26
The prayer that inspired “Who by Fire” is one of the three moments in the Yom Kippur service that have become linked, at least in my own mind, to this story.
Another moment occurs in the afternoon, when the congregation reads the Book of Jonah and its account of the wayward prophet’s journey—not just his physical voyage from the land of Israel to dissolute Nineveh, but his trajectory from believing you can run away from God and fate to knowing that you can’t. The book begins with Jonah escaping to the Mediterranean and ends with him immobile in the desert. He’s been brought against his will to the attitude of the other Biblical prophets who respond to the divine summons by simply saying, “Here I am”—hineini. That Hebrew word appears in the Bible for the first time in the story of Isaac, spoken by Abraham when he hears God’s voice. Abraham is about to be told to commit the most terrible act he can imagine. Saying hineini is the opposite of running away.
At the end of his life, Cohen released a song called “You Want it Darker.” It’s addressed to God. The theme is the futility of our manoeuvres in a script that we never write.
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 then mine must be the shame.
You want it darker
We kill the flame.
The song was produced by Cohen’s son, Adam, who was a year old when his father left Hydra to go to Sinai. The words are in English, except for one: hineini. If you listen to the track you hear that word sung by someone else, a rare appearance in a Cohen song of a male voice that isn’t his. When Cohen reached back at the end of his life, he didn’t go to his Buddhist monastery, to India, Hydra, French Canada, or the Village. He went back to the synagogue of his childhood, the one built by the Cohens in Westmount. The voice belongs to Gideon Zelermyer, the cantor at the Gate of Heaven.
The song includes a fragment from the Jewish mourners’ prayer, the Kaddish: “Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name.” Some listeners, knowing what happened a few months after the song’s release in 2016, believe that Cohen was saying the Kaddish for himself, that he knew he didn’t have much longer. But Robert Kory, the singer’s friend and last manager, remembers Cohen calling him up in the summer of 2015 to hear the first cut of the song. Kory made the short trip from his office in Beverly Hills to the poet’s home in Hancock Park. Cohen was ill at the time, Kory said, but expected to recover. He was even talking about a new tour. Cohen played “You Want It Darker” for him in the living room. The song was a prediction of a sombre future not just for Cohen but for everyone. America was taking a darker turn, but there weren’t many who felt it in the summer of 2015. Kory remembers feeling a chill in his bones, and asking Cohen if he couldn’t come up with a brighter vision for their children and grandchildren. “I don’t write the songs,” Cohen said.
He never made it back on the road, and died shortly after the song’s release. He was buried at the Gate of Heaven’s cemetery, next to his parents. The same cantor read the prayers. Long ago, in “Lover Lover Lover,” he’d asked his father to change his name, but the gravestone has the one his father gave him: Leonard in English, Eliezer in Hebrew. He never changed it.
The third and final part of the Yom Kippur service that evokes this story happens around midday, or just before the time the siren sounded on October 6, 1973. Men who are descended from the priestly class, who have the designation “Cohen” and sometimes that name, get up to bless the congregation. They remove their shoes as the priests did in the Temple, cloak themselves in their prayer shawls, part their fingers in the middle, and say: “May God bless you and protect you. May God shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift up His face to you and grant you peace.” In Hebrew the whole thing is just fifteen words.
When, during his time in Israel, Cohen was drawn back to something, it wasn’t just the synagogue or the tribe, but his specific place in the tribe. That’s what Asher the proselyte meant in his trippy monologues about Cohen deciding “if he’s a lecher or a priest,” and when he wrote in his letter to the poet: “We believe that if you will receive the cape of the prophet Elijah, the Spirit of God will be on you to make you a real Cohen.” It’s what Cohen himself meant, in his unpublished manuscript, when he refers at one point to his “ruined Cohanic benediction.” The subject was on his mind. As a child, he once said, “When they told me I was a Cohen, I believed it. I didn’t think it was auxiliary information.” When he grew up, he came to see the role of the priests as nothing but rote recitation, symbolic of the way dead ritual had replaced creative fire. You don’t need to know anything to memorize those fifteen words. But the idea that an ordinary person, the grocer or the dentist, a person of no moral pretence, can be transformed for a moment into the cracked vessel of a divine blessing—this is, in fact, a beautiful idea. It’s a Leonard Cohen idea.
Cohen’s last reunion with Israel was in 2009. He’d turned his back on the crowd, retreating to the monastery on Mt. Baldy, and then, upon discovering that his manager had stolen his savings, came out to tour for the first time in fifteen years. That’s when he found that he’d ascended to the upper reaches of fame and admiration, that he could fill stadiums around the world. His depression had lifted. Age had loosened the grips of his urges. He seemed happy. This is the Cohen we remember now—a wry lover in a fedora, a gracious envoy from a nobler time.
Just like Cohen’s 1972 tour, this one ended in Israel. The venue in Tel Aviv was a few miles from the café where, thirty-six years earlier, the musicians had picked him up and taken him to Sinai. The café was gone, along with the old bohemians; today the site houses a generic coffee franchise where you can watch tattooed youth flash by on electric scooters. In the intervening years, Israel had abandoned the kibbutz and the collective ideal and moved toward Cohen, toward the individual. But at the same time, the world in which Cohen made his name, the one that once embraced people like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and other Jewish kids escaping their parents for a culture that didn’t care where they came from—that American world was fraying and looking treacherous after all. Tribes were reasserting themselves, extending their protection and suffocation. So by the time he returned, Israel was more like Cohen, and the world was more like Israel.
