Closing Time for Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius by Harry Freedman (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Reviewed by Michael Jimenez
It is funny how some music can be tagged as timeless. For a singer and writer to be remembered years after his or her death is rare. Perhaps even more of a rarity is the versatility of a musical artist. Take for example, Leonard Cohen’s song “Closing Time,” that describes the fun, frivolity and, ultimately, the sadness when the night is done.
And it's partner found, it's partner lost
And it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops
It's closing time
These lyrics were written by a self-described lady’s man, the same author, in fact, of the classic song “Hallelujah.”
At the time of his death in 2016, the predominant image of Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was of the fedora-wearing, wizened, old statesman of music. Cohen came on the music scene during the 1960s with hits like “Suzanne,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and “So Long, Marianne.” These songs illustrated his poetic prowess, but it was his later hits in the 1980s like “Hallelujah,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and “Everybody Knows” that formed Cohen as a musical icon. Even a cursory review of his songs reveals many spiritual themes and symbols. Those themes and symbols are at the heart of Harry Freedman’s book Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius, which looks at Cohen’s spiritual life.
Freedman envisions Cohen as a modern-day poet who “brought comfort to many, smoothed the path to healing and shone a beacon of spiritual light upon the world” (245). Surveying many of his most famous songs, Freedman points out that Cohen’s lyrics, more often than not, drew on both the Jewish and Christian traditions (11). In fact, his corpus reveals that he had a “personal relationship with the Bible” (33, 106). Stories from the Old Testament and a focused attention on Jesus Christ are littered throughout his work (140). However, Cohen’s relationship with his religious roots might best be depicted by the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the desert―Cohen’s genius is his refusal to settle for easy answers, thus providing comfort to both the penitent and the skeptic.
Freedman suggests that “Jews have a tradition of challenging God” (57). Challenging God is exactly what Cohen often does in his music. Many of his songs deal with the brokenness of the world (95). The greatest example of this is his songs that confront the horror of the Holocaust. However, even when Cohen flirts with a transgressive side to his poetry, he pulls back to a more ambiguous message about brokenness and the hopeful moments that still inspire human beings. This tactful art is what makes Cohen so special. For example, songs like “Hallelujah” and “Dance Me to the End of Love” both reveal these dark and light elements.
Even though Cohen spent some time practicing Zen Buddhism at Mount Baldy and was interested in Sufism, Freedman focuses mostly on the Jewish-Christian roots. Cohen always identified as Jewish, but he had a deep relationship with the Christian tradition, which led him to see it in a more positive light, especially the life of Jesus (115, 124, 140). From Cohen’s perspective, love is what is needed to heal this broken world. The songs at the end of his life show this deeper, spiritual focus (132). A good example of this mix is in the song “You Want it Darker,” from an album released seventeen days before his death (233-39). A look at these lyrics reveals a glimpse of Cohen’s spiritual poetry:
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.
Hineni, Hineni
I'm ready, my Lord.
Freedman analyzes the song showing references to the Abrahamic response to God’s call, the crucifixion of Christ, and the lives lost in the Holocaust, to name just a few of his examples. In the song , Cohen wrestles with what seems like God’s dark, cruel, distant injustice, without letting the divine off the hook. However, the close of each passage, the repetition of “Hineni,” which is the Abrahamic answer “Here I am” to God’s call, followed by “I’m ready, my Lord,” reveals that Cohen, on the eve of his death, ultimately takes a stance of submission to God’s will. Freedman declares that Cohen’s music was meant to “repair the broken world in which he found himself, a world swarming with demons, however middle-class and tame” (238). The world is thus, but at least one can add a little poetry and love to it to make it more manageable.
This is a timely book, because there is something of a Cohen renaissance happening and there are several new books about him. Some other recent studies also build on his religious sensibilities. For example, Matthew R. Anderson’s recent study Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul (McGill-Queens, 2023). Its cover image has Paul sporting a dark fedora, comparing the musician and the apostle, seeing mostly similarities as it relates to spirituality. Anderson is a scholar in Pauline literature and a fan of Cohen’s music, which explains how the book was imagined. Francis Mus’s The Demons of Leonard Cohen (University of Ottawa Press, 2020) and Marcia Pally’s From this Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (T&T Clark, 2021) present similar studies that look at themes throughout Cohen’s work that display his complicated relations with both the divine and the human.
What makes Cohen so special, or so spiritual, that all these books are suddenly being written about him? At a time when so-called spiritual music feels rather empty, especially the lyrics, it is Freedman who gets to the heart of why Cohen’s music can speak to both the sacred and the secular in an almost seamless way. Cohen’s work is extremely personal, so it is easy to identify with his struggles (117). In addition, in an age of authenticity, his challenging of false spirituality comes across as refreshing. Moreover, Freedman believes that Cohen’s surname, Cohen, reveals his priestly role to the world (1-8, 241-6). Cohen essentially plays the part of priest, prophet and poet.
The number of recent books about Cohen indicates the breadth of scholarship about and enthusiasm for him. Perhaps the most relevant historical study of Cohen’s life is Matti Friedman’s Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai (Spiegel & Grau, 2022). This book is about a specific moment in Cohen’s life. In 1973, he traveled to Israel in the midst of the Yom Kippur War, ending up entertaining the young Jewish troops in the desert (25). This was somewhat of a midlife crisis for him, and his best work was still ahead of him, but this event also presents Cohen’s lifelong relationship to his Judaism. Friedman does a good job tracing Cohen’s steps through interviews of Jewish witnesses.
Harry Freedman’s Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius is an excellent book to read if you are relatively new to Cohen’s music or would like to learn more about the influence of biblical themes in Cohen’s lyrics. Since most of Cohen’s most famous works have a spiritual component, the book serves as a good introduction to the best songs of his corpus (I recommend listening to the music after each song highlighted in the chapter). If you would like to go deeper into Cohen’s life overall, the best biography about him is Sylvie Simmons’s I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (Vintage, 2017).
This is truly an exciting time for Cohen fans. Hopefully Freedman’s book leads to the pleasure of listening to Cohen’s poetic voice, as he cautiously listens for the divine, as he once stated in his song “If It Be Your Will”:
If it be your will that a voice be true
From this broken hill, I will sing to you
From this broken hill, all your praises they shall ring
If it be your will to let me sing
We are all fortunate that God allowed him to sing for us.
Michael Jimenez is an Associate Professor of history at Vanguard University. He is the author of Remembering Lived Lives: A Historiography from the Underside of Modernity and Karl Barth and the Study of the Religious Enlightenment: Encountering the Task of History.
