First They 'Took' Jerusalem, Then They 'Took' Hebron

With apologies to the great Cohen.

Leonard Cohen.

-     -     -    -    -

I fully understand my Hebron friends, from the Prime Minister to the Mayor of Hebron, the Jewish Mayor, that is.

But let us recall, last week's Hebron UNESCO resolution was enabled back in  when the previous Jerusalem-centered resolution passed and also United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 (2016), - thanks to Barack Obama* - and in fact, last Thursday's resolution included this reference before getting to Hebron.

And it detailed this regarding Jerusalem:

30.I Jerusalem

...5. Reminding that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and in particular the “basic law” on Jerusalem, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith,

...7. Regrets the failure of the Israeli occupying authorities to cease the persistent excavations, tunneling, works and projects in East Jerusalem, particularly in and around the Old City of Jerusalem, which are illegal under international law and reiterates its request to Israel, the occupying Power, to prohibit all violations which are not in conformity with the provisions of the relevant UNESCO conventions, resolutions and decisions;

...9. Stresses again the urgent need to implement the UNESCO reactive monitoring mission to the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls, and invites the Director-General and the World Heritage Centre, to exert all possible efforts, in line with their mandates and in conformity with the provisions of the relevant UNESCO conventions, decisions and resolutions, to ensure the prompt implementation of the mission and, in case of non-implementation, to propose possible effective measures to ensure its implementation;

Letting UNESCO getting away with that, not consistently following up and demanding some sort of a recall process, led straight to Hebron.


-------------------
*

President Obama had to make that decision. And one of the factors in that decision was, if he vetoes it, does it somehow give his approval to this big party going on about annexation and legalization and widespread settlement construction and the death of the two-state solution? That was a factor. So it was a judgment call.”

Blessed by A Cohen Who Has Become Very Dark

Leonard Eliezer Cohen has died.

Admitting my age, my intellectual development coalesced in the mid-1960s, from the end of high school through to university studies.  Leonard Cohen was there.

I first heard "Suzanne" in the winter of 1968 when I went up to Montreal to visit the Betar group there (Dina Kolodny-Shalit, Mendy Shalit, etc.) but dropped off to see the three HaShomer HaTzair girls who were with me on Machon.  Of course, it was at their ken that the song was played

I have, still, I hope, his Spice-Box of Earth book of poetry.  I bought my son a book of his poems translated into Hebrew.

His records were heard by all our children.

My wife would use his "Hallelujah" in her English teaching curriculum.

I recently found this article on his Zohar references.

And I still read intensively:

Including this last interview with this

In recent years, he spent many Shabbat mornings and Monday evenings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue on Venice Boulevard, talking about Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there, Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley, who says that he considers Cohen “a great liturgical writer,” read from the pulpit passages from “Book of Mercy,” a 1984 collection of Cohen’s that is steeped in the Psalms. “I participated in all these investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,” Cohen has said. “I even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas—no robe, I didn’t join them, but I was trying everything.”

To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts. In our conversations, he mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kabbalah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl Jung’s “Answer to Job,” and Gershom Scholem’s biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah of the seventeenth century. Cohen is also very much at home in the spiritual reaches of the Internet, and he listens to the lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain, a Kabbalist who has converted, serially, to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism, and lives in the San Bernardino mountains 

and other snippets:

Cohen showed up in Israel [during the Yom Kippur War], hoping to replace someone who had been drafted. “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people,” he told an interviewer at the time. He ended up performing, often many times a day, for the troops on the front.) 

and finally,

what is on Cohen’s mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. “I’ve had a family to support, so there’s no sense of virtue attached to it,” he said. “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now it’s a habit. And there’s the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I haven’t gotten near finishing up. I’ve finished up a few things. I don’t know how many other things I’ll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue. . . . There are times when I just have to lie down. I can’t play anymore, and my back goes fast also. Spiritual things, baruch Hashem”—thank God—“have fallen into place, for which I am deeply grateful.”

Cohen has unpublished poems to arrange, unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish. He’s considering doing a book in which poems, like pages of the Talmud, are surrounded by passages of interpretation.

“The big change is the proximity to death,” he said. “I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.”

and

“I know there’s a spiritual aspect to everybody’s life, whether they want to cop to it or not,” Cohen said. “It’s there, you can feel it in people—there’s some recognition that there is a reality that they cannot penetrate but which influences their mood and activity. So that’s operating. That activity at certain points of your day or night insists on a certain kind of response. Sometimes it’s just like: ‘You are losing too much weight, Leonard. You’re dying, but you don’t have to coöperate enthusiastically with the process.’ Force yourself to have a sandwich.

“What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.” The divine voice. “You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ 

^

Meeting Your Deadline

.

...when a journalist mentioned writing on deadline, he said:

“You’ve got a deadline. Well, I do too: death.”

He smiled. “It tends to insert itself into our considerations.”

And, not to be that forlorn, he added:

“It’s probably not a good idea to do an autopsy on a living thing.”

