‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (1935) from The Four Quartets
It is an era of trauma and terror. Existential crises are being weaponized and made subservient to political agendas. In an era in which ‘God is dead,’ we live by existential choice. Individuals are free to define and pursue the good as they see fit, each person effectively becoming his or her own god. In relativizing the absolute, however, the modern world has absolutized the relative. Each person has his or her own truth, upon which there can be no compromise. Truth is non-negotiable. Each chooses the good as s/he sees fit but, in the absence of objective standards and criteria – Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ – this good might as well be the bad. The result is what Max Weber described as the polytheism of values, renascent warring gods that brook no compromise. They may as well be devils. Given the loss of an authoritative and overarching moral framework, it is impossible to discern right from wrong in other than personal terms. The modern world continues to issue moral imperatives by the dozen, but these lack the proper quality of imperatives since they draw on no substantive standard or framework. ‘Nature’ reified through the voice of the scientists is not that standard. But, as Max Weber wrote, we are destined to live in a 'prophetless and godless age.' How much reality can people cope with? How much reality do people want?
"You Want It Darker" by Leonard Cohen
If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame
They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame
If you are the dealer, let me out of the game
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
Hineni
Hineni, hineni
Hineni
There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. You want delight? You want it darker? How much reality can people cope with? How real do you want it?
In answering these questions, a few comments on Leonard Cohen’s The Future are in order. These lines are key:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
Here, Leonard Cohen drops the irony and biting sarcasm of some of the other lines in this song in order to get as honest-to-God as it is possible to get with words. How much reality can people handle? This is as real as things could get.
The notion of 'things sliding' is an easy enough, if still discomforting, idea to understand. It suggests we live on unfirm ground, with the things we desire or need becoming increasingly out of our reach. The notion of 'things sliding in all directions,' however, is a qualitatively different idea, indicating the extent to which our experience has become one of chaos and confusion, without possibility of (re)connection, contact with reality, and communication with others. It is a condition that expresses the inescapability of loneliness. We no longer share a world in common, and the world we do live in is not our home. The scientific-political attempt to build a Heaven on Earth has overturned the order of the soul, the one and true order, and in victory the new masters of the universe, 'men as gods,' come to see that they are merely the masters of nowhere. The fight is over, things aren’t going to get any better.
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder.
The only true thing left standing is Love.
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
There are people who disagree. They say Love does nothing to prevent evil and remedy ills, and demand strategies, politics, organisation, action, guns, bombs … Their mindsets have been shaped by the very machine world they claim to be fighting against. But that's the problem of the fight mode: once you are in it, it is well-nigh impossible to get out of it. It is the mental preparation for and expression of the world of the Megamachine, a world in which organisation and action proceeds without regard for persons, places, and planet: a world in which means become enlarged to displace true ends, and function replace purpose. That's the problem of a sophist view of the world in which everything is a power play. There are no standards of evaluation by which to judge good and bad. To think that the world is whatever we want it to be, and whatever is in our power to make it be, is not to escape or overcome the blizzard of the world, it is the blizzard of the world that has crossed the threshold. And where there is nothing, there is nothing to win. The power struggles of the world are empty, even with respect to survival.
Cohen’s use of negation in saying ‘there won’t be nothing you can measure anymore’ is strong on the irony of man the measurer coming to discover to his horror that he is not the measure of all things. By raising measurement in relation to the order of the soul, Cohen is raising issues about the nature, claims and limits of human rationality. Cohen strongly suggests here that there are things that are beyond measure, and that attempts to measure them can only backfire on us. The clear implication is that human beings have created the catastrophe that now confronts them by equating being as such with the quality of being measureable, calculable, quantifiable, manipulable, tradeable, controllable. Here, Cohen resurrects the corpses of the 20th century, the age of civilized barbarism and death, when mass politics and total war joined to make annihilation and exterminism the height of political rationality. Human beings, like all things possessing intrinsic worth, are beyond measure. That’s the anarchic surplus that evades reason, the excess that is beyond our rational grasp and technical control, but which is the very core of our being, the soul of all living things. There is an order of the soul. However, instead of seeing the immeasurable as the most worthy of all that there is, such things are discounted by those adhering to the dominant rationality as unworthy. With that rationality comes a disregard for all things that are not measurable. We have no need of measurement to know that people are real, we have no need of measurement to know the planet is real, and we have no need of measurement to know God is real. Such things stand in no need of proof.
I am reminded of Wittgenstein here. Although his Tractatus became the textbook of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s own reaction to them was cool. Moritz Schlick, their leader, sort contact with Wittgenstein. ‘To persuade Wittgenstein to attend these meetings Schlick had to assure him that the discussion would not have to be philosophical; he could discuss whatever he liked. Sometimes, to the surprise of his audience, Wittgenstein would turn his back on them and read poetry. In particular – as if to emphasize to them, as he had earlier explained to von Ficker, that what he had not said in the Tractatus was more important than what he had – he read them the poems of Rabindranath Tagore … whose poems express a mystical outlook diametrically opposed to that of the members of Schlick’s circle’ (Monk 1990: 243).
