25
Four and a half months after the ceasefire, an entry in Cohen’s notebook places him in a hotel in the city of Asmara, which was then in Ethiopia and is now in Eritrea. He was working on new songs. He would never say that it was his experience in Sinai, at those intimate concerts where music was a matter of life and death, that restored his faith in what he had to say, or if in Israel he’d really found the place he imagined in his manuscript, the one where he could “begin again.” That kind of explanation wasn’t Cohen’s style. If he’d lost his creative thread at thirty-nine it wouldn’t have come as a surprise—most singers don’t even make it that far. What’s unique is that he didn’t burn out, that he managed to resurrect himself. Had he faded that year, we would be without “Hallelujah,” “Anthem,” “Everybody Knows,” and many other masterpieces. Anyone touched by those songs would be different had they never been written.
All that can be said is that in 1973, before the war, he was speaking about retirement and saying he wanted to “shut up,” and that after the war he released New Skin for the Old Ceremony. One of the pleasures of going through Cohen’s little notebooks is seeing words emerging from his head en route to becoming known to millions, like this scribble from the months of the album’s gestation:
Wed.
Chelsea Hotel broken
I never heard you say:
I need you
I don’t need you
I need you
I don’t need you
& all that jivin around
Unlike his description of that renowned encounter with Janis Joplin in New York, his inferior poem about Aleece in Room 8 was never put to music, and the Gad Hotel never achieved the fame of the one in Chelsea. The hotel in Tel Aviv has been gone for years and is forgotten.
One page in the notebook looks like the start of a journal. It reads, “Imperial Hotel, Asmara, Ethiopia, March 21, 1974.” Cohen reports eating an “excellent lunch at the Albergo Italiano,” after which he washed his white shirt and hung it to dry on the balcony. He sang for an hour. “First two verses of Chelsea Hotel will do; delete the third.” He rented a bicycle and bought grey fabric for a suit that would be ready by the coming Sunday. By four p.m. his shirt was almost dry, and he soaked his grey cords and hung them in the evening air.
Then, with a confusing jump in geography, these lines appear:
Hydra
March 1974
And who—and who shall I say is calling?
Two pages later, the embryonic form of the song appears:
Who by fire who by water
who in the sunshine who in the nighttime
who by stern command who by his own hand
who in the midst of love who by the angry mob
and who shall I say is calling
Elsewhere you find this fragment:
who by earthquake
who by heartbreak
Cohen was riffing on Unetaneh Tokef, the medieval prayer that is recited on the Day of Atonement and which appears at the beginning of this book, the one in which a human life is said to be “like a broken shard, like dry grass, a withered flower, like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that blows and dust that scatters, like a dream that flits away.” There are similar passages in the Buddhist tradition, in which Cohen was immersed: Our existence, according to the Diamond Sutra, is like “a bubble floating in a stream, like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.” The Jewish prayer goes on to list the ways those lives might end in the coming year, depending on how fates are sealed on Yom Kippur—by fire, water, wild beast, sword. It’s the prayer that was sung in synagogues across Israel not long before the siren on October 6, 1973, sent thousands of people to their deaths by fire or water, scattering them like dust or dreams. Some of those people have appeared in these pages.
The ancient prayer had two remarkable incarnations after the war. Cohen’s version, “Who by Fire,” was the first. His song is now more famous than the original. The second originated on a kibbutz in northern Israel over which the war still hovers, as one member said, “like a black cloud.”
“A few days after the war ended, rumours started flying around the unit,” Amichai Yarchi, a soldier from Kibbutz Beit Hashita, said in an interview on Israeli television. The first rumours said the kibbutz had lost ten members, then eleven. It didn’t seem possible. But after the ceasefire, eleven small army trucks pulled through the kibbutz gates, headlights on even though it was daytime. Each bore one coffin. The men were the kibbutz’s next generation—young workers and fathers, most of them reservists who’d been called from their regular lives a few weeks before. Many people in Israel, and especially on kibbutzim like this one, hadn’t observed Yom Kippur before 1973, believing their generation had progressed past archaic religion. After the war, Yom Kippur on the kibbutz became a day of mourning. “I have two Yom Kippurs,” Yarchi said. “One Yom Kippur is the day the war broke out, and the other Yom Kippur belongs to the rest of the people of Israel and is passed from generation to generation. The Yom Kippur of the war was the end of an era and the beginning of a new era, one that I think Beit Hashita and the state of Israel haven’t recovered from yet.”
