Who By Fire: Why Leonard Cohen Ran Toward War
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This is honestly. In the last month, I have been extraordinarily moved by stories of people, including some people I know who have gone to Ukraine. Some of them, I know some veterans, are going to train soldiers. Some are going to cook food for refugees at the border. Some of them are helping people get resettled in countries surrounding Ukraine. And I listen to these stories and I wonder, what draws people to leave the comfort of their homes and run toward war?

We hear a lot about the fog of war, right? The way that war can confuse and obscure. But also, is there something about war that reveals? Is there something about being so close to the edge between life and death that is clarifying? I think we can find an answer in a story from almost 50 years ago that's never been told, about an unlikely meeting between a folk star of the 1960s who decided to drop in on the bloodiest war in Israeli history. Really such a...

The musician in question is Leonard Cohen. His audience in the desert are young Israeli soldiers, many of whom had just witnessed their friends die, and some of whom would themselves die in the days ahead. When Leonard Cohen set off for Israel in 1973,

He was 39 years old, and he was a musician that said he was done with music for good. But after those weeks in the desert, he would go on to write Who By Fire and Hallelujah. What was it that happened in the desert in October 1973 between this Jewish musician and those Israeli soldiers? How did it remake Leonard Cohen?

How did it transform those who heard him play? What did it mean for Israel for him to show up? And how did the war end up remaking the Jewish state? Those are only some of the questions that my guest today, award-winning author and journalist Mati Friedman, explains in his beautiful new book, Who By Fire? Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Shall I say his calling? As Mati writes in his book, Leonard Cohen once called Israel his myth home.

And I think for a lot of people, both lovers and haters, Israel is exactly that. It is a myth, a symbol, often a projection. But Mati Friedman's work, his books, and his journalism shatters that idea. If there's a theme to what he writes about, it's that Israel is not a litmus test or a symbol of the liberal imagination. It's a real place.

where real people sometimes have to run to bomb shelters in the middle of the afternoon, or where a terrorist sometimes tries to kill you on the bus home from work. Israel is on high alert after a wave of deadly terror attacks claimed the lives of 11 people in just one week. Five were killed in a shooting spree in the ultra-orthodox city of Nabrak. The roots of that reality, of a country and a people used to living on the brink, were born in the story that we're telling today. We'll be right back.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Mati Friedman, welcome to Honestly. Thanks so much for having me. Congratulations on this new book of yours, Who By Fire, which I'm so excited to talk to you about in person here in LA. So I want to set the scene of 1973 a little bit. So take us back to that year, both in terms of Leonard Cohen's life and his career, and also in terms of Israel as a country. So let's start with Leonard Cohen.

Who was Leonard Cohen in the fall of 1973? Cohen is a really unique figure in the folk rock scene of the late 60s. And he begins as a poet in Montreal, as kind of a small-time Canadian poet, and then becomes a musician. And he's part of the village scene with Nico. I don't do too much talking, sleep and go before they're forever gone.

and Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Dylan. But he's never quite

He's part of the scene, but he's never quite of the scene. He's always seen as a bit different than all of the other stars of that time. He's a bit older than everyone else. Everyone's wearing jeans. Leonard Cohen wears a suit. People change their names to things like Bob Dylan. From? Robert Zimmerman, of course. But Leonard Cohen never changes his name. He stays Leonard Cohen. So he's kind of stubbornly pursuing a different path. And he's a unique figure. And he has major hits, like Suzanne.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river. You can hear the boats go by. You can spend the night beside her. And you know that she's half crazy. But that's why you want to be there.

And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And you'll hold us when the wind blows, my little darling. And so long, Marianne. I'd like to try to call home. I used to say I was some kind of gypsy boy.

Bird on the wire. Like a drunken age Midnight choir I've tried In my own To be free

And he has a lot of success. He plays at the Isle of Wight Festival, which is a year after Woodstock, and it's much bigger than Woodstock. It's a half million people. So he's a major star. But by 73, he really feels like he's hit a wall.

He felt trapped. He felt trapped in his personal life. He was pursued by depression for much of his life, and he was in a dark period at the time. He announced that he's retiring from the music business, that he had nothing left to say, that he couldn't find the words anymore. He tells one interviewer that year that he just wants to shut up, and that's published in the music press in the U.S. and Europe, so it's known that Leonard Cohen has announced that he's retiring. So he's in a rut, and he's 39, so it would make sense that he'd hit a wall. I mean, most rock stars don't

make it to 39, let alone pass 39. So it wouldn't have surprised anyone if Leonard Cohen had just kind of flared out in 1973. But that's not what happens. So let's go to Israel in 1973. You know, most people today think of Israel, it's the startup nation, high-tech capital on the Mediterranean, you know, unbelievable success story, both in terms of technology, militarily, economic powerhouse.

That is not the Israel of 1973. What was the country like back then, and what was the mood of Israel? So Israel's a pretty strange place in the early 70s. It's a really small place. It's barely 3 million people. Today it's about 9 million people. It had existed for barely 20 years, and the people who lived there were largely refugees, people who had been torn from other places, a lot of people kind of screaming in their sleep as they dreamed about things they didn't want to remember during the day.

people who'd been torn from their homes in Eastern Europe and a greater number of people who'd been torn from their homes across the Islamic world. So it's a kind of a very energetic refugee camp. Right. I was going to say a country of orphans. Yes, it's a country of orphans on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. And in the middle of the country is Tel Aviv, where there are the first glimmerings of a

So the culture in Israel at that time is very much the culture of official kind of Zionist ideology. The government dictates what music is on the radio. The Beatles tried to come to Israel in the 60s and the government will not let them come because they're afraid that the Beatles would corrupt the youth. So the country that Cohen comes to is a backwater. It's not a country like today where you can find nice hotels and have a vacation. It's a pretty rough country.

and traumatized place that's only beginning to develop its own culture. So Israel at that point, it's just coming into being, but the things that it is defined by, I would say, are wars. And the last war that Israel had fought prior to 1973 is the Six-Day War of 1967, which is this ultimate David beating Goliath story.

What was the Yom Kippur War six years later? So I think many Israelis would say that the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is a kind of penance for the way Israelis misunderstood the victory of 1967. In 1967, you have this incredible victory of

On three fronts, the Israeli army, despite being outnumbered, defeats the Syrians in the north and the Jordanians in the center of Israel and the Egyptians in the south. Israel increases the territory under its control by vast amounts. And many people get swept away by the euphoria of the victory and they forget the limits of force. And they think that maybe Israel's problems in the Middle East have been solved.

