Monstrous Hermits & Lilies That Fester

A good rant is an emotional defibrillation. It lends you the ranter’s rage, lifting you in its hot winds, swirling your liquids around, shooting you through with clarity and feeling; it swarms you with a hive’s worth of stings, redirecting the elephant of your mind in the direction of the ranter's passion. It whelms you in a montage of dedicated fervor-flavors so completely that a channel from the ranter’s heart to yours opens and their life-blood flows into you.

Leonard Cohen’s life blood oxygenates nooks and crannies in my vascular system that none other can reach. His words scratch itches in my soul that had begun to show the first signs of fading, and I am forever grateful to him for that. The way he speaks and cries and yells in this rant is deeply familiar to me- it's a Jewish cadence from far in the backrooms of my soul, a rhythm and tone used by specific kind of Rabbi on a specific kind of day; the Jewish equivalent of a fire and brimstone preaching. Here, Leonard is speaking with the voice of a Rabbi before Yom Kippur: a Day of Judgement napalm airstrike against arrogance and sin in the heart of man, a plea to find redemption before it's too late. Not a moral redemption, not a communal absolution, not a socially sanctioned pardon, something dangerous, something lonely, something alive.

Here, he uses this ancient Jewish pen-sword magic against its originator- he snatches the strength a Rabbi wields through unifying his community and uses to to cut the bonds stale spiritual culture that wrap around the individual mystic instinct to tear the status quo a new one, to bound out of lecture halls and tired sermons and matching uniforms directly into the eye of the firestorm, directly into the great waterfall. He grasps them tight, then severs them, and screams at us to take spiritual risks, to gamble with our comfort, sanity, and security, to go all in on the vertical.

The context of this rant is the Symposium for English Language Jewish Writers, held in Montreal on June 7th, 1964. The panelists discuss Jewish literature and ask a series of somewhat boring and uninspired questions about writing in Yiddish versus English, what it means to be a Jew, what and what it means to be a Canadian, English speaking Jew. To someone like Cohen (a surname that appropriately translates to Priest) whose molecules buzz with divine impatiens and the kind of longing a moth feels for a flamethrower 200 nights into an Alaskan winter, these questions are maddening. What does it mean to be Jewish??? Can you not feel that you are sitting on God’s face, right now?!? Can you not sense the spiritual content beyond language? Can you not feel the destiny that transcends the alphabet??

This might seem like a lecture for Jews, and to some extent it is; but I think the fury and poetry that follows is for all mystics, all lonely artists, anyone who has seen a vision in the desert or heard a voice late at night. It's for anyone who feels a pull to follow a burning passion that leads them away from the herd, even as wolves chomp at their ankles.

He rails against ‘the mentality of the Minyan’- Minyan being the Hebrew word for ‘prayer quorum’. According to Jewish law, the daily set of three prayer services must be done with at least ten Jewish men. But throughout history, many saints were known to eschew this law and pray on their own. For much of my time as an Orthodox Jew, I did the same- many of my best memories of God and prayer occurred when I was ‘alone’ in nature, not between pews. I use a different word for what I feel in the forest these days, but the feeling is often the same.

Part of what I love in particular about his fury is that it is directed as much towards religious Judaism with its restrictive obsessive legalism- the requirement for a minyan to pray being a perfect encapsulation of this excess safetyism- and secular Judaism alike; he dismisses it as an ‘insane Talmud of identity that must end in psychiatry or Zionism, but never a prayer of praise’. No one is safe from his holy frustration, and that's the point; no one is safe. Love isn't safe, life isn't safe, following the aches in our hearts to the break in our souls isn't safe. That’s no reason not to chase the infinite.

Listening to him speak this way is very validating and inspiring for me. I think it can be inspiring to anyone, not just Jews, not just mystics, but anyone who feels like a lonely man of faith, regardless of whether they are a man, or have faith in anything but something real.

Here is the recording of his rant, which I highly recommend listening to. Below, I have transcribed the rant, and enjoyed every tap of every key, every subtle sensation that comes with the feeling of his words flowing through me.

So here it is; my favorite rant ever.

"Judaism is the secretion with which an Eastern tribe 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.

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 are 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 why 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 wished 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 efface, 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 to the absence of God in our midst.

And it's interesting that in the two symposiums that I have been to within the Jewish community in the past few months, no one has mentioned the word God! And I am laboring under the misapprehension that the Jewish people represent that testimony on the earth, and that 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 hearts 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 Minyan. 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 light the world.

<applause>

Look, 4000 years ago the world was idolatrous and a small Eastern tribe repudiated the experience of the world to develop a difficult idea that has burnt a people for 4000 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.

Question from audience: Are you saying the Jews have a special duty to save the world?

Leonard: The Jews have a special duty to save God, in the world.

[Question from the audience] Can you explore a little further the differences that are innate in the Jew?

Leonard: 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 what 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.”