Lovely Leonard

2009-09-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

I love Canadian Jews – and their prophet Leonard Cohen. I love and covet their healthcare system, their excellent educations for which they pay so damn little, and I am in love with Leonard Cohen’s brain – the free-wheeling reach into Jewish tradition to snatch dream images, the persistent sneaky subversion, destruction of any any any trace of the wannabe triumphalism that is poisoning Jewish life, the perfect pitch of achingly modest hopefulness – my kinds Jew – his songs/ my prayerbook - “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in” (Anthem), the call to repentance from “the little Jew” who knows that love (not all the security fences in the world) is “the only engine of survival.”

The below description was published in The Guardian and comes from Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal, a Jerusalem-based independent English-language quarterly, initiated and maintained by prominent Israeli and Palestinian academics and journalists, aiming to analyze freely and critically, the complex issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians.

“Three days before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when everything comes to a halt in Israel, Leonard Cohen sang:

Repent, Repent … I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible, I've seen the nations rise and fall, I've heard their stories, heard them all, but love's the only engine of survival.

The national football stadium in the Ramat Gan suburb of Tel Aviv has been the scene of many agonising defeats in recent times, but Cohen's performance, with a background of signs saying Shalom, Salaam, Peace, was a triumph of the will. Or as Cohen put it:

Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.(from the song Anthem).

Cohen's response to the call for a cultural boycott was to create a Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace and to devote all of the proceeds from the Israeli concert "to organisations and individuals working in Israel and Palestine to advance the recognition and full expression of human rights in the region".
The singer singled out the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents Circle, who despite the loss of a close loved one work together for peace and reconciliation. Author David Grossman, who lost a son on the last day of the Lebanon war in 2006, thanked Cohen for his support and the singer answered from the stage that "the bereaved parents' response to their suffering transcends the instinct for anger and revenge, and offers hope from the heart, even the hope for peace".
In the words of Cohen's mesmerising version of the old anti-Nazi Partisan Song, one of the highlights of last night's concert and an old staple of leftwing hootenannies during the 1950s and 1960s in the US:

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing, through the graves the wind is blowing, freedom soon will come; then we'll come from the shadows.”

Righteous [Yid]dish

Lovely Leonard