And there are a few years that Israelis refer to as the euphoria after 1967. And what 1973 is, is an incredible slap in the face that brings Israel back to a realization that many problems remain and that the limits of force are very, very real. But the trauma of the 1973 war, which persists in many ways to this day, comes from Israel

It's positioned immediately after the euphoria of 67. So you have this euphoric moment followed by an absolute catastrophe. And that is really the heart of the trauma as it's remembered to this day in Israel. So basically, in the...

war, Israel gets this territory from Syria. It gets the Golan Heights in the north. From Egypt, it gets the Sinai Peninsula. And from Jordan, it gets the West Bank. Do I have that right, basically? So is the point of the '73 war, at least from the perspective of Syria and Egypt, to regain that territory? At the very least, it's to regain that territory. Some Israelis interpret the war as an attempt to annihilate the state of Israel.

What it really is, I think, is an attempt to restore Arab honor after a great humiliation. And there's a great humiliation in 1967. Previous to that, there'd been a great humiliation in 1948. The Jews are a small minority. They're not supposed to be defeating Arab armies, and they do repeatedly, and it's hard to swallow. And I think the Arab world needs to restore its honor with a military victory, even if it's a limited military victory. I don't think they were actually out to annihilate the state or

I don't think that they believed that that was possible, but they wanted to restore a sense of dignity to their army and inflict some kind of defeat on Israel. And they do it by launching this...

surprise attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, which is Yom Kippur. Right. Mati, describe for us the first few hours of the war and the sort of confusion and panic that you described so powerfully in the book that ensued, because it doesn't seem to me like the Israeli military had any sense that this war was coming and certainly not coming on that day.

Because of the arrogance and confusion after 1967, many Israelis believed that there would be no war in the near future, that the victory in '67 had been so conclusive that we had nothing to worry about in the near future. And people were really not thinking about the possibility of an attack. And on Yom Kippur in Israel, even people who aren't religious for most of the year, on that particular day, they tend to fast and go to synagogue. So it really is a day that you feel in Israel, there's no cars on the road.

There are no flights. The whole country shuts down. There's no TV broadcast. There's no radio. It's really kind of the country goes quiet for that day. And people are largely in synagogue contemplating their fate and looking forward to the coming year as we are required to do on Yom Kippur.

And at 2 p.m., sirens go off across the country while people are in synagogue. And if you're Israeli, you know the sound of the siren because it's something, unfortunately, we still experience a fair bit. It's this whine that starts very low and then raises in an octave over a few seconds. So it goes, you know...

It kind of clenches your stomach and it gives you a moment as the pitch of the siren rises, you have a moment to understand that something very bad is happening and to kind of wonder what it means for you. And that happens at 2 p.m. Everyone's in synagogue and men of military age start disappearing from the synagogues as call-up orders are read over the radio, which comes back to life.

People are being told to join their units and it becomes clear that something very bad has happened. And what has happened is that the army, which was completely unprepared, has been caught off guard on two fronts: the Syrian front on the Golan Heights in the north and the Sinai front

to the south where the Egyptians managed to cross the Suez Canal and kind of destroy all of the Israeli defenders who were supposed to be able to hold off an attack and fail to do so. So the first couple days of the war are very bad for Israel. So when the siren goes off, do people have a sense that it's going to be a major war?

Initially, some people think that it's just going to be a raid or a day of fighting, but very quickly it becomes clear that this is something big. And it's so bad in the first couple of days. The casualties are so high that the government hides it from the people. So it takes a while before the public really realizes that it's a major crisis and that the army actually might lose something.

That doesn't cross people's mind initially, but when it becomes clear that the Air Force, for example, is being shredded on both fronts by these new Soviet missiles that had been given to the Arab armies, it becomes very possible that Israel is not going to win the war. In the book, you tell a story that I had never heard about the first casualties in the first hours of the war, this incident of friendly fire. Can you describe what happened?

So there's a radar base, which is near a place called Sharm el-Sheikh at the very tip of Sinai. And it's described by people who serve there as a kind of laid back kind of thing. I was going to say like stoner. The word stoner comes to mind when I hear Sharm el-Sheikh. Right. It's a base for stoners, basically. And they fish in the Red Sea and fry the fish and stuff.

smoke and play guitars and nothing really happens there. And people want to be posted there just because it's fun. And let's be clear, there's mandatory conscription then and now. That's right. Israelis serve in the military after high school. So there are men posted to Shem El Sheikh, there are women down there, and everyone who served there before the 1973 war describes it as being pretty awesome. And you see their pictures. And as I write in the book, it looks kind of like

Charlie's Angels, but shot in the landscape of the Book of Exodus. It's this weird kind of 70s biblical epic look, and everyone looks really, really happy. So there's a radar station next to Sharm el-Sheikh that's staffed in large part by 18- and 19-year-old women who run the radar screens. And at the opening of the war, that station is hit by two Egyptian missiles. Some of the people at the station are killed, and

And other soldiers in the vicinity believe that the station has been conquered by Egyptian troops, so they send tanks to recapture the station. The tanks go up to this radar station, open fire, killing more of the defenders of the radar station until it turns out that the position had not been captured by Egyptians and that Israelis were fighting other Israelis.

And this is a very traumatic experience for the people who were there. This is really one of the first incidents of the Yom Kippur War. And I met a few of the soldiers who were there that day. It takes them about 30 years to talk about what had happened. But that's the way the war started. It was clear this was not going to be some great victory. It wasn't going to be 1967. This was a different kind of war, and it was not going to go very well, certainly not initially. And what do we know about how all of this hit Leonard Cohen?

So in the fall of 1973, Leonard Cohen is living on the island of Hydra, kind of a, you know, idyllic setting and sunshine. And on the same day of that attack on the radar station, he's listening to the radio and he hears a report about this war. And he does something quite unexpected. And I think he even surprised himself, which is that he gets on a ferry from the island to Athens.

And then he boards a flight from Athens to Tel Aviv and he inserts himself into this Middle Eastern catastrophe that we would later call the Yom Kippur War. And I'm not entirely sure he knew at the time why he was doing it, but there are two parallel reasons, I think, and I get into them in the book. One is...

a desire to be in Israel and the other is a desire to escape his own life, his own crisis by running away to another crisis. So he's trying to get out. He's trying to get off the island, right? An island can be a place where you vacation, but an island is also a place where you're stranded. And I think he felt stranded and he needed to get out. The second part of it is that he felt deeply connected to Israel and to Jews. And he understood in some visceral kind of internal way that if

If the Jewish people was in danger, he needed to be there. And he went. Now, how do we know what Leonard Cohen was thinking or what was going on with him at the time? It's thanks to this manuscript, this very strange, unfiltered Leonard Cohen manuscript that I managed to find hiding in a box in a university library in Hamilton, Ontario, of all places.

