When Leonard Cohen Sang for Israeli Soldiers During the Yom Kippur War

On Oct. 6, 1973, sirens were heard across Israel during the middle of the Yom Kippur afternoon services. The country immediately scrambled to call up its entire reserve forces in what remains the deadliest and most haunted war in Israeli history.

Around this same time, a depressed and retired Leonard Cohen heard the news of Israel’s war while sitting isolated on a remote Greek Island. Without a guitar, Cohen boarded a boat and subsequent flight to Tel Aviv, drawn for inexplicable reasons to the war front, where he would eventually perform a series of concerts that transformed his life and the lives of the soldiers who heard him.

Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai (Spiegel and Grau, 2022) is award-winning Israeli journalist Matti Friedman’s account of Cohen’s tour, intertwined with the story of Israel before and after its most tragic war.

Cohen performing in the Sinai Desert (Photo Credit: Isaac Shokal)

In this exclusive conversation with Aish.com, Matti Friedman discusses Leonard Cohen’s life and transformation, beginning, oddly enough, with Cohen’s death in 2016. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Eli: Why is Leonard Cohen buried on Mount Royal in Montreal, in the very small Jewish cemetery belonging to the Shaar HaShamayim congregation?

Matti: That's a great question. And it's a good way to start because from the end of his life you can understand something very important, which is that Cohen started out in this very tight-knit Jewish community in Montreal in the neighborhood of Westmount, which for our non-Canadians, is an upper-class neighborhood in Montreal. He grows up in a shul called Shaar haShamayim where his family is one of the most important --- his grandfather was the president, his great-grandfather was also the president of the synagogue and there are actually painted portraits of both of them up on synagogue. This is where he grows up.

So he absorbs a lot of Judaism and Jewish culture and this same Cohen goes very far from this place, to Greek islands and London and Los Angeles. And yet in many ways, he never really pretended to be someone else. The fact that he never changed his name is one of the most interesting and important details about Leonard Cohen – he didn't become “Bob Dylan” (born as Robert Zimmerman). He remained Leonard Cohen and never tried to be anything other than a Jew from Montreal. And at the very end of his life, that's where he is buried at the cemetery of ancestors, next to his grandparents and great grandparents. In some ways, his life is a story about great movement and change and upheaval, and also a guy who comes from a place and never quite leaves it.

Eli: Weeks before his passing, Cohen released an album You Want it Darker (2016), which many interpreted as a prayer and even acceptance of his death with such lyrics as “Hineni, Hineni (Here I Am, Here I Am, I'm ready, my lord”) - a line from the Yom Kippur liturgy like “Who by Fire?” How would you describe “Cohen the elder” and what was his relationship to the Israeli public at that point?

Matti: He had this kind of very, very spiritual life at that time and was all over the place. He spent time in his Zen monastery, visited India… It's not correct to say that he left Judaism and then return, because he was always very much part of the Jewish world.

Matti Friedman

Indeed, his songs are very hard to understand if you don't understand Judaism. And at the very end of his life, as you point out, he releases this really striking song “You Want It Darker,” and the song includes a quote from the Kaddish (Mourner’s Prayer). Translated into English, it says, “Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name.” And it includes a word in Hebrew, “Hineni,” as you mentioned, which is the word that biblical characters say, when they're not running away from God. The most famous example is when Abraham was contacted by God to sacrifice Isaac, rather than run away from God he said “Hineni, here I am.”

Some interpret his final album to be a kind of a “goodbye to life” by Cohen, but according to people who knew him well, that's not what he intended. He did not think it was the end. He had cancer, but he thought he was going to beat it, and he was actually talking about going on tour again.

Photo Credit: Isaac Shokal

But it's definitely a song in which we see that Cohen, in his final album, doesn't go back to folk music or his Buddhist inspiration, or the many other influences that he could have chosen. He goes back to Jewish texts.

Eli: I had the pleasure of seeing Cohen perform in one of his last concerts in Montreal. What was Cohen like as a performer, and what were his departing words to the Israeli public at the end of his last concert in Israel in 2009?

Matti: Cohen in 2009 was already an old guy, and was back on the road, during this really unlikely resurrection at the very end of his life. 50,000 Israelis came out to see him and it was apparently an incredible, almost religious experience that ends with this moment that anyone who was there remembers. He ends the concert with the Priestly blessing, because one of the most important aspects of Cohen’s character is that Leonard Cohen is a Cohen (a Priest).

You really see his connection to the priesthood in his writing about the Yom Kippur War, that when he hears about the war and the young people fighting there, he’s a Cohen which means he has a job to do in the Temple and he’s not doing it. What’s the job of a Cohen in our time? There are very few things to do other than a few lines that are said- the Priestly Blessing - which is called down to bring divine protection, and this is something he could actually do.

