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You Want it Darker
Hebrew & English • 2016 • Lyrics and music by Leonard Cohen

LEONARD COHEN often said that it was difficult for him to subscribe unambiguously to one religious tradition because he saw himself as a traveler, a stranger, who lived on the outskirts of many traditions. Yet his Jewish identity was often affirmed both in his work and life, and sometimes in a very ironic way. On his 1992 album The Future, he sings “I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible.” There is also a poem in his 2006 collection Book of Longing that is entitled “Not a Jew.” In the text itself, he says, “Anyone who thinks I am not a Jew is not right.”

“Who by Fire,” a track from 1974, is based on the Jewish prayer Unetaneh Tokef, which is chanted on Yom Kippur and asks who will live and who will die. The traditional version of the prayer raises issues that ultimately boil down to the fundamental question, “Who will be there in the end?” In Cohen’s version, he retains the form of the prayer as well as its melody. Each repetition ends with the question: “Who shall I say is calling?” Throughout his life, Cohen borrowed from religious and other traditions because ordinary language did not suffice to communicate the intensity of his experience.

For his 2016 album You Want it Darker, released several weeks before he passed away, Cohen literally returned to his hometown, Montreal, to collaborate with Gideon Zelermyer, the cantor of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, the oldest and largest traditional Ashkenazi congregation in Canada, where back in the 1940s he had celebrated his bar mitzvah. On the title track, “You Want it Darker,” you can hear Zelermyer and the synagogue’s men’s choir performing in the background. There are several explicit religious references, starting with the repetition of the word hineni (“Here I am”). Cohen sings the Hebrew word Abraham uttered when God called upon him to sacrifice his son, then translates it as “I’m ready my Lord.” In the same song, he also sings, “A million candles for the help that never came.” When I first heard that line, I immediately thought of my own trip to the Yad Vashem’s Children’s Memorial in Jerusalem. Hollowed from an underground cavern, it pays tribute to the 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. The memorial candles remembering them reflect infinitely in the dark and somber space, creating the impression of billions of stars shining in the firmament.

Cohen was also famous for rewriting his songs. He went through a lot of versions. Sometimes he worked on one for several years, and for that reason, I consider his oeuvre as a palimpsest. Initially, a palimpsest was a written parchment from which the original words have been scraped off and replaced by new writing, but with traces of the old still remaining. It’s also a standard procedure in historical Hebrew writing. I consider this a Jewish dimension to his artistic practice. The best-known example is probably “Chelsea Hotel Number Two.” He explicitly adds “Number Two’ because there was a first version. A further example is his reuse of texts that were first released as poems and later as songs and so forth. The idea of the artistic practice as

Francis Mus, a postdoctoral researcher in translation studies at the University of Antwerp, is the author of the book, The Demons of Leonard Cohen.