One of the weird things about this story, when you realize how important the war was to Cohen and how deep he went into the war and how big the impact was on him and how great an impact he made on the people who heard him, one of the strangest things is that he almost never mentions it afterward. So it was very hard to find out what he saw or how he experienced it or when he decided to go.

And then I found this manuscript which tells the story immediately after it happens. He's back from the war, he's on the island, and he obviously sits down with his typewriter and cranks out this 45-page manuscript that's completely raw.

unedited and eventually unpublished. He shelves it and sticks it in a drawer. So the manuscript doesn't say exactly on what date he hears the radio broadcast and why he decided to go, but it's pretty clear from the manuscript, which seems largely to be factual, if not completely factual. He hears the radio broadcast. He goes down from this little white house where he lives on Hydra. He walks down the stairs to the port and

And he gets on a ferry that's headed for Athens, and he recounts the conversations he has with people on the boat, including a Greek landowner who's very impressed that this guy is going off to war. He's going off to join his people at war in Israel. And he gets to Athens, gets on a plane. It's hard to get seats on the planes to Israel because so many Israeli men are trying to get back to join their units.

Somehow Leonard Cohen gets on a plane and inserts himself into this, you know, completely crazy situation in Israel. And what did he plan on doing when he got to Israel? Was he going to play music? Looking at the events, it's pretty clear that he did not intend to sing for soldiers because he doesn't take his guitar. And of course, he had just announced that he was retiring from music. So I don't think he went to Israel intentionally.

as Leonard Cohen, the rock star. He went as Leonard Cohen, the Jew? I think he went as a pilgrim. He was going there as an individual who just needed to be there because something was going on. And he told people who he met that he wanted to volunteer on a kibbutz, on a communal farm, like to replace the men who had been called up to the front, right? Which many American volunteers had done in 1967. That makes sense. I think that's a pretty credible explanation. But he never gets to the kibbutz because he's sitting in a cafe in Tel Aviv,

when he's recognized by a group of Israeli musicians who happen to be in the cafe. They're sitting at another table, and one of them looks over and says, I think that's Leonard Cohen. And the other musician says, no way, there's no way that's Leonard Cohen. And to prove the second musician wrong, this one singer walks over to the table and says, are you Leonard Cohen? And when the answer turns out to be yes, they basically force him to come with them to play for troops. They say, we're about to head down to the front.

which in Israel, you know, it's hard for Americans to understand, but going off to play at the front doesn't mean you get on a military airplane and fly 8,000 miles away to, you know, Iraq or Vietnam. Going to the front in Israel means you get in your car and you drive for an hour to the front. And that's what they were planning to do. So they pile Cohen into a Ford Falcon and they set off to find the war. I see you gone and changed your name again.

After the break, Leonard Cohen's very strange and very extraordinary music tour on the war front. We'll be right back. So Mati, let's go back to that Ford Falcon. Who were these musicians that run into Leonard Cohen in the cafe? So one of the first things that I did when I was trying to figure out the story was I went to the IDF archive, the Israeli military archive, and I tried to find a list of concerts or the arm of the army that would have organized concert tours during the war.

No such thing exists. There's no list of anything. I spoke to one of the musicians who was with Cohen, a pretty famous Israeli singer named Oshik Levy. And when I asked him who organized it, when I said the word organized, he cracked up because nothing was organized. It was completely ad hoc. And anyone who knows Israel understands that that's the way it works. No one was in charge. And the artists were just kind of going around the front line.

accompanied by these very young officers who were in charge of taking artists to units in the field. No one was keeping track of them, which is probably why Leonard Cohen could cross the Suez Canal at the very tip of the front in Sinai a day or two behind the Israeli army. So Cohen is really...

At the very edge of the front, I think people might imagine that this was a kind of Bob Hope situation where he's playing at a base in the rear and things are safe or that famous scene from Apocalypse Now with the Playboy bunnies. And it wasn't like that at all. It was a Jeep in the desert driving along, stopping when they would see a few artillery pieces parked in the sand. They'd get out of the Jeep.

And they'd say, hey, do you guys want to hear some music? And if the soldier had said yes, then they would make a stage out of ammunition crates and they would use the jeep headlights as spotlights. And often they didn't have an amp and they would just stand on the ammo crates and play Suzanne.

I mean, I'm looking right now at the picture on the cover of your book, and it's literally people, soldiers, sitting in the sand, just gathered around, and Leonard Cohen with an open shirt, playing a guitar, bent on one knee. Is this representative of what the shows look like? Yes, and I think that photograph is of a concert that was relatively organized. The descriptions are quite incredible. It was very, very raw. And that's one amazing thing about this tour,

No one's selling records. No one's selling tickets. No money is changing hands. Everyone's sober. So it's not a night out. And you can see in the photographs that the audience is very intent and Cohen seems uplifted.

And it's more than an ordinary gig. What was the music that the other Israeli performers were there to play? And how did it sound different or not from Leonard Cohen's music? The people who knew about the Cohen tour joked that they sent Leonard Cohen off to Sinai to depress the troops. The Israeli pop charts at the time were dominated by this very kind of upbeat, on-message Zionist music, heavy on the accordion, songs about making the desert bloom.

So

and Zionist agriculture and, you know, glorious battles and things like that.

One famous song is called Ammunition Hill, and it's about a famous battle in 1967. So into that sound steps Leonard Cohen. It's time that we begin to laugh

What was he playing when he was sort of driving around in this Jeep, finding some troops who might want to hear his music? What he was playing, as far as we can tell, and I guess I should say that none of these concerts were filmed. There are a few fragments of audio that I managed to find, but they're very, very rare. So it's not like we have a concert that we can sit down and watch, but it's pretty clear that he played his hits because there were certain songs that people knew. And when you listen to the lyrics of Suzanne...

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river. It's really hard to imagine lyrics that were farther from the reality of the Sinai Desert in 1973. And you know that she's half crazy, but that's why you want to be there.