Wittgenstein's silence here pertains to that excess or surplus, that ethical stream, that evades capture and enclosure by a totalizing reason. We never had certainty, and misplaced expectations here cannot but generate reaction and rejection. The problem is that in seeing freedom as the projection of truth and meaning upon an objectively valueless world, we have come to locate value in the valuer and not in the valued, which means that human beings merely measure things for their instrumental use to them, and do likewise with other human beings. Such individuals, men as gods, use others as mere means to personal ends, with the result that all become subject to an external fate that is outside of their control and comprehension. The demand for control here is a neurotic reaction to a primary lack, a divorce from the source of life and meaning in the first place. As Marx put the same idea, the ‘private individual regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers.’ (Marx EW OJQ 1975: 221). But Marx is one of the measurers and controllers in this context, overturning the order of the soul, and seeing human beings as revolving around their own self-created sun. Which human beings? Individuals? Marx knew well that human beings lived within asymmetrical social relations and sought a transformation to ensure unity. I believe that, without a transcendent standard, his position is incoherent, historicist, and very much subject to the warning issued by Leonard Cohen here. In the past, the soul was bound up with politics conceived in the broad sense of the good life. The belief in God supported a whole metaphysical infrastructure that gave meaning to demands for freedom, justice, equality, notions of good and evil. With the death of God, however, that overarching and authoritative ethical framework dissolved too. Some present this as a liberation, with human beings as gods revolving around their own sun. The liberation of self-made man as the measurer of all things is also the story of his undoing in a world of his creation. This is the subject of Leonard Cohen’s The Future. We need to call back the soul.
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
I think we had better understand what that word 'repent' means in order to understand what Leonard Cohen is driving at.
There are some deeply troubling elements in the human condition. This was Leonard Cohen's final message to us: God I love you, but I don't love the world you created - and I don't like the human beings you have made in your image. 'If you are the dealer, then I'm out of the game. If you're the healer, I'm broken and lame.' If this is God, then I'm out of it all.
And yet for all of that, Leonard Cohen continued to affirm life and God and light and hope. That is extraordinary and worthy of deep reflection. Everywhere, there are broken vessels, but within those vessels is the divine light - that is the power of God's love to reach everywhere:
"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair
with a love so vast and so shattered it will reach you everywhere."
Leonard Cohen - Heart with No Companion
And that, of course, is the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us, each and all.
Even in the midst of darkness there is the light that never goes out.
And Cohen did affirm realities beyond that which proof and evidence can warrant. He wrote a final ‘so long’ to Marianne Ihlen on July 27th, 2016, just two days before her death:
Our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine…Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.
On his final album, You Want it Darker, Leonard Cohen expresses his ambivalent relationship with God through issues of pain and suffering, and what these things mean with respect to those who cause them and those who experience them. The idea of God as monstrous is not a new idea at all, but has Biblical origins. Moreover, in the Bible, there is an argument on the question, not a simple conclusion drawn from the facts of the matter. In You Want it Darker, Cohen expresses doubt about the nature of a God who not only allows evil, but even seems to sanction it. He charges this God with being unlikeable and expresses anger at the permitting of so much pain and suffering, drawing attention to the withholding of the help that is needed. And he yet nevertheless prepares his ultimate surrender to God. That position requires some serious unknotting. Cohen’s view in the end seems to be, on the basis of what we know and what can be known, this God may well be a monster, but that it is not the facts of the case that decide the matter after all. We are truthseekers who are destined to always fall short of the truth, leaving us with an existential decision to make with respect to the salvation of our souls. Cohen prepared for ultimate surrender to God after making a very strong case indeed against what the facts seem to show about the nature of that God.
In It Seemed the Better Way, Cohen sings: ‘Sounded like the truth .... But it’s not the truth today.’ The search for truth never remains the same, and as death approached, Cohen who had come so far with what sounded like the truth, now prepares to embrace another truth. The lesson is that at all stages of our lives we can only live as if we knew, but what seems like the truth as we negotiate our way through our lives is not or never the whole truth. The truth of the matter of living is that it is impossible to discover the truth before the fact of living, and impossible to know the whole truth before the fact of dying. But that impossibility, far from foreclosing on life, is an invitation into living. We live into mystery through faith and courage. Living without proof and certainty, we make an existential choice.
