Who By Fire?
Yom Kippur 5783/2022
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Yom Kippur in Israel is unlike any day anywhere in the world. The entire country becomes still, for one entire day. Jerusalem, the Holy City, of course. But also Tel Aviv, Israel’s secular metropolis, comes to rest. No buses, no cars. No shops open. Everywhere in Israel, Yom Kippur is as it has always been, Shabbat Shabbaton, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, a day dedicated to stillness and silence and prayer.
This explains, in part, why Israel was caught so completely off guard on October 6, 1973, when the armies of Egypt in the South and Syria in the north, launched a coordinated surprise attack on Israel at 1:51 on Yom Kippur afternoon. Over the course of the next three weeks, 2,656 Israeli soldiers died, a catastrophic loss. The people of Israel and Jews all over the world learned in that terrible October that the Israeli army was not in fact invincible. Only later did it become clear that in the early days of that war, Israel came very close to being destroyed.
Israel was taken by surprise in 1973, in part, because it was Yom Kippur. But also, Israel after the Six Day War had grown arrogant and complacent. The Yom Kippur War was a turning point in Israel’s history, in which we came face to face with two truths: Israel’s army is not invincible, and Israel’s leaders are not infallible.
How strange that these truths were revealed to us on Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur is at its core a confrontation with those same two truths about ourselves: we human beings are not invincible; we will not live forever. And we are not perfect. We break and we are broken. Yom Kippur summons us to these truths. We are mashul kacheres hanishbar, we are like broken pottery,…k’avak poreach…like dust, floating.” And Yom Kippur is the holiest day of our lives because on it we declare “af al pi chen. Nevertheless. N’kadesh et shimcha ba-olam. We will sanctify Your name in this world. We reject cynicism and despair. Tonight and tomorrow, we commit ourselves once again to hope, to trust, to goodness and to love.”
A new book came out on last Yom Kippur, entitled Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. In it, Matti Friedman uncovers the previously untold story of how in October 1973, the Jewish Canadian singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen went to the Sinai, in the midst of the Yom Kippur War, and sang for the soldiers, who were surrounded by death, all around them. It changed his life. In the weeks and years following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Leonard Cohen found his way back to the heart of Judaism and until he died in 2016 he sang in a prophetic voice which the entire world came to hear. Come and listen.
Born into a prominent Montreal Jewish family in 1934, Cohen became a songwriter, and gained fame with hits like Suzanne and So Long, Marianne. But he struggled with depression, and fell deep into drug use, consuming massive quantities of quaaludes, speed, and acid. And endless promiscuous sex. By 1973, disgusted with his life, he declared that he was done with music for good and went to live with his girlfriend and their son on the Greek island of Hydra.
There, in early October, he heard on the radio that Israel was at war. He took a ferry to Athens, and a plane to Israel, with a vague plan to go to work on a kibbutz, to replace the men who had gone to war. He was spotted in a coffee shop by some musicians who recognized the famous man. They told him they were heading down to the Sinai to play for the troops and invited him to join them. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t even have a guitar with him, and he said that his songs were all depressing (which was true!) and would not cheer the soldiers up. But they persuaded him, and they drove down to the Sinai, into the chaos of the war.
It was not a planned tour. There was no schedule and there were no stages. It was the middle of a war, in which eighteen, nineteen and twenty-year-olds every day were seeing their friends being burned alive and blown to pieces. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers were dying every day. Cohen and the others drove around the desert, with no idea where they were, then seeing a few soldiers, they would get out and play a few songs. Sometimes the soldiers would gather and listen in stunned amazement to the celebrity singer who had come out of nowhere. Other times, the performers saw that they were not needed or wanted, and they would drive on to find another unit. They played as many as eight times a day, for three weeks.
In his research for the book, Matti Friedman tracked down as many soldiers as possible who actually saw and heard Cohen during those weeks, and came to learn that those men, in that hell of sand and fire and blood, had no desire for upbeat, encouraging music. Leonard Cohen’s music of lament spoke more eloquently to them of their experience. Most of all, they were moved that he had come from such a great distance to be with them. Then the war was over, and Cohen left Israel and almost never spoke about the experience again. He returned to Hydra, where he began to write the song Who By Fire.
Who by fire, who by water. In the opening line of the song, Cohen returns to Yom Kippur. Both the three-week-long Yom Kippur of terror and death in the Sinai desert, and the Yom Kippur of the Jewish past. Who by fire and who by water. Six words, straight out of our traditional Yom Kippur prayers. All the rest of the song is commentary. Cohen establishes immediately that those devastating words from the heart of Jewish history and prayer, reminding us of our mortality, are as true as they ever have been. Now Cohen’s song…his treatment of the traditional words… has been incorporated into the Yom Kippur service in synagogues around the world. You will hear it here tomorrow morning.
