A Divine Irritation - Leonard Cohen 1964 on Judaism

I want to share with you something that is stirring my soul this morning. 

My son, Yehoo Shalem, sent me a speech by Leonard Cohen from some Jewish gathering he attended back in 1964 (he was only 29 or 30 at the time). 

His words are fire-forged, and they move me deeply. What he says here — a year before I was born — has in fact driven me my entire life. From entering the Kabbalistic world in Jerusalem, to leaving institutional Judaism and establishing an ashram in the Judean Desert (the “Yeshiva-Ashram” of "HaMakom Community” 2000-2005), establishing the academy of Neviah (2010-2012) for pointing at the Hebraic path of our ancestors, seeking God by every means — like dirty prophets, through fasts and ascetic practices, and yes, through sex and drugs too, as he says in his speech.

All the way to the meaninglessness of Jewish survival in my eyes, unless it is burning in the light of God — which is what it was made for — and neglecting the care for Jewish identity, what so ever, caring just for those who are burning with God from any nation. He simply said it more beautifully than I could ever have said it myself. So I am sharing his prophetic words with you, as they are. Perhaps your hearts, too, will tremble:

Leonard Cohen 1964 on Judaism 

https://youtu.be/cFMm_x1qlPY?si=Z1K4pqW0DyCwlhV_

Judaism is a secretion, which an eastern tribe, surrounded a divine irritation, a direct confrontation with the absolute. 

That happened once in history, and we still feel the warmth of that confrontation, divorced as we are from the terms of it. 

That happened a long time ago. Today, we covet the pearl. But we are unwilling to support the irritation, the burning nucleus. And our spiritual life today has the exact consistency of an unclean oyster. And it stinks to heaven. We cannot face heaven. We have lost our genius for the vertical.

Jewish novelists are sociologists, horizontalists, and the residue of energy left from that great vertical seizure we had four thousand years ago that we turned toward ourselves, we knocked on our own doors and wonder that no one answers. We create this insane totem of identity. That must end in psychiatry. or Zionism, but never in a prayer of praise. 

Perhaps our taste of the absolute was too intense. We could not bear the light. We could not support the annihilation of the world inherent in the light. Perhaps we lost the land because we no longer wished to possess it. The light made the cities and the temples irrelevant.

There is an awful truth which no Jewish writer investigates today, which no Jewish poet articulates. It is a truth that the synagogues and the cultural establishment cannot efface. And it is this truth: we no longer believe we are holy. This is the declaration that I wait to hear going out from synagogues, and from the lips of cultural Jews and ethical Jews. This is the confession without which we cannot begin to raise our eyes, the absence of God in our midst. And it is interesting that in the two symposia that I’ve been to, within the Jewish community in the past few months, no one has mentioned the word God, and I am laboring under a misapprehension that the Jewish people represent that testimony on the earth, and that without that testimony informing its actions Jewish survival is nominal and no more important to me than Armenian survival or Greek survival. 

The absence of God in our midst is a deep, rotten cavity that has killed the nerve of the people. We are ready to accept psychiatric solutions for our suffering. We are ready to accept ethics instead of sanctity. Each generation of men must continue the ancient and holy dialogue. Between the material, secular, artificial, ethnocentric on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritual, ascetic, natural, experiential. Certainly, we have built too much on the other side. The balance has hit the ground. 

Let us refuse the title Jew to any man who is not obsessed by God. Let that become the sole qualification of Jewish identity. 

Let us encourage young men to go into the deserts of their hearts and burn the praise of perfection. Let us do it with drugs or whips or sex or blasphemy or fasting. But let men begin to feel the perfection of the universe. 

Let us declare a moratorium on all religious services until someone reports a vision. Or breaks his mind on the infinite. Jews without God are lilies that fester. Let us discard the mentality of the Minyan (a congregation of ten Jews, required for prayer in synagogues, O.P.). The danger which it was meant to shield us from — lonely self annihilation in the spirit — is unfortunately no longer a danger. Let us make it a danger!

Let us see, Jewish monasteries. Our families are strong enough to support the dialectic. We need our dirty saints and our monstrous hermits. Let us create a tradition for them, for they light the world. 

Look, four thousand years ago, the world was idolatrous. And a small eastern tribe repudiated the experience of the world. To develop a difficult idea that has burned people for four thousand years. That is what I mean by variety. Of course, the world is idolatrous today. That’s why the Jews have a particular vocation. That’s why we’re here tonight, examining a special, unspoken kind of anguish about our identity because we’re not fulfilling it. There was a time when all Judah’s neighbors were idolaters, and some madman decided to smash the images, and turn himself into light. Now, that is the challenge for Jews in every generation, whether it’s a ghetto or whether it’s a metropolis, whether they are burnt or whether they are citizens. 

Q: Don’t you think the Jews have a special duty to save the world? 

L.C: The Jews have a special duty to save God in the world.

Q: (not clear) 

L.C: The question was, will I explore the differences that are innate in the Jew? And I couldn’t do that while standing on one foot. It’s a matter of the knowledge that each person in this room has. There is a time when we must start discarding definitions. Start discarding the problem which we create for ourselves. We know what God means. We know what the word means. We don’t need a definition. We know what the word Jew means. We don’t need a definition. There comes a time when the definition only obscures the human reality. Let us return to the human reality. We know how we feel in the world. Jews know how they feel in the world. All I ask is for some allegiance to that feeling.

Let us refuse to clarify. Let us only follow the allegiance that we know we owe.

—-------

So far, his words. The words of a prophet, burning like torches.

Like a prophet (Navi)  he says: "Let us bring (Navi) something new, something ancient, something real. Something we know must be here — and it hurts that it isn't."

In my own ways, I have not despaired, and I try to bring this today — every week — in the weekly Zoom gathering of "Shoov LaMakom" ("Return to the Place"), a multidisciplinary Kabbalistic Beit Midrash, open to all whose soul is on fire.