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Between bond and breach: The covenantal theology of Leonard Cohen

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While Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016) desired relationships with God and persons, he was unable to sustain these very relationships. This double failing — abandoning God and persons — brought Cohen to his lifelong argument with God: why did God make us relational and yet so easily able to sever the relationships we need? (Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images)

With the recent cascade of fires and floods, wars and pestilence, it has become something of a cliché to make arch remarks about the arrival of the apocalypse. And yet, there is something deeply concerning about this time. One would be forgiven for feeling that one has fulfilled the requirements for a course on the Book of Revelation after watching the nightly news. If one is of a questioning mind, wondering how precisely we got here, the poet and soothsayer Leonard Cohen may have something to offer. The fifth anniversary of his death falls on 7 November 2021 — going by the Hebrew lunar calendar, it’s 12 October.

Any attentive listener to Cohen’s music, or sensitive reader of his poetry, will soon discern that his aesthetic vision was underpinned by a rich ontology and theology. According to Cohen, our lives habitually ignore what makes the world work — and it is this studied ignorance that lands us in the kind of malaise in which we now find ourselves. But the diagnosis is the easy part. For Cohen, the hard part is coming to grips with the question: why has transcendent source of all things created us so prone to violate the fundaments of creation? Cohen would not entertain free-will theodicies as either an answer or a solace. Such explanations only kick the fundamental problem down the road.

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“Speaking to eternity”

Cohen’s theological understanding of the “being of things” begins with covenant: first with Adam, and then Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then down through the history of this wayward species. According to the Jewish tradition which Cohen explored throughout his life, covenant is a foundational commitment with the transcendent and with other persons — particularly with women, whom Cohen regarded both sexually, and, following the Lurianic kabbalist tradition, as a portal to spiritual union with the transcendent. Cohen called the transcendent “God”. As he wrote in his 1984 Book of Mercy, “How beautiful our heritage, to have this way of speaking to eternity.”

These two bonds — with God and among persons — are, for Cohen, inseparable and intertwined. Covenantal commitment to world is part of covenant with God, and covenant with God sustains us in commitment to world. Thinking one can have bond with God absent care for persons gets you the ire of the prophets. Don’t think only of the intemperate Amos or Jeremiah; there is also the soberminded Proverbs: “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than [ritual] sacrifice” (21:3).

According to Cohen’s Jewish ontology, we are not complete, autonomous, separate persons who happen to opt for relationships. Rather, we become who we are precisely through our relationships. We flourish by seeing and seeing to our neighbours — those close to us and those further away along our paths of global interconnectedness. “My very uniqueness”, as Emmanuel Lévinas once put it, in language strikingly resonant with that of Cohen, “lies in the responsibility for the other man.”

Cohen’s Book of Mercy is a modern psalter, in which he described his bond with God like this: “Not knowing where to go, I go to you. Not knowing where to turn, I turn to you. Not knowing how to speak, I speak to you. Not knowing what to hold, I bind myself to you.” Not only the divine, but also the entwined covenant with other persons runs through his work. So, in his 1973 song, “Please Don’t Pass Me By”:

I brushed up against the man in front of me.

I felt a cardboard placard on his back ...

it said “Please don’t pass me by —

I am blind, but you can see —

I’ve been blinded totally —

Please don’t pass me by.”

Passing others by precludes seeing and seeing to them. It makes us blind and forecloses attending to our connection with others, however close or attenuated. Or consider the language of Cohen’s 1967 song “Suzanne”:

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind

And you know that you can trust her

For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

The woman moves the narrator from the sexual and corporeal to mind and spirit. At age 82, in the last group of songs he composed before his death, Cohen was still writing of a woman whose breasts “opened to me urgently / Like lilies from the dead”. As Pamela Erens put it, “The descriptions of the female body could be written only by someone who adores its every form.”

Cohen brought the bonds of the entwined covenant together frequently in crafting images that can be read simultaneously as speaking of God and of commitment to another person. In “Come Healing”, he writes of the entwined covenants even more directly:

The Heart beneath is teaching

To the broken Heart above …

Come healing of the Altar

Come healing of the Name

The heart “beneath” in the covenantal relations of the world “teaches” covenantal love to God’s broken heart above. Covenant is bottom up as well as top down. In the Jewish tradition, “Name” is one way to reference God. Thus, Cohen notes the exchange of healing that comes of the human altar-ritual as it reaches “up” to God and the healing that comes of the Name, God, as it reaches “down” to world. Thus, the entwined covenant.

And yet, we breach covenant daily — with God and in our interpersonal and political lives. As covenant is the foundation of the cosmos, its breach disturbs the workings of the world. That’s how we got to this place of war, pestilence, fire, and flood. We fracture the structure that holds the world.

“Looks like freedom but it feels like death”

What gets in the way of keeping covenant? Everything human. We follow after the call of Babylon and Boogie Street — two themes that run through Cohen’s work. As he once explained in an interview with Terry Gross, “Boogie Street is a way to describe our lives. We go up a mountain or into a hole [to spiritual retreats] but most of the time we’re hustling on Boogie Street.” We are inconstant with God and ignore, abandon, and aggress against each other because we think some self-interest is better than relationship and covenantal regard. We find fifty ways to leave our lovers out of fear of commitment, fear that our autonomy and independence will be compromised by relational ties. Cohen knew he failed the covenant, persistently — desirous of relationship with God and persons, yet unable to sustain these very relationships. Fearful of being subsumed, he bolted. Repeatedly.

