online course, “The Theology of Leonard Cohen Through the Study of Selected Poems,” which consisted of five one-hour classes over Zoom on Wednesdays from August 24 through September 21. Finley continues his public pedagogy as it pertains to “the greatest Jewish poet of our generation, and I would say in many generations” — to borrow the rabbi’s description of Cohen, lifted from his synagogue’s November 4 e-newsletter promoting the last Shabbat morning service — tomorrow night, November 8, with a new course, “The Spiritual and Religious Background of the Poetry of Leonard Cohen, continued,” one evening after the anniversary of the acclaimed lyricist’s death.
I wrote a freshly published piece about Finley’s first Cohen course. But given the conditions of concision associated with writing an article for commission within the editorial confines of another outlet, I felt that insufficient to fully commemorate the troubadour’s artistic contributions. Additional words are also needed to elevate the work of the man who was his rabbi. Likewise, I want to pay tribute to the recently released documentary, HALLELUJAH: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song (2022), directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, especially given that it features Finley, and given how it served as catalyst for the rabbi’s recent online course offerings.
With this essay, I want to further mark the occasion of Cohen’s Yahrzeit with an homage to him and the enduring spiritual resonance of his poetry and music, which he merged together as beautifully as two corporeal bodies united in amorous bliss — a subject his throngs of fans can attest he engaged seriously with his heart, soul and artwork. But I also want to use this piece to throw additional light on the expert filmmaking from Geller and Goldfine, and on the finely crafted yeoman’s work Rabbi Finley has done and continues to do to. Their work has enhanced spiritual understanding, and it augments appreciation of what Cohen gifted the world. My intention here, then, is to apply what I’ve learned and to work through that in ways that venerate all those figures and their contributions, even if it means charting a different trajectory at critical junctures.
To do that, I’d like to highlight apropos spiritual themes the rabbi broached and brilliantly wove together in an iridescent tapestry of ideas in his service on Saturday, while doing my best — “it’s not much,” like Cohen sang with his characteristic humility — to echo Finley’s melodious ensemble of theological, philosophical and socially significant rabbinic commentary from this weekend. And at the risk of this becoming unwieldy, I hope to put all that in conversation with some of the insights related to the oeuvre of the Montreal-born musician Finley helped students in the first course, myself included, flesh out, using revelations from the Geller and Goldfine film, along with ideas from a few other select sources, to aid in that endeavor.
If Cohen was right to call Finley a “healer,” with any luck here we can learn from the artist and rabbi, not to mention the aforementioned filmmakers, and take on the task of embracing our brokenness in addition to assuming responsibility for doing something about it.
***
First, a focus on recent lessons from Finley.
This past Saturday, in his publicly available Shabbat talk on Zoom, Finley focused on the archetypal meaning and dimensions of the biblical story of Abraham, or Avram. With near-perfect elocution, the rabbi participated in “spiritual political theory,” as he put it, and pieced together reflections on Émile Durkheim’s conception of estrangement — more specifically, “anomie,” a Durkheimian term — with thoughts on the devaluation of human life that spelled doom for the Tower of Babel. There’s more. He addressed the emergence and attraction of anti-semitism, the appeal of fascism. Importantly, Finley also intimated how transformative healing might take place, à la the “Avram archetype,” hereafter written without quotation marks.
Aside from the incidence of suicide Durkheim documented at the tail end of the nineteenth century, a magnified “hatred of the other” and “escalation of a rhetoric of a my group versus your group” character cropped up in response to the loss of close ties and eclipse of community that came with mass migration from rural villages to urban areas, Finley recounted. “People need to find an external cause of their suffering,” as he explained the impulse that gave rise to anti-semitism and fascism in the twentieth century. On a basal level, fascism might be described as “the idea we all have to speak alike and think alike and if we don’t,” or else. The “or else” implies coercion or violence capable of forcing folks to comply — or, when compliance isn’t possible, the use of genocide to extirpate the part of the body politic deemed irredeemable, subhuman or otherwise disposable.
The fascistic impulse feeds nationalism. Finley said he believed the same sort of “devaluation of human life” occurred in Babel, where the infamous “tower was more important than a person,” and people became and remained disposable so long as bricks were brought up to build the architecture higher and higher. Fascistic tendencies devalue human nature in similar ways, as we’ll see.
If Torah rightfully suggests human beings are beings that speak, and if, in the main, we clarify our respective perspectives by listening to the uncoerced speech of other people when possible (putting aside when conditions of dehumanizing subordination prevail and preclude that), then othering out-groups to the extent no disagreement, dissent or dialogue can occur amounts to devaluing our naturally (or divinely) endowed constitution. At least that’s one of my takeaways from what Finley shared, with a dash of my own thought process thrown in.
“I was so touched as a child by the kind of charged speech that I heard in the synagogue where everything was important,” as a portion of the new Hallelujah documentary features Cohen saying. “The world was created through words, through speech in our tradition.”
Nancy Bacal, Cohen’s lifelong friend featured in the documentary, corroborated the importance of the word and Torah to him and his family.
“When we were young Leonard would say very proudly that his grandfather could take a pin and put it through the Torah and know every word it touched on every page,” she told viewers and listeners.
As humans, Finley explained this most recent Shabbat, we’re made to think independently. Insofar as authoritarianism suppresses that capacity it adulterates and represses the innately human.
***
Enter old Abe the patriarch, again, for wisdom and insight.
In a recently distributed commentary, adapted from previous versions, Finley wrote that within a “Jungian, archetypal approach to studying Torah, Abraham is the archetype of the person who had to make a move.” He had to physically uproot himself in the biblical narrative in response to “the voice that spoke to him,” which “came from deep within his soul; a divine voice, perhaps, but nevertheless one that found its way to him from his own mysterious depths.” An archetypal take on Torah, Finley explained in the piece, suggests Abraham had to move beyond his extant subjective state.
