Leonard Cohen - A Broken Offering

This very cool article on Leonard Cohen and religion was published by the very impressive Aeon Magazine. Cohen is Jewish by birth and by culture, and he is a Zen Buddhist by training and practice, and somewhere in the mix of all that, along with a healthy dose of sexuality, Cohen has crafted his own version of faith. Unlike other singers who have found faith (Dylan the Christian, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam the Muslim, George Harrison the devotee of Hare Krishna), you are not likely to be able to identify a evangelism in his music and lyrics.


There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

A broken offering

A cracked voice, an empty bank account, a tour of duty. Who would have thought so much light could still get in? 

Tim Footman 16 November 2012

Leonard Cohen attends the Prince of Asturias Awards ceremony at the Campoamor Theater on October 21, 2011 in Oviedo, Spain. Photo by Jack Abuin/Zuma/Corbis

~ Tim Footman is a journalist and editor, and the author of Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah: A New Biography (2009).

Leonard Cohen’s autumnal years have been afflicted, and his writing nuanced, by more than a simple awareness of his own mortality. The Canadian singer-songwriter spent most of the 1990s in a Zen monastery in California, during which time his manager (and former lover) Kelley Lynch siphoned off several million dollars’ worth of earnings, mostly from the sale of his publishing company to Sony. Not being particularly astute in such matters, it took Cohen several years to work out what had happened, by which time he was facing a severely diminished bank account and a rather larger tax bill.

The resulting legal squabbles no doubt sapped Cohen’s creative powers, and used up even more of his diminished funds. That Lynch was ordered to pay him back was little consolation — she hasn’t done so, and is now in prison for harassing him. Yet Cohen was able to cast a ruefully theological spin on events and all the time he was forced to spend in other people’s offices. As he put it to one Canadian journalist in 2009: ‘If God wants to bore you to death, I guess that’s His business.’ Such, we might think, is the wisdom of Cohen. His music has always awakened impulses in his devotees to see him as some sort of mentor for the melancholic. But this impulse took a new twist once Cohen’s own fortunes looked bleak: what would, or could, he do in the face of this personal crisis?

The reality, of course, was that Cohen needed to find some cash. His output had never been prolific (he has released a dozen studio albums in a 45-year recording career) and, in any case, his critical acclaim has never been matched in sales figures. Where he had always been able to turn a respectable profit was through live shows, though he hadn’t toured since the early 1990s. Through necessity rather than any particular inclination, Cohen went back on the road.

But 2008 was a tumultuous time in the wider world. As Cohen and his band snaked through North America, Europe and Australasia, the full impact of the global economic meltdown was beginning to take hold. But this was not some preening rock behemoth making a brief stopover from tax exile in Monaco or the Bahamas. Cohen was just another shlimazel who’d woken up one morning to find his pension pot had been cleaned out. Many of those who came to see him perform were facing all too similar anxieties. Long-term fans were perhaps contemplating reduced retirements; the more recent ‘converts’, many of them encouraged by the recommendations of Nick Cave or Rufus Wainwright, were similarly fearful of their diminished futures, their faith in the material rewards of modern capitalism deflated. It was a potential congregation of gloom and despondency, almost a parody of Cohen’s reputation as the patron saint of bedsit depressives. What philosophical (or, if so inclined, spiritual) consolation could Cohen offer? The fact that his singing voice, never the most technically perfect instrument, was now little more than a forlorn croak simply added to the mood. The line, ‘I was born with the gift of a golden voice’ (from ‘Tower of Song’, on the 1988 album I’m Your Man) was greeted every night with an ironic cheer.

Cohen’s religious background is one of contradiction and complexity. Born into a Jewish family in Montreal in 1934, his maternal grandfather was a rabbi, and the young Leonard enjoyed reading the Book of Isaiah with him. Unsurprisingly, Old Testament imagery crops up regularly in his poems and songs, adding to his reputation — only partly deserved — for austerity and solemnity. Yet Montreal was very much a Catholic city (Cohen even had an Irish nanny as a child), and his work is just as likely to refer to Jesus, Mary or Joan of Arc. Indeed, his first successful song, ‘Suzanne’, tells of ‘our lady of the harbour’, a statue that stands in the chapel of Nôtre Dame de Bon Secours, one of the city’s oldest churches.

But while the imagery might have appealed, Cohen never thought of converting to Catholicism. In his own idiosyncratic way, he maintained a loyalty to Judaism, despite his many indulgences in the archetypal rock and roll foibles of sex and drugs. It wasn’t until the age of 33, by which time he had begun to make his name as a poet and novelist and was recording his first album, that he became seriously interested in the doctrine and practice of another religion — Zen Buddhism.