Here are these guys in dirty uniforms who'd just seen their friends killed and who'd had to do terrible things themselves. And the desert is full of charred tanks, like blackened tanks, and these figures and burned coveralls lying in the sand. And here's Cohen singing about...

tea and oranges that come all the way from China and a beautiful woman at the port of Montreal. And you want to travel blind. Know that she will trust you for you touched her perfect body with your mind.

It's just so far away. And I think that's part of what made it work. I think there's a misconception that soldiers want to hear about war. So, you know, if you go off to play for soldiers, you're going to have to play like some martial music that's going to get the soldiers all riled up for battle. But of course, soldiers don't buy that bullshit. And they also won't buy it if the songs are too distant from their own reality. So you can't come in with comic numbers that make fun of the terrible things that they're doing.

Cohen comes in with this very serious music, and something about that touched the soldiers. I think many of them didn't understand English. I killed a butcher slaughtering a lamb. And Leonard Cohen did not know Hebrew. But there's a great line from T.S. Eliot who says that poetry, when it's good, can communicate before it's understood. Tortured lamb. He said, listen to me, child. I am what I am. And you...

There's a kind of non-verbal communication that goes on and Leonard Cohen was a master of that. The way he presented himself, the way he performed, the way he sang his songs, it almost didn't matter if he couldn't quite get the lyrics. You understood that this guy understood you, that he had compassion for you, that if you're a person on the edge or maybe going over the edge, which is true of many soldiers, that Leonard Cohen had also been there and he knew something about that.

But the nights were cold and it almost kept me warm. How come it's long? Right before the Yom Kippur War, Leonard Cohen had been playing at mental hospitals in the UK. And there are incredible descriptions of those concerts, which seem very similar to his concerts in the war. He shows up at these hospitals with his band. And there's something about Leonard Cohen.

And this particular audience that works. And someone once asked Leonard Cohen what he thought was going on. And he said, you know, these people understand something that I understand. And often a regular audience in a stadium or in an auditorium doesn't necessarily understand how fragile that is.

everything is. Some people think that they haven't yet surrendered. And he says people in a mental hospital have already experienced a kind of surrender. So they're closer to my truth than the average listener. And there's an incredibly strong connection that's formed in those concerts. And I think something similar happens in the war concerts. Soldiers aren't

mental patients, but they're... They're peering into a darkness. They're peering into a darkness. Yes, they're standing at the brink, and Leonard Cohen knew the brink. I saw some flowers growing up where that land fell down. Was I supposed to praise my Lord? Make some kind of joyful sound. He said, listen, listen to me now. I go round

And you, you are my only child. I spent a couple of years trying to find soldiers who'd seen Cohen in Sinai, just to try to figure out what had happened to them before the show, what had happened to them after the show, where these concerts met them in their lives. It turned out pretty early in my work on this book that it couldn't be just a story about the concert tour. That wasn't enough. It had to be a story about the war itself.

And the concert tour and where those two things coincided. So the book is as much about the soldiers as it is about Cohen. And many of the people who saw Cohen never forgot it. And it became one of the...

most powerful memories of the Yom Kippur War, which is so strange because it's not a battle. It's not, you know, it had no impact on the final outcome of the war. It's not really a war story. But for many Israelis, the fact that Leonard Cohen was at the front, that's become one of the most, most known, most powerful stories about the Yom Kippur War. And anyone who saw Cohen in Sinai never forgot it.

Why? Any meeting of art and war is hallucinatory, but it's much more weird when it's an artist who's not even from Israel. So I think the soldiers kind of knew that when you're in war, artists come and most of the greatest singers and performers in Israel came to Sinai to play for troops. But Leonard Cohen wasn't from Israel.

He was from the great world beyond Israel. He was an international star. And the dissonance of that guy in the desert in Sinai was so striking that I think that that's one reason that people never forgot it, you know, beyond the quality of his music and beyond, you know, the love that Israelis have for Leonard Cohen. I think it was just so weird. There's a line that you recount from Cohen's unpublished manuscript where he says, I said to myself, perhaps I can protect some people with this sock.

What do you think he meant by that? You can also look at a line in the song Lover, Lover, Lover, where he says, may this song be a shield for you against the enemy. So he says it in his manuscript. He also actually puts it into music that he has this idea that his songs can somehow protect the people he's performing for. And I'm not exactly sure what to make of that, whether he really believed that if people heard this song, it would protect him. But I think it comes from his desire to help. You know, he's

facing an audience, you know, let's say he's playing at an Air Force base, as he did at the very beginning of the war, and he's looking at an auditorium full of Israeli men and women, some of whom will be dead by the end of the week. And he knows it, and they know it, and he plays for them knowing that this might be the last thing they hear. So I imagine that among many other emotions that that would trigger, one is an emotion of helplessness. Like, what can I offer these people?

I'm just a singer with a guitar. What can I possibly give them? And he has the idea that maybe the song could be a shield. Maybe he can give them some kind of protection. Maybe he can give them some kind of blessing that they can take with them as they leave the auditorium, get in their fighter jet and, you know, head out to risk everything amid the anti-aircraft batteries over the Golan Heights.

So you mentioned the song, that the song would be a shield, that lyric. It comes from the song that Cohen started writing in the desert, which is called Lover, Lover, Lover. Tell us about the origins of that song and what that song was about.

So the very first stop on this very strange concert tour is an Air Force base called Hatzor, which is in central Israel. And that is a base where the crews were flying missions over Sinai and over the Golan. And the Air Force was getting shredded in the first week of the war. It was the worst week in the history of the Israeli Air Force, which had a lot of bravado. And it had basically won the Six-Day War in a matter of hours. And they were not expecting the first couple of days of the Yom Kippur War when losses were really, really high. And people were very traumatized by it.

So Cohen shows up at Hazar with this improvised band of Israeli musicians and they play a show in the auditorium at the base. And it's so successful that not everyone can fit in the auditorium. And the officers beg the band to play another show so that more soldiers can get a chance to hear them. And they agree. And in the break between those two concerts, Cohen sits down and writes a new song. Sure.

And one of the amazing things about researching this book was spending time with the notebooks that Cohen kept in his pocket. Cohen always kept a little notebook. And in this notebook that he had with him in his pocket during the war,

You see the draft of "Lover, Lover, Lover" taking shape in his own handwriting. And he's at an Air Force base and he writes this song, which is recognizably the same song. He polishes it throughout the war. And when you understand that it was written for an audience of Israelis who are fighting a desperate war, then the song starts making more sense.

