Rabbi Leonard

Some critic has listed “The Future” among their picks for Leonard Cohen’s best songs, with the following caveat:

“This is also home, disappointingly, to a throwaway line that sounds very anti-abortion (“Kill another fetus now/ We don’t like children anyhow.”) Come on, Leonard, you’re better than that.”

Golly—Leonard Cohen against abortion. Who’d have thunk it? That’s stepping across the rather visible political line artists in general are not allowed to cross.

But that’s the thing about Leonard Cohen. Somehow he is able to trample that line and speak honestly and get away with it where no other artists seem able to.

If Leonard Cohen’s opposition to abortion is new to this critic, he hasn’t been listening.

Consider these lines from “Diamonds in the Mine”:

“and the only man of energy, yes the revolution's pride,
he trained a hundred women just to kill an unborn child.”

If that reference is not clear enough, he changed the lines, in somewhat later performances, to

“Here she comes, Miss Liberty, our revolution’s pride
Showing everybody how to kill an unborn child.”

And go back further, to “Teachers,” on his first album:

“Some girls wander by mistake
Into the mess that scalpels make.”

What do you suppose that refers to? Cosmetic surgery?

Leonard Cohen is both a hereditary Jewish priest and an ordained Buddhist monk. He means it. One of the most amazing things about Leonard Cohen is how he has managed to be so overtly religious in his lyrics—beginning with the very first song of his anyone recorded, “Suzanne” (who did you think “Our Lady of the Harbour” was?)--without alienating the pop culture mavens (I was going to write “the public” here, but that is not really the issue). Compare Bob Dylan’s experience with putting religious references in his songs. And no, it is not because Cohen’s references are Jewish and Buddhist, while Dylan’s were Christian. Cohen uses Christian references all over the place: “Joan of Arc”; “Song of Bernadette”; Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, in Beautiful Losers.

Not really all that pornographic.

Cohen can get away with it, I think, because he has also written a lot of lyrics that seem shockingly sexual, and sexually explicit. It seems clear to the libertines that Cohen is a libertine—which shows that this is their real objection to religion, that it preaches against things they want to do. If Cohen also speaks a lot about religion, my guess is that the irreligious think his religious references are ironic. One recent critic wrote that some see his latest album, “Old Ideas,” as a rather gloomy meditation on oncoming death, but points out cheerily that many of the lyrics can instead be read sexually, just like the good old Leonard.

He has this completely wrong. The album is indeed all about death. And it is Cohen’s most cheerful album.

But in a sense he is also right. That is, if you hold that statement up in a mirror, it is right. You can always interpret a Cohen song two ways: sexually, or spiritually. I think most of, if not all of, Leonard’s love songs have, all along, been using romantic love/sex as a metaphor for the spiritual quest. It just gets more obvious as he ages, and the literal sexual meaning becomes less plausible to the listener.

God as the lover, and the spiritual quest as a love affair, is a longstanding conceit in the Jewish tradition, as it is, indeed, in the Christian, Muslim, or Hindu tradition as well. This is in the Song of Songs of the Bible; it is the key to Medieval romance. And it is a key aspect of the Zohar, the main Jewish mystical (Kabbalic) treatise, in which Cohen is alleged by adherents to be adept.

This symbolism seems to be pretty explicit, for example, on the cover to his album “New Skin for the Old Ceremony,” which shows an illustration from an alchemical text of the divine marriage, the mystical union of the soul with God. Two winged, crowned figures, of uncertain sex, are locked in an embrace. This may be coitus, Jim, but not coitus as we know it.

It is also strongly suggested by what has become his personal logo, the image of two inverted hearts, in outline, interpenetrating—to form what is unmistakably the Star of David.

Consider, too, the song, “Lover Lover Lover.” What could be clearer from the title than that it is a love song? Yet the lyrics are a conversation between Cohen and God, and not about any romantic relationship.

The swine can ignore the pearls and find all the muck they like. But even so, it is the powerful religious symbolism that gives Cohen’s lyrics such force. It gives it the numinousness, even when the source is not understood.

So there you have it, in case you’re interested. The key to everything Cohen has done.

In general, our appreciation of art these days, our art criticism, indeed the humanities in general, is paralysed by a deafness to religious references. Yet without religious references, there is no art.