Leonard Cohen Took Judaism Seriously

In 1964, at a symposium For English language Jewish writers, Leonard Cohen delivered a jeremiad against North American Judaism — a Judaism that had abandoned God in favor of bourgeois, assimilationist dreams.

In a recording of this address on YouTube, Cohen’s tone is prophetic, or, as some might interpret it, grandiose. At one point, he breaks off, seemingly distracted by someone in the audience snickering or perhaps rolling their eyes.

“I take this seriously,” he says to the eye-roller, and then he continues where he left off.

On my third listen to this recording, I realized that it was those words, “I take this seriously,” that stood behind my rapt fascination with Cohen’s speech.

For Leonard Cohen, “taking this seriously” means taking God seriously. 

“Judaism,” he states, “is the secretion with which an eastern tribe surrounded a divine irritation — a direct confrontation with the Absolute that happened once in history … Today we covet the pearl, but we are unwilling to support the irritation… and our spiritual life today has the exact consistency of an unclean oyster, and it stinks to heaven.”

“Let us refuse the title ‘Jew’ to any man who is not obsessed by God,” he goes on. “Let that become the sole qualification of Jewish identity.” 

Moreover, “the absence of God in our midst” is “a 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, and we will die very badly for our choice. Our monuments will be new parochial schools; and the state of Israel; and a militant Anti-Defamation League; and maybe even a Jewish president of the United States — well, to hell with these mausoleums.” 

“Taking this seriously” also means taking one’s role as a Jew seriously. “The world is hostile to any man who will hold up a mirror to the particular kind of mindless chaos in which we endure. That is the glory of the poet, that is the glory of the writer, that is the glory of the Jew — that he moves in this mirrored exile, covered with mirrors, and as he passes through the communities where he sojourns, he reflects their condition and his condition … his destiny is exile and his vocation is to be despised.” 

These words are as hard as steel and bound to make many of us feel uncomfortable. His claim, for instance, that “there is greater contact with the spiritual world” in “any junkie’s kitchen” than there is in “any synagogue on the North American continent” seems designed to offend. This becomes clear when the audience is given a chance to ask questions. 

The first to raise a hand demands that Cohen come down to earth and define his terms. After all, if you’re going to prattle on about God and holiness, you should explain what you mean. 

Cohen curtly responds: “I would not blaspheme the Name by giving it a definition at this particular symposium. If your apparatus for comprehending the numinous has collapsed to such a degree where you ask me for a definition of God, then you are beyond my therapy.” 

The next person to stand up assails Cohen’s devotion to Jewish particularism.

To her he responds: “The fact is that Jews are different from other people … The Jew has a particular kind of vocation, [without which] he becomes nothing but a consumer of the world’s goods.”

I, too, find myself challenged by his words. After all, am I worthy of the title Jew? Am I adequately inflamed and intoxicated by God? Am I a sleepwalker through the “mindless chaos” of the world? Has my exile become “meaningless?” Does my spiritual life have the consistency of an “unclean oyster?” Have I let my love of Israel supercede my love of the Creator?

To take Judaism seriously, as Cohen does, is to recognize that there are stakes. We have an important historic mission —which means it’s possible to fail. 

It is good to ask such questions of ourselves. It is good to be challenged. To take Judaism seriously, as Cohen does, is to recognize that there are stakes. We have an important historic mission — which means it’s possible to fail. We are here on earth to represent the “testimony of God,” and thus “the absence of God” in our midst is not just a matter of each Jew’s preference, but rather a grave collective abdication.

I am a rabbinical student, which means that I have been blessed to meet many Jews who also take this seriously, who also understand that there are stakes involved. For whatever reason, however, I rarely see such people speaking from synagogue pulpits, and this makes me wonder if much has changed in the decades since Cohen offered his address. 

What I hear in synagogues varies from place to place. Words of comfort. Political diatribes against the other side. Lovely and neatly constructed Torah morals. References to God as a character in a book, not as a living presence in the world. But never a challenge—never a word that confronts and transforms.

Only a few months ago, at a Shabbat service I attended in Boston, I heard the rabbi tell us to “turn our hearts towards God, or to whatever higher power or higher ideal is meaningful to you.” 

This is nice. This is inclusive language. It will not offend, but it is not serious. It implies that the stakes are low. Believe in God or don’t. It really doesn’t matter. 

We, the representatives of non-Orthodox Judaism, often complain—and complain bitterly—that we are not taken seriously. Orthodox Jews don’t take us seriously. The state of Israel doesn’t take us seriously. The Israeli rabbinate doesn’t take us seriously. 

None of this, however, is material. 

What matters is this: we don’t take ourselves seriously.

As we approach the high holidays, there will be familiar and tired discourses about what rabbis should say to us from the pulpit during the two days of the year that they have our attention. Let us hope they don’t blow it, and let us pray that they challenge us, confront us, wake us up, and impress upon us the urgency inherent in the mystery of our existence.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.