It's kind of a hard song to understand. I asked my father. I asked my father. I said, Father, change my name. I said, Father, change my name. The one I'm using now, it's covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame. The one I'm using now, it's covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame. Yes, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, come back to me.

Yes, and lover, lover, lover. And he goes on and on. And then there's this verse, which is very strange, unless you understand when it was written and for whom. He says, And may the spirit of this song, it rise free. May it be a shield for you, a shield against the enemy. Yes, and lover.

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. Which doesn't sound like a love song. It sounds like a different kind of song. In fact, I think "Lover, Lover, Lover" is a war song. And once you understand it like that, it becomes easier to understand. But maybe the most interesting thing about "Lover, Lover" is that it has a missing verse.

And the way I found this out was when I interviewed a soldier who'd met Cohen in very weird circumstances on the other side of the Suez Canal at the height of the fighting in '73. This guy was part of a kind of improvised commando force that had been in the thick of the fighting and they'd managed to cross the Suez Canal in the great counterattack that's really the turning point of the war. And he's just kind of wandering around the desert trying to scrounge some fuel for his Jeep. And he comes back to this camp where he and his friends are sleeping.

As he comes back to the camp, he hears a voice in his description. It's like Moses in the desert hearing the voice of God. That's what this guy says. As he gets closer, he sees there's someone sitting on an upside-down helmet on the sand, and it's Leonard Cohen playing his guitar.

in the middle of the desert and he can't quite believe that this is happening and Leonard Cohen is playing "Lover, Lover, Lover" which is a song that no one knew because it had just been written. And this soldier Shlomi said that the verse that he remembered most, the lines that stood out for him the most, were when Cohen called the soldiers his brothers.

He said, "I'll never forget it." He looked at us and said, "You're my brothers." And for Israelis, that was a big deal. I mean, Israel felt very isolated. You know, most European countries weren't allowing resupply flights to land in Europe in order to avoid antagonizing the Arab world, and Israel felt

lonely as you know it still doesn't Leonard Cohen isn't a transport plane full of weapons but he's something he's a guy who came from the outside world and is expressing you know sympathy and kind of familial love for the Israelis and it meant a lot to them the problem is that there is no such verse in lover lover lover

There's no verse in Leper Lever when she calls the soldiers his brothers. And I thought that Shlomi was probably confused. You know, people's memories change over decades and certainly memories of a war get very fractured and weird. And I know that from my own memories. So I kind of put it aside. And then when I had access to the Cohen notebooks, I found the verse. And it goes something like this. I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight. I knew that they weren't wrong. I knew that they weren't right.

But you can see that Cohen, after this kind of expressing this very emotional and very immediate connection with the Israelis, I guess I should also mention that he asked the Israeli musicians to call him by his Hebrew name.

which was Eliezer. So they were calling him Eliezer Cohen. Now, Leonard Cohen is a weird name for Israelis, but Eliezer Cohen is like every single person in Israel. It's like Joe Smith for Israelis. So he's going by an Israeli name and he's calling them his brothers. He's very much on the Israeli side. And then when the fighting ends, I think he starts taking a step back. And you can see in the notebook that he's erased...

The line that says, "I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight." So there's a line drawn through those words, "help my brothers fight." And instead the line says, "I went down to the desert to watch the children fight."

So he's taking a step back and then ultimately when the song comes out a few months after the war, the verse is completely gone. There's no trace of that verse that all the Israelis remembered. And by a few years later, there's a concert he gives in France in 1976 where he introduces Lover, Lover, Lover and he admits that he wrote the song in the Yom Kippur War and he says that he wrote it for the Egyptians and for the Israelis. I wrote this song for...

In that order. And you see Cohen struggling with his tribal affiliations versus his universal job as a poet to be larger than one side in a war and larger than any one war. His subject is the human condition. At the same time, what's so interesting about this story is that it's really happening in a real place at a real time. And that's what's interesting to me. And it's always been fascinating to me

to kind of figure out that moment of interaction between an artist and an event that ends up creating something eternal. And a good example is Guernica, that famous painting by Picasso about the Spanish Civil War. Like there's a terrible event in Spain and the Spanish artist runs it through his brain and out comes this painting that is a depiction of something happening in the Spanish Civil War, but it's much more than that. And it, you know, it's eternal art. You also have in Beethoven's 5th,

a few bars of French revolutionary music hidden in one of the movements of the symphony because when Beethoven was writing that, it was the Napoleonic Wars and Europe was being ripped apart. And those events made their way into his music. And I'm trying to get at that aspect of his work. I'm not sure how happy Leonard Cohen would be that we're restricting his work in that way. But he does use that fascinating, kind of evocative and very confusing phrase, myth home. He says, I'm going to my myth home.

And I'm not sure he necessarily understood what that meant, but I think a lot of people can identify with it. I think certainly for a lot of Jewish people, they know what that means, even if we can't really explain what it is. You know, it's not for most people, it's not their actual home and they might never have even been there.

But they have this idea that it is the mythical home of the Jewish people. And that makes it, I think, very confusing to actually go there and sometimes upsetting. Yeah. I mean, one line that's from your book that really stuck with me is this idea, as you write, that Cohen's relationship with Israel was powerful and tenuous. Like being in love with someone you don't really know.

To me, that describes Cohen, but it also describes so much of diasporic Judaism's relationship to Israel. Right. It's a very powerful connection that's based on very little actual knowledge, and that makes it

I think very strange for people to actually go to Israel. And I've been in Israel for 26 years and I often meet people who are coming for the first time and they're coming in with a lot of information, with a lot of, you know, love. A sense of a myth home, but not a real place. But not a real place. And the meeting with the real place can be quite jarring because, of course, it's not a myth. It's a real country and it's a real country in the Middle East and it doesn't really correspond.

to Judaism in the way that North American Jews understand it. And it's a country that's messed up like all other countries. And it has short-sighted politicians and traffic problems and sewage problems and moral blindness and the usual package of human nonsense. And I think that's quite hard for people to deal with. So if you're coming in looking for a myth home or looking for these very elevated ideas about Judaism, and I think Cohen was. I mean, what Cohen really connected to in the Jewish tradition was prophecy.