The ambivalence that Cohen expresses towards God in You Want it Darker draws on a Biblical tradition that not only addresses the charge that God is a monster, but is the origin of all accusations to that effect. In charging God with being the cause of human suffering, Cohen is participating in an existential debate that took place in the Bible itself. The accusations are echoes of the ancient voices who asked the questions that could not be answered: Abraham, who accused God of ruthlessness towards the people of Sodom, Moses, who raged against God for threatening to destroy the Israelites, David, who accused God of causing him personal pain and beseeched Him to stop. And the point is that this is an existential debate, not a court of law in which the questions are answered conclusively on the basis of available facts and unanswerable logic. For those who want a decisive answer, the only conclusion is that God is guilty as charged - and so are the rest of us: case closed. God is unlikeable and so are the creatures He made in His image. We are monsters, one and all. The pain and suffering in the world is self-caused and runs right through the entire fabric of the universe. And yet we carry on. Something carries us, something impels us forward - there is a power that moves all things, as Dante well knew. Leonard Cohen affirmed life to the end, despite the wealth of evidence against. In the Preface to All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), Marshall Berman writes of the pain of living making people want to give up, but they carry on all the same:
Shortly after I finished this book, my dear son Marc, five years old, was taken from me. I dedicate All That Is Solid Melts into Air to him. His life and death bring so many of its ideas and themes close to home: the idea that those who are most happily at home in the modern world, as he was, may be most vulnerable to the demons that haunt it; the idea that the daily routine of playgrounds and bicycles, of shopping and eating and cleaning up, of ordinary hugs and kisses, may be not only infinitely joyous and beautiful but also infinitely precarious and fragile; that it may take desperate and heroic struggles to sustain this life, and sometimes we lose. Ivan Karamazov says that, more than anything else, the death of children makes him want to give back his ticket to the universe. But he does not give it back. He keeps on fighting and loving; he keeps on keeping on.
Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That is Solid Melts into Air.
There is a Greater Love: but what is it? Death is a normal and natural part of life. But death by war and violence is not. What kind of God could create creatures that are so warlike and violent, so callous with regard to the lives of others as to inflict pain and death deliberately? Why do we carry on, in the teeth of the facts of fragility and finality? The insurgency of life is one answer, to carry on is life’s imperative. Is there a deeper truth or is that God enough? In The Faith, Cohen is asking all the questions again:
The sea so deep and blind
The sun, the wild regret
The club, the wheel, the mind,
O love, aren't you tired yet?
The club, the wheel, the mind
O love, aren't you tired yet?
The blood, the soil, the faith
These words you can't forget
Your vow, your holy place
O love, aren't you tired yet?
The blood, the soil, the faith
O love, aren't you tired yet?
A cross on every hill
A star, a minaret
So many graves to fill
O love, aren't you tired yet?
So many graves to fill
O love, aren't you tired yet?
The sea so deep and blind
Where still the sun must set
And time itself unwind
O love, aren't you tired yet?
And time itself unwind
O love, aren't you tired yet?
With respect to religious faith, You Want it Darker has been called the most Jewish of Cohen's works. Cohen was involved with Buddhism beginning in the 1970s and was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1996. He nevertheless continued to consider himself Jewish: "I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism." ("Leonard Cohen: Poet, Prophet, Eternal Optimist;". Myjewishlearning.com. Archived from the original on August 31, 2014. Retrieved September 22, 2014.) Cohen was a Sabbath-observant Jew, as described in an article in The New York Times:
Mr. Cohen keeps the Sabbath even while on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So how does he square that faith with his continued practice of Zen? "Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago", he said. "Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief."
See Larry Rohter, "On the Road, for Reasons Practical and Spiritual." The New York Times, February 25, 2009. For an extended discussion of the Jewish mystical and Buddhist motifs in Cohen's songs and poems, see Elliot R. Wolfson, "New Jerusalem Glowing: Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen in a Kabbalistic Key", Kabbalah: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 15 (2006): 103–152.
Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks makes a strong case for the Jewishness of You want it Darker. There are, however, as many Christian references, and more besides, in the song. In a 1993 interview entitled "I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible," he says, "at our best, we inhabit a biblical landscape, and this is where we should situate ourselves without apology….That biblical landscape is our urgent invitation…Otherwise, it's really not worth saving or manifesting or redeeming or anything, unless we really take up that invitation to walk into that biblical landscape." Cohen expressed an interest in Jesus as a universal figure, saying, "I'm very fond of Jesus Christ. He may be the most beautiful guy who walked the face of this earth. Any guy who says 'Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek' has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness...A man who declared himself to stand among the thieves, the prostitutes and the homeless. His position cannot be comprehended. It is an inhuman generosity. A generosity that would overthrow the world if it was embraced because nothing would weather that compassion. I'm not trying to alter the Jewish view of Jesus Christ. But to me, in spite of what I know about the history of legal Christianity, the figure of the man has touched me.” (Leonard Cohen: In His Own Words (In Their Own Words) Paperback. July 7, 1998.)
The chorus of You want it Darker begins with the first line of the Mourners Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead: ‘Magnified, Sanctified, be thy holy Name,’ a direct translation of Yitgadal v’yitkadash shmei rabah.
The blood, the soil, the faith, key themes in Cohen's The Faith – whatever seems to be the truth is a truth that is lived and experienced and passed on in a certain way in a certain place. And we keep fighting, loving and keeping on. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3: 16).
