WHO BY FIRE?

SERMON KOL NIDREI 5784  September 25, 2023

In 1973, Canadian poet and singer Leonard Cohen, 39 years old, at the height of his early fame, with hits like Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat, announced his retirement from music.  It was a dark time for him, a time of depression and disorientation.  He left the music scene in Greenwich Village and retreated to a rustic Greek Island without roads or modern amenities: the Greek Island of Hydra where he had bought a house for $1500 in the early 60’s.  He went to Hydra to try and renew his spirit and figure out a direction for his life.  On the day of Yom Kippur, he was lying in a hammock listening to the radio when he heard that Egypt and Syria had launched a surprise attack on Israel.  He immediately jumped up, and without a plan, took a ferry to Athens and the first flight to Tel Aviv. The news was bad.  The early days of the war brought heavy losses to Israel and there was widespread fear of losing the war and the nation.  Cohen had an ambivalent relationship with Israel, but he intuitively knew that he needed to go. He felt the call, not as the Leonard Cohen but as Eliezer ben Natan haKohein.  He didn’t take a guitar; he didn’t announce his coming.  He had no plan but just a feeling that he needed to be there to help in any way that was needed. This was not the Israel of today with its high-rises and high-tech start-ups.   In 1973, Israel was truly a backwater.  With barely three million people, most of whom were traumatized by war, dislocation, and genocide, it was a “Country of Orphans.” 

The music scene, in contrast, was one of peppy Zionist anthems with lots of horns and young people singing about working the land and building the nation.  The radio was tightly controlled by the government.  For example, The Beatles had wanted to come to Israel earlier but the government had said no because they thought the Beatles would corrupt the youth.  

Into this comes Leonard Cohen.   

Cohen went by himself and was thinking he would go to a kibbutz and help out.  But it wasn’t long before he was spotted by some young Israeli musicians who were also in the army, and who on the spot threw together the idea of an impromptu music tour to the Sinai to sing for groups of soldiers in the middle of the war.  These were not big concerts, but acoustic song sessions on the back of jeep, or sitting on a helmet with groups of 5, 10, or 50 soldiers, shell-shocked from the war and the loss of life.  Using Jeep headlights for lighting at night, Cohen played set after set as the war’s fortunes began to reverse and Israel began to push Egypt back toward the Suez Canal.   The musicians he traveled with had thought seeing Cohen would cheer up the troops, but now, hearing his music day after day, they joked he came to depress the troops.  

Somehow Cohen finds himself on the other side of the Suez Canal with Ariel Sharon’s famous tank offensive into Egypt, one that ultimately ends the war with Egypt’s call for a ceasefire. 

There are no recordings or videos of Leonard Cohen’s concerts, and yet they live on in Israel as one of the most common and powerful symbols and memories of the Yom Kippur War.     

The mythic tone of it intrigued journalist Matti Friedman, a Canadian who made aliyah at age 17, and who has become one of Israel’s most outstanding journalists and writers of non-fiction. For his book about Cohen in the ’73 War, Who By Fire, he interviewed as many of the soldiers that heard him, and tracked down a lost spiral-bound notebook Cohen wrote in during his time there.  The result is a moving, beautiful book about war and art.  

According to Friedman, the soldiers that heard Cohen in the middle of the war never forgot it. Many described it as a religious experience, like meeting an Old Testament prophet in the desert in the midst of war.  Here is this world-famous bohemian singer in the middle of the Sinai singing for them. 

Others were more sanguine, and said it was hallucinatory, or just ‘too weird.’ But they never forgot it.  

It transported them to a space outside the war where they connected as human beings, with all the sorrows and struggles of human beings throughout time.  It did what great art does: it removed barriers and brought those listening into communion with something greater than themselves, something sacred and profound and ineffable.  Something that can’t be recaptured or repeated:  a burning bush moment.   

Have you ever had one of those moments?  A moment of connection that seems, for a moment, to be outside of normal time and space, a moment of numinous profound connection. A moment when art and music transported to something I would call holy. A moment of k’dusha, of pure “presentness,” when we can feel for a moment completely here and now but also deeply connected to something larger or deeper? 