“Some belief system was failing him,” Finley wrote. “In this archetypal re-telling, something was tearing at his inner world. We have all experienced this. We discover that some of our beliefs about the way things are or ought to be can’t stand up to scrutiny.”
In turn, we question. In consequence, we come to feel like “a stranger in a strange land,” per Psalms 119:19, to riff on scripture the rabbi cited in his talk on Saturday. Yet, sensing oneself as alien, Finley continued, appears to be an ideal position for personal growth, spiritual enlightenment and venerable transformation.
In those moments in which a person feels estranged in and from the world, the individual can try envisioning themselves as best positioned to operate as a receptacle for “divine correspondence,” per Finley’s Shabbat suggestion.
Doing so and embodying the Avram archetype also entails a rejection of the aforementioned fascistic impulse and a repudiation of dogma, which Finley criticized as a method for shutting down discussion. In accord with that aforementioned fascistic impulse, dogma forecloses the possibility of perspective-enriching dialogue.
In a reinforcing cycle of suffering, it thereby diminishes and attempts to extinguish the human power to facilitate deeper understanding of self and other. That deeper understanding could help overcome the hatred functioning, again per Finley, as an unconscious solution to existential loneliness. Experiences of estrangement and anomie continue apace, fueled by profound feelings of unaddressed unease and anxiety owing to social structures and conditions, no doubt, but also to the demonization of different peoples. The dogma-producing proscription against our (what some might consider divinely prescribed) archetypal responsibilities to (spiritually elevate) ourselves and each other beyond the politics of tribalism while assaying without abandoning values we hold dear, enables the insidious scapegoating that in turn holds human estrangement intact.
Yet as the rabbi offered, abandoning hatred in accord with the Avram archetype involves some acceptance of your own loneliness birthed by refusal to conform to practices antithetical to your authentic ethic, along with a willingness to question deep-seated assumptions about yourself and the world. That complements and is complemented by openness to sincere dialogue — or maybe by what cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke calls “dialogos,” I reckon. This opens the door to mystery, to a sense of the numinous, as Jung might have it.
Although Finley didn’t suggest as much during the Shabbat service, commentary from Cohen’s close “collaborator, the incomparable Sharon Robinson,” per the late poet’s description of the Grammy-winning songwriter offered to the audience at the end of an epic live performance of “Take This Waltz” in London, intimates the man she worked with regularly in his later years probably embodied essential aspects of that archetype.
“Unlocking the mysteries of life was his primary preoccupation,” she said on camera in the Hallelujah film.
***
In the interest of the independent thinking antithetical to fascism and contra the dogmatic conformity its ideology demands, I want to expound upon the Avram archetype and suggest intersecting avenues for transcending anomie and animus en route to profound personal, social and possibly even spiritual transformation.
Finley suggested on Saturday that in addition to committing major atrocities, past state-communist regimes like Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China systematically devalued human life with their totalitarian practices, including the intolerance for dissent.
Point taken. Yet, I can’t help but think more nuance is needed here to more accurately understand the past and to think more appropriately about the present.
Enter Avram again, although this time not the one immortalized in the story of Genesis.
Interestingly, another thinker who exerted a notable influence on me years ago, Noam Chomsky, the long-time socially engaged scholar, born to a father who taught Hebrew elementary school and who worked as principal for Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school, received the given first name of Avram when he was born in December 1928.
Finley’s comment about Mao’s China, as well as coincidental comments the rabbi made about receiving emails (many hate-filled, sadly), prompted my recollection of and reflection on Chomsky’s credo and on an email exchange I had with the the 93-year-old Noam back in August. I’ve exchanged emails with Chomsky a precious few times over the years. Not unlike Finley, Chomsky remains responsive and responsible to curious knowledge seekers no matter where they are, and he’s famous for answering earnest messages from strangers on topics of social (or historical) significance.
Most recently, after a conversation with some friends and acquaintances on the subject of the Maoist takeover, I asked Noam about it. Citing William Hinton’s classic description of the Chinese Communist Party’s land-reform campaign circa 1945-1948 — and referring favorably to Hinton’s “highly informative” later work on China — Chomsky noted libertarian-socialist elements coexisted in the early stages with top-down authoritarian control.
“The whole story is complex and mixed,” Chomsky wrote. “There’s no doubt that great crimes were committed, with huge human toll. These are extensively discussed in the West. Almost totally suppressed however is the fact that as compared with democratic capitalist India, Maoist China saved 100 million lives through rural health and other reform programs.”
Tangentially related, economist Richard Wolff, Ph.D., founder of the Democracy at Work social movement organization and a proponent of workplace democracy, has tried to explicate the complexities of revolutionary Russia and of the USSR relevant to an honest understanding of history.
“They quickly discovered as they rebuilt after the war, after the revolution,” he said about the Bolsheviks following the overthrow of the Tsar, “that they had enemies. And the enemies affected them deeply. Again, for those of you who don’t know, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, 1917, they were invaded by four countries who tried to put down the revolution. The four countries all [allocated] troops that landed in Russia to fight the new revolutionary government. France, Britain, Japan and the United States. Just a little footnote. The United States landed troops on Soviet soil. The reverse never happened. You can ask yourself who’s entitled to be afraid of whom given that history.”
Of course, folks in the aforementioned libertarian socialist tradition, which includes the rich and remarkable history of Jewish anarchism devoted to creating a free world for all peoples, early on documented attempts to extirpate non-conformists under the Bolshevik regime, pre-Stalinist power grab. And those efforts at exterminating unwanted sectors of society extended to Marxian social democrats like Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by paramilitaries on the order of government authorities in Russia in 1919.