Life’s mandate is God’s mandate. That seems to be God’s way. But God’s mandate also seems to extend to things destructive of human health and happiness. Cohen has some troubling questions, particularly with respect to the way that divine sanction extends to war and cruelty: ‘Didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim.’ Have we? We do it, and God seemingly does nothing to stop us. Those on the receiving end cry out for help, but help doesn’t come. But it’s not the questions that are decisive, it’s Cohen’s response to them. The chorus ends with a Biblical Hebrew word Hineni, repeating ‘hineni, hineni.’ This is perhaps the most spiritually significant word in the entire Torah, translated from the Hebrew as ‘Here I am,’ and is a personal statement of deep and direct moral responsibility. This is followed by surrender ‘I’m ready my lord.’ The charges levelled against God remain, yet Cohen gives himself up all the same. And that is an answer beyond the facts of the case.
Hineini is the response of several Biblical characters to the Divine call that takes them on a journey far beyond their comfort zone. Most famously it draws our attention to the story that Jews call the Akedah, “the binding of Isaac,” in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The story pivots around the three times that Abraham responds Hineini, first to God when God commands him, then to his son on their journey up the mountain, and finally, to the angel, when the angel commands him to stop. This structure is echoed in the song, in which Hineini is also repeated three times.
Rabbi Sacks makes clear the extent to which the song echoes an ancient rabbinic midrash or commentary on the Biblical story. In the midrash, after the angel commands Abraham to stop from sacrificing Isaac, Abraham throws up his hands in total exasperation and cries out to God: ‘First you promise me that through Isaac, I will have descendants that will compare to the number of the stars. Then you tell me to sacrifice Isaac. And now you tell me to stop!’ Sacks hears Cohen issuing a similar Job-like protest to God: ‘You make human beings in Your image, and what do we do? We kill the flame, we kill in Your name! Is this the world that You want? Do You want it darker?’
You Want it Darker evokes the vocabulary, structure, and midrash of the Akedah and interweaves it with the opening lines of the Kaddish, begging the question that if this song is indeed Cohen’s Kaddish, for whom is Cohen saying it – for himself, or for a darkened humanity that has failed to live up to its potential in being created in the Divine image? The most troubling question of all is that human beings have lived up to that potential, and if there is pain and suffering in the world, it is because God wants it that way. You Want it Darker is four minutes of religious accusation from a man concerned to see a loving God live up to the promises of inherent goodness. The song is filled with allusions to Jewish liturgy, Christian liturgy, and Biblical texts.
You Want it Darker thus begins with an accusation against God with respect to personal suffering:
If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I’m ready, my lord
The ‘dealer’ is God, or what the facts of the case incline us to think is God. The tense is conditional. If these be the only facts of the matter, then the only conclusion to be drawn is that God is a monster and we are irredeemably broken. If. Cohen doesn’t quite say it is so. It seems to be the case, but Cohen is ambivalent, beginning with accusation and ending in surrender. But surrender in what way? Ultimate surrender to God, despite the impossibility of answering these key questions? Or surrendering of himself in the sense of a preparedness to take personal moral responsibility and stand judgement, regardless of the judge?
The age-old question of mortality in the midst of life and the inevitability of death crops up, of course. The ascertainable facts of the matter will never suffice to stop the question being asked. Whatever the answer, be it an acceptance of a finite understanding about suffering and death or the possibility of eternal life, Cohen doesn’t know it, no more than anyone else, but is ready to accept it. The fact that Cohen asks the question, but doesn’t answer it, is itself significant. The natural facts of the matter point to only the one conclusion. Those who refuse to draw that conclusion are implicitly holding out other, unknown and unknowable, possibilities.
Cohen knows fine well the case for 'God the monster.' The song questions the morality of a loving God who seemingly permits suffering. This is the question that has troubled the religious mind from the first. To argue for a good God creating a good world is contradicted by such a weight of evidence that it seems much easier to abandon all belief in such an entity. The problem is, human beings are not inclined to abandon the transcendent hope for something better, a world without pain and suffering, that is attendant upon the belief in a good God. Human beings are more inclined to surrender to this mystery of a God beyond ascertainable facts than they are to a natural world that inflicts pain and suffering and holds out indifference as the only way to cope with them. The cry in face of pain and suffering makes a difference.