And, you know, these really kind of pure ideas of the mission of the Jews in the world, which was to receive divine transmission and communicate it. And then you come to a country which, because it's a country, has to do all kinds of really kind of terrible things, including have an army and kill people to, you know, to protect yourself and, you know, collect taxes and collect the garbage. And I don't think that really matched what his ideas were.

of the myth home was. And I think that's one of the reasons that Cohen, he doesn't leave at the end of the war waving the Israeli flag and singing the national anthem. I think he leaves quite conflicted and upset as you must be if you're a sensitive person who's just seen a war. And I think that's probably one reason that we don't hear a lot about this experience from him afterward. Shortly after he leaves Israel, he writes this song, "'Who By Fire?"

It comes, this song, very much based on a play of the most famous liturgy in all of Judaism, which is this prayer we say, On Yom Kippur, which the soldiers who were going off to war surely heard the night before the battle started, which is called Unetana Tokef. And it's this very haunting prayer. Unetana Tokef

that describes the way our fates will play out in the coming year. So the words go like this: "On Yom Kippur it is sealed, how many will die and how many will be born, who will live and who will die, who will reach the end of their days and who will not, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast,

Who by famine and who by thirst, and it goes on and on like that. A lot of people are really uncomfortable with the prayer and the idea that your fate is going to sort of be decided on that day by God. Cohen's song goes like this. And who by fire, who by water, who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime, who by high ordeal, and who by common trial,

And as far as I understand it, Mati, Cohen never spoke about this song in connection to his experience in the war. But it's impossible as a listener not to see that connection.

So that prayer is really at the heart of Yom Kippur, in my opinion, not just of Yom Kippur the holy day, but of Yom Kippur the war.

And you have this prayer that's really weirder and weirder. I mean, it's kind of, if you're expecting like a typical prayer, the text is kind of bonkers. It keeps going on, you know, who by strangulation, who by stoning, who by earthquake. It kind of very specifically lays out the many ways you could die in the coming year. And then a war breaks out and many people die in just those- In a fire. In just those ways.

So if you're a novelist writing about this and you made that up, you would be a ridiculous writer, you know, and you'd get rightly criticized for heavy handedness. But it actually happened. And that prayer and the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar and the war, they're all wrapped up with each other. And Cohen experiences it with the Israelis. And then if you look at his notebooks, you'll see the text of this prayer.

song appear. And all we can say is that he goes through the Yom Kippur War, comes back home very rattled. The song appears in his notebook and it comes out on this incredible album that he puts out after the war called New Skin for the old ceremony. So the ceremony is referring to his circumcision and he goes within a matter of months from desperation, retirement to

Yeah.

So something happens in the war and he never tells us exactly what it is. And he never says, you know, I was, you know, my creative life was saved. He'll never say that. All we can do is look at the chronology and infer that something like that happened. So the war for Leonard Cohen is a catalyst. But the kind of solemnity that is in the song Who By Fire and that is in the prayer, Unatanatokef, that to me seems to be the legacy of the war in Israel. Yeah.

Reading your book, I was shocked sort of to remember how devastating the war was. It was 2,600 fatalities in under three weeks. Israelis described it as a national catastrophe. And it really was a kind of hinge moment for Israel in terms of its national mood, also in terms of its culture. You know, you described to us Israel at the outbreak of the war. What was Israel after the war?

Israel after 1973 is really a different country. The confidence in the founding generation is shattered. And this is the kibbutz generation. This is the generation of people who left Eastern Europe, people that changed their names from these Eastern European shtetl names to Hebrew names and built the country. Right. And the 67 war was seen as proof of their genius because things were going according to plan.

And then in '73, there's this incredible reversal. Golda Meir, who's really a member of that generation, she's the prime minister and she's never forgiven for it. Israelis still see her as a very ambiguous character. People think that the government should have seen this coming. There were signs that it was going to happen. The army was unprepared. These poor infantrymen and tank crews were left exposed on the borders. And the number of fatalities in that war was, for such a small country, just shocking and unbearable. So I think that's one.

one part of what's going on in 1973 is this realization that these wars are not going to stop. War is kind of going to accompany the life of the country indefinitely. And that's part of the depression, I think, of the 1973 war. And by the way, it's something that Cohen knew, right? He has a song called Anthem where he explicitly says that. He writes, Yeah, they will be fought again. The wars, they will be fought again. The holy dove.

She will be caught again. The holy dove? She will be caught again. Sold and bought again. The dove is never free. Bought and sold and bought again. The dove is never free.

So he got that that was the world. And I think that is pretty close to the Israeli realization after 1973. And the kind of optimism of the country up to that point really changes. It's not that optimistic kind of horror dancing kibbutznik country. People say the 1973 war killed the accordion. It kills that vibe, the vibe that would have used the accordion in these kind of upbeat kibbutz type songs goes and goes.

The kind of music that will come to the fore after the 73 war is very much, it's not music written in the collective we. The use of we goes out of style. And now it's going to be I. It's going to be the individual. It's going to be people thinking about their soul and not about the collective. And a different kind of artist is really going to come to the fore after the 1973 war. And Israeli music after 73 is going to sound a lot less like the military entertainment troops.

that were popular before the war, and it's going to sound a lot more like Leonard Cohen. My favorite, and in my opinion, the only one who's really, the only Israeli artist who's really Cohen's equal in terms of lyrics and originality is an artist named Meir Ariel. ♪

It's interesting to see what happens to Ariel after the war. He starts out, he comes from a secular kibbutz and he starts out like everyone else and

After the war, he finds a very different voice and he talks about the individual and talks about himself and he draws closer to religion, right? One aspect of Israeli music before the war was that it was completely secular. People had no interest in traditional Judaism and thought that that was old-fashioned and that it would soon be gone and that the old wisdom had very little to teach us because we were now... We were the new Jews. We were the new Jews, which meant we were socialists and we went to the beach and we weren't part of that whole old world. Yeah.

God and synagogue thing. And that too is discredited. And people realize that the new stories about Zionism are just not going to be enough and we're going to have to access the old wisdom. And people start becoming religious. Explain to me if you would, why? Like, what is it specifically about this war that leads to a kind of reinvigoration of

traditional Judaism, maybe even mysticism, things that the earlier generation of Israelis thought were in the historical dustbin. I think people realized that the stories that they'd been told weren't enough, like the story of Zionism and the story of agriculture and life without God, that wasn't going to be enough to get us through a real crisis. And that in fact, we come from one

one of the oldest and wisest civilizations in the world. And it might be a good idea to try to access that and people become more open to it and you can really hear it in the music. So like Leonard Cohen, as his life goes on, Leonard Cohen writes songs that can really only be described as prayers. Like his song, If It Be Your Will. If it be that I speak no more

which is a prayer. And there are other examples of Cohen writing prayers and Ariel, Mayor Ariel too, who's Cohen's Israeli counterpart. Also, you know, as he ages, he begins writing prayers, which would have been unthinkable for the pre-Yom Kippur generation. And today, if you listen to Israeli pop, God's everywhere. It's very, it's much more religious than American pop music. The parallel genre in America is really country music.

