Reflections on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”

April 2021

When I gaze into the night sky and see the work of Thy fingers
The moon and stars suspended in space
O what is man that Thou art mindful of him?
You have given man a crown of glory and honor
And have made him a little lower than the angels
You have put him in charge of all creation
The beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea.
O what is man that you are mindful of him?
O Lord, our God,
The majesty and glory of Your name
Transcends the earth and fills the heavens.
O Lord our God,
Little children praise you perfectly,
And so would we.
Hallelujah, hallelujah
The majesty and glory of Thy name transcends the earth and fills the heavens
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah! 

Tom Fettke, paraphrasing  Psalm 8, a Psalm of David

The Concept of “Hallelujah”

The word, “Hallelujah” is an interjection, composed of the Hebrew hillel (to praise joyously in song), and Yah (the name of God). The yoking of the two parts – the first, an exhortation; the second, the articulation of the name of the Supreme Deity, is an act that is both exhuberant and unrestrained but also expressedly forbidden – potentially explosive and dangerous. 

The recently deceased Leonard Cohen was most probably aware of the dangers involved in centering his song on this word.  Raised in the Jewish faith, he is familiar with its parameters. His references in the first stanza are to the great King David and the last warrior judge of Israel, Samson. Significant parts of these stories focus on the consequences of sin, particularly the unshakeable residue of sexual transgression. The poem pinpoints specific moments in the histories of these greater-than-life characters and the references are clear:

You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.

for David, and:

She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair

for Samson. Special powers have been bestowed by God on both biblical heroes – the divine gift of song in the first case:

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth,
the minor falls, the major lift,

 and supernatural physical strength emanating from a Nazirite dedication made at birth in the case of the second. David’s desire for the married Bathsheba and his efforts to possess her, hatching and executing a plan to ensure the death of her husband, Uriah, a general in David’s army leads to consequences that the king never quite recovers from – the death of their ill-begotten infant, the subsequent deadly conflict among his many sons for his throne, the open rebellion and ignominous death of his favorite son, Absalom, in a civil war against the King. Samson’s power is stripped from him when in violation of the commitment made to the God of Israel at his birth, he commits the treasonous act of marrying Delilah, a woman from the enemy Philistine camp, who cuts off the hair that is the source of his great strength, before revealing herself as an agent of the enemy that has plotted his undoing for a long time.

In these stories, it is apparent that while the sexual life, per se, is a joyous thing and not by its nature transgressive, the danger of putting the pursuit of personal desire and individual will without aligning the self to the cosmic translates as defiance of the sacred and is the source of human grief. It is inextricably linked to original sin. Desiring someone else’s wife and actively working for the death of her spouse is an exercise of naked, self-serving power. Desiring and marrying a woman clearly aligned with an enemy nation is not only a recipe for disaster but also an instrument of personal as well as national destruction. David, withdrawing into himself as he mourns the death of his infant son by Bathsheba, comes to understand this. He prostrates himself before God, acknowledging his error, accepting its consequences before rising from the ashes to resume his kingly role. Samson, captured and blinded by his enemies, and chained between two pillars, rededicates himself to God, who restores his power and allows him to demolish the great Philistine temple at Gaza, destroying both himself and all his captors in a blaze of glory equivalent to a mighty song of praise. 

Thus, the concept of Hallelujah, the ability to joyously praise and acknowledge a mighty and all-seeing God, especially at the precise moment of intense suffering and pain, is a spiritual discipline to be rigorously practiced if one is to triumph over the human condition. Self-pride is the original sin, the belief in the ability to impose one’s personal will on the cosmic order. Focused on the self, decisions made in this state ultimately result in failure, if not disaster. Brokenness, on the other hand is the recognition that the self cannot triumph over the order of things. It acknowledges an individual’s imperfection and leads to the acceptance of its consequences. In Genesis, this struggle is depicted in the story of Jacob, the founder of the nation of Israel, who permanently broke his hip, consequently walking with a limp after he wrestled with God at Peniel.[1] In the light of the humanity’s fall and our resulting estrangement from God, the act of being broken by God is necessary for our healing. And one moves closer to this with the act of praise. 

Furthermore, the ability to praise even as one acknowledges one’s brokenness leads to blessing  - the end result of the healing process. The state of blessedness therefore, is the desired end-product of struggle and negotiation with Deity.  Jacob wrestles with God all night, until he cannot go on. He resorts to clinging to God until sunrise, whereupon, the Lord gives Jacob His blessing and thus renews their covenant.

Cohen brings this idea into the contemporary and applies it to the mundane concerns of everyday life, notably the struggle of body, mind and spirit to approach the divine; the forced union of the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual pieces of one’s being, their jagged and frayed edges uncomfortably bound together in the dynamics of the internal and the personal as it puts itself in the presence of deity.

