I'm speaking to you from New York after a very, very divisive and troubling American presidential election. And of course, that's not the only troubling thing in our world. In Britain, we had an almost equally divisive Brexit vote. The Middle East is in turmoil. Europe is on the edge with the rise of the far right in several European countries. And all of a sudden, the world has suddenly got darker.
And of course, the poem, the song for our time, was actually written by the late Leonard Cohen, - who has just died - who left us as his last song, a song entitled, “If You Want It Darker.” And those might be the words that many people I've been speaking to have been thinking.
“If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game.
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame.
If yours is the glory, then ours is the shame.
[You are,] you want it darker, we kill the flame.”
A song for our time. But I really want to say and explain, is that actually, it's much more than that.
Leonard Cohen was a very Jewish figure, despite his obvious flirtations with other faiths and his obvious dissident view of religion and of life. A real inhabitant of the darkness.
And yet, of course, this last song he left us is the most Jewish he ever wrote. It contains the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Or as he puts it in English, “Yitgadal v’Yitkadash sh'mei raba” - Magnified and sanctified be Your holy Name.
And the chorus three times repeats the word, “Hineni,” here I am. The famous words of Abraham and indeed of Jacob and Moses to God. When God calls, we reply, “Hineni,” here am I.
But what is remarkable about this and what I've just realised, is that in fact, this song, “Darker,” is a very precise commentary on the passage we are going to read in our synagogues in a day's time.
The story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. It's very, very precise. This is where the word “Hineni” first appears in the Bible.
And it is, of course, one of the darkest episodes in the whole Bible. God asks the father to offer up and sacrifice his son. What's much more remarkable is how very beautifully, like a midrash, like a rabbinical commentary, Leonard Cohen has given us a precise commentary to that episode.
Let's notice what he's doing.
First of all, he's conflating two figures. The way he did in “Halleluya,” when he brings together the two stories of sexual desire, the most famous ones in the Bible - David falling for Bathsheba and Samson falling for Delilah.
He brings them together in one verse in “Halleluya.” So here in “Darker,” he brings together two figures, Abraham and Isaac, father and son, the sacrificer and the sacrifice. It's Abraham who says “Hineni” and it is Isaac who in effect says, ‘I'm ready, Lord.’
The second thing he does is he tracks the shape of the narrative. The song has three choruses, each of which begins with the word “Hineni.” If you read Genesis 22, you will see that three times, the word “Hineni” appears, one at each key moment in the narrative.
When God first tries Abraham and calls him to the trial, Abraham says “Hineni,” here I am. Secondly, when Abraham and Isaac are on their journey and Isaac turns to ask his father a question, he says, “Father,” and Abraham replies, “Hineni,” here I am, my son. And finally, at the climax, when Abraham is about to kill Isaac and a voice from Heaven says ‘Stop!’ Abraham says “Hineni” again.
So he's created a song that's isomorphic with, of the same shape as, the biblical narrative. But what's even more remarkable is that he turns this song into an echo of a famous rabbinic commentary on this passage. It's quoted in Rashi in his commentary.
The Sages said when God told Abraham, ‘Don't touch the lad, don't lay a hand on him, don't do anything to him,’ Abraham turned in exasperation and said to God, ‘God, what do You want? First of all, You told me Isaac will be my son. He will be my posterity. He will be my link to eternity. Then You say, sacrifice him. And now You say - the moment I'm about to sacrifice him - stop, don't do anything.’
Abraham, as it were, rose up in protest against the apparent cruelty and wilfulness of the entire story.
And that, of course, is what Leonard Cohen is doing. He's saying, ‘God, I love You dearly, but look at the world You've created. And look at how people take Your words, and out of love for You, kill human beings. You're the God of life, not death.’
And he says very simply - and this too is biblical commentary - there's a lover in the story. The story begins by saying, God's saying to Abraham, “Take your son, your only one, the one whom you love.”
This is the first time the word “love” appears in the Hebrew Bible. But the story is still the same, says Leonard Cohen. Abraham loved his son, but God still told him to sacrifice him.
There's a lullaby for suffering. Leonard Cohen knew that some of our most powerful liturgical songs in Judaism are very sad. They're lamentations.
But there's “a paradox to blame,” which is, out of love for God, we sometimes kill in His name.
But then he says, “It's written in the Scriptures, and it's not some idle claim.” He's telling us, ‘Don't think I, Leonard Cohen, am making this up. There's some deeply troubling elements in the human condition.’
However, this is his final message to us. He's saying, ‘God, I love you, but I don't love the world You created.’
I love You dearly, but I don't like the human beings that You've made in Your image. I love the love that You have for us. But I don't like the hate that so often that love gives rise to.
And if the Binding of Isaac is a symbol of that faith, then “if You're the dealer, I'm out of the game. If You're the healer, I'm broken and lame.”
And yet for all that, Leonard Cohen continued to affirm life and God and light and hope.
It's an extraordinary thing. And he did so in very Jewish ways. His most famous line, “There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” is a reference to Kabbalistic doctrine known as Shevirat HaKeilim, the Breaking of the Vessels.
