Editor’s note: The next is an excerpt from Marcia Pally’s From This Broken Hill I Sing To You: God, Sex, and Politics within the Work of Leonard Cohen. It has been edited for length and elegance.
“Should you love only what can’t be snatched out of its lover’s hand, you undoubtedly remain unbeaten.” Augustine wrote these words in On Christian Belief to clarify his faith in loving God over worldly goods. If one directs one’s love at what can’t be “snatched” away—at God and love itself—one will suffer neither longing nor loss. Thomas Aquinas, elaborating on the concept, held that the theological virtues of religion, hope and most of all charity direct humanity towards God, who’s the one Good that may satisfy all needs and desires. With this, we may come to a way of inner unity and peace.
Aquinas’s insight may function an introduction to the novels, poetry and songs of Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s images of inner disunity and loss—of desire that is just not unsatisfied but unsatisfiable—reach without delay into the human intimate and to the transcendent. Contrary to the wisdom of Augustine and Aquinas, he was unable to remain constant to God and so find peace with himself. He stayed no more constant to the ladies he loved. This double restlessness was his persistent wound, investigated in over 60 years of art in a magisterial vivisection of his soul. The scholar Rabbi Aubrey Glazer called Cohen’s work a “circum/fession,” each confession and circumcision, where “we cut a hole in our hearts as we spill our story onto the page.” Or, as Lou Reed said, “If we could all write songs like Leonard Cohen, we might.”
Cohen’s images of inner disunity and loss—of desire that is just not unsatisfied but unsatisfiable—reach without delay into the human intimate and to the transcendent.
What is that this covenantal commitment that we fail? We may say that God forged a bond of reciprocal love and commitment with humanity (through Adam and Noah) and with the biblical patriarchs “for the blessing of all humanity”—a telos thrice emphasized, once with each patriarch in Genesis. It’s a pledge between God and person and amongst individuals. As everybody reciprocates commitment to God and other individuals, each of us is embraced by the divine. Within the tradition of the Psalms, Cohen wrote in Book of Mercy, “We’re made to lift my heart to you [God]…travel on a hair to you…undergo a pinhole of sunshine… and fly on the wisp of a remembrance.” Greater than two millennia earlier, the psalmist himself said it this fashion: “I call out to the Lord… My steps have held to your paths; my feet haven’t stumbled” (Ps 3:4; 17: 5-6).
Max Layton, the son of Cohen’s mentor, the poet Irving Layton, called Cohen “the best psalmist since King David.”Yet Cohen also saw that though we’re made as covenantal creatures, depending on bonds with God and other individuals, we breach them and bolt. Inconstancy, betrayal, and abandonment are the human condition. “I made a date in Heaven,” Cohen wrote in “Got a Little Secret.” “Oh Lord but I have been keepin’ it in Hell.”
Boring into this human condition, Cohen got here to this theodical query: Why did God make us needy of him and others and yet founder in inconstancy? Why is it so difficult to sustain covenant, really easy to desert, abuse and be left with gaping loss?
The issue of covenant unsustained is the theme of Cohen’s theodicy. Beneath each interrogation of why humanity fails covenant is the more anguished query of why God created us so vulnerable to fail it. Cohen’s problem was not a crisis of religion—he never ceased believing in God—however the scandal that God makes it so hard for us to live by our beliefs.
If one promise of Judaism—indeed, the central promise at Sinai—is covenant with the God of grace and compassion (“el rachum v’chanun” Ex 34: 6), why are we so on our own to forsake and be forsaken? Why is each of us on the market, dangling like “a bird on the wire,” attempting to be “free,” having “torn everyone who reached out for me” (“Bird on a Wire.”1969)? On this song, Cohen says he’ll repent, “I swear by this song/ And by all that I actually have done flawed/ I’ll make all of it as much as thee.” Yet he breached this and so many guarantees over the following half century, each failure fueling the following song.
Inconstancy, betrayal, and abandonment are the human condition. “I made a date in Heaven,” Cohen wrote in “Got a Little Secret.” “Oh Lord but I have been keepin’ it in Hell.”
Cohen’s Jewish and Christian imagery
Cohen grew up in Montreal, which he called a “Catholic city.” His nanny was Catholic and took him to church. For his highschool years, he went to a historically Christian school. The ability of Latest Testament imagery and its weight in our cultural-emotional repertoire was, in Cohen’s view, unavoidable no matter one’s religious beliefs. “From David to Jesus,” he said, “the concept of Law, of revelation, of a sacred life, or a messiah. All that poetry was at my fingertips.” While he comically ranted when Bob Dylan converted to Christianity, “I just don’t get it… I don’t get the Jesus part,” he also once commented that the “figure of Jesus is amazingly attractive. It’s difficult to not fall in love with that person.”
The critic Northrop Frye observed that in Cohen, “The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god within the tradition of the martyred Jew.” Jewish and Christian images are thus often back-to-back or conflated in Cohen’s writing, not unlike the interwoven and conflated imagery that he used to evoke relationship with the divine and human loves. His 2014 song “Born in Chains,” as an illustration, though built on the Exodus narrative, nonetheless includes a picture of the crucified Christ: “I used to be idled with my soul… But then you definately showed me where you had been wounded/In every atom broken is a reputation.”
The “wound” of the song may reference the wound of the biblical Jacob as he wrestled with God’s messenger and was so certain in covenant with God (Gn 32:22-31). Or it might be Christ’s wound within the Passion; or each without delay. The wounded man, the scholar Peter Billingham notes, is a paradigm for Cohen, signifying the human condition of being broken off from the bonds we’d like. Woundedness is the plight of the primary man, Adam (and so all humanity), who “inhabits,” Billingham writes, “an internal state of exile from a pre-Fall Paradise.” Woundedness is the plight, Billingham continues, of the Jesus-man, who restores “the wholeness (holiness) of humankind and creation.”
The scholar Babette Babich’s insight involves mind: “As a Jew, Cohen reminds us to feel for Christ, to not be a Christian necessarily but to get the purpose about Christ.”
Interwoven within the Exodus narrative of “Born in Chains” is the image of Jesus wounded on the cross. The image of Jesus helps Cohen leave the chains of Egypt for God’s blessings. The scholar Babette Babich’s insight involves mind: “As a Jew, Cohen reminds us to feel for Christ, to not be a Christian necessarily but to get the purpose about Christ.”
What, for Cohen, was the purpose? “Any guy,” he explained, “who says blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness. A person who declared himself to face among the many thieves, the prostitutes and the homeless. He was a person of inhuman generosity, a generosity that will overthrow the world if it was embraced.” The purpose is the novel nature of seeing to, attending to, the opposite. In a word, covenantal love.
We don’t embrace it for long, and so forsake one another and are forsaken. This can also be “the purpose” about Christ, forsaken at Golgotha and repeatedly by the world ever since. Babich continues: “[E]ven Nietzsche, that consummate anti-Christian, gets that too, writing as he does in The Antichrist: ‘There was just one Christian, and he died on the cross.’” Jesus died betrayed by others, and now we have continued betraying him and one another. Babich then concludes that “we’re at Golgotha again.” Not only Jesus but each of us is abused and abandoned. In highlighting Golgotha, Babich echoes a 1968 interview through which Cohen explained,
Our natural vocabulary is Judeo-Christian. That’s our bloodmyth. We’ve got to rediscover law from inside our own heritage, and now we have to rediscover the crucifixion. The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol… It is going to should be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.
We’re at Golgotha, bludgeoned and abandoned again. For Cohen, the human condition is Jesus’ condition as he uttered, “My God, why have you ever forsaken me?” Indeed, why has God left us with forsakenness as our continuing iteration? In an attempt at a solution, Cohen once wrote that when the human heart doesn’t make an area for God, we divide ourselves from one another:
Into the center of each Christian, Christ comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the center becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. Within the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of each sort.
These divisions are our Egypt, Babylon, Boogie Street and cross. We divide ourselves, separate from others and breach commitment. Thus, we sadden the God of Judaism and Jesus, who shows us love, which by the character God gave us, we don’t sustain. It’s the wrench of each the Jewish and Christian traditions and the core of their theodicies.
For Cohen, the human condition is Jesus’ condition as he uttered, “My God, why have you ever forsaken me?” Indeed, why has God left us with forsakenness as our continuing iteration?
Moses and Jesus
Moses and Jesus: men of affection and forbearance. What grabs Cohen about these two is that they—fully human, riddled with the identical fears and temptations that filled him, forsaken by their people and at moments seemingly by God—abandon neither God nor people. They persist in commitment. Jesus, Cohen wrote, “was nailed to a human predicament, summoning the center to understand its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.” Suffering is turned to hospitality. Moses too extends seemingly infinite forbearance to the Hebrews even after the scandalous Golden Calf idolatry. Indeed, he has more patience than God is capable of muster (Ex 32:9-14). Moses extends his patience and care repeatedly through the 40-year trek to Canaan, the topic of 4 of the five Pentateuch books.
Sustaining love amid betrayal and suffering: That captures Cohen’s attention. It suggests one answer to the theodical query of why God allows us to suffer. It brings us to deeper love, as cruciform and soul-making theodicies suggest. In giving himself to suffering and death, Jesus finds the love-that-will-not-leave, a love that’s each covenantal and Augustinian. Cohen caught moments of this love in his life, lost it, missed it, and sought it throughout his own suffering. In his 2012 song, “Come Healing,” he writes of Jesus because the one who restores us:
The splinters that you just carry
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind.
It’s from the splinters of the cross, from the shards of its lesson of suffering-turned-to love, that humanity could also be healed.
