{"id":1394,"date":"2022-04-17T15:46:44","date_gmt":"2022-04-17T12:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1394"},"modified":"2022-04-17T15:47:33","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T12:47:33","slug":"why-leonard-cohen-joined-a-war-to-sing-for-his-brothers-and-never-spoke-of-it-again-times-of-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2022\/04\/17\/why-leonard-cohen-joined-a-war-to-sing-for-his-brothers-and-never-spoke-of-it-again-times-of-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Leonard Cohen joined a war to sing for his brothers, and never spoke of it again (Times of Israel, March 29, 2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/
 Leonard Cohen, center, performs with Israeli singer Matti Caspi, on guitar, for Israeli troops in the Sinai in 1973. Ariel Sharon is to the left of Cohen, with arms crossed (Yakovi Doron)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Using Cohen\u2019s own notes, and recollections of Israeli soldiers who heard him, Matti Friedman teases out the astounding story of the Jewish singer-priest on the Yom Kippur frontline<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By David Horovitz<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matti Friedman had a series of near and not-so-near misses with Leonard Cohen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friedman was born in Canada in 1977, four years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War during which the Canadian poet-songwriter-singer performed a truly remarkable series of ad hoc concerts for Israeli troops on the front lines of the catastrophic conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn\u2019t make it to Cohen\u2019s final, very different concert in Israel in 2009, when Cohen \u2014 now in his mid-70s and enjoying the greatest adulation of his career \u2014 played for tens of thousands of Israelis, defied the vast concrete arena to elevate a stadium audience as never before, and concluded by offering his people a Priestly Blessing. Friedman was at home in Jerusalem, looking after his 18-month-old twins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when, in November 2016, Friedman started working on the pitch for what became his new book on Cohen, and emailed his editor at the Canadian publisher he and Cohen shared to see if an interview could be arranged, it turned out that Cohen had passed away, at 82, the previous day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no knowing what Cohen in person would have added to Friedman\u2019s fascinating and important book, \u201cWho By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,\u201d<\/a> published in English on March 29 (having appeared in Hebrew, fittingly, last Yom Kippur).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He might have explained why he discarded the verse Friedman rediscovered, from the song \u201cLover Lover Lover\u201d released soon after the war, in which Cohen wrote of going \u201cdown to the desert to help my brothers fight.\u201d He might have clarified what possessed him not merely to come here and perform in a war but to put his life at genuine risk; Cohen crossed the Suez Canal just after the first Israeli troops had done so in the turning point of the conflict. He might at least have helped Friedman track the itinerary of exactly where and when he played; no such definitive record exists, unsurprisingly given both the chaos that reigned here and the fact that Cohen was not a megastar at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as Friedman came to realize as he researched the book \u2014 frustrated by the absence of basic core information, but ultimately empowered when he was granted unprecedented access to the musician\u2019s notebooks from the period \u2014 Cohen might not actually have helped him much at all. In the decades after his extraordinary war tour, Cohen didn\u2019t talk about it. Wouldn\u2019t talk about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLeonard Cohen the man was very much here, with the Israelis,\u201d Friedman, a friend of mine and a former colleague here at The Times of Israel, told me in an interview. \u201cBut Leonard Cohen the artist understood that he had to be bigger than one side and bigger than the Yom Kippur War. He didn\u2019t want his art to be considered journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hence, said Friedman, the amending and ultimate deletion of that Zionist verse in \u201cLover Lover Lover.\u201d And hence, perhaps too, the refusal to discuss his 1973 musical desert heroics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately for those many people for whom Cohen\u2019s uniquely wise, anguished and spiritual oeuvre continues to resonate deeply, Friedman\u2019s book fills the vacuum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has much to say, moreover, for those many who want to better understand the shattering moment for Israel that was the Yom Kippur War \u2014 October 6-25, 1973 \u2014 after which the country would never be the same confident, indomitable, secular pioneering miracle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Read the rest here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using Cohen\u2019s own notes, and recollections of Israeli soldiers who heard him, Matti Friedman teases out the astounding story of the Jewish singer-priest on the Yom Kippur frontline By David Horovitz Matti Friedman had a series of near and not-so-near misses with Leonard Cohen. Friedman was born in Canada in 1977, four years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War during …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1397,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions\/1397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}