Note most of all how little Cohen actually says with respect to a positive and definite resolution of the issue. He levels the charges, debates and discusses, puts the strongest case against God, and yet does not deliver a conclusive answer. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t presume that it is for him, or for you or I, to know. ‘It would seem Leonard Cohen is no different or superior to the millions of humans who have lived and died before him in this regard.’ His position is certainly different from and superior to those who do presume to answer the question with a degree of certainty. Cohen understands the wisdom of not answering unanswerable questions. And he understands the wisdom of asking, rather than not-asking, such questions, if they are the right ones. Cohen thus manages to address a weighty moral and philosophic dilemma without being presumptuous. He doesn’t draw any positive conclusions. The facts of the matter with respect to questions of faith point in only the one way, but Cohen’s awareness that the facts do not exhaust the question is clear in his solemn declaration of ‘Hineni, hineni / I’m ready, my Lord.’ Here Cohen demonstrates the true depth of faith, no matter how incomplete and broken and it may be. In writing these lines, I cannot but recall the argument of theoretical biologist and atheist Stuart Kauffman (in Reinventing the Sacred 2006), who argues that, above all, we need faith in order to live into the future with incomplete knowledge. We can never know the whole truth and yet live forwards as if we do know. That, too, demonstrates a depth of faith, a faith in living. That is compatible with Cohen’s words. It’s just that in using the Hebrew word Hineni to say ‘Here I am,’ Cohen is knowingly using a word used by Abraham and other Biblical heroes as an assertion of moral responsibility. ‘Hineni, Hineni, I'm Ready my Lord’ were the words used by Abraham in response to God’s call upon him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Cohen faces God, ‘I’m ready, my Lord,’ I’m here. I’m not hiding from the truth, whatever it may be. Cohen doesn’t offer any kind of explicit statement as to what it is he is ready for, beyond all that he can give, all that any of us can give, a personal account of ourselves, and a declaration of readiness whatever the outcome.
The faith that Cohen affirms is clearly of a different order to any general faith in life. By explicitly drawing upon a line commonly found in the Torah, ‘Hineni, hineni,’ a phrase famously declared by Abraham and Isaiah (the Book of Yeshayahu (Isaiah 6) in the Jewish Torah and the Old Testament, Cohen is making a definite statement of faith, even if he still refuses to spell out exactly what it is he is ready for, standing judgement or leaving this mortal coil.
Why does Cohen declare his readiness? Perhaps because his engagements with the world (and with the divine) have been so dispiriting, disillusioning and demoralising. He once warned of the breakdown of the ancient western code and things coming to slide in all directions. The consequences are not good. ‘I’ve seen the future,’ he declared, and it is murder.’ Now he seems to be abandoning the moral code himself, as a result of losing faith in its author, a loving God who seems to give divine sanction to this murder. Cohen’s readiness to take personal responsibility seems motivated by an awareness that there is no other way. He has ceased taking orders from above, not least because help, when needed, doesn’t come: ‘Magnified, sanctified/ Be thy holy name/ Vilified, crucified/ In the human frame/ A million candles burning/ For the help that never came.’ If things are dark, then it is because the governing authority behind it all wants it this way. In fine: ‘If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game.’ The God that makes false promises, the God who can ignore the ‘million candles’ lit in vain hopes of salvation, is the God that has dealt divine agents like Cohen out of the game. As agents of divine will, human beings want light and love, and yet the truth seems to be that this God we serve seems only to ‘want it darker.’
Here, Cohen goes beyond statements in previous songs. In Anthem he sings: ‘ring the bells that still can ring / forget your perfect offering / there is a crack in everything / that’s where the light gets in.’ In The Future he warns of things coming to slide in all directions as a result of the breaking of the ancient western code. The breakdown and slide has occurred, the vessel is not merely cracked, it has fallen into pieces, and there is no light from God, only a God that wants it darker. Cohen seems ready to abandon core beliefs such as ‘fundamental goodness and the wisdom of the way’ in facing a universal reckoning: ‘please don’t make me go there/ though there be a God or not.’
In the concluding songs on the album, It Seemed the Better Way and Steer Your Way, Cohen is prepared to relinquish his tight grip on past moral and spiritual certainties of the past:
It seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
But now it’s much too late
To turn the other cheek
It Seemed the Better Way, Cohen sings in the past tense. The beliefs, stories and practices that sustained the better way in Cohen life are not as vital to him anymore as he prepares to take his leave of this mortal coil. Note, this is not so much a repudiation of the way he has lived as a justification of a form of life that brought him thus far, but can carry him no further. These beliefs, stories and practices were the better way once and served their purpose. To him, now, they appear as all things of this earthly life, transitory. All he can do now is navigate his way through the ruins:
Steer your way through the ruins
Of the Altar and the Mall
Steer your way through the fables
Of Creation and the Fall.
‘It’s over now,’ he sings, and ‘it’s much too late’ to search for new truths. In It Seemed the Better Way, Cohen ponders the virtues of silence and acceptance, invoking the wine as the blood of Christ:
I better hold my tongue
I better take my place
Lift this glass of blood
Try to say the grace.
In Steer Your Way, Cohen takes the opportunity for one final outburst of prophetic outrage:
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap.
That seems like an expression of hopeless hope that somehow, all evidence to the contrary, we can maintain a faith in the moral order of the universe to the end and live up to its promise of inherent goodness. Except that clear suggestion of the song is that if the world is as dark as it appears to be, and humankind so utterly irredeemable, then that’s the way that God must want it: darker. If God ceases to be the transcendent source of hope, love and redemption, then what’s the point? We have no option but to be ready in a personal sense, taking responsibility. A godless universe makes existentialists of us all, a familiar enough refrain from the past century. But Cohen is wrestling with a problem much more troubling than that: the existence of God as a figure that sanctions the darkness. ‘I struggled with some demons / They were middle class and tame’ closes off the direction into endless existential whingeing. The problem is much deeper than that of seeking meaning in a meaningless world. God is real, but has reneged on His promises and let everyone down; worse, has sanctioned cruelty and violence in His name. ‘Vilified and crucified in the human frame / A million candles burning for the help that never came.’ I can only read that first line as Jesus as the son of God, who died for our sins, repaying the debt. And yet there is no salvation. But when did God ever say that salvation would be here on earth?
