My visit to Leonard Cohen’s house on Hydra and its lesson

Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond

(RNS) — Some pilgrimages you plan. Others plan you.

This summer, mine took me first to Israel, the birthplace of my faith; then to Athens, the birthplace of rationalism and democracy; and finally — an hour and 10 minutes by ferry — to the Greek island of Hydra.

Why Hydra? Because that was where Leonard Cohen had lived with his partner, Marianne Ihlen, and their young child, Adam. I wanted to see his house and the steps leading to and from it because I love his music, and because those steps had led Cohen to one of the most consequential journeys of his life.

If I might quote the cultural moment of “The Odyssey,” Hydra was Cohen’s Ithaca — the place that was supposed to be home. But his journey ran “The Odyssey” in reverse. Odysseus wandered for 10 years to get home. Cohen had to leave his home to find out where home actually was — a people.

In the autumn of 1973, Cohen was in the midst of a deep crisis, as described in Matti Friedman’s book “Who By Fire? Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” His most recent albums had been both critical and commercial failures. He struggled with depression — or, at the very least, a profound sadness.

That October 1973, on Yom Kippur, the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan launched a surprise attack on the Jewish state.

Cohen walked down the steps in Hydra to the port, went to Athens and took a plane to Israel.

He landed and went to a café in Tel Aviv, where a few Israeli pop stars spotted him — most notably, perhaps, the late Matti Caspi. They persuaded him to travel with them to the Sinai and to sing for the soldiers, as Friedman chronicled in his book. 

The rest is rock ‘n’ roll history — or, rather, the place where rock history and Jewish history intersect. Cohen went to Hatzor, an airfield in the south. There, he sang, as depicted in an amazing photo in which the late general and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is on Cohen’s left, and Caspi, on his right, accompanies him on guitar.

This story carried with me on my trip to Hydra, and I have been carrying it with me in the days since my return — through Tisha B’Av. And, it carried me as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unleashed his performative fury against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire state of Israel, in a video that reached millions of people. And, it carried with me when two people, one of them in a kippah, were attacked on a New York street by a man screaming “Allahu Akbar.”

I have been wondering to myself: What would Cohen sing?

It would not have been a song of his own composing.

Rather, it would have been a brief song with which he would often close his concerts. It was written by Earl Chalmers Guisinger, under the pseudonym Guy Singer, in 1954, and recorded by such artists as Perry Como, Les Paul and Mary Ford.

It describes an excerpt from the biblical book of Ruth — the words that Ruth said to her mother-in-law, Naomi, who had urged her to return to her native land of Moab, rather than traveling with her back to the land of Israel:

Whither thou goest, I will go
Wherever thou lodgest I will lodge
Thy people shall be my people
Whither thou goest I will go

Why can I imagine Cohen singing this — this week of all weeks?

I go back to an earlier moment in the book of Ruth. Boaz, whom she will ultimately marry, spots Ruth and asks a simple question: “Whose is this girl?” L’mi ha-naarah ha-zot?

He does not ask, “Who is this girl?”

To whom does she belong? What tribe claims her?

Ruth refused to leave her mother-in-law. “Ruth clung to Naomi” — or rather, she “sticks” to Naomi. The word for “cling,” davkah, comes from the same root as the modern Hebrew word for “glue,” devek.

Ruth feels the stickiness, the adhesiveness, the glue.

Her response is clear. “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Ruth starts with the horizontal and then moves to the vertical. She starts with sociology, and then moves to theology.

In other words: Judaism is, first and foremost, a people — and only then, a religion.

I felt that sense of peoplehood, of belonging, of stickiness, as I always do, when I was in Israel. I would look at Israelis in the street and in the stores, and I would say to myself: This is my people. For me, a transcendent God and a transcendent people walk hand in hand.

This past week, you need not be a religious Jew to have felt the glue. Because it is there. Because this is our people, and this is our family, and they are under attack.

The rest of the story of Leonard Cohen and his journey to Israel?

On that trip he wrote some of his most powerful music, which appears on his album “New Skin for the Old Ceremony” — among them, “Who by Fire” and “Lover Lover Lover.” Cohen later admitted to a reporter that “I came to raise their spirits, and they raised mine.”

Cohen’s trip to Israel resurrected both his spirit, and his career. It was his own odyssey — and unlike Odysseus, what he found waiting for him wasn’t just a shore. It was a people.

I get it.

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