Here I Am & 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

from You Want It Darker Leonard Cohen

 Saturday marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Leonard Cohen, poet and musician and mystic, and there have been concerts to commemorate his passing. Cohen died in California at 82 and Rolling Stone decided he was the 103rd greatest singer of all time. I find that a little weird given that he had to be cajoled into singing publicly by Judy Collins and as a singer he was a good poet, an opinion perhaps not widely shared. 

Cohen began life in Montreal and was raised in the Jewish faith. Through the decades he explored Buddhism and he was much more than a dabbler or dilletante. He spent five years in seclusion at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California and was ordained as a monk. He was given the Dharma name Jikan which means silence 

The excellent writer Pico Iyer, himself deeply intrigued by Buddhism, visited his long-time hero Cohen and observed "I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who’d been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world."

Some of us will remember Cohen's 60s hits, Suzanne and So Long, Marianne, long before Hallelujah of the 1980s, which became the Amazing Grace of a generation.The latter is an enigmatically spiritual song with references to Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba. There have been a lot of covers of Hallelujah (far too many) but KD Lang's is the best. 

I've written about Cohen a couple of times, the first not long before his death. I reflected on what turned out to be one of his last songs, You Want it Darker. It includes the Hebrew word "hineni" which is part of a prayer in which the Jewish cantor recites: Hineni he’ani mima’as. Here I am, impoverished in deeds and merit. But nevertheless I have come before You, God, to plead on behalf of Your people Israel.

The cantor and choir of the chorus in the recording are from the synagogue of Cohen's youth, Montreal’s Shaar Hashomayim, The cantor, a tenor is Gideon Zelermyer, with the Shaar choir, and their voices are powerful, ethereal. 

Cohen also reflected on Yeshua, Jesus, the Jew: 

As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ comes and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace.

Here are the links to those earlier blogs: 

https://lionlamb-bowmanville.blogspot.com/2016/10/darkness-and-light-in-leonard-cohen.html

https://lionlamb-bowmanville.blogspot.com/2025/03/leonard-cohen-and-mezuzahs.html