Stalin’s later purges are legendary and well-documented. But less understood is the background and the context in which they occurred.
To recapitulate Wolff’s summary of USSR history, an impoverished country lost the First World War, experienced revolutionary socioeconomic and political upheaval, suffered through civil war and faced foreign invasion from multiple armies leaving the nation in abject destitution. As Wolff told podcast host Lex Fridman, interested persons can find a detailed analysis of much of that history in a book he spent ten years working on with fellow economist Stephen Resnick, “Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR.”
Illustrating the kind of commitment to public knowledge cultivation evinced routinely by both Finley and Chomsky, Wolff explained in a response to a question from a Patreon patron that despite Russia’s domestic turf, “where the Nazi armies of Germany did the most damage of anywhere in Europe in terms of property and life destruction” — turf which served as critical theater during WWII — the USSR nevertheless exhibited economic recovery and growth “that had no equal.”
“The achievement of the Soviet Union, which has to be understood,” per Wolff’s analysis, “is that it went from that level of destruction in 1917 to ‘22, so that 50 years later, in the 1970s, Russia had become the second most important superpower in the world, second only to the United States. … What I want to stress is, they went to work to overcome poverty. That was their number one goal. That’s what their number one leader for most of these years, Joseph Stalin, was committed to.”
Putting Finley and Wolff in conversation, we might conclude that Stalinism and Soviet communism more generally erred in ways similar to the people who erected the Tower of Babel. But we can acknowledge the real desire of revolutionaries and ordinary people in the USSR to eradicate the poverty-stricken conditions that impede human flourishing while simultaneously remaining critical of the suppression of civil liberties and subordination of innate human needs and naturally endowed desires in that society to the priority of economic development. It’s all the more understandable within the context alluded to above. As commentary within a major spiritual text quoted at greater length below cautions, “sometimes ruin comes for want of justice,” though a dearth of justice assures it, the mystical text adds.
In the service of meaningful socioeconomic uplift, undeniable alongside terror and enforcement of dogmatic ideology in the Soviet Union, human beings became devalued means to ends justified on the basis of their alleged liberation. That can hold true whether Stalin or any of the political leaders before him truly wanted to liberate all people from exploitation and toil or just enjoyed vainglorious and narcissistic exercises of power.
This wouldn’t be a Waywards essay if we did not wrestle with those nuances and possibilities. Failure to do so, for me, would amount to the kind of intellectual and speech conformity Finley criticized for enabling the slander, and in severe cases, the outright slaughter, of out-groups.
Any residual or ensuing loneliness stemming from the rejection of dogma, we recall from Finley’s Shabbat service, can in actuality serve as a source or precondition for inspired if not always divine dialogue to come. Or so we at Waywards and I’m sure many wayward souls sincerely hope.
Eschewing the sociopathic propensity that Cohen ominously channeled in his song, “The Future,” with its references to torture, Stalin, crack and anal sex, we can also avoid the blanket condemnations that risk conflating citizens, rulers, social relations, ideologies as well as socioeconomic and political arrangements. Those flippant full-on condemnations inattentive to subtleties all too often elide empirically verified history and, worse, interfere with our own social, political and spiritual journeys.
Stalin’s marshaling of resources, undertaken by the Russian people, even amid atrocities, marked an achievement Wolff argues should not be dismissed even if it’s imperative we attend to all the grave, legitimate criticisms of that society. And he suggests the same can be said for China, past and present.
That appears especially true in light of the anti-communist xenophobia vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China witnessed today. Unfortunately and annoyingly, I just encountered some of that on October 31 while watching the Clippers play the Rockets on KTLA 5, courtesy of Hulu. Prior to Paul George going off for 35 points in a performance in which he also grabbed nine boards, racked up eight assists, committed a whopping six acts of what basketball commentators call “leather larceny” (steals), and hit the game-winning shot to secure the victory for the Clips, the channel and platform subjected viewers to political ads, including one featuring fear-mongering language about Communist China. Gross.
Another reason to purposefully check our impulse toward nuance-bereft ideological criticism pertains again to the danger of dehumanization implicit in that sort of rhetoric. Redolent of the anti-intellectual fascistic othering deliberately averse to dialogic understanding, the mindset reproduced by vilification eviscerates the potential of the Avram archetype and risks amplifying jingoistic insecurities already existing in the United States. “I've seen the future, brother,” Cohen-as-harbinger of a possible fate forewarned in a song released back in 1992, “It is murder.” Yikes.
We ought not repeat our own sordid history in the United States of anti-communist hysteria. From violent purges like the Palmer Raids directed against working-class organizers in 1919-1920, to the charging of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly conspiring to share nuclear secrets despite a lack of evidence against her and reason to believe the US government tried to use Rosenberg as a pawn to construct a case against her husband (as argued in a 2016 Seton Hall School of Law study), the record reeks.
Here in California, the UC Regents approved an oath in 1949, forcing would-be academic workers in the system to sign stating no affiliation with the Communist Party. The following year, the Golden State passed the Levering Act, enforcing compelled speech by requiring a loyalty oath from public employees, as I mentioned in a 2018 journal article.
