A Holy or Broken New Year: Sacred Space as Bridge for Duality ERH 5777 Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg

I heard there was a secret chord That David played and it pleased the lord But you don't really care for music, do you Well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall and the major lift The baffled king composing hallelujah Hallelujah…

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this song. If you like the song, and millions of people around world do, take a moment to think about why you do? My guess is there isn’t one simple reason. It’s probably not just the melody or the lyrics or the musician who sings it, its sanctity, its irreverence, the mashup of Biblical and secular imagery. It may be some combination of all of these. But the thing about a great song, like any powerful work of art, is how it moves us, how it makes us feel somehow elevated, even as it reveals to us the boundaries, the edges of its holiness. The techelet, the blue thread on the tallis is only powerful inasmuch as it’s the only blue thread, because its holiness stands in relationship with the white.

Back when we lived in Chicago, Miriam and I used to go to a local coffee shop called Uncommon Ground, not to be confused with the Hampden shop Common Ground, which has good coffee, but, frustratingly, no wifi. Uncommon Ground is legendary in the Lakeview neighborhood. A hole-in-the-wall place just blocks from Wrigley Field which has since expanded to include a bar, art gallery and restaurant. But, to my knowledge it’s always been a music venue that for years has featured nationally-known singer-songwriters, including the late great Jeff Buckley. (As an aside, I once got up the courage to play a single original song at Uncommon Ground, at their renowned open-mike night, one known around the city as a place where real musicians on Chicago’s music scene try out their stuff in front of a live audience before plugging new pieces into their own sets at some other venue. I was terrified, of course, so when another performer, some seriously impressive long-haired dude, leaned over to me a while after I finished and said, “Hey man…nice song…good lyrics,” I was over the moon). Anyway, Buckley played his very first two Chicago gigs there back in 1994, the same year he released his one and only studio album, over a decade before I would play that open-mike on the same spot. And after Buckley drowned tragically in the Mississippi River in ’97, Uncommon Ground began to host an annual tribute concert. Last year was its 18th year. The first song in the set was Hallelujah.

Buckley was reasonably well-known while he was performing but became an icon after he died. He was strikingly handsome and had an extraordinary voice. His estranged father Tim, before he died tragically young, had been a reasonably successful musician too. Buckley met him only once when he was 8 years old.

Now, you may be wondering why I’m talking about folk musicians and singing instead of giving a traditional sermon right now? This year at Beth Am, we’ll be focusing programmatically on

1 the notion of Sacred Space. I’ll say more about my own thoughts on that topic tomorrow, but tonight I want to pose some questions for us to consider as we step into the New Year – what are the boundaries of how we use sacred space? Does such space demand sacred text? What is sacred text? Can a rabbi stand in shul on Erev Rosh Hashana singing pop music? How does that make us feel? How do we assemble meaning from raw materials and construct uplifting edifices from the world beyond these walls, even beyond our tradition? Put differently, how does the holy relate to the broken?

You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well really, what's it to you? There's a blaze of light In every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah Hallelujah…

Cafés often feel sacred to me. There’s something about the interplay of light from the window on coffee bars and wooden tables, music, fresh coffee brewing, the scent of which I always liked, even as a kid, long before I drank the stuff. Some cafés are more sacred than others. Yom Kippur afternoon we’ll hear from the proprietors of a café here in Reservoir Hill (one that just won City Paper’s “best café”), about how they’ve managed to create sacred space in this neighborhood. We’ll make space on our holiest day for stories of unexpected holiness. Holy cafes: There’s the Steep and Brew in Madison, Wisconsin, and Café Assisi where my buddy Dan and I used to play gigs. But there’s another café in Chicago, in East Rogers Park, that holds a special place in my heart. It’s where Dan and I first performed on stage – an open mike at a place called the No Exit. We were fourteen. We played a song I wrote called Time. It was terrible, but we were so proud! Years earlier, before they were married, my parents would go the No Exit Café where one of their favorite musicians, a young John Guth would cover Leonard Cohen songs, including a brilliant little tune called Suzanne. I doubt they heard him play Hallelujah since Cohen first recorded that song in 1984.

Leonard Cohen spent years working on Hallelujah, sometimes literally banging his head against the floor. He’s said to have written dozens of verses. When the president of CBS records first heard the recording, he refused to release it – thought it was awful. The album, Various Positions was released overseas on a private label. Barely anyone heard it. Cohen would tinker with Hallelujah in concert, changing and adapting lyrics, slowing it down, speeding it up, adding and subtracting stanzas. He was always noodling, ramming pieces together like a superconductor, secular and sensual images with biblical references gleaned from his traditional Jewish upbringing. David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, the Shechinah or Holy Dove moving in tandem with love-making. “This world is…full of things that cannot be reconciled,” Cohen said, “but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’

The version that Buckley knew wasn’t Cohen’s at all; it was a cover. He first heard the song on a 1991 tribute album called I’m Your Fan. John Cale of the Velvet Underground, covered

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Hallelujah in the final track. Buckley was crashing at the house of a friend in Park Slope, Brooklyn, while she and her family were out of town. He pulled I’m Your Fan off the shelf and listened to Hallelujah. Buckley’s version is considered by many to be the definitive one and all versions from here on out are basically covers of Buckley covering John Cale. Buckley didn’t even realize it was a Leonard Cohen song – he, like many others, thought it was Cale's just as for years after Buckley died, everyone just assumed the song was Buckley’s.