When God created the world and filled it with light, the world was simply not strong enough to hold that light. So the vessels broke. And everywhere there are broken vessels.
But within those vessels, a divine light, “a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” is Leonard Cohen's summary of a famous Jewish mystical doctrine.
The second thing, of course, is that Judaism is ultimately about love and the power of love. God's love to reach everywhere. Listen to the line, he says, “I greet you from the other side of despair.”
“With a love so vast and shattered, it will reach you everywhere.”
And that, of course, is God's love for us. And then in an extraordinary gesture, he takes the biggest paradox of all, Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
If you listen to Kaddish carefully, you'll see it's a prayer for the dead, but there's not one mention of death in it. It's all about life. It's all about God, magnified and sanctified.
“Be Your holy Name.”
And even though Leonard Cohen knew he was about to die and was saying Kaddish for himself, nonetheless, he was saying that despite everything, even in the face of death, Jews still praise God. Or as he put it so famously and beautifully, “Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue, but Halleluya.”
That's what it is to be a Jew, a person of faith, to sing “Halleluya.”
What Leonard Cohen taught us is that even in the midst of darkness, there's light.
Even in the midst of death, there's life.
Even in the midst of hate, there's love.
And even with our dying breath, we can still say “Halleluya.”
That is the power of love to redeem the brokenness of the world.
In his beautiful tribute in the New York Times, Leon Wieseltier spoke about just how Jewish Leonard Cohen was, and how funny as well. He said that Leonard used to send him a message before Pesach saying, “Dear brother, dear bro, dear Leon, happy Pesach. I miss Egypt.”
And before Shavuot, a commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, he said, “Dear bro, see you at Sinai. I'll be wearing headphones.”
He was very funny, but he was never more Jewish than in this, his final message to us.
In this final song, Leonard Cohen becomes Job, arguing with God, finding no answers to his questions, but finding nonetheless the strength to sing and to affirm. Leonard - or as he signed himself, Eliezer HaCohen - thank you for teaching us how to find God in the middle, in the midst even of darkness. And even among - as he put it in “Suzanne” - “The garbage and the flowers, we can still find light.”
You taught us that it's the cracks in our fractured world that let the light in. Let Leonard Cohen's final message to us be just that. Yes, the world has grown darker, but we can still see light coming through the cracks.
And let that lead us to sing a song to God and find love and redemption in this broken world.
Shabbat Shalom.
You Want it Darker
Leonard Cohen and Parshat Vayera
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Sitting in his hotel room in New York on the morning of 16th November 2016, Rabbi Sacks suddenly had a thought about a connection between the late Leonard Cohen's song "You Want It Darker", the current state of the world and this week's parsha of Vayera. So he took out his phone to record his ideas...
Here is a rather different kind of parsha shiur.
The lyrics to "You Want It Darker" can be found here
I'm speaking to you from New York after a very, very divisive and troubling American presidential election. And of course, that's not the only troubling thing in our world. In Britain, we had an almost equally divisive Brexit vote. The Middle East is in turmoil. Europe is on the edge with the rise of the far right in several European countries. And all of a sudden, the world has suddenly got darker.
And of course, the poem, the song for our time, was actually written by the late Leonard Cohen, - who has just died - who left us as his last song, a song entitled, “If You Want It Darker.” And those might be the words that many people I've been speaking to have been thinking.
“If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game.
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame.
If yours is the glory, then ours is the shame.
[You are,] you want it darker, we kill the flame.”
A song for our time. But I really want to say and explain, is that actually, it's much more than that.
Leonard Cohen was a very Jewish figure, despite his obvious flirtations with other faiths and his obvious dissident view of religion and of life. A real inhabitant of the darkness.
And yet, of course, this last song he left us is the most Jewish he ever wrote. It contains the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Or as he puts it in English, “Yitgadal v’Yitkadash sh'mei raba” - Magnified and sanctified be Your holy Name.
And the chorus three times repeats the word, “Hineni,” here I am. The famous words of Abraham and indeed of Jacob and Moses to God. When God calls, we reply, “Hineni,” here am I.
But what is remarkable about this and what I've just realised, is that in fact, this song, “Darker,” is a very precise commentary on the passage we are going to read in our synagogues in a day's time.
The story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. It's very, very precise. This is where the word “Hineni” first appears in the Bible.
And it is, of course, one of the darkest episodes in the whole Bible. God asks the father to offer up and sacrifice his son. What's much more remarkable is how very beautifully, like a midrash, like a rabbinical commentary, Leonard Cohen has given us a precise commentary to that episode.
Let's notice what he's doing.
First of all, he's conflating two figures. The way he did in “Halleluya,” when he brings together the two stories of sexual desire, the most famous ones in the Bible - David falling for Bathsheba and Samson falling for Delilah.
He brings them together in one verse in “Halleluya.” So here in “Darker,” he brings together two figures, Abraham and Isaac, father and son, the sacrificer and the sacrifice. It's Abraham who says “Hineni” and it is Isaac who in effect says, ‘I'm ready, Lord.’
The second thing he does is he tracks the shape of the narrative. The song has three choruses, each of which begins with the word “Hineni.” If you read Genesis 22, you will see that three times, the word “Hineni” appears, one at each key moment in the narrative.
