Refuse to Clarify

Leonard Cohen on Consciousness and the call of Judaism (1964)

My colleague Rabbi Ariel Goldberg culled these comments from a recording of a seminar held at the Jewish Public Library of Montreal in June 1964 about being a Canadian Jewish writer (Cohen participated in a panel along with the great Canadian Jewish writers Melech Ravitch, Adele Wiseman and Ruth Wisse). It took place three years before Cohen's 1967 transition from being a Canadian poet to an internationally known singer-songwriter. You can listen to Cohen’s recording of the segment below here, and the entire recording here: Part 1, Part 2

Judaism is the secretion which an Eastern tribe with which an Eastern tribes surrounded a divine irritation a direct confrontation with the absolute, that happened once in history and we still feel the warmth of that confrontation.

Divorced as we are from the terms of it that happened a long time ago, today we covet the pearl but we are unwilling to support the irritation. The burning nucleus and our spiritual life today has the exact consistency of an unclean oyster and it stinks to heaven.

We cannot face heaven. We have lost our genius for the vertical.

Jewish novelists, our sociologists, horizontalists, and the residue of energy left from that great vertical seizure we had 4000 years ago that we turned toward ourselves we knock on our own doors and wonder that no one answers.

We create this insane Talmud of identity that must end in psychiatry or Zionism but never in a prayer of praise. Perhaps our taste for the absolute was too intense. We could not bear the light. We could not support the annihilation of the world inherent in the light. Perhaps we lost the land because we no longer wish to possess it. The light made the cities and the temples irrelevant.

There is an awful truth which no Jewish writer investigates today; which no Jewish poet articulates. It is a truth that the synagogues and the cultural establishment cannot face and it is this truth:

We no longer believe we are holy.

This is the declaration that I wait to hear going out from synagogues and from the lips of cultural Jews and ethical Jews. This is the confession without which we cannot begin to raise our eyes the absence of God in our midst and it's interesting that in a two symposia that I have been to in within the Jewish community in the past few months no one has mentioned the word God! And I am laboring under the misapprehension but the Jewish people represents that testimony on the earth and without that testimony informing its actions, Jewish survival is nominal and no more important to me than Armenian survival or Greek survival. The absence of God in our midst is a deep 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. Each generation of men must continue the ancient and holy dialog between the material secular artificial ethnocentric, on the one hand, and on the other - the spiritual ascetic natural experiential.

Certainly we have built too much on the other side. The balance has hit the ground. Let us refuse the title Jew to any man who is not obsessed by God. Let that become the sole qualification of Jewish identity. Let us encourage young men to go into the deserts of their heart and burn the praise of perfection. Let us do it with drugs or whips or sex or blasphemy or fasting but let men begin to feel the perfection of the universe! Let us declare a moratorium on all religious services until someone reports a vision or breaks his mind on the infinite.

Jews without God are lilies that fester. Let us discard the mentality of the minion, the danger which it was meant to shield us from lonely self-annihilation in the spirit is unfortunately no longer a danger. Let us make it a danger. Let us see Jewish monasteries! Our families are strong enough to support the dialectic. We need our dirty saints and our monstrous hermits. Let us create a tradition for them for they like the world [Music]

Look, four thousand years ago the world was idolatrous and a small Eastern tribe repudiated the experience of the world to develop a difficult idea that has burned to people for four thousand years. That is what I mean by variety. Of course the world is idolatrous today. That's why the Jews have a particular vocation. That's why we're here tonight examining a special unspoken kind of anguish about our identity because we're not fulfilling it.

There was a time when all Israel, when all Judah's neighbors, were idolaters and some madman decided to smash the images and turn himself into light now that is the challenge for Jews in every generation - whether it's a ghetto or whether it's a metropolis - is whether they are burnt or whether they are citizens - the Jews have a special duty to save God in the world!

It's very hot. The question was what I explore the differences that are innate in the Jew and I couldn't do that while standing on one foot it's a matter of the knowledge that each person in this room has. There is a time you know when we must start discarding definitions. Start discarding the problem which we create for ourselves.

We know what God means.

We know what the word means.

We don't need a definition. We know it.

The word Jew means we don't need a definition.

There comes a time when the definition only obscures the human reality. Now let us return to the human reality. We know how we feel in the world. Jews know how they feel in the world. All I ask is for some allegiance to that feeling. let us refuse to clarify! Let us only follow the allegiance that we know we owe.

Leonard Cohen, 1964