Many are also of course familiar with the second “Red Scare,” spearheaded by Senator Joe McCarthy, and many probably have some familiarity with the history of the House Un-American Activities Committee, responsible for the persecution of intellectuals like screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, incarcerated because he refused to name names when forced by HUAC to testify about communists in Hollywood. As the late Kirk Douglas documented based on personal experience in a delightful book published about a decade ago by the time the actor was in his nineties, he and his production company, Byrna productions, named after his mother, a Belarusian Jew who hailed from Homel, helped break the HUAC-imposed Hollywood Blacklist, with help from the prolific Trumbo and a young director by the name of Stanley Kubrick. Douglas and the exceedingly self-confident, ~30-year-old director butted heads enough they even went to therapy together over the course of shooting of the movie. Per Douglas, the cast called the filmmaker Stanley “Hubris” on the set of Spartacus (1960) for a time, at least until Kubrick shot the epic battlefield scene for the film, which left everyone awestruck.
To his credit, Chomsky, standing atop the shoulders of the philosophical giants who came before him, has oft-repeated an elementary moral maxim I strive to live up to yet of course do not always uphold. That is, hold yourself to, and judge yourself by, the same ethical expectations with which you hold and judge others. If possible, you try to hold yourself to far more stringent standards. Background and context can complicate matters, but generally adhering to the basic moral principle still seems right to me. To do so could mean more closely interrogating our own dogmatic and arguably fascistic or proto-fascistic proclivities, personally and within our own society, including the recent spate of anti-semitism Finley indirectly challenged in his elucidating Shabbat talk two days prior to the Yahrzeit of his congregant who transitioned six years ago.
Cohen wasn’t a theological poet, as Finley confirmed, and fans would be hard-pressed to find ample evidence sufficient to call him a political songwriter. And yet, like all the men referenced above, he remained concerned with human suffering, recognized socioeconomic pain and paid attention to sociopolitical trends and possibilities.
Robinson offered more fitting commentary, featured in the Hallelujah documentary, on the man she met when she was “very, very young.”
“I came in and felt an immediate warmth from Leonard,” she said. “So we spent a lot of time talking about his overall philosophy of life. He was very attuned to human suffering around the world, even though he was relatively comfortable in life. And he was constantly aware of everyone in the world who isn’t comfortable.”
He also used his lyrical gift from time to time to criticize our current social order and to insert careful reflection on the problems afflicting, as well as the immense potential residing in, the people of the United States. Of course, he did so with his characteristic style, suffusing social commentary and ideas for transcending strife with allusions to passionate, erogenous embrace.
For example, in the song, “Democracy,” a composed but energized Cohen exclaims,
It's coming from the women and the men
O baby, we'll be making love again
We'll be going down so deep
The river's going to weep
And the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
A cursory glance at his music and poetry provides confirmation of the awareness Robinson alluded to.
***
In his Shabbat commentary and in his course on the theological facets underpinning Cohen’s work, Finley averred and unpacked the sources of spiritual unease and discomfort — the brokenness — afflicting us all. In both, he pointed toward additional ways we might address our shared loneliness and heal each other along with the supernal, introducing concepts from Kabbalah, which he and Cohen both immersed themselves in and discussed together at length.
As Finley explained during the first class in the online course, he and Cohen became “spiritual study partners” of sorts. Cohen appreciated his breadth of scholarly knowledge in the field of philosophy, Jewish thought and Lurianic Kabbalah. Not only that. Cohen respected how “Reb,” as he came to call the rabbi, had internalized it all.
An archaic “theosophy,” if you will, insofar as it engages ideas about the upper force(s) in the universe extracted from symbolic and unorthodox interpretations of esoteric texts, and a method for redemptive realization of self and world, Kabbalah enjoyed a revival at the end of the 13th century. Finley attributed that renaissance to the authorship and circulation of The Zohar, a massive tome filled with resplendent-sounding theories about divine realms applied to the Torah.
Around 1570, Isaac Luria took what’s implied in The Zohar and made it overt, popularizing a particular branch of (Lurianic) Kabbalah, according to Finley’s lesson. Hasidism, which Finley called a kind of Kabbalistic psychology, came into being less than two centuries later and emphasized inner life experience, human authenticity and the brokenness of the human being without the complexity of the older system.
Finley juxtaposed the two approaches with an analogy about a great door separating us from the divine. The Kabbalist tries to enter by delicately picking the lock on the door. The Hasidic Jew, in contrast, brings an ax to break it open.
***
In the Lurianic origin story metaphor, the Ein Sof, what’s infinite in extension and density — that “obsidian luminosity,” to borrow the beautiful phrase Finley used — long ago contracted out (Tsimtsum) to create space filled by the absence of the divine (Chalal / Tehiru). As light shined into the space of divinity’s absence, vessels holding the light cracked. What’s called the “Kabbalistic catastrophe” has to do with the shattering of the vessels, the breaking of the sefirot, those otherworldly emanations. The breakage left divine sparks scattered throughout our realm.
Cohen famously borrowed and repurposed the metaphor in his song “Anthem,” as Finley discussed during his class. “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,” goes the refrain. With the chorus, Cohen conveys a Kabbalistic insight and polishes a nugget of folk wisdom. To the point, striving for perfection is a fool’s errand.
Within the Lurianic framework, since the catastrophic shattering, light has remained encased in husks, dull sheaths akin to the narrowly selfish and narcissistic ego mind. Conceivably, if we connect this notion to the perennial problem of estranged being, we can liken that egoism to the lack of humility and unwillingness to empathize or humanize the other.
Thus, we must release the light and meaning locked inside those husks, Finley taught. In that vein, Ohr HaTorah Synagogue, the place of worship he co-founded with his wife in the early nineties, and the same one Cohen attended in the 21st century, adopted, “Break the Husk – Release the Spark,” as the theme for their High Holy Days services this year.
Craft raised to the level of poetry or art, Finley offered, helps break those husks hiding the holiness within. The kind of artistic appreciation the rabbi helped cultivate among pupils under his tutelage on Zoom can do the same.