For the most part, the imagery of the second to the fifth stanzas  appears focused on the sexual, that most intimate of human relations, dramatically elevated to the level of sacredness. The thought that Deity acts and moves through the sensuous universal and finds its expression in the sexual act is a compelling one:

But remember when I moved in you
And the Holy Dove was moving too
And every breath we took was “Hallelujah!” 

The promise of the Hebrew God to indeed, establish and prosper the early biblical heroes, male and female, as progenitors and populators of a great and holy nation, achieved through a covenant between God and man, is a major premise, repeated again and again in Genesis. The long and copious genealogies, the establishment of unbroken lineages, the coupling, peopling, survival and flourishing of the nation are there for all to see. But one also sees here the failure of many individual selves - the insatiability of physical desire, the domestic deception and intrigue, the insecurity and desperation of the barren, the bitter competitions among wives and concubines for the favor of their husbands, the enmity between fathers and sons, the violence and anger of sibling rivalry, with disastrous consequences. Cohen’s lyrics project this sense of fierce despair and defiant failure over man’s inability to bend his natural desires to the Holy Will and reflect on the consequences of his actions.

Performing Hallelujah

The history of the singing of Cohen’s work is an interesting one. Record producers were originally hesitant to include the album that contained the song in a commercial recording because they felt it would not sell. I conjecture that it was the subversively charged lyrics that sought to bind the imagery of the sacred and the sexual together. Indeed, it was only released in 1984.[2] But singers and recording artist took notice of the song soon enough, beginning with the late Jeff Buckley, who was responsible for popularizing the song in 1994. Today, the song has been “covered” by so many singers and musicians that there is an occasional comment that it is being oversung. Cohen’s response was to acknowledge that, “many different hallelujahs exist,” and that each one had an integrity of its own.[3] A review of the field substantiates Cohen’s feelings. His rendering of the song for a London audience in 1993 is done with a quiet sense of peace, detachment and exhausted acceptance in a gravelly bass range, reflecting on his past and its moments of pain.

Jeff Buckley renders the song in simple folk style with a sweet and sadly lyrical eye focused inward.

KD Lang uses a richly textured croon to project a subtle, intense, almost beatific interior dialogue with the cosmos.  

But for me, the definitive performance and my own personal favorite is that of Raul Esparza, singing at the Kennedy Center for the 19th anniversary of 9/11.

Alternating almost imperceptibly between song and whispered speech building up to an explosive display of dangerous levels of vocal fry, his rendering projects the anger, anguish and the defiance of a stunned but not quite completely broken Everyman. 

The continued popularity of the song and the seemingly inexhaustible number of variations of reading and thus performing the texts has resulted in a rather Biblical situation where a work that was originally rejected by record producers and companies alike has become a cornerstone, a text mined again and again for its richness.

The Women of the Old Testament

As I listen to this selection of singers who have chosen to sing Cohen’s opus, I reflect on the Hallelujah of the patriarchs, and reenter the world of the Bible to find my own place in this order. I find myself in the company of familiar female figures - Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, and the unnamed wife of Manoah who is also Samson’s mother.[4] Dividing the extended narrative to surface major themes and motifs in the lives of these female founders of the faith, I found that central to the narrative were the states of longing and fulfillment, barrenness and fertility, blessing and suffering in erotic love.[5] Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and in all probability the wife of Manoah were beloved of their husbands - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and blessed by God as equal partners in the marital relationship. Both Sarah and Rebecca, who were deeply loved by Abraham and Isaac, respectively, were unable to bear children initially. Rachel, whose family Jacob served patiently for fourteen long years in return for her hand in marriage, was likewise barren. Her oldest sister Leah, who Jacob was tricked into marrying, was not highly regarded by her husband but nevertheless, was blessed with many sons. Rachel’s resentment and jealousy over Leah’s fertility despite Jacob’s clear lack of preference for the latter, created discord and tension between her and her husband and propelled the story of this family forward. Sarah, Leah and Rachel, offered their servants, Hagar, Bildad and Zilpah to their husbands to serve as proxy mothers for even more sons that would be counted as theirs. The machinations of these women, sometimes reluctantly abetted by their men, were not pleasing to God, who promised to protect the children, but separated them from the direct line of the covenanted people. Children, the product of the marital act, are blessings and signs of God’s favor.[6] They are a woman’s “Hallelujah!” Women are the bearers of this blessing as they conceive, bear, give birth and nurture children to adulthood. They have roles to fulfill in the maintenance of the covenant relationship. But every woman also has consequences to pay as she enters the covenant relationship. If one is to project backwards to the female primogenitor, Eve, we note that childbearing was linked by original sin to pain. Female suffering in childbirth and nurture is a consequence of the fall. For a woman, every sexual encounter bears the promise of suffering and is fraught with the danger and possibility of death. The rivalry between children is also the cause of deep pain. Both Eve and Rebecca see their children tear each other apart and are parted from sons they love. Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, and David’s many wives are locked in enmity as they seek to promote their sons over those of other wives.  The beloved Rachel dies giving birth to her second son, Benjamin, leaving Jacob grief stricken. The pseudo-death of her first son, Joseph, at the hands of his half-brothers, scars Jacob permanently. Part of Jacob’s apprehension at allowing Benjamin to go with his brothers to Egypt is the fear that the memory of Rachel will be lost forever with the disappearance of both their sons and his resignation over her possible erasure as a result is poignantly expressed in his declaration, “If I am bereaved, I am bereaved.” (Genesis 43:14)

