Another Cohen in Israel

September 24, 2009 - 9:34 AM by David · 5 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Music, Pop Culture, coexistence

Leonard Cohen and his band onstage in Ramat Gan Wednesday at a sound check (Reuters)

After all the months (years?) of speculation, rumors, false starts, boycott calls and health scares, Leonard Cohen will finally be performing on Thursday night before 50,000 fans in Ramat Gan Stadium.

It was almost as if someone – or something – didn’t want this show to take place. As Ethan Bronner wrote in The New York Times, “Leonard Cohen’s path to his sold-out concert here Thursday night has been strewn with obstacles. Those seeking to ostracize Israel through an international boycott demanded that he call it off. When he offered instead a matching concert in the West Bank, Palestinians said no thanks. Amnesty International agreed to help him distribute the concert’s proceeds to peace groups; Amnesty International withdrew. Then last Friday, three days before turning 75, Mr. Cohen collapsed onstage in Valencia, Spain, in the middle of his classic “Bird on a Wire” and was rushed to the hospital.”

Thankfully, Cohen has recovered, performed in Barcelona on Monday, and arrived in Israel on Tuesday looking dapper as ever. He’s “in great shape,” Cohen’s manager Robert Kory told The Times. And indeed, last night, Cohen was seen onstage at the stadium testing out the sound system and getting his bearings for the show, which is being billed as “A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace.”

Cohen is giving the expected profits of $1.5 million to $2 million to a new charity he has created of the same name, run by a board of Israelis and Palestinians, which will distribute money to groups focused on coexistence here – particularly organizations composed of people who have paid a great personal price because of the dispute and yet are working for peace, like the Parents Circle — Families Forum, made up of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost close family members to the conflict.

Why has the Cohen concert, which sold out in record time, generated so much controversy and coverage? My colleague Ben Jacobson, one of the country’s foremost Cohen fans and scholars, had some interesting insights in a recent essay in The Jerusalem Post.

Why is everyone so up in arms over a folk singer from the ’60s entertaining some civilians with large wallets? Perhaps Cohen’s appearance in Israel was taken to be a potentially partisan threat because of the perception that he is “one of ours,” having grown up in the upscale Montreal neighborhood of Westmount, where he attended Herzliah High School and Camp Mishmar in his teens and played in the Hillel Band at McGill University.

But Cohen’s world view is hardly oriented towards taking sides in any given conflict – it is, rather, strictly a vehicle for expressing his artistic ideas. Cohen’s oft-uniformed “Field Commander Cohen” persona, which has informed several works and inspired the title of a 1979 concert tour, grew out of his posturing as a guerrilla of verse, a rogue revolutionary who champions the cause of the underdog.

“Field Commander Cohen” only came into his own in the fall of 1973, when Cohen, facing crises in his career and family life, dropped everything to participate in the Yom Kippur War. Arriving in Tel Aviv from his habitual haven in Hydra, he announced to the press that he had come “to make my atonement” – and to entertain the troops.

He also noted that while he had once advocated an unconditional return to the 1967 borders, recent events had inspired a change of heart. Cohen joined a group of local musicians that included Ilana Rovina and Matti Caspi on an informal performance tour of bases close to the front in Sinai, at one point even pocketing a firearm so that he could feel like he was ready to participate in the battles.

In his unpublished memoir, The Final Revision of My Life in Art, Cohen reflected on having shared a bottle of cognac with General Ariel Sharon at a makeshift desert wilderness fort. “I want his job,” he wrote of the 1973 meeting, in a sentiment more significant for its self-conscious romanticism of military strength than for its political alignment. After all, the trip to Israel was possibly more about personal redemption for the artist than anything else. In Cohen’s mind, Israel was “a place where you may begin again,” he would write.

To this end, he was determined to perform a pilgrimage from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on foot before his return to Hydra; he ended up wandering back to the cafes of Dizengoff Square after a few hours, of course.

Later, he would be known for having played impromptu sets for IDF troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Eleven years later, Cohen’s public Middle Eastern anti-politics surfaced once again, this time in the context of his compilation of personal psalm-like essays, The Book of Mercy. The work includes several references to the nation of “Ishmael,” and in one passage, Cohen tears down all of the region’s constructs of alignment: “Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation – none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy… Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless.”

For the perpetual Canadian-American-Jewish-Zen-Greek exile, traditional trappings of nationalism and alignments are to be scoffed at and simply employed as tools for conveying one’s own artistic statements.

As Cohen wrote in “Democracy,” a 1993 song, which, based on recent set-lists, he’s likely to perform on Thursday, “I love the country but I can’t stand the scene / And I’m neither left or right / I’m just staying home tonight / getting lost in that hopeless little screen.”

Share with others