We cannot liberate concealed divinity without first becoming aware of its existence, however, and art like Cohen’s and public pedagogy like Finley’s performs an important function in that regard. And you cannot crack those pesky husks surrounding our wounded souls without an awareness of the selfishness, loneliness and brokenness controlling and containing the sparks yearning to escape.
“If you don’t know you’re broken, you can’t heal God,” Finley put it matter-of-factly, invoking the Kabbalistic notion that not only are human beings and the world we inhabit broken, so to speak, but so too is God. The almighty requires repair, which implies human responsibility and confers some meaning to all the suffering.
Again, non-egoistic humility might help here, and if Cohen’s work serves as any indication, a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor can help that medicine go down and perchance spur healing. Evidence for that attitude toward his own aptitudes and abilities abounds.
The Hallelujah documentary features footage of Cohen referring to his “curious career” and his “marginal presence on the edge of the music scene for the past 30 years,” for example. The film also includes one of Cohen’s live performances of “Tower of Song,” during which someone shouts, “I love your voice!” Not missing a beat, the weathered poet responded warmly. “You’re about the only one who does,” he said before resuming the vocals.
If we’re broken and, indeed, if YHWH sustains similar anguish, we probably better learn to laugh about it all a bit, without of course wholly retreating into realms of cynical or hapless humor for all eternity. We can draw a parallel here to what Finley said about the Avram archetype and how it entails learning to interrogate your own presuppositions while engaging disparate perspectives without surrendering your values.
Cohen incorporated self-deprecating humor into some of his songs (see below for one example), but he also never shied away from the gravity of our situation with his lyrics, which is probably why they resonate.
***
Insistence on our brokenness reflects another dimension of spiritual thought Cohen and Finley wrestled with together. Both receptive to the idea of a veiled reality, their dialogue took them to two divergent schools of thought at the intersection of Lurianic Kabbalah. When they spoke, Finley veered toward a neo-Platonic understanding of the world — predicated on the belief we’re in a benighted realm but also on the possibility we can gain awareness of upper worlds — while Cohen leaned into Gnosticism. The latter led him to theories of a universe controlled by a corrupt God overseeing our cruel confinement in a world created to rebuke us. Trapped within a tortuous box that causes us all to chafe, we’re ineluctably mangled and haplessly maimed without any real recourse, according to the particular Gnostic worldview Cohen gravitated toward.
He refrained from writing explicitly in a Gnostic frame, for the most part, but one song he composed later in life became a noteworthy exception. “Wow, you did it,” the rabbi exclaimed in Cohen’s apartment when he first heard “You Want it Darker,” a track on the album of the same name released shortly before the artist died. The rabbi immediately got the sense his congregant had finally authored a song that adequately expressed his “Gnostic religiosity,” he told students in his online course. “If you are the dealer, I’m 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 / We kill the flame,” Cohen ominously informs listeners on the track. While the “upper world of luminosity” entreats us, it simultaneously enforces a border separating our lower realm run by the lesser God, a quasi-demonic demiurge. So goes the “gnosis” (knowledge) Cohen acquired. As Finley laid out in his virtual lesson, the “glory” of the Gnostic God denotes the shame of humanity inside the torture chamber we dare call life.
The song resembles a Mourner’s Kaddish, he added. That’s especially true considering the affirmation in the lyrics — “Hineni, Hineni / I’m ready my Lord” — with the Hebrew phrase averring, “Here I am,” followed by an announcement about the narrator’s readiness, a semi-autobiographical statement reflecting the artist’s prescient, impending sense that death was near. He died less than three weeks after the release of the record.
Yet, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, another spiritual teacher and fan of the song, underscored before he too passed from this earthly realm, Cohen never abandoned Judaism. He never forsake the Jewish tradition.
Nor did he disavow a belief in divine compassion. “Behold the gates of mercy / In arbitrary space / And none of us deserving / The cruelty or the grace,” as he croons in the song “Come Healing.” The tradition of Lurianic Kabbalah Finley and Cohen worked through throws light on that condition; going beyond the Gnostic notion of an evil or deranged God, a Kabbalist might instead see God as broken, like us, and similarly in need of repair. The view renders the undue cruelty humanity endures in this world explicable, or perhaps a bit more bearable. By making an ethical claim about what we don’t deserve, “Come Healing” foregrounds the fated condition of our existence.
***
The penultimate and final sessions in Finley’s first Cohen course brought his wisdom and understanding of the artist’s theosophy to bear on the most recognized song recorded by the rabbi’s most recognized congregant.
Renditions of the now-celebrated song proliferated. But not immediately. As illustrated in the new film about it, if the viewer draws parallels, the initial apathetic response to the song sort of echoed the early response to Cohen’s music career.
As detailed in the documentary, agents in New York told him he was too old for the music business when he made the switch from writing poetry and books to writing songs in his thirties.
Similarly, the initial reception of the song “Hallelujah” by the music business and broader public left a lot to be desired.
John Lissauer, who produced original version of “Hallelujah” featured on the album, “Various Positions,” said in the new movie about the song that he “wanted to be the audience,” “to make of the lyrics what they were to the listener,” adding: “I think it’s insulting in a way to ask someone to explain his art. It has to explain itself.”
That might be true unless you have the man on hand who spent hours in spiritual conversation with the artist, the man who assumed the responsibility of serving as the artist’s rabbi and who’s decided to devote time to teaching others the insights he gleaned from his privileged access to the poet’s inner world, as Finley has done.
After Cohen recorded that album in the mid-eighties, Lissauer waxed ecstatic. “We’ve done it,” he recalled saying upon completion of the record. “This is really good. And I think Columbia is going to like this. They’re going to be happy.”