At the end of his life, when he holds this concert in Tel Aviv with 50,000 Israelis in a stadium, something moves him and it’s not something that was planned, it's not something that he did anywhere else. At the very end of the concert, he raises his hand and makes the priestly gesture with his fingers and he moved into Hebrew and started saying the Priestly blessing in his very kind of deep, European Ashkenazi accent he blesses the congregation. It was an incredible moment.

Eli: In the decades after the Yom Kippur War, Cohen had one of his most fruitful artistic periods. That’s when earned the description as “the greatest psalmist since King David” and one “whose musical language could reach the soul.” What was this period like, and what was Cohen’s relationship to his Judaism during this period?

Matti: Some people like to turn Cohen into a kind of rabbinic figure and I think while certainly he's written down some of the most beautiful words possible to write, we can't clean him up too much.

If you read his poetry and his novels, you find that this was a guy who was “in the gutter” and that is how he would describe himself -- not as living a life that should be imitated by others. He is deeply depressed much of the time he isn’t experiencing powerful urges, so he can’t really keep a relationship going for a very long time.

And he's haunted and meeting different women and experimenting with different substances and moving from place to place. So I think, particularly among liberal Jews, people are looking to project onto Cohen the character of a secular rabbinic figure when he was just a great artist.

Cohen believed that Judaism ought to be taken more seriously.

If he had a saving grace, it is that he was aware of more than anyone else, the many ways in which he failed as a human, and he wrote about them with incredible honesty. His relationships were complicated. His relationship with Judaism was complicated. He was deeply disappointed with the Jewish community because he believed that Judaism ought to be taken more seriously. Cohen took the idea of biblical prophecy very seriously and understood that the Jewish people are on this earth with a job -- and that job is to receive divine transmissions and translate them into the language of humans.

That is what we did at Mount Sinai, when we received the Torah, and repeatedly through our history. Now, we are just normal people going to synagogue and people care about what clothes we are wearing on Rosh Hashanah, and talk about what car we're driving and Cohen found that all quite depressing. His criticism is leveled as someone who feels a deep affinity with Jews and Judaism and never as an outsider.

Eli: What really stood out to me in your book is the description of Cohen’s authenticity during the war, playing concerts on ammunition crates, alone in the Sinai desert. Can you briefly discuss Cohen’s concert tour during the war itself?

Matti: People who hear about the tour think it was some kind of Bob Hope US tour. And that's not that's not what it was. It was in the middle of a war, no one knew what was going on. And the musicians were simply by themselves going on land, minutes after being hit and retaken from Syrian and Egyptian forces, and they're still bodies lying around them. It is totally crazy.

And he was driving in the desert in a jeep and playing for guys. There were no roadies and no support, without amps most of the time and it was just Leonard Cohen.

As a musician to him it was all very, very raw. And that worked, that's why it was so powerful for the people who were at the concert and so powerful for Cohen himself who at that time was disgusted with the music business and money and the way that everything was commercial. Here he is in a world where nothing was commercial. It was a matter of life and death, quite literally.

He knew this might be the last thing these soldiers ever heard and that’s what was so authentic and so powerful about it. It wasn't a PR stunt.

Eli: Before the war, Cohen, like many diaspora Jews, describes himself as having a mythological understanding of Israel as opposed to seeing the “real Israel.” Do you see parallels between your own move to Israel and having a mythological or utopian understanding of Israel -- as Israeli society is described as “utopian” before the Yom Kippur War?

Matti: Yeah, that's a great question. It is definitely something that happened in the country since the Yom Kippur War, which really shattered the old kibbutz leadership i.e., the generation that the generation that founded the country with this utopian ideal. That dream really came crashing down during the Yom Kippur War, and after that war it's really a different country. And it becomes the country that we live in now, which is not a very utopian place ---It's not even really driven by utopian dreams, with a few exceptions. Rather, people feel the weight of the region around us, and the weight of the cost of living and everyone just trying to make a go of it.

Israel now is a place that has all the problems of other countries, plus a few problems that result from our unique position in the world and our unique history. And you have to be willing to accept that if you're going to really move here. Otherwise, the difference between your mythic hopes of Israel and the mundane realities of life are going to too extreme for you to maintain.

Personally, I didn't really come here with that many mythologies. I didn't even go to Jewish summer camp and came out of a public school. I had been here a few times and did not really have any rosy visions of it, and I just really liked it. I like the reality of life here, I like the Hebrew language, I like the people and I stayed. I'm pretty sure that's why my immigration and absorption were relatively successful.

That is really what you see from Leonard during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. From this ideal, and then the reality that the country is in a state of crisis and bloodshed. War is a time when people act their best, and also the worst. And he saw the worst of humanity.

And you have to deal with all of that -- and he was really rattled by the war. He came to help his brothers and also wants to be part of that bigger human story. And in many ways, a big part of being Jewish is wrestling with the extent to which you belong to this Jewish story versus belonging to all of humanity. It is a question of to what extent and to whom do you belong? It remains a big one for our times and it was a big question for Leonard Cohen.

Featured Image Above: Photo Credit: Isaac Shokal