Leonard Cohen


(Listen to his new album)

P.S.  Just now found this:

To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and f___ one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

The Jewish messiah, it turned out, was a gaunt poet with a guitar who promised not to whisk us away to some other, better world but to teach us how to come to terms with this one.

 and

Joan Baez was equally baffled. “People say that a song needs to make sense,” she told the filmmaker. “Leonard proves otherwise. It doesn’t necessarily make sense at all, it just comes from so deep inside of him, it somehow touches deep down inside other people. I’m not sure how it works, but I know that it works.”

^

Can We Get Leonard Cohen to The Temple Mount?

For Temple Mount Awareness Day next Tuesday:

I asked my father,
I said, "Father change my name."
The one I'm using now it's covered up
with fear and filth and cowardice and shame.

Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me,
yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me.

He said, "I locked you in this body,
I meant it as a kind of trial.
You can use it for a weapon,
or to make some woman smile."

Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me
yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me.

"Then let me start again," I cried,
"please let me start again,
I want a face that's fair this time,
I want a spirit that is calm."

Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me
yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me.

"I never never turned aside," he said,
"I never walked away.
It was you who built the temple,
it was you who covered up my face."

Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me
yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me.

And may the spirit of this song,
may it rise up pure and free.
May it be a shield for you,
a shield against the enemy...

A nice theme song and easily deconstructs as a defense of Jewish identity and the need to be on the alert and preserve your Jewish heritage.


(Kippah tip: Gideon Charlap)

Leonard Cohen Reciting The Priestly Blessing

After making some good music and a slightly foolish political statement - Leonard, I too work with the heart with love for my people and my land - at 8:00 he pronounces the Biblical text of the Priestly Blessing:

Two Reasons To Reconsider Attending Leonard Cohen's Israel Concert

After the Pals. refused his offer to appear in Ramallah,

Internationally-renowned artist Leonard Cohen will not be performing in Ramallah as planned. The 74-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter has had his concert in Ramallah canceled in a development viewed as a small victory by groups calling to boycott Israel.

Pro-Palestinian activists said Cohen was not welcome in Ramallah as long as he insisted on performing in Tel Aviv, where a concert is planned for September 24.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Club, which was organizing the event, decided to cancel the concert because it was becoming too politicized, but the club insisted it did not bow to pressure from boycott organizations.

we now read this:

The official Leonard Cohen forum announced it will start selling tickets for the singer's Tel Aviv concert this coming Friday, July 31. The sale, which is offered only to registered members of the forum, will last until Saturday evening...According to the message, all the proceeds from the September 24 concert in Ramat Gan Stadium, titled "A concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace“, will go towards a newly-established foundation to benefit Israeli and Palestinian organizations working for reconciliation.

So, the tickets will be bought via chillul shabbat, desecrating of the Sabbath and the monies will go to some sort of peace group which will be, no doubt, dominated by our progressive liberal cultural elites.

Not very inviting.


====================


UPDATE

Tickets for Leonard Cohen¹s September 24 concert in Ramat Gan Stadium will go on sale Saturday night...Ticket prices will range from NIS 350 to NIS 1,200...

As reported exclusively in The Jerusalem Post, Cohen will be donating his proceeds from the concert to an Amnesty International-administered fund which will funnel the money to Israeli and Palestinian organizations that are working toward conciliation.

The initial recipients of the funds will be the
Parents Circle - Family Forum, the Peres Center for Peace Children¹s Medical Program, and Combatants for Peace, an organization which attempts to bring together IDF veterans and Palestinian terrorists who have renounced their ways.

The Palestinian Happy Child Center, a developmental center that works with special-needs children in Ramallah, has been vetted as another recipient but has not yet confirmed its participation.

Well, chillul Shabbat (Desecration of Shabbat) is out but the list of those NGOs is way too left for anybody with a modicum of Jewish self-respect.

What about Terror Victims' groups?

And as for the prices...

On Leonard Cohen's Writing

I wouldn't possibly begin to tell you what I think he wrote, because that changes, so all I will say is that like the Bible or the Talmud, great lines have an endurance, no matter what position you take when you open the book. And I think that he studied that, and he began over time to understand what it was that made a phrase enter this heart. So that's the crucial issue there, the words actually do get under your skin, for very good reason. He's a genius that way. And so, you know, today they mean this, today they look like that, maybe it's that, and that's great. It's like a diamond, it depends on which side you look at it.

Jennifer Warnes

Bad Vibes

I've heard of punk rock and trash singing but this is the worst, our lefties and progressivies trying to hitch a ride on Leonard Cohen:

AN OPEN LETTER TO LEONARD COHEN

Dear Leonard Cohen,

We are Jews, Palestinians, Israeli citizens, who hold your poetry and music in high esteem, and it is because of this respect for your artistic contributions and your moral Buddhist commitment to "save all beings" that we hope that our appeal to you to cancel your planned performance in Israel will not fall on deaf ears.

Israel is facing one of its most immoral historical moments. Its ruthless, criminal bashing of the Palestinians has met with little international criticism or curbing. The silence of most of the world’s governments continues to embolden successive Israeli governments to commit more violent acts. Israel has violated numerous international laws, but so far for Israeli Jews life in Israel goes on as if nothing happened. Indeed, your people, Cohen, have built “a new Dachau, And call it love, Security, Jewish culture”, as you have so perceptively put it yourself in ‘Questions for Shomrim’,[1] but only a few voices have been raised against these injustices.