But after Jeff Buckley died, Hallelujah exploded becoming one of the most popular, widely recognizable, but also most highly regarded songs, in history. Depending on the context it’s joyous or contemplative or sad. It’s been used on countless television shows, movie soundtracks, in benefit concerts. It played over and over on TV and radio during the events of 9.11. KD Lang sang it at the Olympics in Vancouver. It’s a go-to choice for contest shows like The Voice or America’s Got Talent. It’s gone gold and platinum around the world. Pastors and Rabbis began to sing it in worship services, selecting appropriate verses based on the setting. I tried it this summer in Druid Hill Park. If you watched the Emmy’s this year, it was the song playing over the “In Memoriam” montage. We said goodbye to Gene Wilder this year with Hallelujah.

A song that Cohen struggled for years to write, and that for over fifteen years barely saw the light of day, became his most famous by far launching him from critically acclaimed lyricist and fringe folk artist to super-stardom. The song is so ubiquitous that after weeks thinking about this sermon and listening to dozens of versions on YouTube, I’m still discovering new ones. Thanks to Henry Feller who pointed out last week an IDF version, with Hallelujah translated into Hebrew, a fascinating reclamation of the song in lashon kodesh from which Cohen wrestled his source material in the first place. Here’s just a bit of that one:

שמעתי שדוד הנעים אקורד פלאים לאלוהים ושאתה שונא תווים ידוע אקורד עגום ומסתורי מינור נופל, מז'ור ממריא ומלך מבולבל שר הללויה הללויה, הללויה, הללויה, הללויה

I could go on and on, in fact I read a whole book about the song over the summer. It’s by Rolling Stone reporter Alan Light and it’s called The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Accent of Hallelujah. But Light’s main point seems to be this: The song is a chameleon, adapting to sacred moments and sacred spaces based on need. It’s religious and secular, joyous and solemn, sexual and platonic all at once. Light says it this way: “In a world polarized by the black-and-white politicization of religion, the song offers a rare example of both reassurance and doubt.” But it's also collaborative, even if unintentionally so. It took multiple artists, numerous settings (some sacred like church choirs, some profane like an animated Scottish ogre), and it took many years, to launch the song into the world’s collective consciousness. Light summarizes the import of Hallelujah this way: “A venerated creator. An adored, tragic interpreter. An uncomplicated, memorable melody. Ambiguous, evocative words.

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Faith and uncertainty. Pain and pleasure. A song based in Old Testament language that a teen idol can sing. An erotically charged lyric fit for a Yom Kippur choir or a Christmas collection. Cold. Broken. Holy.”

So why did I bring you this song tonight? Because as we begin to contemplate our sacred space in 5777, including this room with its luscious new carpet and beautifully upholstered seats, I want us to think about how Beth Am stands at a nexus of religious and secular, how we celebrate the vector of holy writ, Torah, Talmud, midrash, top-tier scholars and Hebrew language, but also how important it is that we make space within our walls for the world beyond them: People’s Talmud, IFO and Social Action, Sages for the Ages, Eutaw Place, political activism, cultural expansiveness.

But while the secular, worldly questions are essential, this is a synagogue, and the question I’m always asking when we utilize our time and space to reach beyond ourselves is how we do so because of our Jewishness, and never instead of it, or God forbid, in spite of it? Which leads me back to Cohen. Leonard Cohen’s performance of Hallelujah was forever changed by John Cale, Jeff Buckley and the myriad interpreters who sang his song. His cadence and tempo changed. He re-embraced verses previously discarded. Hallelujah became not just a better song for humanity, but also for its creator because it took a 15 year walk through a wide-wide world. But Cale and Buckley conclude their interpretations with “Cold and Broken,” and Cohen has always insisted on a different final stanza – which is as Jewish as it is redemptive. I’ll sing it for you. If you know it feel free to sing along (and no matter what I hope you’ll join me for the chorus). And as we listen to the music, I’ll invite us to contemplate the year that’s past and speculate about the year to come. Because each year we hopefully do our best, each year we seek the sacred. Each year I suspect we fail more often than we succeed and then redouble our efforts once more. All of us are holy and broken, seeking spaces and communities that lift us up. And in the end, we stand before our Maker having stretched into and out of ourselves, to people, places and a Presence beyond us, hoping and praying that it was enough.

I did my best, it wasn't much I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you And even though It all went wrong I'll stand before the Lord of Song With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

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