In Anthem, Cohen tells us to ‘forget your perfect offering.’ In Treaty, he is amenable to a peace offering. He entertains little hope for accord between opposing belief system: ‘Born Again is born without a skin/ The poison enters into everything.’ Cohen calls for a pact, a treaty. Which begs the question of who the parties of this treaty are. Who is the one being entreatied? Where does moral responsibility for pain lie? The fact that there is a real debate to be had here is indicated by the fact that a good case could be made for any of the parties involved: God, the ominous ‘they,’ and the narrator:
There’s a lover in the story
But the story’s still the same
There’s a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it’s written in the scriptures
And it’s not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame
They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I’m ready, my lord
Treaty sounds like thrashing out the terms of a divorce settlement after the loss of a deep relation.
Rabbi Brian Field writes:
Treaty, the second song of the album, reminds me of the way the Torah describes the last years of the two most spiritually compelling characters in the Book of Genesis – Abraham and Jacob. Following the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham lives for many decades. But Abraham and God never speak again. Similarly, Cohen describes how God feels absent to him. The passion for God he felt earlier in his life is gone. The best he can hope for in his relationship with God is some kind of treaty “between Your love and mine.”
I sit at your table every night
I try but I just don’t get high with you.
I haven’t said a word since you’ve been gone
That any liar couldn’t say as well.
He doesn’t blame God for the absence, but rather, points to himself:
I’m so sorry for the ghost I made you to be
Only one of us was real – and that was me.
Treaty also reminds me of what Jacob says to Pharaoh after Jacob settles in Egypt. The 130-year-old man who fled home as a teenager, who became a wealthy and successful shepherd, wrestled with the angel, and who reconciled with his brother, simply said, “The days of my life have been few and hard” (Genesis 47.9). In a similar vein, Cohen, at the end of a phenomenally creative and successful career, simply says:
I’m angry and I’m tired all the time.
In Treaty, evoking a time in his life when spirit seemed much more alive, vivid, and even miraculous, and when truth was something that he could realize, he draws on a famous New Testament story:
I’ve seen you change the water into wine
I seen you change it back to water too.
In the final verse of the song, he revisits the same imagery as a dying man:
I wish there was a treaty we could sign.
It’s over now, the water and the wine.
Treaty is almost like a forensic examination of love's demise. It's a graceful rumination reportage on the last flickers of a doomed relationship that he delivers with a stinging intimacy:
And I wish there was a treaty we could sign
I do not care who takes this bloody hill
I'm angry and I'm tired all the time
I wish there was a treaty
I wish there was a treaty
Between your love and mine.
Cohen’s confession that he ‘didn’t know’ that he had ‘permission to murder and to main’ strongly suggests his surprise that a good God would indeed permit such cruelty and violence. That’s not the true God, surely, but human beings acting contrary to God by killing and maiming others in God’s name. But Cohen goes deeper than this familiar point to comment on the nature of God. The criticism that human beings are acting in ways contrary to God keeps God’s good true nature intact. Cohen goes further to question this nature by suggesting that, in causing human beings physical hard and death in the first place, God is the one who gives human beings implicit sanction to do likewise. The concept of Imitatio Dei holds that human beings are made in the image of God: as human beings are, then so must be God. If human beings inflict injury upon one another, then they do so in the same way that God has. The only conclusion to draw is that the moral responsibility for human evil lies ultimately with God: If God had wanted things differently, better, then He would have made it so. The direct connection between divine and human evil is stated explicitly in the final stanza:
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Cohen’s mixing of Christian and Jewish symbolism is deliberate. The first line derives from Jewish liturgy, which itself is derived from Psalm 92:2 and 99:3; this is coupled with the second line recalling the death of Jesus to signify the violence that has been done in God’s name, even to sanctify God’s name. The charge is that God intends for human beings to suffer, and that it is human action that sees the intention through. It is, of course, a complete inversion of the theological position of a good God enjoining human beings into right actions to live up to the inherent goodness of the moral order. The song issues a challenge to human beings to live up to their high moral ideals, ideals attendant upon the existence of a good God, or give it up. It’s not only God that wants it darker, but human beings themselves. If they wanted it otherwise, then they would have it otherwise. ‘If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game,’ are words that apply to a faith in humanity at least as much as they apply to a faith in God. The initial accusation against God can now be levelled against humanity. Cohen doesn’t want to dance this dance with this kind of God:
If you are the dealer, let me out of the game
If you are the healer, I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame
You want it darker
How real do people want it? The question is one for those who argue for the non-existence of God. Because if there is indeed no God, then the responsibility for all this cruelty and suffering lies squarely at the feet of humanity, nowhere else. Once we finally abandon the belief in the reality of a good God, then the world gets a whole lot darker. Things are every bit as bad as they seem, and there is no transcendent source for love and redemption, no prospects of anything better. That's what the facts of the case say it is.