Alas, trying to please fickle corporations can be an exercise in futility.
To wit, Jared Ball noted in his 2011 article, “I Mix What I Like! In Defense and Appreciation of the Rap Music Mixtape as ‘National’ and ‘Dissident’ Communication,” that only four record conglomerates — Sony (which owns Columbia), Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group or EMI — hold rights to virtually every song receiving spins on commercial radio or appearing on corporate TV. The Internet, at least in its current form, prior to the advent of the Web 3 world some are working hard to realize, might offer the illusion of greater choice, but I get the impression it too often tends to do a better job of fostering tribalism while occluding or rendering largely inaccessible authentically emancipatory options.
In short, those companies exerted and still exert a preponderance of control over what music gets traction.
“I said, ‘This is it,’” Lissauer recounted about the record he helped Cohen create back in the eighties. “And boy was I wrong.”
The head of Columbia at the time, Walter Yetnikoff, “pretty much hated it,” Lissauer said to the camera with a laugh in the medium close-up shot used for the interview in the Hallelujah movie.
The album did not launch in the United States as planned. “Columbia Records refused to put it out,” Cohen told journalist and author Adrienne Clarkson, former Governor General for the Arts of Canada, in an interview segment included in the film.
As noted in the new documentary, the chief executive of Columbia Records, according to Cohen, told the singer-songwriter, “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” At least that’s how Cohen recalled it.
***
While, “Cohen was the most self-deprecating of men,” as David and Lucy Boucher remind readers in their 2021 book, “Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: Deaths and Entrances,” and even as the man’s “modesty shines through in placing Hank Williams a hundred floors above him in the ‘Tower of Song,’” the Canadian-born poet-bard retained low-key confidence or faith in the value of his work.
“I don’t think that Leonard ever believed that he was not any good,” Clarkson said on camera as instrumentals play in the background about 48 minutes into Geller and Goldfine’s feature-length exploration of Cohen’s hymn about the holy and the broken. “I don’t think he ever believed that. I don’t think no matter who told him, what titan of the record industry told him, or what sales figures they could show him he would ever believe that he wasn’t any good.”
Cut to footage of Cohen performing a verse from, “Night Comes On,” another song from the same album before the directors cut back to Clarkson, who said, “I don’t think he would let anybody destroy him in that way. I think he always knew that he was very strong.”
Just prior to those comments from Clarkson, a shot of a handwritten statement shows on screen, and we hear a voice-over of Cohen reading the lines: “Courage is what others can’t see, what is never affirmed. It is made of what you have thrown away and then come back for.”
I associate that kind of courage, moderated by the sort of modesty and humility Cohen exhibited, with the Avram archetype and with the traits of a true artist.
Far from arrogance, his belief in what he was doing or, as he might’ve put it, what he stumbled about trying to do, surely stemmed in part from all the labor that went into the work.
“I remember being in my underwear on the carpet banging my head against the floor and saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore. It’s too lonely. It’s too hard,’” Cohen commented on all the agonizing work involved in composing “Hallelujah,” as relayed in an audio segment featured in that documentary released this year, elsewhere adding: “It’s all sweat.” He deemed the whole experience one “of work and of failure.”
He spent years revising and refining the lyrics. Some of the “endless variations” scribbled in his notebooks not appearing on any widely released versions of the song include lines like, “When David played his fingers bled / He wept for every word he said,” and “Baby, I’ve been here before / I know what rooms like this are for.”
And as Finley indicated in his talk over the weekend, sometimes when you’re in a beleaguered and lonely state you’re surprisingly most receptive to crossing paths with other outcasts and spiritual seekers.
At a point in his career when his extreme popularity had waned and he too admitted to being a bit lost, the only songwriter alive today who can claim to be just as if not more a master of his craft than even Cohen — though I think each exhibited respective elements of unmatched greatness — recognized the awesomeness of the new record, which was eventually released in the US by a small label.
“There’s a lot of stuff that’s really good nobody really is turned up to, you know? Most of the things that you’re exposed to are just the things you hear on the radio,” Dylan said decades ago.
He appreciated the song long before Cohen facetiously called for a moratorium on all the covers.
“Nobody’d heard of Hallelujah at that time — except Dylan,” Cohen recalled. “And Dylan was singing the song at some of his concerts, which was a wonderful affirmation.”
***
The song “Hallelujah” puts forward a dismal, ironic understanding of love, drawing on the biblical account of David falling for Bathsheba, a young married woman he sees bathing on her roof when he looks over from his palace, as told in 2 Samuel. “Your faith was strong but you needed proof / You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya,” Cohen sings on the track. Finley highlighted Psalm 51 in his class when addressing the song, since it contains David’s mild indictment of God and attests to the seeming impossibility of honoring halakah when our innate carnal compulsions drive us away from chaste righteousness toward forbidden pleasures of the flesh. Not all of those pleasures deserve repudiation, though, and “Hallelujah” redeems those relations that fail or are even doomed from the onset.
Herein likes an important nexus, a node of convergence pregnant with possibility. And another antidote to the estrangement experienced by Avram and all his progeny emerges. We can connect it to the generative process and to the energy of sexual union understood to encompass but also to extend far beyond genital excitation.
As regards wellsprings of creativity, Finley explained the following when interviewed for Hallelujah:
One time when we really talked about [the] creative process, Leonard acknowledged there’s something called the Bat Kol, which in the Talmud is the feminine voice of God that extends into people. The Bat Kol arrives, and if you’re in her service, you write down what she says, and then she goes away. So the baffled king is, ‘I just wrote the secret chord and I don’t even know how I got it. But what I think I did is I made myself open to the Bat Kol.’ Refine yourself enough that the Bat Kol recognizes that you’re open. She arrives. You speak. She departs. And you polish it.