It is left for us, citizens of the world, to condemn Israeli atrocities and crimes against humanity. Dissociating ourselves from Israel’s brutal policies is the only non-violent way now to avoid becoming complicit in the killing, the wounding and the maiming, and the robbing of Palestinians. Faced with all this and more, Palestinians are calling on all people to support their struggle for their basic rights. Unfortunately, recognizing Palestinian rights will require a fundamental shift in Israeli society. We suspect that this change will be achieved only via external pressure. The least that one can do in such a situation is not act as if it is business as usual. We see our society becoming more and more calloused and racist and given your longstanding, vocal commitment to justice, we cannot envision you cooperating with continued Israeli defiance of justice and morality; we cannot envision you playing a part in the Israeli charade of self-righteousness. We appeal to you to add your voice to those brave people the world over who boycott Israel. We urge you to cancel your planned performance in Israel.

Sincerely,

Noa Abend
Iris Bar
Yoav Barak
Adi Dagan
Naama Farjoun
Prof. Rachel Giora
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
Dr. Irit Katriel
Rela Mazali
Dr. David Nir
Leiser Peles
Yonatan Shapira
Dr. Kobi Snitz

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

and this

AN OPEN LETTER TO LEONARD COHEN

Dear Leonard Cohen:

Your songs have been part of the soundtrack of our lives -- like breathing, some of them. But we can’t make sense of why you’ve decided to perform in Israel in September this year.

If we understand anything about Buddhism – your practice of which is public knowledge – it’s that Buddhism advocates ‘right action’. We accept that this precept, like the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, is probably honoured more in the breach than the observance. But we can’t believe you didn’t weigh up performing in Israel in the light of ‘right action’. And apparently you’ve decided that it’s right to take your unavoidably starry and very newsworthy presence there.

But what does this say to the Palestinians? If you had just emerged from three weeks of unfettered bombing from land, sea and air, with no place to hide and no place to run, your hospitals overwhelmed, sewage running in the streets and white phosphorous burning up your children, what would the news that the great Canadian musician Leonard Cohen had decided to play for your tormentors say to you?

You will perform for a public that by a very large majority had no qualms about its military forces’ onslaught on Gaza (in fact wanted it to continue). You will perform in a state whose propaganda services will extract every ounce of mileage from your presence (they will use it to whitewash their war crimes). As someone who lives in the US, you are saying ‘yah boo sucks’ to the American academics, musicians, film-makers and others (including poet Adrienne Rich), who earlier this year launched the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel. And you are telling the Palestinians -- who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Holocaust in Europe but have endured the torments of exile and military occupation ever since they were driven out of their country in 1948 -- that their suffering doesn’t matter.

Have you come across an Israeli woman called Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan? She lost her 13 year old daughter to a Palestinian suicide bomber in 1997, but Dr Peled – showing the compassionate greatness of which human beings are sometimes capable – didn’t retreat into rage, revenge or depression. Instead she co-founded an Israeli-Palestinian network called ‘Bereaved Parents for Peace’. When the 10 year old daughter of a Palestinian colleague was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier, Peled said: ’I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, “We are all victims of occupation”. But my daughter’s murderer had the decency to kill himself. The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques’.

Or going to a Leonard Cohen concert in Ramat Gan. Is this really what you want to be part of?

Yours sincerely,

Professor Haim Bresheeth
Mike Cushman
Professor Hilary Rose
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead

London
22 April 2009

I bet you he comes nevertheless.


--------------------

[1] the reference is to a poem which also includes these lines:

We, you and I, were lovers once
As only wild nights of wrestling in golden snow
Can make one love
We hiked by moonlight
And you asked me to lead the Internationale

I guess he was in Habonim?

Leonard Cohen: Observant Jew?

From an interview with him on the occasion of his new tour:

The day after his first American concert in more than 15 years, Leonard Cohen sat in a Manhattan hotel suite warily submitting to an interviewer’s questions, including one about the music in his laptop’s iTunes. In response, he played a klezmer-style Hebrew hymn, then followed it by singing along with one of George Jones’s weepy country morality tales...Religious devotion weighs heavily in both music and life for Mr. Cohen, and it takes many forms...

...About the meaning of those songs, Mr. Cohen is diffident and elusive. Many are, he acknowledges, “muffled prayers,” but beyond that he is not eager to reveal much.

“It’s difficult to do the commentary on the prayer,” he said. “I’m not a Talmudist, I’m more the little Jew who wrote the Bible,” a reference to a line in “The Future,” a song he released in 1992. “I feel it doesn’t serve the enterprise to really examine it from outside the moment.”

...Jennifer Warnes...said: “He has investigated a lot of deities and read all the sacred books, trying to understand in some way who wrote them as much as the subject matter itself. It’s for his own healing that he reaches for those places. If he has one great love, it is his search for God.”

Mr. Cohen is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath even while on tour



and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So how does he square that faith with his continued practice of Zen?

“Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago,” he said. “Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief.”

Well, I have no problems with that.