Saturday, May 29, 2021

How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses




How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses

PJ Grisar May 23, 2021
I
Our story, like its subject, starts in several places.


The balmy parapets of Jerusalem, where David gives into temptation. The third-row pew of a Montreal synagogue, where the shul president’s son learns about the Bible’s most calamitous affair. A movie theater in Mohegan Lake, N.Y., where a 10-year-old Jewish boy watches a movie called “Shrek” and hears plaintive piano while an ogre surveys his ransacked swamp, catching a glimpse of his reflected face in shattered glass as these words play:

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?

I was that 10-year-old kid, hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the first time, and wondering what it had to do with the giant green guy I’d been watching for the past hour.

Like most people, I haven’t been able to escape the song, an infectious melody with cryptic verses and a simple chorus of a sacred word and too many covers to name. In some ways, as the poet sang, it doesn’t matter which you heard. Not because all versions were created equal, but because in two decades the song has become so pervasive as to signify nothing and everything.

A case in point: Just a few months after the Republican National Convention featured two unauthorized versions of “Hallelujah” set to fireworks, gospel singer Yolanda Adams performed a version approved by Cohen’s estate on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration, as part of a memorial to 400,000 dead of COVID-19. Both uses, played mere feet from each other on the National Mall, seemed to hit the wrong note.

The song is too accepting of fallibility to champion Trump. It’s too sexual to mourn the dead. It’s too Jewish to work as a Christian-inflected hymn. But like the story of David, the tune means so much to so many, that it’s hard to pin down a single interpretation. Online, debates about its meaning take on a Talmudic intensity.

I wanted to understand the song — what Cohen meant by it, and if that meaning was lost to other musicians. I needed to know Cohen’s spiritual biography. I had to find out how the song worked in synagogues or at klezmer festivals, in Hebrew and in Yiddish. I wanted to know what the song meant in the modern state of Israel and what it had to do with the Bible figures it winks at. In short, I needed to know if the song, perhaps the most misunderstood popular work of the last 40 years, was truly Jewish and what, if anything, that means for its status as a global anthem. Does its popularity mean that Jewish thought has gone mainstream, or, as the critics trumpet, that many interpreters simply don’t get what the song’s really saying?

To try to figure it all out, I talked with the man who wrote the book on “Hallelujah.” I chatted with Cohen’s rabbi, his cantor and his manager. I spoke with songwriters who adapted it for Jewish venues and faith leaders who use it as liturgy.

I found in “Hallelujah” a song that draws from Kabbalah, the Psalms and Hasidic thought. It is a manifesto of a man whose life was spent appealing to, and wrestling with, the absolute, and touching the mundane with the divine. It is the living text of a new Psalmist, who birthed a melodic prayer used in synagogues — but who never meant for it to be heard in those sacred spaces. “Hallelujah,” with its layered contradictions, is a mark of Cohen’s spiritual consistency, and finally, his work as a Jew hoping to comprehend a holy, broken world. But before it became all that, it was yet another struggle to find the right words.

II
A Baffled King Composes “Hallelujah”

Alan Light first started thinking about “Hallelujah” when he heard it as part of Kol Nidre services at Beit Simchat Torah, a progressive synagogue in midtown Manhattan. When I asked if the song was Jewish, Light, author of 2012’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,’” resisted a simple answer.

“This song has permeated the world and people’s lives and their own experiences in such a way that pretending this song is about this specific thing — we’re not there anymore,” he said.

How the song rose, from an obscure, synth-heavy track on Cohen’s 1984 album “Various Positions,” proves “Hallelujah” can’t be confined to any one meaning or definitive version. As outlined in Light’s book, soon to be a documentary film, its journey was a group effort: an act of collage in which Cohen’s original was soon surpassed by other, sparer interpretations.

To begin with, “Various Positions” was a tough sell. Columbia refused to even release it, leaving the job to independent label Passport. Few reviews of the album mentioned the first song on the second side: a strange, pseudo-gospel composition with a decidedly gospel-sounding title.

Bob Dylan was the first to recognize the song’s promise, playing “Hallelujah” on two occasions on the 1988 leg of his “Never-Ending Tour.” Some time before that, the Prophet of Hibbing and the Prince of Bummers from Montreal were having coffee in Paris. Dylan asked how long it took Cohen to write it. Cohen lied and said two years — in actuality, it took around five.

While there are four verses in the cut on “Various Positions,” Cohen wrote about 80 for the song, originally titled “The Other Hallelujah.” Describing his process, Cohen once conjured an agonized picture of a supplicant before his muse. He was in his underwear at the Royalton Hotel, banging his head on the floor, saying “I can’t finish this song.”

And he was never done fine-tuning it. The lyrics suggest Cohen’s hesitation when putting the song together. Instead of narrative unity, there are fragments of scene and sentiment, all connected by the word “Hallelujah,” which comprises the chorus and the final word in each verse. The word is a Hebrew compound of “Hallelu” (praise) and “Ja” (God), in a command form. In the Bible, it’s most frequently found in the Psalms attributed to David.