 

Laughing Lenny: 'all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have equal value'. Photo by Bob King/Corbis

Though he became closely associated with the teachings of the Rinzai monk Joshu Sasaki, known as Roshi, Cohen still identified himself as a Jew. What he craved in his association with Roshi was something he called ‘the voluptuousness of austerity’, a delectably contradictory concept that echoes both the koan (the paradoxical statements and questions that are central to Zen practice) and Cohen’s own attitude to the spiritual life: at various times committed, ambivalent or mocking, and sometimes all three at once. One of the things that attracted Cohen to Roshi’s teachings was the teacher’s ability to discuss the benefits of self-denial while knocking back cups of sake. The two of them also later bonded over a shared fondness for brandy. When Cohen became a resident at Roshi’s monastery on Mount Baldy in California, he would wake up half an hour before the 3am start demanded of residents, not for extra meditation time, but because he knew he’d need vast quantities of coffee and cigarettes to prepare himself for the drudgery of the prescribed rituals.

There is, understandably, a temptation to look for a doctrine or creed in Cohen’s writing that captures his spiritual outlook — nonetheless, it is a temptation that is not easily satisfied. The history of his best-known song, ‘Hallelujah’ (originally released on the Various Positions album in 1984), neatly encapsulates his spiritual eclecticism. Its lyrics draw on the story of David and Bathsheba in the second Book of Samuel, but Cohen so obsessively wrote and rewrote the piece over the years that the explicitly theological content (‘Maybe there’s a God above…’) came and went. What remains, above all, is a tribute to the power of religious music, of hymns and ritual itself, without specific acknowledgement of any particular religious truth underpinning it. There is something indefinably hymn-like about it — Guy Garvey of the band Elbow, who comes from a Catholic background, has described it as ‘a mantra’ — but ultimately it transcends any particular denominational categorisation, and has found favour with the devout and atheists alike, as well as most steps in between.

If anything, it’s a hymn to hymns, rather than to God (or gods). As such, it’s been recorded by the Algerian singer Khalida Azzouza and by the erstwhile Songs of Praise host Aled Jones, but it is also played every Saturday night on the radio station of the Israeli Defence Forces. (Cohen played some ad hoc concerts for Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur war in 1973.) Cohen tends to be evasive when asked to explain his work, but he suggests that the lyrics explain that ‘Many kinds of hallelujahs do exist, and all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have equal value.’ This notion of brokenness, an awareness of one’s own frailties and imperfections, crops up time and again in Cohen’s lyrics. In ‘Anthem’ (1992), the notion of the ‘perfect offering’ (the Biblically sanctioned sacrifice to God) is spurned in favour of the ‘crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.’ Nothing good (or enlightening) is possible without flaws or fractures. In ‘Come Healing’, from his most recent album Old Ideas (2012), brokenness is specifically equated with the splinters of Christ’s cross. What is paramount is Cohen’s awareness of the grimness of existence, and for many years critics sarcastically dubbed him ‘Laughing Lenny’ for the apparently gloomy nature of his outlook. But, it is from such fractures and splinters that the ‘healing of the spirit’ comes. His recent temporal crisis might have, in a very literal sense, been about being broke but, in spiritual terms, Cohen has always been broken. Brokenness is not an end in itself, but an opportunity to allow something else to happen.

While Cohen has frequently dealt with religious themes in other songs, the more often he does it, the harder it is to pin down to any specific ideology. ‘Who By Fire’ (1974) is based on the structure of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead; ‘The Smokey Life’ (1979) suggests the impermanence at the core of Buddhism; ‘Anthem’, with its bells and ‘holy dove’ hints at the Christian ritual and imagery that informed much of his early works. But Cohen’s theology, however he might define it, seems anything but easy-going. Old Ideas is riddled with intimations of mortality. As well as ‘Come Healing’, it includes a piece simply titled ‘Amen’ that sounds almost like a crib sheet for the King James Bible, with references to angels, ‘the blood of the lamb’, and the assertion that ‘vengeance belongs to the lord’.

Some fans might regard themselves more as disciples than mere enthusiasts. Yet, while Cohen might have admired the rigours of discipline — as a boy he’d seriously contemplated joining the Canadian army, and one of the attractions of his time in the Buddhist monastery was the quasi-military discipline it imposed — he was always wary of the those who sought to administer it. He might have had a close and fond relationship with Roshi the Zen master, but he never saw him as a guru. As Cohen said in an interview on Mount Baldy: ‘I’ve always had a great suspicion of charismatic holy men… A lot of them are just head hunters.’ It was a resistance to being led that he’d expressed as far back as his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967). The lyrics of ‘Master Song’ from that album castigate the chancers and charlatans that he — in common with many of his contemporaries — had encountered in the quest for spiritual fulfilment. True to his Jewish upbringing, Judaism, Cohen lacks any particular evangelical urge or thirst for converts.