Over the course of the next forty-two years, Cohen wrote a number of songs all of which perform the same miracle: demonstrating beyond any doubt that the oldest truths of Judaism, first expressed three thousand years ago in the Hebrew Bible, are absolutely alive for anyone willing to listen.
The most famous of all Cohen’s songs is Hallelujah, whose profound, worldwide impact was documented this year in the film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song. That song begins with David, most gifted and most deeply flawed human being in all of Jewish literature. Sweet singer of Israel, author of the psalms, warrior, king and sinner. It seems impossible. How could it be that the religious genius who wrote the psalms, so full of love of God, could also take another man’s wife to bed and then send her husband to his death in battle?
Hallelujah opens with David’s gift for music and prayer: “I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord.” And then moves directly to David’s descent into sin: “you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.” The song never refers to David again, but with those few lines, the old familiar story has been told. It is a shocking story, but nothing about it strains belief. We despise David but we understand him.
In his most famous song, Cohen brought us to the deep idea of Yom Kippur. Our sins are more modest…well, hopefully... but essentially David is each one of us. We break and we are broken. And still we rise up and commit ourselves, tonight and tomorrow, to hope, to trust, to goodness, to love.
While Hallelujah is Cohen’s most famous song, his own favorite was another number on the same album, entitled If it be Your Will. It’s a prayer, an outpouring of longing for God. In that song, Cohen sings directly to God, offering to grow silent, if that is God’s will. Or to sing praises, if it be Your will. Marian and I first heard it sung in the tribute film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, in which the song is sung by the singer now known as Anohni. Marian immediately bought the soundtrack of the film and for a period of months, she and I would sit in our living room in the evenings and turn off all the lights and just listen to that song. Marian is not generally given to traditional prayer. Somehow, inexplicably, Cohen’s song takes down the wall that stands between the modern secular heart and our old Jewish God.
Cohen’s life did not become easy after returning from the Sinai. He continued to battle depression, suffering gravely until he finally moved in 1994 to a Zen Retreat Center on Mount Baldy, in the San Gabriel mountains, where he lived for five years. Then one day he decided he was done and came down the mountain. And began to write and to play music again.
But Cohen’s God, with the darkest possible sense of humor, was not done with him yet. In 2005 it came to light that his longtime friend, ex-lover and manager had drained his bank accounts, and sold the rights to all of his songs. At the age of 73 he was forced to go back on tour, simply to earn enough money to survive. He performed all over the world for the next five years, until finally stopping at age 79, having given 372 concerts, all lasting over 3 hours. It’s safe to say that he made his money back. But what is more miraculous, his depression had lifted.
At the deepest level, on Yom Kippur we are at our most Jewish and at our most human. We spend an entire day in synagogue, removing ourselves completely from the outside world, and dive deeper than we ever do all year long into Jewish ritual and tradition. We are at our most Jewish. But we are simultaneously at our most human. The concerns of Yom Kippur have little to do with Jewish history and the theme of this day is simply and profoundly: what does it mean to be a human being? How can we create a life of meaning and holiness given our human frailty and imperfection?
At the end of his life, Leonard Cohen established a deep human connection, easily and joyfully, with audiences all over the globe. He was 75 years old and at peace with himself….and grateful to be alive. And in his final years, he became his most Jewish. One of the peak experiences of his world tour was a performance in 2009 in Tel Aviv’s Ramat Gan sports stadium. There he played to a crowd of 50,000 Israelis. At the end of the long concert, he spoke to the crowd saying “before leaving, I wish to give respectful attention to the Israeli and Palestinian members of the Bereaved Parents for Peace. They have achieved the only victory possible, the victory of the heart over its own inclination for despair, for revenge and for hatred.” And then Cohen lifted his hands in the gesture of the Cohanim, the Jewish priests of old, and in Hebrew offered to the crowd the birkat Cohanim, the Priestly Blessing, with which his own ancestors have blessed our people for three thousand years:
יברכך ה׳ וישמרך. יאר ה׳ פניו אליך ויחנך. ישא ה׳ פניו אליך וישם לך שלום.
Coming out of the Riviera Theater last month, after watching the documentary about Cohen and the song Hallelujah, tears streaming down my face, the friend with whom we had gone to see it commented “His life was such a kiddush hashem,” a sanctification of God’s name. “Yes.” I said.
May we all be blessed on this Yom Kippur and throughout our lives, to know that we are only human, we will break and be broken, and nevertheless, we can sanctify the name of God in our world. Ken Yehi Ratson. May this be Your Will.