Feminine divinity imparts insight, igniting the passion fueling productivity in its purest form. But only if you make the commitment and do the work that invites her in. She’s not inclined to amuse the arrogant, assure the selfish, help the hateful, comfort the callous, dish dimes to the dogmatic, entertain the egoistic or assist the narcissistic. She will work to lift your loneliness, provided you hold her in high esteem and conduct yourself accordingly.
The Bat Kol represents a neglected force, overlooked at our own peril.
In their book on Dylan and Cohen, the Bouchers devoted a chapter to the influence Federico García Lorca exerted on Cohen’s music. Drawing on the Spanish poet, they cited “three spirits” at the heart “of artistic creation” — namely, an angel that gives light, the muse providing form and an inner drive “integral to the performance” termed duende. Expounding upon those themes, they wrote:
The angel, Lorca suggests, acts as a guide and defender. It looks forward, announcing and forewarning, dazzling as it soars high overhead clearing the path to an effortless realization, or manifestation, of charm in the work. The angel imposes a predestined order that is useless to resist. The nine muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Apollo, the god of beauty, poetry and music, is the half-brother of the muses. The muse moves in the artist the evocation of memory, based on emotional and cognitive experiences. The muse is tired, dictating and prompting from afar, awakening intelligence, or intellect, which is the enemy of the poet, elevating him, or her, to lofty positions, forgetful of the calamities likely to befall him or her. The angel and the muse are external to the poet, bestowing their gifts, whereas duende is internal and must be awakened from ‘the remotest mansions of the blood.’
Without detouring dramatically, Cohen undoubtedly kept in touch with the “spirit of duende” well into his later years.
“Leonard really honored his audiences,” Robinson affirmed for the record. “He said every night before the show, we’re going to give you everything we got.”
Elaborating on that commitment to the people via performance, Sloman said Cohen threw himself into whatever he did.
“Look at him close to 80,” he entreated on screen. “People his age are more worried about getting to the early-bird dinner special. I mean, Leonard is on-stage for three hours jumping up and down, and skipping off at the end of a three-hour set.”
Reflecting on that responsibility, Cohen said you must “put yourself at risk” to really carry off a concert.
“And if you don’t do that, people know,” he said, “and they go home with a feeling that they liked the songs, but, you know, they prefer to listen to them at home. But if you can really stand at the center of your song, if you can inhabit that space and really stand for the complexity of your own emotions, then everybody feels good. The musicians feel good and you feel good and the people who come feel good.”
That care and concern cultivate and enable display of duende, sure, but that’s also probably what affords a visit from the Bat Kol — or, to borrow elsewhere from the Kabbalist canon, what creates the conditions for a meeting with the the Malkuth or Shekhinah, also spelled Shechinah (the “feminine indwelling”), residing at the bottom sephirah, representing our physical realm, a sensuous world wherein erotic delight meets excruciating degradation.
Emphasizing energies more than genders or sexual identities within the emanatory scheme of Kabbalah, Finley highlighted the Kabbalistic contention that “the male can be entranced by the feminine.” As an “inherently erotic” tradition, Kabbalah can be “a little bit scandalous,” Finley acknowledged on Zoom in the course he taught.
This last Shabbat, with lucidity bespeaking the three fountains of inspiration the Bouchers described, and with an effortless quality perhaps bestowed by the Bat Kol in response to years of wisdom work and scholarship geared toward the greater good, Finley, in passing, referenced The Zohar, that mystical text mentioned above. He held up a copy of one volume, which appeared ethereal and translucent on screen with his stone architecture in the Zoom background.
A section from the Zohar, taken from a single volume of the text made available for free from The Kabbalah Centre, foregrounds the supernal wisdom of the Shekhinah in relation to the goodness she gives, engendered by the ecstatic connection of mutually affording sexual energies, produced by the union of opposing, yet complementary, poles. The same section also issues warning about the woeful condition imposed in the absence of that euphoric unification:
So when ZEIR ANPIN threw from heaven the earth, MEANING THE SHECHINAH, ‘they made me the keeper of the vineyards’ (Shir Hashirim 1:6), MALE AND FEMALE, for the time that ZEIR ANPIN AND MALCHUT faced each other, it is written, ‘How good and how pleasant.’ However, when the male turns his face away from the female, woe is to the world. Then it is written, ‘But sometimes ruin comes for want of justice’ (Mishlei 13:23) and assuredly without justice, MEANING WITHOUT ZEIR ANPIN CALLED JUSTICE, WHO DOES NOT LOOK OR GIVE ABUNDANCE TO THE FEMALE CALLED RIGHTEOUSNESS. The verse, ‘Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne (Tehilim 89:15) means that one does not go without the other. When justice, WHICH IS ZEIR ANPIN, moves afar from righteousness, WHICH IS MALCHUT, woe is to the world. (All caps in original)
We might surmise the labor to embody the Avram archetype, the search for life-altering and life-affirming answers, the dedication to defying dogma in favor of dialogue or (dialogos), the ability to marinate in and the willingness to grow as a consequence of abject failure, the work to stoke the flames of latent duende dwelling within for the benefit of others — and maybe even for the benefit of those you’re told to despise (see Cohen’s collection of poems entitled, “Flowers for Hitler,” released in 1964, for example), all despite enduring feelings of depression and estrangement, help unlock the metaphorical door through which the Bat Kol can come in and gift us. All of that likely helps us swing open the proverbial gate through which the Shekhinah can enter too, preparing the ground for “divine correspondence,” for sensuous bliss by way of two becoming one, or for both.
