Leonard Cohen: celebrated songwriter, poetic dreamboat, ladies’ man, writer of “Hallelujah,” a song so ubiquitous and covered so many times that even Cohen, by the end of his life, felt maybe people should give it a rest. Diving into the details of all that, for some, would be enough.
But at a screening of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man — a documentary about Cohen and his life — held at Best Video on Wednesday night, former Best Video owner, photographer and film maven Hank Paper was on hand, along with Rabbi Benjamin Scolnic of Temple Beth Sholom and Reverend Jack Perkins Davidson of Spring Glen Church, to discuss other aspects of Cohen’s words and music as central to his work as sex: his spirituality, and more specifically, his Jewish identity.
Paper had chosen the film to screen at Best Video and of the three he had the most to say. He began by comparing Cohen, who died in 2016, to Bob Dylan. “These two poet-songwriters are so unique. They stand out, for me, in front of everybody. Two good Jewish boys from the North who went south and made good, and told us a lot about the country and the soul.” Paper characterized Dylan as capturing the zeitgeist of his era. “He looked out and he wrote songs about his country and what he saw, following in the footsteps of his idol, Woody Guthrie.” Dylan’s songs “helped define what our country was going through in the 1960s counterculture.” By contrast, Leonard Cohen “looked inward. His was a zeitgeist of the soul. He looked inside himself and he saw the brokenness of the human condition, and his own brokenness, and he wrote about it and sang about it — his own contradictions and failings, his hypocrisies and, and this is his own words, his lecheries.”
Paper also pointed out that Bob Dylan changed his surname from Zimmerman “like a lot of people who want to be celebrities. There’s nothing wrong with it. Immigrants change their names.” Paper’s own grandparents changed their name at Ellis Island. “Do you think their name was Paper?” he said, garnering laughs. To Paper, Dylan changed his name because “he wanted to be a part of the culture he was going to criticize.” But Cohen “never changed his name. It would never have occurred to him.” Paper explained that the surname Cohen is common among Jews, but some can trace their lineage back to the cohains, or priests, who performed duties in the Temple of Jerusalem in antiquity.
“Leonard Cohen on both sides of his family had a lineage of Hebrew scholarship, Jewish scholarship,” Paper said. “Every Friday night he lit candles, even when he was on tour.” Later in his life, “he came to regard Israel as his mythic country.” Paper talked about how he visited Israel on the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, “at a point in his life where he thought he was a failure.” He arrived without any expectations of performing; “for some reason he was pulled there.” When he got there he played for soldiers at air force bases.
To Paper, many of Cohen’s songs had a thematic structure in common, starting out low, in the “brokenness of the human condition,” and rising toward a moment of revelation, a “vertical confrontation with the divine. He had a trajectory.” Dylan, an admirer of Cohen’s, “thought his music, his lines, were liturgical. He thought the melodies gave his songs a celestial lift.” The epiphanic arc of Cohen’s songs “is a longing that I respond to myself. I think it represents a longing in each and every one of us.”
For Scolnic, many of Cohen’s songs were “prayers on the edge of darkness,” he said. “Not going into the abyss, but staying on this side.” He suggested that a group get together and play a Leonard Cohen song and “talk about what it means to you. Because there’s so much in the songs that I don’t understand.… There are songs to me” — “If It Be Your Will,” for example — “that mean so much to me, but I study texts and there are Leonard Cohen songs I still haven’t fully grasped the meaning of. You talk about poetry? That’s poetry, more than Dylan.” Though Scolnic also talked about how Dylan inspired Cohen to start singing in the first place.
He then read a passage from an interview with Cohen that, in his estimation, “sums up everything about Leonard Cohen” and his relationship to spirituality:
Well, we sense that there is a will that is behind all things, and we’re also aware of our own will, and it’s the distance between those two wills that creates the mystery that we call religion. It is the attempt to reconcile our will with another will that we can’t quite put our finger on, but we feel is powerfull and existent. It’s the space between those two wills that creates our predicament. […] Somehow, in some way, we have to be a reflection of the will that is behind the whole mess. When you describe the outer husk of that will which is yours, which is your own tiny will – in all things mostly to succeed, to dominate, to influence, to be the king – when that will under certain conditions destroys itself, we come into contact with another will which seems to be much more authentic. But to reach that authentic will, our little will has to undergo a lot of battering. And it’s not appropriate that our little will should be destroyed too often because we need it to interact with all the other little wills. From time to time things arrange themselves in such a way that that tiny will is annihilated, and then you’re thrown back into a kind of silence until you can make contact with another authentic thrust of your being. And we call that prayer when we can affirm it. It happens rarely, but it happens in Book of Mercy [a collection of Cohen's poetry], and that’s why I feel it’s kind of to one side, because I don’t have any ambitions towards leading a religious life or a saintly life or a life of prayer. It’s not my nature. I’m out on the street hustling with all the other wills. But from time to time you’re thrown back to the point where you can’t locate your tiny will, where it isn’t functioning, and then you’re invited to find another source of energy.
Scolnic saw in Cohen’s thought a condition that underlies much religious activity, and was also deeply human. Cohen was asking questions: “I don’t know what’s going on here, my life is a mess, I’ve got all my jagged edges, but can you help me? Can I somehow interact with you? Can I somehow reach for something else?”
Perkins said that he was there mostly “as a learner,” but also professed his adoration for Cohen’s most famous song. “There’s just something about that song, as with all of Cohen’s music, that immediately evokes the multitude of humanity, and the connectivity of humanity, and you have that sense of yes.” He was also eager to understand more about Cohen’s Jewish identity and faith, especially in the context of the current rise in anti-Semitism. “I have noticed in the past decade or so that a lot of the Jewish context of Leonard Cohen’s music has been erased. For example, ‘Hallelujah’ has started to appear on Christmas albums, and there’s one particular viral video where they rewrote the lyrics to be a song about Christmas. So I think it’s really important to reclaim that context, the spiritual allusions that he uses, and some of the stories that you all shared as well. I’m excited to learn more.”
Without further ado, the documentary was screened. I’m Your Man contains footage from a concert of Leonard Cohen’s music held in Australia that features the likes of Nick Cave and a few members of the Wainwright family. It also features interviews with Bono and the Edge, of U2, about their admiration of Cohen. But easily the most interesting parts of the film are the interviews with Cohen himself, in which he comes across as thoughtful, funny, extremely self-deprecating, and a heady mixture of earthy and otherworldly; the same man who spent years in a monastery as a Zen monk also wrote notes to people that prominently featured quickly drawn pictures of naked women. The overall effect is to create a larger portrait of the man. Paper appended the film with a performance of “Anthem” by Cohen, that contains a line that just might outlive “Hallelujah” and join the collective wisdom of humanity, long after people have forgotten the source: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”
Check Best Video’s website for schedules of other screenings.