Tel Aviv was no longer a poor cousin of New York or Paris. It had somehow found its own Mediterranean sophistication and no longer needed foreign celebrities to feel cool. But people here were still beside themselves to see Leonard Cohen again.
The fact that Israelis have always considered Cohen to be a kind of Israeli is not only because he’s Jewish. There are plenty of Jewish artists, and almost none with that status. It is, at least in part, because of the memory that at one of this country’s darkest moments, he came. He didn’t have to, and few others did. The story of Cohen in Sinai is one that people here know, even if the details have never really been clear. When tickets went on sale in Tel Aviv it was just minutes before the phone lines crashed.
As happened onstage in Jerusalem long before, when he was paralyzed by some sense of judgmental family, Cohen still couldn’t see this as just another country to play in. At first he thought things were so complicated that he should probably skip Israel altogether, and changed his mind only when young Israelis flooded his manager’s inbox with more requests than the staff could ignore. The idea was to do a charity concert whose proceeds would go to bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents who’d lost children to violence and were working for peace. To further appease the savage politics of the place, he also announced a second gig in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, but those intentions fell afoul of the same kind of sentiment that drove the war of 1973. On the Arab side there were calls to boycott his show; people seemed to find his attempt at even-handedness as convincing as his claim, all those years ago, that he wrote “Lover Lover Lover” for soldiers on both sides. The Ramallah show didn’t happen, and neither did peace. But fifty thousand people turned out in Tel Aviv.
Among them were many of the characters in this book. Orly from the destroyed radar station, who’d given Cohen her bed when she was nineteen, was there. So was her friend Pnina, the one who heard the enemy tank commander speaking Hebrew after the terrible mistake on the hill. They now had children the same age they’d been when they encountered Cohen the first time. They waved fluorescent green light sticks with everyone else.
Roni, the navy lieutenant who had his picture taken with Cohen aboard the Bathsheba, was there with his daughter. Shlomi, from Patzi’s crew of desert fighters, bought tickets but then didn’t go. Cohen had sat next to him on a helmet in the dark on the far side of the canal. He’d been close enough to touch, and hearing him in a stadium felt wrong. Gidi, the young doctor who translated “Suzanne” and saw Cohen at a field hospital, was living in Canada and went to the show in Hamilton. He cried through most of it.
Shoshi, the Super Mystère pilot who’d seen the first concert in his dirty jumpsuit, was there. Oshik, the singer, by now a grizzled member of Israel’s music pantheon, tried to meet up with Cohen, sending a reminder through a distant connection that they’d “slept together on the ground in Sinai.” But Cohen was seventy-five and needed all his energy for the stage. Even the president of Israel couldn’t get a meeting.
Whether or not Cohen really belonged to this audience more than to one in Nashville or Barcelona, the Israeli audience felt he did. The concert went down as one of the best ever held here, and people speak of it in almost religious terms, especially the very end.
After the encore, close to midnight, the concert diverged from the script of all the other concerts on the tour. Roni, the former naval lieutenant, recalls that the stadium “trembled.” It was a moment—the Children of Israel were assembled at Sinai, something was about to happen, and here it was. It felt that way, even though what he was doing is clear only if you know about the war and the way he thought about his place in it.
The stadium was quiet. Cohen raised his hands and parted his fingers. He switched from English to Hebrew—not the new Hebrew of the Tel Aviv streets but the archaic language of the synagogue and the Diaspora, of the old men at the Gate of Heaven, the language of the priests, fifteen words. He blessed the people, and left the stage.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project couldn’t have happened without the kind cooperation of the Leonard Cohen Family Trust or without the generosity of Robert Kory, the poet’s friend, last manager, and the executor of his estate, whose insights into Cohen’s personality and art were invaluable to me as the book evolved.
I’m grateful to everyone who shared their memories with me in my years of research—soldiers, musicians, and friends of Cohen, all of whom are mentioned in the text and source notes. Special thanks to those, like Ofer Gavish and Shlomi Gruner, who generously put their personal networks at my disposal; to Ofer and to Menachem Ben Shalom for reading the manuscript; to Isaac Shokal, for the wonderful photos; and to Rabbi Mordechai (Pupik) Arnon, who didn’t live to read the final product.
I’m grateful to my Canadian editor, Doug Pepper, for understanding this idea from the first moment and making it a reality, and to Jared Bland of McClelland & Stewart for bringing it into the world of the publisher of Cohen’s own works, one hundred floors above mine. Thanks to my American editor, Cindy Spiegel, for believing so deeply in the book, and to the excellent team at Spiegel & Grau; and, as always, to my agent, Deborah Harris, for following me down yet another rabbit hole and helping me out the other end. Thanks to the talented researcher Dan Magen for coming up with some of the crucial contacts that made the story what it is. Thanks to Peter Norman for the eagle-eyed copy-edit, to Leslie Camhi for the introduction to Jacob El Hanani, and to those who read the manuscript as it evolved: Nicole Krauss, Mitch and Tali Ginsburg, George Eltman, Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs, Benjamin Balint, Jonah Mandel, David Bezmozgis, Rabbi David Wolpe, Danielle Berrin, Yossi Klein Halevi, Jill Offman, and Bash Doran.
I’ve benefited greatly from the work of other Cohen researchers, but special thanks is due to Jeff Burger, editor of Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, an indispensable compilation of interviews that I was lucky to find one day in the Strand in New York, and which ended up shaping my understanding of who Cohen was and how he changed over the years.
Thanks to my parents and first readers, Imogene and Raphael Friedman; to my sister, Sarah; to my wife, Naama; and to Aviv, Michael, Tamar, and Asaf, who don’t care about Leonard Cohen but will one day.