This double failing — abandoning God and persons — brought Cohen to his lifelong argument with God: why did God make us relational and yet so easily able to sever the relationships we need? In “Lover Lover Lover”, Cohen has God explain the world this way: “I locked you in this body / I meant it as a kind of trial.” God made us for committed love yet gave us bodies — wandering desires — which betray that very love. What kind of “trial” is that? Indeed, what kind of God?

In his personal life, the yo-yo of love and flight left Cohen a man who found even serial monogamy constraining. “I needed so much / to have nothing to touch, / I’ve always been greedy that way”, he wrote in “Night Comes On”, one of his most self-revealing songs. If feminine beauty, like God’s grace, is too great in its awesome dazzle, one must protect oneself lest it subsume one and take control. In short, one must flee. Or we think we must. As Cohen told Alberto Manzano in 1988, “The condition that most elevates us is the condition that most annihilates us, that somehow the destruction of the ego is involved with love.”

At age sixty-three, Cohen confessed to journalist Stina Lundberg Dabowski, “I had wonderful love but I did not give back wonderful love … I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation.” He said much the same in Nick Broomfield’s documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love: “A large part of my life was escaping … so it was a selfish life … people close to me suffered because I was always leaving.” He could be a lot less polite about this sense of confinement, of suffocation. In the poem “O Wife Unmasked”, Cohen wailed: “Claustrophobia! Bullshit! Air! Air! Is there an antidote to this mustard gas of domestic spiritism?”

Yet in writing about his “greedy” self-protection, Cohen knew it was a fault: his fault, our fault, never a strength. We kill ourselves off by it. In “Closing Time”, Cohen grasps the paradox of the human condition: “Looks like freedom but it feels like death.” We cannot stay with love because we fear its murder of the self, so we choose “freedom” — which feels like death. And that’s the power of Cohen’s laceratingly self-aware imagery: a vivisection of his soul.

“Democracy is coming …”

Cohen’s political writings continue the theme of broken covenant. Abandonment, poverty, and war are breaches of covenant in the public sphere, in our paths of local and global connection. We don’t evade bonds with God, lovers, and in politics in seriatim, but rather all at once because they are connected — the entwined covenant.

Cohen’s 1992 song “Democracy” is a template for his political thinking. He begins with our political betrayals and aggression but moves to the graver ill — lost prayer, grace, and covenant, here expressed as the Sermon on the Mount:

It’s coming through a hole in the air

From those nights in Tiananmen Square …

From the wars against disorder

From the sirens night and day

From the fires of the homeless

From the ashes of the gay

Democracy is coming to the USA.

From the struggles against tyranny and with the police, poverty, homelessness, and prejudice, something of democracy may rise. But then Cohen goes deeper, to the spiritual:

from the staggering account

of the Sermon on the Mount …

From the wells of disappointment

Where the women kneel to pray …

Democracy is coming to the USA.

The political covenant of democracy will emerge from the covenants preached in Jesus’s sermon, remembered in prayer, and promised in grace — if it comes at all. But if we betray and ignore these bonds, little remains to hold the world together. And that’s how we got to where we are now.

“I’m ready, my Lord”

Was there a conclusion? Did Cohen come to some resolution of his struggle with God over our covenant breaches? Not resolution, but perhaps an understanding of the entwinedness of covenant and an acceptance of a certain aporia. The title song of Cohen’s last song collection, You Want It Darker, begins with Cohen’s signature derisive address to God:

If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game

If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame

If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame.

Cohen confronts God: if you created this world, then count me out of your miserable creation. Why should I be broken in shame while you are in glory? The refrain continues the charge:

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.

The first line — “Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name” — is from the Hebrew prayer for the dead, used in Cohen’s work for the first time in this collection, released three weeks before his death. He is sarcastic: this is the God we magnify and sanctify — a God who allows vilification and crucifixion and whose help never comes? Why lay our souls in his hands?

The last line of the refrain staggers the mind and faith: God, for his unknown reasons, wants life dark. How dark? A later verse takes us to the damage we do: “I didn’t know I had permission / to murder and to maim / You want it darker / We kill the flame.” We, God’s dependent creatures, do the dirty work of murdering and maiming. We were created capable of doing so. Only a perverse God wants it darker and makes his creatures kill the flame.

The second part of the refrain, however, puts an end to this ire. It turns to God, whom we do not understand. But there are no other gods, as Cohen acknowledges: the first and second commandments. The aporia must be lived with; there is no other living. Hence Cohen sings, “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.”

Hineni is Hebrew for “I am here, present, for you”. It is a pledge of commitment to God. It is Abraham’s response to God when he is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19). But it is also Abraham’s response to Isaac himself and to the angel who stops the sacrifice-that-wasn’t-to-be. Abraham is present, in covenant, with them all: to the person of Isaac, as to the angelic and divine. The entwined nature of covenant is why the sacrifice was never to be. Sacrificing Isaac, breaking covenant with him, would not demonstrate bond with God. It would end it.

Cohen, in invoking this Abrahamic hineni, assents to the entwined commitments to God and persons. Covenant with one is at once covenant with the other. This is God’s creation. Rending one covenant rends them all, and thus the relations that hold the world together. We will flounder through fire, plague, and flood until we stop the rending.

Three weeks before he died, after a life of ricocheting between bond and breach, Cohen answers God with “Hineni”, I am here, present for you. This is Cohen in relationship, who understands that God is the healer whom he sought and resisted throughout life — and that God is now taking him out of it.

Professor Marcia Pally teaches at New York University and held the Mercator Professorship in the Theology Faculty of Humboldt University, Berlin. Her most recent books are From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Mimesis and Sacrifice: Applying Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines, and Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality, which was selected by the United Nations Committee on Education for Justice for worldwide distribution and was nominated for a Grawemeyer Award in religion.

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