If Israel’s music scene went in Cohen’s direction after the war, away from the collective and toward the individual soul, the spiritual life of the country also moved toward his inclinations, abandoning the militant secularism of the founders for an openness to the old wisdom. Meir Ariel, the singer-soldier who was near Suez at the same time as Cohen, was born on a secular kibbutz but eventually drew close to Judaism and, like Cohen, wrote songs that can only be described as prayers. Others left Western civilization altogether for the world of unyielding Orthodoxy, like Cohen’s bandmate Pupik Arnon, the comic. Rabbi Mordechai Arnon died at seventy-eight, not long after I interviewed him in his tiny apartment in Jerusalem, leaving six children and twenty-one grandchildren.
The grief of Kibbutz Beit Hashita was still raw seventeen years after the war, in 1990, when one of Israel’s most famous songwriters came to stay. Yair Rosenblum had written dozens of hits, including many for the army’s entertainment troupes, in the old Israeli style, a genre whose time had now passed. As Yom Kippur approached that year and the annual black cloud began to gather over the spartan kibbutz homes in the valley, he “decided to give something personal, something of himself, to this special day,” as one kibbutz member remembered afterward.
At first he thought he’d write new music for Kol Nidrei, “All of My Vows,” the prayer that is famous for opening the service on the eve of Yom Kippur, but whose Aramaic text is legalistic and uninspiring. Then he came upon Unetaneh Tokef, “Let Us Relate the Power,” the same prayer that had inspired Cohen. The words couldn’t have been further from the kibbutz’s approach to Yom Kippur, which members had marked since the war as a day of meditation and honouring the dead, ceremonies unconnected to a God whose nonexistence remained an article of faith. In the prayer, humans are negligible next to a deity who is a shepherd and a righteous, fearsome judge.
“Yair read it and knew this was what he was looking for,” the songwriter’s friend, Michal Shalev, wrote afterward. “He didn’t shut his eyes all night, and waited for the morning, for the house to be empty of people and for a chance to play uninterrupted.” When Shalev arrived around ten a.m., she found Rosenblum “writing and crying.” He played her a composition that combined European cantorial melodies, Sephardic tunes, and the music of modern Israel. “It was one of those moments when you feel shaken and an excitement that leaves no room for words.”
There was a member of the kibbutz who had a good singing voice, and he performed the new tune when the community gathered that Yom Kippur. Rosenblum had introduced an unapologetically religious text into an atheist stronghold and touched the rawest nerve of the community, the loss of eleven sons in the space of three weeks. The result appears to have been overpowering. People started to cry. The tune made its way from that kibbutz to others, and then to synagogues across Israel, where it’s now probably the most popular melody for the prayer marking the height of the Yom Kippur service. Part of the composition’s power is the way it joins the two pieces of Yom Kippur in Israel: Jewish tradition and the war of 1973.
It’s increasingly common, however, to hear the same prayer chanted to a different melody—the one Cohen wrote for “Who by Fire.” This happened in my own synagogue a few months ago, and no one thought it was strange. The prayer had travelled from a synagogue somewhere in the violent world of medieval Europe to the placid Gate of Heaven in Montreal, where it was heard by a child in the 1940s, then mixed with his experience of the cultural tumult of America in the 1960s, and of a catastrophe in Israel. Then it migrated back into the synagogue.
The two incarnations of the prayer after the war, Cohen’s song and the melody from Kibbutz Beit Hashita, were reunited as I worked on this book when an Israeli singer, Aya Korem, released a new version. Her song combined the traditional Hebrew prayer, sung to the melody composed at the kibbutz, with the verses of “Who by Fire,” translated into Hebrew. The song braids the medieval prayer about life and death, the melody from the grief-stricken kibbutz, and the song by Leonard Cohen. These threads are now part of the way people experience the Day of Atonement. But in Korem’s song, none of this is explicit. An appreciation of what’s going on in the lyrics and melody depends on how much a listener knows about the fearsome days of October 1973, when Cohen was in Sinai.