In country music, you're allowed to sing about God. And that's true in Israel, too. And I think it's really a factor of post-73 Israel, where people become, people are really rattled. And a lot of the old stories are undermined. Not that there haven't been surges of optimism since then. And when I moved to Israel in the 1990s, the country was having another surge of optimism around the peace process and the very real possibility. Or so it seemed that the idea of a two-state solution, it seemed really about to happen. And then there was going to be a peace agreement with Syria. And Israel's position in the Middle East was going to be normalized.

And we were going to be, you know, shopping in the markets in Damascus within a few years. That's really what seemed to be happening in the 1990s. And that also hasn't happened. So Israel 2022 is quite a capable place. And you think of Israel basically being a refugee camp in a war zone. I mean, it's remarkably successful, but it's a place that's lost its utopian dreams and the utopian juice that drove the country up until 1973. One more break, then more with Mati Friedman and Leonard Cohen.

From this broken hill, your praises they shall ring. If it be your... Let me sing. If it be your...

Why this one? Why this tiny, seemingly tiny story of a forgotten little music tour by Leonard Cohen in the Sinai Desert?

I started out as a journalist writing for a magazine called The Jerusalem Report, which was a great English language news magazine out of Jerusalem. And it was published every two weeks. And when you work for a biweekly news magazine, you can't cover the news because by the time the magazine is on the newsstand, news stories are dated. So as a young reporter, I was trained to look for stories on the margins of people's consciousness that would still be fresh a week or two later when the magazine came out and

That just became part of my DNA as a journalist. So I know that if I'm with a herd of journalists, I'm in the wrong place because that story is not going to work. I need to be alone covering some other story on the margins that can still have a longer shelf life. And I think that that's really when I started having this approach to journalism, which is to find some small, unknown, marginal or seemingly marginal story that's really on the periphery of everyone's vision. But that actually says something huge about journalism.

the country that I write about, and if possible, about the human condition. And here too, I think this is a marginal story, right? It's not the greatest battle of the Yom Kippur War. It's very hard to argue that this concert tour had any geopolitical impact. Of course, it didn't. This is a story about people at the worst moment of their lives and about what art can do and about how

an artist can interact with an event to create art that then kind of flies over time and space and can lodge in our mind 56 years later and kind of not only help us to understand that event, but help us rise above ourselves. So that I think is really what the book's about. It reminds me a little bit of Johnny Cash just a few years before. And here's what I mean by that.

In 1968, really against the wishes of a lot of people around him, Cash and his band famously performed in Folsom Prison. Hello, I'm Johnny Cash. And that performance and the album that comes out of it... I hear the train a-comin', it's rollin' round the bend And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when I'm stuck in Folsom Prison

What made it special was the dynamic between the performer and the audience, right? It's Cash singing these songs that are from the perspective of thieves and murderers and drug addicts and prisoners. Mama told me, son, always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns. But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

in front of people that had done perhaps those things. In '68, people were worried about how prisoners would respond to hearing those songs, right? Would they get depressed, as Cohen worried in his case? Would there be a riot? But what actually happened was that they loved it because they felt seen in the songs.

I think maybe you could say that they felt some sort of hope of redemption, arguably. And you can hear that on the album, and it's one of the most sort of electric live albums to listen to because of that particular special sort of scene that happened between Cash and the prisoners in Folsom. But those people keep on moving, and that's what sorcerers mean.

And I wonder if in the same way that that album has kind of become a feature in the American imagination, certainly in the world of American music, if there's a comparison between the way that Leonard Cohen and his tour hold in the Israeli imagination and that special sort of seeing across the darkness, the collective peering into the darkness that happens between

Yeah, I think that's beautifully put. I hadn't made the connection between this tour and the Folsom Prison concert. I think there's definitely something about taking an artist out of his or her usual life.

context and placing them in a completely different context that's quite extreme and seeing what happens. And that's one of the interesting things for me about this story about Cohen. You have this guy who's, you know, you associate him with Greenwich Village or with, you know, this island, this Greek island, but you don't think of him in a war. So what happens when you take a guy like that and you drop him into a war? What happens when you take a guy like Cash and you put him in prison with the people who he, you know, whose stories he's tried to tell, you know, from his

From his imagination, what happens and what often seems to happen or what happened in these two cases is magic. It's electricity. Something happens. And the audience, you might expect to respond with disdain, right? Who is this guy who thinks he's singing about prisoners in Folsom Prison? Who the hell are you? But what ends up happening is they appreciate his authenticity. And something about Cohen and Sinai struck people as authentic. He was obviously not...

There on some kind of ego trip, he was sleeping on the ground. He was wearing what the soldiers were wearing. He was asking for no special treatment. He was there with them in the most authentic way. And that's what makes it work. I think there had even been a whiff of exploitation in it if he'd been accompanied by a film crew or accompanied by an entourage of, you know, of...

But he wasn't. He was there in the most authentic way and an audience like an audience of prisoners and an audience like an audience of soldiers. And those two audiences are similar, right? Soldiers are kind of prisoners. They're prisoners of events. They can't leave. You can't just get up and leave the war. These are people who are trapped and it ends up working in a very interesting way. And it should be

I remember that Cash not only goes to Folsom Prison, but he goes to Vietnam. And I mention it in the book because not many artists would go to Vietnam because it would seem like you supported the war. And of course, no one was supposed to support the war. So it took a lot of bravery to go to Vietnam. And Cash and his wife, June Carter, they go to Vietnam around that same time and they play for soldiers.