If this is the only God, then of course so many will quit the game. But the cries against suffering continue, the pleas for something better continue nevertheless. There has to be another game and another God. Because if there isn’t, then we have no option but to cease crying and fall into mutual indifference. Life is pain and suffering and lamentation is to no avail. But that resignation, that foreclosure on life, doesn't ring true, doesn't make sense of human life.
In the Bible there is a whole literature of lament, grief, protest. Much of the Bible is written in tears. 'There can be a darkness so dark that it extinguishes any attempt to light a light. The Bible does not hide from this. It is an honest book.' (Jonathan Sacks 2011 The Great Partnership ch 12 The Problem of Evil).
Judaism, Rabbi Sacks argues, is a religion of protest and not a philosophy of acceptance:
Abrahamic monotheism is not a religion of acceptance. It is a religion of protest. It does not try to vindicate the suffering of the world. That is the way of Job's comforters, not Job.
Sacks 2011 ch 12
The source of that protest is the belief in a good God. Remove that, and there is no point in protest. All we have left to us is an acceptance of a cruel, violent and murderous reality. We only stay in the game out of a belief in a transcendent source and hope. Remove that, on account of the facts counting against it, and all that remains are those facts. Those facts of cruelty, violence and suffering do not change. We merely have no option but to accept them and cultivate indifference. It’s just that we seem to have been made for a morality that makes a difference, regardless of the weight of contrary facts. Jonathan Sacks writes well here:
"But faith does not operate by the logic of the left brain and the law of the excluded middle. It feels both sides of the contradiction. God exists and evil exists. The more powerfully I feel the existence of God, the more strongly I protest the existence of evil. That is why in the Abrahamic faith it is the giants of faith, not the sceptics or cynics, who cry aloud, as Moses and Jeremiah and Habakkuk cried aloud, with a cry that echoes through the ages. That is why Job refuses to be comforted and why he would not let go of God.
There is a difference between a contradiction and a cry.
You can solve a contradiction by sitting quietly in a room, thinking, using conceptual ingenuity, reframing. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves the world unchanged. But faith does not leave the world unchanged. You cannot solve a cry by thinking. Moses, weeping for his people, is not consoled by Leibniz's admittedly brilliant proof that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God's justice in a world of evil, is compelling evidence that in the translation of Abrahamic spirituality into the language of Plato and Aristotle, something is lost. What is lost is the cry."
Sacks The Great Partnership ch 12
However brilliant the philosophy, it won't wipe away a tear, still less deliver a world in which all tears shall be wiped away. If you want such a thing, you will need to look elsewhere. "To what avail lamentation in face of historical necessity," wrote Marx. I would quote the Serenity Prayer back at this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." I would note that necessity is the tyrant's plea. i would also draw attention to false fixities and false claims of certainty: much that has been deemed inevitable has been merely a false objectivism projected by groups aiming at power. And, finally, I would state that just because something is an unalterable fact is not going to stop me protesting against or crying over it if it is plain wrong and cruel. Logic and evidence form only a part of the human story; those who seek to govern existence by these things alone slide very easily into inhumanism. There is an emotional intelligence which does not reduce to fact and reason. You cannot find truth by way of fact and logic unless you have already found it without them – what is it that causes us to seek truth and govern our lives in light of truth in the first place?
Cohen closes with an affirmation of faith:
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I’m ready, my lord
Hineni Hineni, hineni
Hineni
Cohen accepts that we are in the dark when it comes to God, life, the working of the world, mortality and beyond. Positivists would conclude simply that such darkness is non-existence, and any speculation beyond ascertainable facts is an invitation into wishful thinking. Lighter or darker, which way do you want it?
“You Want it Darker is not the first Jewish work to force God to stand in judgment. In fact, there is biblical precedent for this model. Psalm 39, which is attributed to King David, accuses God of disinterest when it comes to the suffering of his creations. There is a frustrating ambiguity that clouds the meaning of this unusual psalm. While the speaker is clearly in great pain, it is unclear who is responsible for causing this pain. At times, it seems that God is the one who is directly causing David to suffer (see v.10; “I am worn down by the blows of your hand),” but at other times it seems that David is most concerned by the deeds of the wicked, coupled with God’s refusal to intervene (see v.1; “I will keep a muzzle on my mouth as long as the wicked are in my presence.”
The psalm, however, is addressed not to the wicked; it is addressed to God. Regardless of who is the direct perpetrator of evil, God or wicked people who are causing human suffering, David holds God responsible. And this responsibility correlates with God’s general indifference towards the brevity of human life. God’s indifference is first referenced as simply a reality that the speaker has to deal with. But later in the psalm, this reality is amplified into an accusation. Compare verses five and eleven:
39:5: You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight. Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.
