Or is it his ordained will with Abraham? Allowing death such immense power in the world, through the bloodstained hands of every Cain, his own image. Cohen grapples with the meaning of God’s “permissive will,” allowing evil space in creation.

Hineni punctuates this song’s dread reckoning with God’s seeming complicity with darkness and murder in the Isaac story. This is the first but not last time it appears in Scripture. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” (Genesis 22:1-2) The Hebrew word Hineni, which means “Here I am,” is repeated thrice in the “You Want It Darker” song and in Genesis 22 (vs. He invokes in the song what seem to be phrases from the story of the “binding of Isaac” in Genesis 22, when God commanded Abraham to slaughter his beloved son, Isaac. The song, addressed to God as “you,” is suffused with the language, and tones, of the Kaddish-Jewish prayers for the dead.Ĭohen wants his poetry to find its luminescence beneath the long shadows that arc over the atrocities of history-especially those perpetrated against Jews, intended to extinguish the flame of their existence from the earth. I wish I could explain the inner sense of awe and holy fear I felt as I awoke.Ĭohen’s gravelly voice bears all of the gravitas of a man near death, weakened by the decay of his aging body. It utterly captivated me last night: “ You Want It Darker.” I dreamt of it and then woke up at 3:00 a.m. This was one of the final songs written and recorded just before his death in 2016. Right to the end of his life, he inhabited and was inhabited by his Hebrew faith-its language, worship, narratives-as he grasped for meaning at the very edge of meaning. It’s heavy.Ĭohen’s music is searching, pained, edgy, gritty, socially engaged, and religiously dissident, but he relentlessly clings to a Jewish biblical landscape.

I won’t bother editing or cleaning it up.

I wrote a journal entry late at night on a song from his final album. I had heard his famous Hallelujah, but was not aware of his other music. So this week while I was out of town staying at a hotel, I happened on an article about singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s Jewishness and how it impacted his music.

Dark darker yet darker entry 17