Thinking about the bravery that it took for Johnny Cash and June Carter to go to Vietnam, I'm struck by the fact that even for musicians to play in Israel in peacetime is considered controversial. You know, it's certainly a safe bet that when Israel goes to war, the prominent pop stars and artists in the West are not going to share posts even supporting Israel. They're going to share posts.

posts that say, more likely than not, free Palestine. Talk to me about how the Yom Kippur War and really the wars that followed were not just a turning point for Israel, but in terms of its perception in the world. So for a few decades after the Holocaust, I think Israel had a lot of sympathy, in part because people felt really bad about what had happened and wanted to imagine that

that the Jews were okay, that somehow this had set things right, you know, that the world had let this terrible thing happen in the 1940s, but it was okay because they have this great country and we're supporting it and look how great they are and they're dancing around in the fields and the kibbutz and there's really a celebration of Israel for a few decades after the founding of the state, but that

starts to wear thin, you know, by the end of the 60s and the early 70s. And it's kind of ironic that Israel achieves power. Israel is really a response to Jewish powerlessness. And Israel manages to achieve real power by 1967. That's really an expression of Jewish powerlessness.

this great military victory. And it happens precisely at the time when power goes out of fashion in the West, 1967. It's the 60s. And now it's not good to be powerful. And now, you know, Vietnam is awful and guns are bad. And Israel kind of comes into its own precisely at that moment and becomes identified with the wrong kind of power

It's a country that worships power. Now, like 10 years before, that was a good thing. You know, in Eisenhower America or World War II America, power was good and the army was good and you didn't want to be weak. You wanted to be powerful. But that really changes in the 60s. And as the years go by, Israel really becomes identified on the left almost as the leader

incarnation of militarism and the incarnation of, you know, nationalism and power of this kind. And it's become so extreme that you can hear voices in this country and others in 2022 really kind of using Israel almost as a symbol of what's gone wrong in the world or the symbol of the values that liberal people are supposed to hate, like militarism or racism or colonialism. It gets kind of wrapped up in issues that are completely unrelated to

to Israel, but it's become a potent symbol of qualities that you're supposed to condemn, which is kind of the flip side of the myth home statement that Cohen makes, right? If it's a myth, it can be any kind of myth. It can be a good myth. It could be the myth of Jewish summer camp where everyone's, you know, beautiful and just, or it can be this dark myth about, you know, apartheid or, you know, the embodiment of oppression and evil and

And it's kind of part of the same package. And the solution to it, in my opinion, is just to try to understand that it's a real country. It's a real country on planet Earth. It's a pretty small place. It's not a myth of any kind. And the quicker people acknowledge that, I think the easier the country becomes to understand. Mati, you end your book with Cohen's last concert in Israel, which is Tel Aviv, 2009. He's 75 years old at that point.

You describe it as one of the best concerts ever held in Israel and one in which people speak about it in almost religious terms. Tell me about that concert. And I was struck by the fact that soldiers who he had met in the war were there in the crowd.

Right. No longer 18-year-old soldiers. They were all grandparents and at a very different point in their lives than they had been the last time they saw Cohen. But when I started hearing about this Cohen concert in 2009, I couldn't quite understand why people were so excited. Like, I grew up with Leonard Cohen because I'm a, you know, I'm Canadian. And if you're a Canadian kid, particularly a Jewish Canadian kid, then you had Cohen playing in the background when you grew up. And of course, Suzanne and all those songs, I don't even remember when I heard them for the first time because they were always on stage.

But I never quite realized that Israelis love Leonard Cohen. He's probably the most beloved foreign artist. I mean, when the tickets went on sale...

The phone lines crashed and 50,000 people came out to see Leonard Cohen in a pretty small country. And they would have sold 100,000, I think, if there had been room in the stadium. It was kind of a religious moment for people. It was in part because people love Leonard Cohen. In part, it was kind of a reconnection, I think, or the closing of a circle that had begun in 1973 when at the darkest moment in the country's history, when Israelis felt abandoned, he came. Yeah.

He didn't have to come, but he did. And Israelis never forgot it.

This is his famous resurrection tour where he goes back on the road basically because having been in a Buddhist monastery for many years, he comes out and realizes that his former manager had stolen all of his money. So he goes back on the road and discovers that he's ascended to the pantheon of great artists and he's filling stadiums. And that's the Cohen that we remember today, this kind of elderly gentleman with a fedora. I asked my father, I said, Father, change my name.

And he ends the concert in a very unique way by reciting the blessing of the priests.

So, dear friends, Yeruah Rechotah Adonai Bishmerechah. The blessing of the priests, or in Hebrew, Birkat HaKonim, is a 15-word blessing that is said in synagogue by people who are descended from the priests in the Jerusalem temple, which was destroyed in the year 70 CE. So this is a blessing that goes back to the time of the priests.

Yes. 2,000 years. A version of a blessing was found scratched on a silver amulet that was unearthed in my neighborhood, and it dates to about 2,600 years ago. So it's an ancient text. And people who are descended from the temple priests still know the word for priest in Hebrew is kohen.

Cohen.

He was very much aware that he came from a family of khanim, of priests, and that these people had a job and that he wasn't doing his job.

That he'd left the community and he didn't want to be part of an organized Jewish community, which he had a lot to say about it. And he ends up in the village and then on this Greek island and in a Buddhist monastery. And he kind of moves throughout his life very far from this synagogue where he grew up in Montreal. But he always knows that he's supposed to be a priest. And in Israel, he meets a guy who's kind of like a hippie rabbi type.

who's on his case about being a priest. And it really seems to matter to Cohen to such an extent that he publishes a letter or he includes a letter from this guy in the manuscript that he writes about the war. And this guy whose name is Asher is saying, listen, man, you're a priest. I don't know what you're doing with this poetry and this bohemian lifestyle. You have a job to do and your job is to bless the congregation and to call down divine protection on the congregation. Maybe we can read

You know, read the text of it. Or in English,

And Asher, this rabbi who he meets in Israel, says, Leonard, you have to decide. Are you a lecher or are you a priest? This is in 1973 during the war. And Cohen, you know, hears what he's saying, but of course he's not going to be a priest. He goes with the other option and returns to some version of his previous life. But this idea is very much part of his brain. And when he

comes back to Israel in 2009, he ends his concert with the priestly blessing. And I don't think you can understand what he was doing unless we understand the story of this war and how he thought about it and how he wrestled with his own Jewish identity during the war. So he doesn't choose to be a priest, but at the very end of his life, he comes back here. And his last communication with the Israeli audience, because this is his last concert in Israel,

is the priestly blessing, where he stands on stage and he raises his hands in a very specific gesture that the priests are supposed to make, and he blesses the congregation, the 50,000 people who come out to hear him in the stadium outside Tel Aviv. Mati Friedman.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Thanks for listening. You can buy Mati Friedman's new book and any of his old ones wherever books are sold. Again, the title of this latest is Who By Fire? Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. See you soon.

And I've seen your flag on the marble arch. But listen, love, love is not some kind of victory march. No, it's a call and it's a very low. Hallelujah, hallelujah.