Leonard Cohen performs with Israeli singer Matti Caspi, on guitar, for Israeli troops in the Sinai, 1973

Yaakovi Doron

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Leonard Cohen’s Lessons in Communal Responsibility

What the songwriter’s actions during the Yom Kippur War can teach us today about the Jewish response to tragedy

by
Ezra Seplowitz
October 10, 2024
Leonard Cohen performs with Israeli singer Matti Caspi, on guitar, for Israeli troops in the Sinai, 1973

Yaakovi Doron

It was a quiet Shabbat on Oct. 6, 1973. Bernie and Eileen Weinberg were woken up unexpectedly in their small, desert apartment in Beersheba to the sound of a jet whisking overhead toward the Sinai. It was also Yom Kippur, the Shabbat Shabbaton (Leviticus 23:32), the most sublime day of the year, a day when the Jewish people—angelic in their white robes (kittels) and prayer shawls (tallits)—renew their commitment to God. “Ki bayom hazeh … lifnei Hashem titharu,” as it is written in Leviticus 16:30: “For on this day … before God, you shall become purified.”

Despite the consternation in the air, Eileen, Bernie, and the rest of the congregation made their way to the synagogue. As the solemn early morning service faded into a tranquil afternoon beneath the calm October sun, Eileen watched with concern as members of the congregation—after receiving a tap on the shoulder and a whisper in the ear—rushed out of the synagogue. By the conclusion of the afternoon service, only their kittels and tallits remained, draped on the now empty seats. The men who donned them had already boarded Egged buses on their way to the Sinai.

Bernie and Eileen, who would become my grandparents and whom I affectionately call “Bobby” and “Zayde,” left the half-deserted synagogue for the afternoon break. That’s when the sirens blared. Then, the jets roared as they sped to the Sinai. Zayde, an aerospace engineer, described to me how he estimated the time that the planes took to reach the Sinai, complete their bomb runs, and return to the nearby base to refuel. To his dismay, many planes did not return. Unfortunately, many of those who boarded the blue-and-white Egged buses did not return either. Those kittels and tallits remained in the synagogue never to be donned again.

On that same day, as Matti Friedman describes in his book Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, Canadian musical icon Leonard Cohen was living on the Greek island of Hydra, “where he had a refuge in a little white house up the hill from the ferry dock.” After news of the Yom Kippur War reached this paradise in the Aegean Sea, Cohen decided to leave his partner, Suzanne, and baby boy Adam and head to the Sinai. He later described that in his “own tradition, which is the Hebrew tradition … you sit next to the disaster and lament … you don’t avoid the situation, you throw yourself into it.” And so, to the Sinai Cohen went—and in the Sinai Cohen performed.

Friedman describes Cohen’s experience during those few weeks in the Sinai; weeks that served as a microcosm for the macrocosmic transition that Israeli society would later experience. In retrospect, those bloodstained weeks served as the State of Israel’s figurative Yom Kippur; it was a period of reckoning that, by and large, renewed the people of Israel’s commitment to God. For many soldiers, at the helm of the Yom Kippur service was Leonard Cohen. He was their cantor leading the services with hymns such as “Suzanne” and “Bird on the Wire” as well as the yet-to-be-released “Who by Fire” and “Hallelujah.”

At one point in his book, Friedman relays an interview he had with one of the soldiers who was present at a Cohen concert in the Sinai. The soldier said:

What touched me very deeply … was this Jew hunched over a guitar, sitting quietly and playing for us. I asked who he was, and someone said he was from Canada or God knows where, a Jew who came to raise the spirit of the fighters. It was Leonard Cohen. Since then, he has a corner of my heart.

Indeed, it was there in the Sinai that Cohen wrote, in an early draft of his 1974 hit “Lover Lover Lover,” that “[He] went down to the desert to help [his] brothers fight.” Cohen heeded Moses’ enduring call, “Are your brothers to go to war while you stay here?” (Numbers 32:6). He bore a sense of communal—nay, familial—responsibility. He was leading the services amid the congregation.

Although Cohen—who died in 2016—was not Orthodox like myself, part of why I find this story to be so riveting is the fact that he embodied the traditional Jewish response to war and tragedy. A providential perspective on life events mandates a response to tragedy, especially war. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, a heated debate erupts between young King Hal and a soldier named Michael Williams just before the legendary Battle of Agincourt about this very topic. Williams proclaims to a disguised King Henry that “the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make” for his soldiers who die in battle. Essentially, Williams believes that political and military leaders are responsible for the soldiers who perish in battle. They are—as another Jewish singer, Bob Dylan, lambasted—the “masters of war.” In an attempt to evade such responsibility, the young monarch responds that “the King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers” because “they have no wings to fly from God” and for these guilty men, “war is [God’s] vengeance.” Essentially, the soldiers, with a guilty conscience, are to blame for their demise in battle.