Cohen himself certainly isn’t claiming to be any kind of leader, spiritual or otherwise. The rabbinical line had stopped with his grandfather. And yet, many of those who have been to one of Cohen’s concerts report some kind of spiritual response, something beyond the purely earthbound sensation of going to a good gig. Perhaps the closest analogy is with the waiting worship of a traditional Quaker meeting, which operates without leadership or liturgy; in this analogy, Cohen himself is more of a ‘facilitator’, whose songs awaken something individual rather than collective. At a Cohen concert, it is possible to be in the company of tens of thousands of fellow fans, and yet still feel exquisitely alone. In that context, the sober grey suit and fedora he has adopted as his stage outfit make him look more like an undertaker than a priest.

If Cohen does have any particular spiritual message — and I rather suspect he’ll go to his grave denying such a thing — it is this call to the individual. Other rock performers — Dylan the Christian, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam the Muslim, George Harrison the devotee of Hare Krishna — have evangelised for their chosen faiths, but that’s too easy a liturgy for Laughing Lenny, who has never promoted Judaism or Zen or any other particular creed as a panacea. He has crafted his own method of coming to terms with the transcendent, but doesn’t offer it as an off-the-peg gift to the punters. If there is such a thing as Cohenism, it is simultaneously syncretic and idiosyncratic. It’s for Cohen alone: the fans have to find their own paths. ‘You don’t need to follow me,’ he seems to intone along with Monty Python’s Brian. ‘You don’t need to follow anybody.’ Each of us has to compose a personal amen, a high and lonesome — and defiantly imperfect — hallelujah.

Documentary - The Bible Unearthed

This is an interesting documentary for anyone curious about the true nature of the Bible and its human authors, based on the book, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, By Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. You can read an excerpt from the book, as well as a glowing review, from the New York Times: 

Finkelstein and Silberman have themselves written a provocative book that bears the marks of a detective story. In juxtaposing the biblical record and archaeological data, they work with tantalizing fragments of a distant past. Assembling clues to argue their thesis requires bold imagination and disciplined research. ''The Bible Unearthed'' exhibits both in abundance.

Here is the film, in several embedded parts.

The Bible Unearthed

The Bible is both a religious and historical work, but how much is myth and how much is history? When and why was the Old Testament written, and by whom? What do contemporary archaeologists know about the Patriarchs? The Exodus?

The Conquest of Canaan? Kings David and Solomon? Where do the people of Israel originally come from? Why were the historical accounts of the Bible written down?

A masterful archaeological and biblical investigation, The Bible Unearthed visits digs in Egypt, Jordan and Israel – including Megiddo, the cradle of biblical archeology, where 7,000 years of history have been excavated.

This far-ranging exploration of biblical history also makes use of archival footage of previous archaeological excavations, maps, biblical illustrations and computer animation, revealing ancient architecture, cuneiform tablets and other rare artifacts.

Based on the best-selling book of the same name, this enthralling documentary features interviews with archaeological specialists and biblical scholars from all over the world, including experts from the Louvre, the Museum of Cairo, the Museum of Jerusalem, and the British Museum.

The Bible Unearthed does something which has never been done before: it reveals a still-unraveling revolution of what we know of the society, the history, and the men who wrote the Bible.

Watch the full documentary now (playlist – 3 hours, 27 minutes)

Jay Michaelson - Nonduality in Buddhism and Judaism

Hmmmm . . . interesting. From Reality Sandwich.

Nonduality in Buddhism and Judaism

Jay Michaelson

All three of the "vehicles" of Buddhism, Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, contain nondual teachings, that is, expressions of the view that reality is essentially unitive, and that both unity and multiplicity are irreducible truths of our experience. Here, by way of introduction, I will focus on how nonduality is presented in those traditions which have had the greatest impact in the West. By way of comparison, I'll also make a few references to Judaism, my other contemplative tradition, to see how the same view is gestured at by two very different systems.

