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And finally, with great trepidation I bring up the idea of starting a new thread, focusing on The Book of Mercy. The idea is to hold a kind of virtual seminar, similar to what was done here about Hallelujah, starting with the first section of the book. Anyone who is interested will offer Jewish, Christian, Buddhist or other interpretations. Once we’ve done that, we’ll move on to the next section, and so on. It may take us a year or two to go through the book, if we can keep it up. How does that sound? Any takers?

D. B. Cohen

LC as dedication in Book of Mercy wrote:for my teacher

I stopped to listen, but he did not come. I began again with a sense of loss. As this sense deepened I heard him again. I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance. This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all. Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode. I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love. I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields. Haltingly he moves toward his throne. Reluctanlty the angels grant to one another permission to sing. In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked, the court is established on beams of golden symmetry, and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance. This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all. Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode.

the court is established on beams of golden symmetry

Tom Sakic wrote:This morning I received beautiful book from Italy, bilingual Book of Mercy / Libro della misericordia (Supernova Edizioni, 2000). Its translators, Francesca Piviotti Inghilleri and Armando Pajalich, printed a beautiful message to Leonard Cohen on the very first page.



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An open letter to Leonard Cohen

Dear Leonard Cohen,
We approached this Book on tiptoe, afraid of unbalacing its spiritual and wordly message.
Neither of us has that kind of faith which allows to tread without fear on spiritual grounds.
So, we let ourselves be fascinated by the fact that Book of Mercy is also about the world, and about your experience of it as a person and a poet, and we entered that world relying on our ingenuousness.
Your words spoke straight to us - as they will speak to any reader of this Book.
We tried to listen carefully to them and rehearse them in our language, following as much as possible the cadence of your own speech.
We got more curious about the meaning of their music. Instead of helping us, published criticism on your Book often led as astray.
So we went back and started all over again concentrating on key words. We asked for help from Rabbis and scholars of Jewish matters. We opened the Bible again. We tried to remember the little we read about other religious poetry and about Buddhism.
(Our own feeling is that no one single religious or national culture stands behind this Book, but rather a twilight or hybrid space with an obvious but undogmatic and open heritage, with an open heart.)
We wrote a small Introduction, so as to offer some guidelines for those who might stumble upon this translation, and the very act of writing it ended up helping us to undersntand more.
Granted the limitations and the simplicity of our spiritual awareness, your trusting us when we asked for the opportunity to translate this Book was very generous. Thanks.
We hope that our Italian will be transparent, and that your message will be fully visible through it.
With our most sincere best wishes,
Francesca Piviotti Inghilleri & Armando Pajalich

I stopped to listen

MB- You know a lot about Judaism, and you seem to know Hebrew and the Bible quite well. Did that come from Religious School at Shaar Hashomayim, or later?

LC- There was something I always liked about the whole enterprise, so I picked up a lot of information, and I went to the synagogue regularly.

MB- Through duress or choice?

LC- There was no choice in the matter. It wasn’t duress and it wasn’t choice. It was just something you did. But I never minded it. For one thing I loved the language and I liked the music very much, and I liked my family. So these were occasions that –

MB- Big family presences I guess?

LC- Yes. We were sitting there in that third row in the Shaar Hashomayim. There was my uncle Horace, and my cousin David and then me, and then Uncle Lawrence and then the cousins and then Uncle Sidney and the other cousins. There was a whole string of Cohens standing up there in the front line and singing our hearts out. (laughter) Of course getting bored, and talking, and gossiping, and called to attention. But through the long periods in the service when you couldn’t really get away with gossiping or talking there was the Prayer Book in front of me, and it was fascinating. It was translated on one side. My Hebrew was almost non existent except for the liturgy.

MB- Could you read the liturgy in Hebrew?

LC- Well, I knew it eventually, over the years. I could read it of course.

MB- For Bar Mitzvah purposes?

LC- Yeah, but even so. I’d gone to Hebrew School. I’d been to synagogue every Saturday.

MB- But that wouldn’t give you a knowledge of Hebrew unless you’d continued a little after Bar Mitzvah.

LC- Well, it would give me a knowledge of Hebrew if all I was interested in was prayer, (laughter) I knew how to address the Almighty in Hebrew as long as it was exclusively concerned with redemption. (laughter)

MB- But what about the Bible? You seem to know it well. Did you read it for interest or were you taught the Bible?

LC- Both. I was taught how to read the Bible in Hebrew, certainly the first books, the Torah, the five books.

MB- So there was more than just Bar Mitzvah. There was a good deal of systematic Hebrew instruction?

LC- I went to Hebrew School twice a week and Sunday mornings, I graduated from Hebrew School.

MB- Oh, so you went on after Bar Mitzvah?

LC- I would have been about fourteen.

MB- That’s quite a bit

LC- From maybe seven to fourteen, and then my grandfather came to live with us for a little while.

MB- For how long?

LC- About a year. And I used to ask him things. Especially about the Book of Isaiah, and we used to read that together. Even though his English was very bad we were using a Soncino bilingual edition of the Book of Isaiah, so we could read that together, and he would read a passage and kind of explain it in a combination of English and Yiddish. He didn’t speak English very well, and the English was there for me to read also. It wasn’t really because I was a devoted Biblical scholar. It was because I wanted the company of my grandfather. I was interested in Isaiah for the poetry in English more than the poetry in Hebrew. But his finger would slip as he explained a passage, and because he was losing his mind, his finger would slip back to the passage he’d just read, and he’d read it again – with all the freshness of the first reading and he’d begin the explanation over again, so sometimes the whole evening would be spent on one or two lines.