Bernie and Eileen Weinberg behind their apartment in Beersheba, early 1970s
Bernie and Eileen Weinberg behind their apartment in Beersheba, early 1970s

Courtesy the author

Both of these explanations are certainly not the focal point of the traditional Jewish perspective, nor even a point of significance altogether. Maimonides sums up the Jewish response to tragedy at the beginning of his Laws of Fasts (1:1-4):

It is a positive Scriptural commandment to cry out and sound an alarm with trumpets whenever a tragedy befalls the community … And this procedure is one of the paths of repentance, for as the community cries out in prayer and sounds an alarm when overtaken by trouble, everyone is bound to realize that evil has come upon them as a consequence of their evil deeds … Conversely, should the people fail to cry out and sound an alarm, and instead say, “What has happened to us is merely a natural phenomenon and this tragedy is merely a chance occurrence,” this is the path of cruelty, and such a conception causes them to remain attached to their wicked deeds, thereby ensuring that this tragedy will lead to further tragedies … In addition, it is a Rabbinic ordinance to fast whenever there is a tragedy that befalls the community until they receive compassion from Heaven.

The Jewish response to a communal catastrophe is personal responsibility and communal repentance. To paraphrase one of the rabbinical leaders at Yeshiva University and a personal teacher of mine, Rabbi Mayer Twersky, “The spiritual responsibility for a tragedy is a reflective one; rather, than reflexive. The Jew assumes rather than assigns blame.” Friedman’s masterful account is about a Jew who did just that.

If Shabbat, Oct. 6, 1973, was a day of renewed commitment to the Jewish God, then Shabbat, Oct. 7, 2023, was a day that necessitated a renewed commitment to the Jewish people. The Talmud (Tractate Sukkah 55b) suggests that the 70 bulls sacrificed in the Temple on the first seven days of Sukkot are brought on behalf of the 70 nations. However, the single bull sacrificed in the Temple on the eighth day of Sukkot, which in Israel is both Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, is brought on behalf of the singular nation: the Jewish people. Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi), a seminal biblical commentator from 11th-century France, notes that Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah is also a day dedicated to God. Nevertheless, unlike Yom Kippur, this is not a day about personal relationships with God; it is a day about the collective Jewish people’s relationship with God—a single bull for a singular and unified nation.

In the months preceding Oct. 7, Israeli society was torn in two. And rightfully so. My professor—and Tablet’s editor-at-large, as well as the author of his own book about Leonard Cohen, called A Broken Hallelujah—Liel Leibovitz noted that the debates, protests, and occasional conflicts that erupted throughout Israeli society were about much more than judicial reform; they were about whether Israel is a Jewish state or a state for Jews. Leibovitz posited that “the massive protests preceding Israel’s 75th birthday have resurrected [this] century-old question.” Indeed, the fissures that ran deep through Israeli society and Jewish communities worldwide were reminiscent of the prestate clashes between David Ben-Gurion’s Haganah and Menachem Begin’s Irgun. This question is an important one, and it should not be neglected. It has been and will remain the most contentious issue in the years to come.

Unfortunately, the rift that has emerged out of the differing ideological visions of Jewish statehood has supplanted the necessary unity among Jewish peoplehood. In his memoir The Prime Ministers, Yehuda Avner recalls a speech he attended in which Begin reflected on the Altalena affair several months after it occurred: “I told my men to go quietly, not to resist … ki Yehudim anachnu! [because we are Jews].” Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the famed rabbinic leader of Yeshiva University, suggested that traditionally, Jewish people dance in circles around the Torah on Simchat Torah because every point on the circumference of a circle is equidistant from its center. Begin, a young man in his 30s at the time of the Altalena affair, who attended Soloveitchik’s synagogue in Brisk as a young boy, was certainly inspired by this message. Ki Yehudim anachnu is a recognition that every Jew has an equal radius connecting them from the periphery to the heart and soul of the Jewish people. Thus, the State of Israel was born out of the ideal of Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, and it was reborn on Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah of 2023. A single bull for a singular and unified nation.

This coming Yom Kippur, I will be in Yeshiva University’s synagogue surrounded by my peers. Amid the sobs and wails for the devastating year that has transpired, we will each be asking ourselves the question that Leonard Cohen asked himself 51 years ago: What responsibility do I bear to the Jewish people? It will certainly be a reflective Yom Kippur, not a reflexive one. With one eye toward Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, the hope is that like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Bobby and Zayde, and Leonard (Eliezer) Cohen, the other eye will gaze inward and respond with the clarion call: “Hineini—Here I am.”

Ezra Seplowitz is a fellow of Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought Scholars Program.