“Men and women have wandered away from each other and have become gypsies to each other,” Cohen once replied when asked what his song, “The Gypsy’s Wife,” is all about.
Overcoming or at least attending to that schism, as Cohen’s husk-cracking, light-releasing artwork attests, reattunes us in a properly metamorphic manner.
“Leonard had a way of putting women on a pedestal,” Robinson said at about the half-hour mark Hallelujah, in between the seamless intercutting of a live performance of Cohen singing “The Gypsy’s Wife,” which continues to play softly as she speaks. “He, I think, saw women as part of the path to some kind of righteousness or enlightenment.”
Geller and Goldine cut back to a close-up of Cohen singing into the mic after that. All the while the music goes on unabated, segueing into germane commentary from Cohen.
“We are irresistibly attracted to one another,” Cohen’s voice can be heard averring as the recording of his song keeps playing at low volume and still photos of him with various women appear on screen, one after another. “We are irresistibly lonely for each other, and we have to deal with this. And the other side of that is the same appetite for significance in the cosmos, where each of us understands his solitude in the cosmos and longs for some affirmation by the maker of the cosmos, by the creator.”
Cut to Cohen inquiring on the mic in concert, “Where is my gypsy wife tonight?”
***
Returning to the song that sparked the documentary, from succumbing to temptation, to reminiscing on literal and figurative romantic climax, Cohen’s changing persona uses erotically charged verse to honor and celebrate the inextricable link between the holy and the broken, the sacred and sexual.
As I mentioned in one of Finley’s online classes over the summer, the version of “Hallelujah” featured on Cohen’s Live in London album, like the rendition by Jeff Buckley, informs listeners:
There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now, now you never even show it to me, do you?
I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove, she was movin' too
And every single breath we drew was Hallelujah
Although Finley didn’t say as much when he talked about the song, a Kabbalistic lens elucidates a double entendre within that euphemistic poetry put to music. The narrator not only accuses a romantic partner of withdrawing sexually by way of a pointed rhetorical question. The lyrics simultaneously bespeak a contraction, or insinuate concealment of knowledge regarding what really structures our world — cessation in divine illumination attributable to the absence of the physical and spiritual interpenetration that once excited the Shekhinah and enabled her to soar, symbolized by the feminized “holy dove,” who “was movin’ too.”
That version of “Hallelujah” quoted above came en vogue as Cohen started incorporating his many different verses into live performances while on tour in 1988.
“I had the King David Song. It was easy for me to use that biblical metaphor until the time came that I choked on the words because it simply wasn’t direct enough,” Cohen said to Sloman as a version of the indelible song forms the auditory backdrop to their conversation and lyrics begin to appear on screen in the film Hallelujah.
Not long after that, the filmmakers unite the visuals with the relevant audio in the movie, emulating the moves the artist made with his reminiscing lyrics in the song. They cut to his live performance of “Hallelujah,” as he arrives at the interrogative, “Do ya?” We see him sway gently back and forth to the rhythm as he sings with his eyes closed, gripping the mic with his left and the microphone cord with his right, “I remember when I moved in you.” The spirit of duende made manifest in concert by the comfort of the Shekhinah, we might assume.
Song and footage continue, albeit with the music volume lowered so you can hear him explain, “I wanted to push the song deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world.”
That struck me as salient. Without sacrificing the spiritual dimensions of the song, he made it more accessible to people. His rabbi has followed suit. Finley has helped us understand the theosophical nature of the late poet’s words. They’ve both deconstructed barriers otherwise precluding greater appreciation of the power inherent in the word to initiate transformation of the self together in intimate union with another, or with others.
To be sure, the originally recorded version of the song hardly eschews affirmation of the amorous, even in the face of heart-wrenching aftermath of romantic relationships and erotic relations gone wrong. That version lacks the overtly euphemistic lines alluding to the orgiastic, ephemeral experience of cosmically fated intercourse capable of changing our sense of self and our perceptions of reality via revelatory penetration, true. Yet omission of the explicit innuendo notwithstanding, the original lyrics brought back intercourse between the holy and the broken, breaking husks. To put it in a synesthesia-sound way, in the oral affirmation of “Hallelujah,” the singer emits rays of “obsidian luminosity,” the primordial expanse beyond mere human thought but amenable to the soul’s understanding, to riff once more on a lesson from Finley’s first course.
You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to ya?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
The recollection of an accusation, the rejoinder that follows and the interrogation embedded in the lyrics serve to subvert dogma. From the point of view of Finleyan Lurianic Kabbalah, the metaphors and symbols from the soul aren’t to be reified dogmatically; rather, they’re expressions for spiritual attainment. Furthermore, following Finley, in “Hallelujah” and throughout his life in this realm, Cohen conveyed a contagious, luminous glow reflecting the supernal light too bright to keep us confined.
Many thanks to Rabbi Finley for teaching the previous course and for continuing his public pedagogy with the new course starting on November 8. You can sign up for that one here. He will be teaching another course, “All and Everything: Consciousness, Knowledge, Truth, Morality, Values and Theories,” also starting 11/8. In addition, he has his, “Ongoing Seminar in Wisdom Work: Vision, Will, Skill, Reflection / Virtue, Rationality, Wisdom and Depth,” starting November 9. And for those already with an understanding of basic wisdom work, he’s offering, “Intermediate / Advanced Wisdom Work: Ego-States, Sub-personalities – Insight, Intervention and Transformation,” beginning on 11/9 as well.
For those who wish to support his work and his synagogue, you can find ways to donate, including methods not requiring a direct monetary donation, right here.