On a Personal Note

Zooming in on the personal in this reflection, I am brought back to that eight-year period in my life centered on my own determined efforts to bear a son. Although, many parts of me are quite modern and even feminist in orientation, the more traditional part of me keenly felt that I must comply with the biblical and patriarchal injunction to “gift” a male heir to my husband, to “perfect” our marriage, despite a union already blessed with two daughters. Our efforts led to four failed and, in two cases, rather horrific, pregnancies. The loss of the children, my own dramatic near-death in the process, my defiance of the doctor’s pointed suggestion that I consider ligation in view of the obvious dangers to my life, rise up to remind me of my stubborn willfulness, deliberate rebellion and refusal to discern and accept God’s will. It is with clarity that I remember being wakened that November pre-dawn of 1990 to be informed of the death of my 3 week-old son, whom we had been unable to bring home from the NICU. The words from a daily devotional I had been following advised me to seek:

A place to flee to, a sanctuary. An escape from misunderstanding, from yourself. You can get away from others into the quiet of your own being, but from yourself, from the sense of your failure, your weakness, your sins and shortcomings, whither can you flee?

 To the Eternal God your refuge. Till in His Immensity you forget your smallness, meanness, limitations. Till the relief of safety merges into Joy of appreciation of your refuge, and you absorb the Divine, and absorbing gain strength to conquer.

 God Calling

The passage emerged in that darkness, resonating in my brain. I remember forcing myself to summon the strength and the discipline to vocalize a “Thank you,” to the Deity for both the brief fulfillment of my desire, the pain of its actualization and the searing reality of its consequences. 

Two decades later, again struggling alongside my husband as we dealt with his prolonged battle with cancer, his favorite passages from the Book of Job jumped out from the pages of the Old Testament: 

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

Tell me if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions?
Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone –
While the morning stars sang together and all the angels sang for joy.

Job 38:4-7

Dealing with matters arising from our present situation, I encounter in my reading today this commentary on the passage above from my daily devotions: 

God’s answer to Job’s archetypal cry of, “Why?” is simply, “Look at me.” The Book of Job is therefore both the most frustrating and enlightening treatment of unanswered prayer in the Bible, because God’s solution to so much misery is ultimately to reveal His greatness.

 Lectio 365
Costly Worship
March 1, 2021

To raise one’s voice in fierce praise to God at the moment of grief; to rise above one’s anger at the betrayal of the body and a physical world that fails; to come to the Deity in the middle of doubt and anger and face Its infinite beauty and overwhelming power; to cling to the Cosmic in order to survive physical devastation in the here and now - this  is the meaning of the cry of “Hallelujah.”

Let my cry come to Thee. (Psalm 102: 1)

[1] One is reminded by Levi-Strauss of the archetype of Oedipus, whose name translates as “swollen foot”; his father, Laius “left sided,” and grandfather, Labdacos, “lame.”

[2] Rolling Stone, “How Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Brilliantly Mingled Sex and Religion,” December 12, 201 

[3] Ibid.

[4] Delilah, the Philistine,  as a transgressive, destructive force, is not aligned with these women and belongs to another category altogether.

[5] I have noted the reticence, if not refusal of Christian groups to tackle the issue of eroticism in the Bible. Even the historic analysis of the content of the Song of Songs is embarrassedly redirected by early scholars who justify the contents as “allegoric” or “symbolic.” My own experience, as a member of a study group of women focusing on Genesis, the books of Samuel and Kings through 3 years of concentrated study, has been that discussions studiously avoid the discussion of such primal matters that stare one in the face as one dives into the narrative.  

[6] A corollary to this is that the children conceived and born after God has “opened the womb” of the barren are often dedicated to special service – as in the case of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Samson although the nature of the parental dedication/blessing varies from case to case.