When God first tries Abraham and calls him to the trial, Abraham says “Hineni,” here I am. Secondly, when Abraham and Isaac are on their journey and Isaac turns to ask his father a question, he says, “Father,” and Abraham replies, “Hineni,” here I am, my son. And finally, at the climax, when Abraham is about to kill Isaac and a voice from Heaven says ‘Stop!’ Abraham says “Hineni” again.
So he's created a song that's isomorphic with, of the same shape as, the biblical narrative. But what's even more remarkable is that he turns this song into an echo of a famous rabbinic commentary on this passage. It's quoted in Rashi in his commentary.
The Sages said when God told Abraham, ‘Don't touch the lad, don't lay a hand on him, don't do anything to him,’ Abraham turned in exasperation and said to God, ‘God, what do You want? First of all, You told me Isaac will be my son. He will be my posterity. He will be my link to eternity. Then You say, sacrifice him. And now You say - the moment I'm about to sacrifice him - stop, don't do anything.’
Abraham, as it were, rose up in protest against the apparent cruelty and wilfulness of the entire story.
And that, of course, is what Leonard Cohen is doing. He's saying, ‘God, I love You dearly, but look at the world You've created. And look at how people take Your words, and out of love for You, kill human beings. You're the God of life, not death.’
And he says very simply - and this too is biblical commentary - there's a lover in the story. The story begins by saying, God's saying to Abraham, “Take your son, your only one, the one whom you love.”
This is the first time the word “love” appears in the Hebrew Bible. But the story is still the same, says Leonard Cohen. Abraham loved his son, but God still told him to sacrifice him.
There's a lullaby for suffering. Leonard Cohen knew that some of our most powerful liturgical songs in Judaism are very sad. They're lamentations.
But there's “a paradox to blame,” which is, out of love for God, we sometimes kill in His name.
But then he says, “It's written in the Scriptures, and it's not some idle claim.” He's telling us, ‘Don't think I, Leonard Cohen, am making this up. There's some deeply troubling elements in the human condition.’
However, this is his final message to us. He's saying, ‘God, I love you, but I don't love the world You created.’
I love You dearly, but I don't like the human beings that You've made in Your image. I love the love that You have for us. But I don't like the hate that so often that love gives rise to.
And if the Binding of Isaac is a symbol of that faith, then “if You're the dealer, I'm out of the game. If You're the healer, I'm broken and lame.”
And yet for all that, Leonard Cohen continued to affirm life and God and light and hope.
It's an extraordinary thing. And he did so in very Jewish ways. His most famous line, “There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” is a reference to Kabbalistic doctrine known as Shevirat HaKeilim, the Breaking of the Vessels.
When God created the world and filled it with light, the world was simply not strong enough to hold that light. So the vessels broke. And everywhere there are broken vessels.
But within those vessels, a divine light, “a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” is Leonard Cohen's summary of a famous Jewish mystical doctrine.
The second thing, of course, is that Judaism is ultimately about love and the power of love. God's love to reach everywhere. Listen to the line, he says, “I greet you from the other side of despair.”
“With a love so vast and shattered, it will reach you everywhere.”
And that, of course, is God's love for us. And then in an extraordinary gesture, he takes the biggest paradox of all, Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
If you listen to Kaddish carefully, you'll see it's a prayer for the dead, but there's not one mention of death in it. It's all about life. It's all about God, magnified and sanctified.
“Be Your holy Name.”
And even though Leonard Cohen knew he was about to die and was saying Kaddish for himself, nonetheless, he was saying that despite everything, even in the face of death, Jews still praise God. Or as he put it so famously and beautifully, “Even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue, but Halleluya.”
That's what it is to be a Jew, a person of faith, to sing “Halleluya.”
What Leonard Cohen taught us is that even in the midst of darkness, there's light.
Even in the midst of death, there's life.
Even in the midst of hate, there's love.
And even with our dying breath, we can still say “Halleluya.”
That is the power of love to redeem the brokenness of the world.
In his beautiful tribute in the New York Times, Leon Wieseltier spoke about just how Jewish Leonard Cohen was, and how funny as well. He said that Leonard used to send him a message before Pesach saying, “Dear brother, dear bro, dear Leon, happy Pesach. I miss Egypt.”
And before Shavuot, a commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, he said, “Dear bro, see you at Sinai. I'll be wearing headphones.”
He was very funny, but he was never more Jewish than in this, his final message to us.
In this final song, Leonard Cohen becomes Job, arguing with God, finding no answers to his questions, but finding nonetheless the strength to sing and to affirm. Leonard - or as he signed himself, Eliezer HaCohen - thank you for teaching us how to find God in the middle, in the midst even of darkness. And even among - as he put it in “Suzanne” - “The garbage and the flowers, we can still find light.”
You taught us that it's the cracks in our fractured world that let the light in. Let Leonard Cohen's final message to us be just that. Yes, the world has grown darker, but we can still see light coming through the cracks.
And let that lead us to sing a song to God and find love and redemption in this broken world.
Shabbat Shalom.