by Diane Joy Schmidt view as published
On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in the unforgettable prayer Unetanneh Tokef, God reviews our fates and decides who will live and who will die in the coming year, but, we say, by sufficient repentance, prayer, and charity our sins may be forgiven, a little:
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass away
and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by fire and who by water,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by hunger and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague…
But repentance, prayer, and charity temper judgement’s severe decree.
I have sat through these services for many years with numb awe and dread; but they seem to be words about another place, another time, not reaching me personally. An understanding of this ancient tradition comes to me best in three songs by the musician Leonard Cohen: Who By Fire, Hallelujah, and, You Want it Darker, where his poetic paradoxes break open the heart. About his song Who by Fire, Cohen identified that “This is based on a prayer recited on the Day of Atonement.” He wrote:
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?
It’s an odd phrase, “And who shall I say is calling?” By breaking the cadence of the old words, it causes new reflection. There are various ways this has been interpreted.
For example, the Israel Forever Foundation website writes that “The line ‘And who shall I say is calling?’ can be understood as a break from faith in God. According to Cohen, that element of doubt is what made the song into a personal prayer for him.”
Rabbi Brian Field, of Judaism Your Way, a Jewish congregation in Colorado, sees something deeper, writing, “Cohen revisits the mystery, the not knowing the Sacred Name … Finally, one can read this from a mystical perspective. In the Kabbalah, Who is a name for God, a name that points to the emptiness (in Hebew: Ayin) out of which everything arises, and into which everything falls.”
In stanzas of his most covered song, Hallelujah, Cohen recognizes that frailty of our humanity that is expressed in the High Holy Days, and asks for forgiveness of our imperfections:
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Then there is ‘You Want It Darker,” the title song of his final album. It is a mourner’s prayer, for Cohen himself, for all of us. The chorus goes:
Magnified, sanctified
Be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the help that never came
You want it darker?
We kill the flame.
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord
“Magnified, Sanctified/be thy holy Name,” is literally the first line of the Mourner’s Kaddish. The next line mourns our human capacity for evil and our being left to repent for it, drawing on the Christian, “Vilified, crucified/In the human frame.”
Then, “A million candles burning/for the help that never came” speaks of the Holocaust, that God did not hear us. And then, the sarcastic, “You want it darker? We kill the flame.” Like, ‘you think we can’t behave any worse? Just watch.’
Then comes the chant of “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.” When God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham says the Hebrew word, Hineni, here I am. Hineni is also, as pointed out in a Times of Israel article on Cohen, the name of a prayer of preparation and humility addressed to God that is chanted by the cantor on Rosh Hashanah.
Then there is the startling middle stanza:
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker?
Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.
The album You Want It Darker was released two months before Cohen passed away, at 83, on November 7th, 2016. The next night Trump was elected president. On January 6th, 2021, it seems the tame middle class got to murder and to maim. It is high time that we turn, to reflection, prayer, and repentance in this country.
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Gallup Independent Spiritual Perspectives 7.31.2021