On Yom Kippur, it is important to remember those experiences because those are moments of the sacred.  They are as close to God as we get hidden as we are in a cleft in the rock.  Those moments remind us of the presence and power of the sacred in our lives, but they are so hard to hold onto.  Later we often doubt whether it was really that powerful because memory can’t hold the holy.  

In many ways, that is what the prayers on Yom Kippur are meant to create, a time outside of time that, if we are lucky, contains a moment of numinous connection with God and with other Jews.   I know, I know – that isn’t what happens for many of us, but if you let go, suspend your skepticism for a time, and let yourself be taken up by the power of this day and the power of our communal acts, Yom Kippur can be a numinous, transformative experience.  

We need those moments of the holy in our lives, whatever we call them.  Those moments remind us who we are, give us the strength to reprioritize our lives, and help us do t’shuvah, to come back to what truly matters. 

Music, literature – art has given me many such moments of k’dusha times in my life, whether it was at the Metropolitan Opera hearing Teresa Stratas sing Liu in Turandot for the first time; or the first time I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved; or playing in a marching band in Georgia when everything came together for a competition; or at a spiritual retreat, when a room full of people eating lunch in a noisy dining hall spontaneously joined a singalong of Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat, played on an out of tune piano while it poured rain on a tin roof.

I can imagine hearing Leonard Cohen appearing out of nowhere in the wilderness and playing Suzanne while war and death were all around would be one of those moments.  

Yesterday in Torah Study, Felicia Kornbluh was saying how grateful she is for human creativity, the ability to make something from nothing, to create art out of the mess of human life.  Perhaps that is what it means to be made in the image of God, b’tzelem Elohim, to be able to create things that have never before existed. Art, our ability to create and our ability to experience it profoundly, are to me the surest reminders of holiness, k’dusha.  Art is where I go to love human beings again when their less-numinous qualities start to work my very last nerve or make me cynical.  

To forgive others, to forgive ourselves we have to learn to love flawed stiff-necked irritating creatures that human beings are. Art is about that very thing. Yom Kippur is about that very thing.   

On Yom Kippur, the liturgy aspires to help us see with double vision: to acknowledge deeply that we are messed up and fatally flawed, but that we are also deeply lovable, and inseparable from what is sacred and holy.  

Perhaps that is what those moments of art are: moments of the transcendent in the midst of the messy unruly wilderness of human life.  Burning Bush moments. 

***

Cohen left Israel after the war and rarely spoke of the experience, and even downplayed it.  But it clearly transformed him.  His creative block ended, and he began to write some of the greatest songs of his career, songs Who By Fire, If It Be Your Will, Hallelujah, and Anthem, all songs with profound spiritual longing; songs that are prayers 

The shock of the Yom Kippur War, the experience of profound vulnerability also changed Israel in many ways. One way is that the nation began to question its dogmatic rejection of Jewish tradition in exchange for the blessings of socialism and Zionism.  Well-known artists began to embrace Judaism, and the music took a turn toward the spiritual. Today, Israeli popular music is full of spiritual longings and imagery of prayer.  

I believe that Leonard Cohen’s presence there during the war is one of the catalysts for that shift.

I pray that this year you have moments like those soldiers had with Eliezer Cohen, moments of art, of aching beauty and profound human communion, burning bush moments, or what Martin Buber called I-Thou moments where God is made manifest among us, whatever the language or ideology we use to describe it. My favorite spiritual descendant of Leonard Cohen these days is an Israeli singer named Hanan Ben-Ari.  The refrain of his most well-known song, a song called VIKIPIDIA, goes like this: 

אל תכלאוני בשום כלוב

אל תסכמו אותי בויקיפדיה

אני הכול, אני לא-כלום

אור אינסוף לבוש בגוף

אז אל תכלאוני בשום כלוב

Don’t put me in a box, 

don’t sum me up on Wikipedia. 

I am everything and I am nothing, 

Infinite Divine Light wrapped in a body. 

Or as Leonard Cohen sang: 

Forget your perfect offerings.

Ring the bells that still can ring. 

There is a crack in everything. 

That’s how the light gets in.  

This year may the Infinite Light shine through your crack!  (laughter)

This year may you see that you are Infinite Light wrapped in a body. 

This year may your broken places show you where that Infinite light is still shining.  

And may we answer its call. .. if it be your will.