39:11: ‘You chastise mortals in punishment for sin, consuming like a moth what is dear to them; surely everyone is a mere breath.
In 39:5, the speaker only states that God has made human life brief. But in 39:11, the speaker argues that the brevity of human life is what makes God value the human experience so little.
In the end, there is no resolution. The speaker concludes that any relationship between the human and the divine will inevitably lead to suffering, because this is the inherent nature of a relationship characterized by a disparity of power:
39:13: Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart and am no more.
The word “am no more” in Hebrew is “Eineni,” which is a contraction from “ein ani:” “I am not.” This word is essentially the opposite of the keyword of Cohen’s song; “hineni,” which is a contraction for “hayn ani:” “here I am.”
Cohen thus draws a very different conclusion to that of Psalm 39: Whereas the biblical author concludes that a person cannot have a relationship with God that does not involve an intensely painful experience, Cohen surrenders to a relationship in which he will forever be in the dark—because that’s how God wants it. (Malka Simkovich 2016).
I want to come back to David accusing God of disinterest when it comes to the suffering of his creations. That’s the key point. There are two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible, the God of physical creation, referring to nature, laws and causal processes, and the God of love and personal relationships. When Einstein declared to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein that he believed in the God of Spinoza, he expressed a belief in the physical world and its processes, and nothing more. Many respond to this conception and affirm it as superior to the religious conception of a personal God, but consider the words deeply and at length: ‘I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ When David accused God of disinterest in face of human suffering, his protest was motivated by an understanding and an expectation that God, a God of love, simply has to be interested. With the God of Einstein/Spinoza, the God of physical nature, there can be no such expectation. Instead of protest there can only be an acceptance of disinterest. David can accuse God of not giving a damn precisely because he knows that God must be morally concerned. There is no such moral concern in nature. Nature doesn’t give a damn. The cultivation of disinterest is a philosophy of acceptance. That’s the deal without God. There is no point to the game other than staying in the game, by any means necessary. The facts of cruelty and violence remain unchanged; all that changes is our approach to them, exchanging vain protest and hope for resigned acceptance and indifference. The word ‘apathy’ has a Greek root, apatheia or a-pathos, meaning literally ‘freedom from suffering.’ We can overcome the pain of suffering by ending our protest against it, abandoning the expectations and promises raised by the existence of a good God to accept it as a fact of life, and the violence and the cruelty. That’s the reality of human beings, as revealed by the historical record. The existence of God merely has us torturing ourselves with unrealistic ideals. Abandon them, cultivate apathy, and mirror the disinterest of Nature rather than the futile moral concern of God, and live 'without feeling,’ the condition of apathy. A belief in God, sharing in the practices and ways of life attendant upon that belief, means learning to feel and share both the burdens and the joys of suffering. That’s the game we are in.
What to make of it?
Rabbi Brian Field recalls (2017) the final line in the verse about Jesus in Suzanne:
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
‘Isn’t that the fate of all of our stories, indeed, the fate of every self? You Want it Darker is Cohen’s testimony about what it feels like to be at the end of one’s life, sinking back into emptiness like a stone. When I listen to these songs from this perspective, I am moved to tears and to silence.’
You want it darker, asked Leonard Cohen. We kill the flame. Vilified, crucified, in the human frame. 'It's written in the scriptures, and it's not some idle claim.' There are some deeply troubling elements in the human condition. This was Leonard Cohen's final message to us: God I love you, but I don't love the world you created - I don't like the human beings you have made in your image. If you are the dealer, then I'm out of the game. If you're the healer, I'm broken and lame. And yet for all of that, Leonard Cohen continued to affirm life and God and light and hope. And that is extraordinary. Everywhere, there are broken vessels, but within those vessels is the divine light - that is the power of God's love to reach everywhere:
I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair with a love so vast and so shattered it will reach you everywhere. Leonard Cohen - Heart with No Companion
And that, of course, is the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us, each and all, the Love that moves all things. It is a Love beyond the human. It is unfailing and ceaseless. It is the Love that redeems all. I can't prove that Love to be true. The argument above doesn't do that and cannot do that. No argument based on logic and evidence can do that. Kant taught us not to mix our logics. What I hope to have shown is a cosmic longing for life as a new beginning beyond the deaths that not only we suffer, but our creations, however technically sophisticated or aesthetically pleasing, and which nature too suffers. That longing is real. The question I ask is which reality is it drawn? To whom do we cry beyond the facts of life? The reality of the quest for meaning may not prove the truth of those things in which human beings invest meaning - but it indicates a transcendent source and a hope that springs eternal.
More on the above here:
By Malka Simkovich - November 14, 2016
By Jesse Kinos-Goodin
'You Want it Darker,' released on singer's 82nd birthday, is an eerie piece with strong religious elements
By GABE FRIEDMAN
Excerpt from a much larger work of mine: