Leonard Cohen and Philosophy by Holt Jason

Author:Holt, Jason [Holt, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812698824
Publisher: Open Court

Who

Like the Hallelujah psalm praising the name of God, Cohen’s “Who by Fire” recounts the New Year prayer, Unetanneh Tokef—who will be inscribed. This is the meaning of the blessing of the New Year Greeting, L’shanah tovah—may you be inscribed. To be inscribed in this sense means that the name of the person so greeted might be added to the Book of Life for the coming year. The ultimate issue is fate, one’s fate, one’s destiny, and the destiny for each and every one of us.

The judgment of the high holy days, the judgment of the New Year, is the judgment of the Lord, as all are brought before the Lord. As a prayer to grace the holiest days of the year, it is attributed to the medieval rabbi Kalonymus ben Meshullam who, in good traditional fashion, reports hearing it in a dream from Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, a moving liturgical psalm, but I quote only that part of it that bears on what Cohen sings:

On Rosh Hashanah it is written,

On Yom Kippur it is sealed,

How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,

Who shall live and who shall die,

Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,

Who shall die by fire and who by water. . . .

(The High Holiday Prayer Book, pp. 189–90)

Unetanneh Tokef recounts the judgment of the Lord, between salvation and doom. What is decided in the new year is fate. And because this is a prayer what’s also emphasized is hope: the chance of mercy. As the logic of the high holy days sets Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, to answer the conclusion of this Rosh Hashanah New Year prayer: “But Teshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedekah, Penitence, Prayer, and Deeds of Mercy annul the severity of judgment.”

Cohen’s “Who by Fire” repeats this and we may find in it echoes of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and therefore, as Nietzsche tells us, also a tragic ethics, as Cohen hears all the ways of coming to one’s own death, such as poets and songwriters like to count these kinds or modes of judgment. These disjoint ways of life and death aren’t the flower-power, petal plucking, “she loves me, she loves me not” of more pragmatic (and one might say justly unattributed) rot-gut verse: “For if she will, she will, you may depend on’t; And if she won’t, she won’t; so there’s an end on’t.”

The beauty of the love disjunction, in all its insight and all its calm (a calm no lover ever concedes or seems to believe for a moment: the beloved will or won’t, loves me or doesn’t) is its illustration of both the principle of contradiction and the same principle of identity which is yet more fundamental to logic and mathematics, namely tautology—as if one needed that. In the same way, different in spirit and accent from Derrida’s reflection that every promised yes is affirmed again, “yes, yes,” the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser proved the value of counting positive statements twice, yeah, yeah, as

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