Perhaps surprisingly, the tradition which is perhaps most well-known in America is Theravada Buddhism, the "way of the elders" based primarily on the Pali Canon of Buddhist sutras. In a sense, this tradition should be the least appealing to Westerners, as it is primarily monastic, and can often seem disinterested in the cares of householders. Yet this path has been the primary entry point for many Jews exploring Buddhist practice, including this one -- I have sat six week, nine week, and twelve week vipassana (insight) meditation retreats in the Theravadan tradition, in both Asia and the United States. One reason for Theravada's appeal, I think, is the dichotomy between contemplative and devotional practice. Vipassana is primarily contemplative; its central objective is jnana, wisdom, not bhakti, devotion. Thus it is compatible with secularism, atheism, and also with religions such as Judaism, because it has relatively little emphasis on worship, ritual, and faith in the religious sense of the word. As transmitted to the West, Theravadan Buddhism is scarcely a religion at all.

Yet it is resolutely nondualistic. First, the principle of nonduality flows directly from the insight into anatta, or non-self, one of the three characteristics of all conditioned phenomena. The insight into anatta is necessarily an insight into nonduality; if every thing lacks separate reality, what else is there? If Vedanta dissolved the "object" of the world into the ultimate Subject -- You are All -- the doctrine of non-self dissolves the subject entirely, leaving only the All. (Judaism has a bit of both: bittul ha'yesh, annihilation of the sense of self, more like the Buddhist model, whereas the statement that God memaleh kol almin - fills all the worlds -- more like Vedanta. Obviously the Endpoint is the same.) Likewise the realizations that all things are anicha, impermanent, and dukkha, unable to ultimately satisfy us. As these insights take hold, not intellectually but intuitively, a letting-go of the unreal naturally evolves. And for a nondualist, this subtraction of the illusory is the most important step toward realization of the true.

In the Pali Canon, these doctrines are of relatively little interest as ontological principles. The Buddha's teaching in these texts if primarily about suffering and the end of suffering, not the nature of reality, and as such is conveyed in relative terms, not absolute ones. However, the two subjects are of necessity intertwined, for what we call the "ego" is where suffering occurs, and when the delusion of a soul is erased, then phenomena like pain, sadness, and anger are merely phenomena which arise and pass, often in an instant. Look closely, and you will never see the "self" doing anything at all; you will only find mental factors and material forms - never a self.

The notion of anatta, non-self, may seem diametrically opposed to Vedanta's conception of the Atman, or Self. However, the two are more alike than they seem, because in both cases, the small self - you, me - is more illusion than reality, and that is what matters. For Theravadan Buddhism, what's left when the self is taken away is Nothing. For Vedanta, it is Everything. For Nondual Judaism, it is God. But it is the subtraction that really matters.

In a sense, the only question dividing these nondual traditions is whether everything is One, or Zero. And despite years of intensive practice in all three of these traditions, I am hard-pressed to tell the difference. Here are the nondual conclusions of one of the core texts of Mahayana Buddhism, the Heart Sutra:

Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.

Here, Sariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness; they are not produced or stopped, not defiled or immaculate, not deficient or complete.

Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness there is no form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness; No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; No forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects of mind; No sight-organ element, and so forth, until we come to: No mind-consciousness element; There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so forth, until we come to: there is no decay and death, no extinction of decay and death. There is no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path. There is no cognition, no attainment and non-attainment...

Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail!

If we were to translate the Heart Sutra into Hasidic language, boldly and ahistorically, I think it would run something like this:

Yesh [something] is Ayin [nothing] and Ayin is Yesh. Everything that appears to be Yesh is actually Ayin. From the perspective of the Ein Sof [infinite], there is nothing: no creation; no body, heart, mind, or soul; no sefirot and no worlds; no life or death; no sin or righteousness. Higher, higher, higher even than the idea of higher, YHVH, Halleluyah.

As with the Hasidic view, the "emptiness" of the Heart Sutra refers to the intrinsic emptiness of all things. For example, as we saw in chapter one, while a table certainly exists according to our usual definition of "exists," there is no intrinsic table-ness. All its properties come from without: strength, color, shape, atomic structure, whatever. Take these "other" things out, and nothing is left. "Table" is really a convenient label only for a temporary set of conditions which, in the Buddhist view, are impermanent, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying.

From the perspective of nirvana all of these formations look like nothing. Yet from the perspective of samsara, nirvana looks like nothing; it has no characteristics, and while it is present right now, it goes undetected except by those who have purified their minds enough to let go of absolutely everything.

Compare this perspective with that of the Hasidic masterpiece called the Tanya. According to the Tanya, from God's point of view, all of what we see as yesh (something) is actually ayin (nothing), whereas the only real Something is what we see as nothing -- it has no characteristics, and it goes undetected except by those who have purified their minds enough to do bittul on absolutely everything. This isn't similar to the Buddhist view; it is functionally identical to it.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: Buddhism, Judaism, nonduality, contemplation, Jay Michaelson, Nonduality in Buddhism and Judaism, Reality Sandwich