This piece is part of Exploring Judaism’s 5785 High Holiday Reader. Download the whole reader here.

Leonard Cohen and I may seem an unlikely pair in the pews; he is much older than I and passed to the next world nearly eight years ago. But we have a lot in common. He grew up about 4 kilometers from my childhood home. And, like me, he was raised in a very committed, though not strictly observant, Jewish home. Some of his English and all his French have that distinctive Montreal lilt that I suppress in my American exile. I imagine greeting him and hugging him and having a distinctly Montreal-coded conversation, French, English, Yiddish, nods of the head and motions of the hands, as we walk into the Shul, Ça va? Nu, altz is git.

Leonard sits with me by dint of a skinny little book that is my constant companion on the high holidays. I have purchased at least six copies of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Book of Mercy (1984).’ (Three were gifted, and one lost, passing through my accidental prophecy to the next lucky soul.) One copy sits on a poetry shelf at home, and a second with my mahzorim in storage. 

I once attended a conference in the venerable Shaar HaShomayaim Synagogue, Cohen’s childhood shul in Westmount. The host took us on a tour of a building I’d been to scores of times. On the stairs from the foyer, there is a painting of Leonard Cohen’s uncle, a former ‘Shaar’ cantor. There’s a secret photo, on a hallway wall between a social hall and a dairy kitchen, of Leonard Cohen sitting with his graduating Hebrew School class. The photo is like all the others: black and white, identically framed, hung among the neat rows of similar shots, boys and girls lined up by height, and not really smiling. It’s cheder, after all. But the boy stands out, distinctively Leonard: a hint of a knowing smile, a twinkle of irony, a sense of belonging and unbelonging live together in that young face. His final album’s first track, ‘You Want it Darker’ featured the Shaar’s choir and Cantor Gidon Zelermyer. You can take the boy out of shul, but you can’t take the shul out of the boy.

With access to thousands of years of tradition and thousands of books in my collection, why am I carrying this poetry book on the high holidays? 

Before the holidays, in Elul, I prepare by reading some classics. This year Heschel’s works on Kotzk, Maimonides’ ‘Laws of Repentance,’ Rav Soloveitchik’s ‘On Repentance,’ the Shelah haKadosh on Yom Kippur. A new classic, Rav Shagar’s post-modern spin on teshuvah in ‘Shuvi Nafshi’ is now part of my rotation as well. I also listen to music. I hear holy people sing the songs I heard as a kid and newer songs I learned as a student in Israel.

But honestly, as familiar and comfortable as I am with all these modes and media, they are, ultimately, foreign languages. Hebrew and Aramaic, modern and ancient, are not my first languages; English is, and secular vernacular though it may be, my memories are coded in English. Leonard Cohen spoke my languages, English and French and Jewish and ‘seeker’ and broken-hearted and loving.

In ‘Book of Mercy,’ Cohen shares 50 contemporary psalms. Biblical Psalms, Tehillim, are the warp and weft that form the fabric of our prayers. They are powerful but ultimately not in my vernacular. Given their language, the Biblical Psalms hold Mystery at arm’s length. Cohen’s psalms use the tools of poetry to create mysterious space.

Cohen’s third psalm has so much space:

I heard my soul singing behind a leaf, plucked the leaf, but then I heard it singing behind a veil. I tore the veil, but then I heard it singing behind a wall. I broke the wall, and I heard my soul singing against me. I built up the wall, mended the curtain, but I could not put back the leaf. I held it in my hand and I heard my soul singing mightily against me. This is what it’s like to study without a friend. 

 Is Cohen writing about the Pargod, the heavenly veil? Is he calling us to the Holy of Holies in the description of the Yom Kippur service? He was a cohen, after all. Is he accusing us of getting in our own spiritual way? What can be fixed, and what never? And how can I go on without a hevrutaA study partner. A hevruta is more than just a ‘study buddy’ it is a serious and personal relationship between colleagues. Also spelled: Havruta, a partner in learning? This short poem brings us to the modes of prayer: singing, hearing, building, holding, and studying. It also reminds us that something, or someone, removed from its source has difficulty surviving.   

These observations and questions about soul are in English and allow me to think and feel without first unpacking language. They open questions going right past peshat – the simple understanding of a text in context – to sod – secrets I hide from myself. 

For Rosh Hashanah, when we hold a coronation for the Monarch of the Universe, we can turn to Cohen’s psalm 6: “Sit down, Master, on this rude chair of praises and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom.” And in that reading, remind ourselves of the inadequacy, the very audacity of praising God, and of the line from Psalm 27, ‘Of David, God is my light and my salvation,’ v. 3, “my heart should have no fear.” The echoes and echoes of tradition are in the words of our late contemporary psalmist.

Cohen so clearly addresses my inadequacy, beseeching, “Let nine men come and lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the glory of the kingdom forever and forever.” Again, echoing the text, the text with which Yom Kippur ends. 

So, when Leonard and I daven together, most likely against his will, he asks me questions I didn’t know I had until he gave them to me. In another work, the 2006 “Book of Longing” Cohen shares a pithy poem which could be from a contemporary Pirkei Avot, ‘Layton’s Question,’ 

Always after I tell him 
what I intend to do next, 
Layton solemnly inquires: 
Leonard, are you sure 
you’re doing the wrong thing?

‘Layton’ is Irving Layton, a great Canadian poet and close friend of Leonard, who shares a first name with my father. I imagine this as my father, Irving, solemnly inquiring, sitting beside me in shul for so many years when we were both in Montreal. I can imagine the question, read all ways and answered in even more: it’s Rosh Hashanah, it’s Yom Kippur, have I really done so much wrong? When I change, am I doing the wrong thing again? Or am I perennially in a state of change that can never answer the question? 

I can ask these questions because I’ve come to shul with my hevruta, my study partner, embodied in Cohen’s verse, I want, I need, I err, I love, I hate, I doubt, I beg, I do it in English, in Hebrew, in seeking Zazen (Buddhist calm) and in a pew. In song and in tears. Cohen’s language is easily superimposed on the traditional liturgy because he nursed and grew on the tradition dear to me, and in my idiom, in my city, in my country. I’ve found that, when I sit with Leonard, I sit more attuned to the native Me, not the me that the Mahzor makes me.

Leonard and I share space on Rosh Hashanah an unlikely pair. A rockstar-poet-monk and a humble Jew, a roshi and just another rabbi. In some moments, we trade places, imagining what could have been. In some moments we trade books, the Mahzor for the poems, the sheet music for the TalmudReferring to one of two collections, the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, edited in the 6th century, that contains hundreds of years of commentary, discussion, and exploration of the ideas in the Mishnah. One could describe it as Mishnah + Gemara = Talmud. Whenever we pray, we remember that whatever the liturgy, it is as the rabbis said (B. Sanhedrin 106b) רחמנא ליבא בעי – the Merciful One is seeking our hearts.