Michael Posner, author of Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories, was Kolot Mayim\u2019s final speaker in this season\u2019s Zoom lecture series.\u00a0<\/i>(photo from Michael Posner)<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/i>Kolot Mayim Reform Temple\u2019s 2025\/26 Zoom lecture series on Jewish music concluded April 12 with a talk by Michael Posner on Hallelujah and Beyond: Leonard Cohen\u2019s Torah of Song.<\/p>\n
Posner, a playwright, author and journalist living in Toronto, penned Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories<\/i>, covering the musician\u2019s life from his early years in Montreal to his death in Los Angeles in 2016. Posner drew on more than 500 interviews with Cohen\u2019s family, friends and others to offer a complete portrait of the man and his art.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt won\u2019t surprise many of you to know that Leonard was a very complex character, a very complicated individual,\u201d Posner said. \u201cIn fact, when I speak about the Jewish soul of Leonard Cohen, it\u2019s necessary to attach what I would call an asterisk to that description. The asterisk is actually very appropriate to Leonard, and maybe essential, because he was a man of many moods and many masks, many manifestations and many contradictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohen had a profoundly Jewish soul, according to Posner. Not only was he a kohanim<\/i> (descendant of Jewish priests), but an ancestor was the unofficial chief rabbi of Montreal, his grandfather was a talmudic scholar and portraits of Cohen\u2019s forefathers feature prominently on the walls of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the time that he starts writing, as a teenager in the early 1950s, Jewish themes and motifs, Jewish imagery and history infuse his art \u2013 they are a very essential part of the first four books of poetry that he wrote,\u201d Posner said.<\/p>\n
It is through his music, however, that Cohen achieved international fame, and many of his songs \u201ccleverly exploit Jewish ideas and scripture,\u201d said Posner.<\/p>\n
In \u201cWho by Fire,\u201d for example, which echoes the Unetaneh Tokef prayer of the High Holy Days, Cohen is not rejecting faith, so much as trying to establish, in the wake of the Holocaust, the grounds of continuing faith, argues Posner.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe metaphor here,\u201d he said, \u201cis a kind of corporate secretary fielding phone calls on behalf of humanity itself, some of whom will live and some of whom will die in the next year, according to the decree of the caller. But who, exactly, is the caller? Who is at the other end of the line? Dear God, it\u2019s me, Leonard. Are you still there? Can you please identify yourself? This is a theme that Cohen mines continually.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cHallelujah,\u201d Posner spots irony in the line, \u201cThere was a time you let me know \/ What\u2019s really going on below \/ But now you never show it to me, do you?\u201d<\/p>\n
The song is often perceived as a celebration of God, but, Posner said, \u201cI don\u2019t think people have paid close enough attention to the lyric, because the lyric is really saying, we want to believe in you, God, but it\u2019s not that simple.\u201d<\/p>\n
Posner discussed Cohen\u2019s struggles with established Judaism and his spiritual exploration that delved into other faiths, including Christianity, I Ching and Sufism; Cohen was devoted to Rinzai Zen Buddhism and ordained as a monk in 1996. Nonetheless, there were several aspects of Judaism that Cohen honoured.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the 1970s, he began to study with a Chabad rabbi in Montreal and routinely traveled when he was on tour with his tallis and tefillin bags,\u201d Posner said. \u201cIn later life, he joined a synagogue in Los Angeles, whose rabbi, Mordecai Finley, was deeply steeped in kabbalah. And, later still, he studied online with Yakov Leib HaKohain, another rabbi who was immersed in the mystical aspects of Judaism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohen, in Posner\u2019s view, touched upon everything that is human \u2013 magnificent, brilliant, humorous and generous, yet capable of being cynical, depressed, angry and jealous.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that is really what I ultimately draw from this fantastic human being \u2013 that enormous complexity, an enormous soul that tried to reach beyond our everyday lives and look at the enduring qualities that make us human,\u201d Posner said.<\/p>\n
Kolot Mayim\u2019s next series starts in November, with the theme of \u201cLech Lecha: Journeys of the Soul.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sam Margolis<\/b> has written for the <\/i>Globe and Mail, the <\/i>National Post, UPI and MSNBC.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Michael Posner, author of Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories, was Kolot Mayim\u2019s final speaker in this season\u2019s Zoom lecture series.\u00a0(photo from Michael Posner) Kolot Mayim Reform Temple\u2019s 2025\/26 Zoom lecture series on Jewish music concluded April 12 with a talk by Michael Posner on Hallelujah and Beyond: Leonard Cohen\u2019s Torah of Song. Posner, a playwright, author […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24710,4242,9270,6585,3036,387,9443],"class_list":["post-48878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-art-history","tag-history","tag-kolot-mayim","tag-leonard-cohen","tag-music","tag-poetry","tag-songwriting"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}