The song begins with David, the “baffled king.” But Cohen’s pronouns are slippery and his subject changes. The first verse mentions David’s playing, which placates the Lord — either the tempestuous King Saul or God — and a “you” who doesn’t care for music. In the second stanza, the “you” appears to be David, seeing a woman bathing on the roof, as he did Bathsheba. But then, in the second half of the line, the “you” appears to allude to Samson, tied to a kitchen chair as Delilah cuts his hair.

The biblical archetypes suggest tragic sexual encounters — or, in the case of David, Cohen’s own affair with a married woman. But the song then departs from biblical imagery, moving on to accusations of blasphemy, introducing the idea of a “holy or the broken hallelujah.” Finally the speaker laments his inability to please that ever-shifting “you” — then, ultimately, shrugs it off.

Cohen had second thoughts about the song’s biblical references, leaving them out in concert and using unrecorded verses in their stead. But for all of his tinkering, he ended his live versions like this: “Even though it all went wrong/I’ll stand before the lord of song/with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” The words, an exaltation in surrender to the world in all its contradictions, were key to the song’s message.

“It’s a rather joyous song,” Cohen said on the release of “Various Positions,” and, he argued often, a secular one. He wanted to push the words of praise back to Earth, “to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion.”

But when the Velvet Underground’s John Cale was preparing to sing the song for “I’m Your Fan,” a 1991 album of covers made by notable Cohen admirers, he rejected some of the unused lyrics because they seemed too religious — or at least too Jewish.

“Some of them, I couldn’t sing myself,” Cale told the Boston Globe of the countless alternate verses Cohen faxed him. “Some of them are about Yahweh, about religion, and reflecting Leonard’s background.”

It’s tempting, but probably a mistake, to use this remark as evidence of the song’s Jewishness. For all the variations of “Hallelujah,” those other words were never recorded, and it was Cale’s new, intimate arrangement that would make the song an anthem.

III
A Cold, Broken and Tragic “Hallelujah”


In the early ‘90s, Jeff Buckley, son of folk singer Tim Buckley, was cat-sitting for a friend in Park Slope. One day he discovered “I’m Your Fan” in her record collection and heard Cale’s “Hallelujah.” Scored to urgent piano, it was an unfussy lover’s lament, with dark meditations on solitude, good and bad sex and the bitter lessons of a doomed relationship. With alternate verses supplied by Cohen, and no cheesy choir, this version sounded nothing like the original — but then, Buckley, like so many others, had never heard the original. Music history might well be different if he had.

The just-emerging Buckley started playing the song at gigs, ending as Cale did, not with the joyous “nothing on my tongue,” but with “It’s not a cry you can hear at night/it’s not somebody who’s seen the light — it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!”

The song’s meaning shifted. It had a sexier edge and a more tortured conclusion with a new brand of vulnerability. Cale’s world-weary delivery and Cohen’s arch humor (“You said I took the name in vain/I don’t even know the name/And if I did, well really, what’s it to ya?”) were gone, replaced by what Buckley called the “hallelujah of an orgasm.” That eroticism was trapped forever on Buckley’s album “Grace,” where the track begins with an exhausted exhale.

Light says the difference in the versions was inevitable: Cohen recorded the original when he was 50; Buckley was 27 — and wouldn’t make it past 30.

After Buckley drowned on May 29, 1997, his “Hallelujah” accrued the air of the sacrosanct. The song was further tethered to tragedy a few years later, when it became the unlikely backing track for 9/11. As Light’s book recounts, VH1 played Buckley’s “Hallelujah” under a hastily-assembled tribute video made of on-the-ground footage of New York after the attacks. The footage played constantly that September of 2001.

Soon the song appeared in montages of crisis and uncertainty on network TV shows, boosted by the appearance of Cale’s version in “Shrek,” a national calamity and Sony’s eagerness to license it. Next it showed up in singing competitions and, owing in part to its religious-sounding refrain, weddings and funerals. It’s now in the repertoire of every kid on YouTube and every busker with a street corner, each with different variations and, with each reorganization, a different takeaway. Paul Simon told Light that Cohen’s song had supplanted “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as a multi-use standard. Despite the objections of many tired listeners, nothing yet has toppled “Hallelujah.”

Last year, a doctor in Cincinnati sang it to COVID patients as they left the hospital. When Italy was on lockdown, the song was heard from the balconies. “It still fulfills these people,” Light said.

It’s hard, and perhaps cruel, to quibble with those who find their own deep, adaptable meaning in the song. We are squarely in the realm of death of the author. But how Cohen lived, and chose to die, tells us where the song came from, and what Cohen wanted it to say.


KD LANG DOING HALLELUJAH

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