How Leonard Cohen’s Song Predicted the Darkness of October 7th – The Forward

Rock stars don’t usually make it to 90.

That’s exactly how old Leonard Cohen would have turned this year, on September 21.

Cohen is part of my Holy Trinity of Jewish singer-songwriters, along with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. Of the three, Leonard was the most consistently Jewish—in lyrics, thought, and life.

Cohen came from a family of leaders in the Montreal Jewish community. His maternal grandfather was a scholar of Hebrew grammar.

He cared about Israel. During the Yom Kippur War, he traveled to Israel to support the IDF, a journey chronicled in Matti Friedman’s book Who through the fire?

When he recorded “You Want It Darker,” he enlisted the help of Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the choir from his childhood synagogue, Shaar Hashomayim. The song won a 2018 Grammy for Best Rock Performance.

Sadly, Cohen, who died on November 7, 2016, did not live to receive this honor.

Imagine if he wrote “You Want It Darker” for October 7th.

If you are the dealer, I am out of the game
If you are a healer, that means I am broken and lame
If the glory is thine, the shame must be mine
Do you want it to be darker?
We extinguish the flame.

Here Cohen accuses God of being malevolent and/or incompetent. He refers to Abraham, Moses, the Psalmist, Job, and Tevye.

On October 7, Cohen wanted to recite the Kaddish: “I adore, I sanctify, may Your holy name…”

But on that day, “Your holy name” was not “exalted, sanctified…”

He would certainly refer to Assaf Gur’s post-October 7 poem, “Kaddish” (in Shiva, edited and translated by Rachel Korazim, Michael Bohnen, and Heather Silverman):Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba:And no one came/Thousands upon thousands called upon Him on the Sabbath morning/Calling His name aloud.”

Which renders the Name of God as “defamed, crucified, in human form.” The world’s most famous visual metaphor for human suffering and redemption: the helpless Jew under torture. As Marc Chagall knew when he painted Jews on crosses. As Christian theologian Franklin Littell knew when he described the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as “the crucifixion of the Jews.”

On October 7, we witnessed torture that would make crucifixion seem like nothing.

Yes, human violence “slanders” the Name and Image of God. But there was another candidate for slander: the Jewish State. Someone told me that Israel “should have turned the other cheek on October 7th” – slandered because the Jews chose not to follow Jesus.

“A million candles burning as a plea for help that never came.” This The Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem is a dark, underground cave. Its only source of light is five memorial candles, reflected in mirrors, flames stretching into eternity, symbolizing the murders of 1.5 million children. No help came for these children. No help came on October 7—not divine help (but those days are long gone), not human help for the 32 Jewish children held hostage in Gaza, many of them in tunnels as dark as the Children’s Memorial.

“Hineni, hineniand: I am ready, my Lord.” When Cohen wrote these words, he stood before God, feeling the agony of mortality.

But in the world after October 7th “hineini”performs and repeats the Akedah — God’s command to Abraham to bind his son Isaac on the altar.

What the Crucifixion is to Christians, the Akedah is to Jews: an ever-available symbol of violence against Jews.

I have a hard time imagining what it will mean for Israelis to hear this Torah text on Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish children and adults will be bound—not on an ancient altar before God, but on a modern altar before Moloch, the ancient Canaanite god of death.

“There is a lover in this story…”In most of Cohen’s songs, the lover would be Cohen himself.

But this time the “lover in the story” is the lover from the “Song of Songs.” “He stands there behind our wall, looking through the window, peering through the lattice” (“Song of Songs” 2:9).

He would know the classic interpretation: This is the Divine Lover, flirting with us from a safe distance. From a distance that is now too safe as we squint to see the Divine Presence.

“But the story is still the same…”We thought the story of Jewish vulnerability had changed. On October 7, we saw that we were wrong. On October 9, we restored a different story—the story of Jewish power.

“There is a lullaby for suffering and a paradox to blame.” Children in the Gaza Strip have no mothers to sing them to sleep.

There are many examples of the “blameable paradox.” The Jewish state, the antidote to Jewish vulnerability, is vulnerable. The world that mocked Jewish weakness also desired that weakness and would mock Jewish power.

“But that’s what it says in the scriptures and it’s not some baseless claim.”

“Written in the scriptures” — Yes, the promise of the Land; yes, the prophetic admonitions that the Land is given on condition of righteousness; and yes, the Book of Lamentations, to which the Jewish people added new chapters in each generation.

They line up the prisoners
And the guards are aiming
I fought some demons
They were middle class and tamed
I didn’t know I had permission to murder and maim
If you want it to be darker, we turn off the flame.

The image of prisoners lining up and guards pointing guns at them is straight out of the Holocaust.

These are the real demons of this world.

Leonard struggled with his yetzer ha-ra – “evil”, lustful drive. But these inner “demons” were “middle class and tame”, They were not equal to the demons of the world.

Who gave us “permission to murder and maim?“ God gave us this permission by giving us free will.

Cohen is right — if “you” (whoever “you” is) want it to get darker, we put out the flame.

And that hineini? This is no longer Leonardo’s hineini of mortality in the face of God.

We are in a new Jewish era hineiniSince October 7, Jews have been living in a new era “hineini” — to the Jewish state, to the Jewish nation, and perhaps even to God.

When I say the Kaddish prayer on October 7, “You Want It Darker” will echo in my soul.

But we don’t want to. We don’t want it to be darker.

We want light.