MB- So you got to know one or two passages very well? (laughter) Clearly you had more than a smattering of Judaic studies.

LC- Well, you know, when you penetrate the world of Jewish scholarship which is unbroken for about 3,000 years and you realize that within that tradition there are minds like Einstein and Freud and Marx – in every generation going right back to the Talmudic period – you realize you’re dealing with a tradition that is overwhelming. You can acquire over a whole lifetime only a corner of it. It is an astounding tradition and the major streams in it, the Cabalistic stream, the non-mystical stream, the literature in there. You’re dealing with a universe that has accumulated, the work of countless inspired men.

MB- Did you get some contact with the Talmud?

LC- Yeah. But when you know about the men that existed in that tradition and still exist today you’re very reluctant to describe yourself as a student of the Talmud.

MB- I understand that, but compared to the average education that a kid gets who belongs to a Reform or Conservative synagogue, you obviously got a lot more than the average kid.

LC- It wasn’t Reform. It was right-wing Conservative. I didn’t learn so much about this written tradition, but I learned a lot about the responsability and the love of the tradition – because the people really loved it. These were real events – the Hebrew calendar that was celebrated, Hanukah… A deep love was being manifested and these were the terms in which we met. That was how it was expressed. What I missed in the tradition was that nobody ever spoke to me about methods, about meditations. I was hungry as a young man – I wanted to go into a system a little more thoroughly. I wanted to be exposed to a different kind of mind. I didn’t find that. Eventually I bumped into an elderly Japonese gentleman who happened to be a Zen master --Roshi -- and I began to study with him on and off – sometimes longer periods, sometimes shorter periods – and it was within that tradition that I found out what the inside of religious tradition is, what religious practice is. After many years of that investigation, I hurt my knee. I think I ran into a wall. I was doing some kind of fancy yoga exercise. I don’t remember what happened, but I tore the miniscus, the cartilage under the knee bone and I couldn’t sit in the zendo. I couldn’t sit formally. Because I couldn’t sit, I started studying Judaism in a more or less deliberate way. This would be late, around ’75-’76, more like ’76. I don’t want to dignify this by « very serious », but I began reading; then I began practising within my own terms, leading what I could understand of as a Jewish life, given the circumstances. I began saying morning prayers, putting on tefillin, I began to practice.

MB- According to the Conservative rites?

LC- It wasn’t really according to anybody’s tradition. I felt as with most things – I felt real respect for the various traditions, Reform or Hasidic, and I’d made contact by this point with some Hasidic rabbis, I was actually using a Hasidic prayer book which the Lubavitcher movement was kind enough to print bilingually.

MB- This was the prelude to your latest book?

LC- Yeah. Book of Mercy came out of that period.

MB- I think that probably there’s some zen in there too.

LC- Well, the thing that happend to me was that I came on texts and attitudes that I wouldn’t have been able to understand if I hadn’t studied with my old Japanese teacher. It was because of his patience -- I’m a very bad student – I don’t want to give the sense in any way that I’m some kind of inspired student of these matters. I’m not. I’m really a fumbling – but I did get one or two things from Roshi that enabled me to penetrate, superficially at least, the Jewish tradition. Without his instruction I don’t think I would have had the attitude that allowed me to enter the tradition. But because I’ve had some experience with Roshi, that other men spoke about in our Jewish tradition, I was able to make these connections and that encouraged me because we need encouragement in these matters. Otherwise it becomes like some sort of arcane structure that can’t be interpreted.

Interviewer- You once said that «the angels of mercy are other people.» What does that mean? And what is the relationship between angels and language?

LC- I don’t know. One of things I always liked about the early Beatnik poetry – Ginsberg and Kerouac and Corso – was the use of the word «angel.» I never knew what they meant, except that it was a designation for a human being and that it affirmed the light in an individual. I don’t know how I used the word « angel. » I’ve forgotten exactly, but I don’t think I ever got better than the way that Ginsberg and Kerouac used the word in the early fifties. I always loved reading their poems where they talked about angels. I’ve read a lot of things about angels. I just wrote a song with Lewis Furey called « Angel Eyes. » I like it as a term of endearment : « Darling, you’re an angel. » I mean the fact that somebody can bring you the light, and you feel it, you feel healed or situated. And it’s a migratory gift. We’re all that for other people. Sometimes we are and sometimes we aren’t. I know that sometimes it’s just the girl who sells you cigarettes saying « have a good day » that changes the day. In that function she is an angel. An angel has no will of its own. An angel is only a messenger, only a channel. We have another kind of mythology that suggests angels act independently. But as I understand it from people who have gone into the matter, the angel actually has no will. The angel is merely a channel for the will.

One of things I always liked about the early Beatnik poetry – Ginsberg and Kerouac and Corso – was the use of the word «angel.»
...
I don’t know how I used the word « angel. » I’ve forgotten exactly, but I don’t think I ever got better than the way that Ginsberg and Kerouac used the word in the early fifties

Reluctanlty the angels grant to one another permission to sing. In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked, the court is established on beams of golden symmetry, and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.