Tour Reviews and Other Memories from
LEONARD COHEN WORLD TOUR Summer 2009
Tel Aviv, Israel
Set List - September 24, 2009
First Set
Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Chelsea Hotel
Waiting For the Miracle
Anthem
Second Set
Tower Of Song
Suzanne
Sisters Of Mercy
Gypsy Wife
The Partisan
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I'm Your Man
Take This Waltz
Encores
So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Closing Time
I Tried to Leave You
Hey, That’s no Way to Say Goodbye
Whither Thou Goest
Tel Aviv, Israel
Nothing on his tongue but 'Hallelujah'
Jerusalem Post - September 21, 2009 by Ben Jacobson
When the Toronto International Film Festival recently announced plans to include a series of movies about Tel Aviv as part of its "City to City" feature, movie stars including Danny Glover and Jane Fonda signed a letter refusing to "become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine." As the backlash against the letter became too much to bear, Fonda backtracked and apologized.
And when Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters visited Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film School this past June to express solidarity with a Palestinian cultural initiative, he was highly vocal about his feelings that the security fence should be torn down, that all checkpoints be removed and that Jerusalem should split into a capital for two states. When he was asked by The Jerusalem Post how he saw these views as fitting into the context of Israel's rejected final status peace offer at Camp David in 2000, Waters was stumped.
Who cares what professional entertainers have to say about local politics? When it comes to Leonard Cohen, who is scheduled to play to a sold-out crowd at Ramat Gan Stadium on Thursday, the answer is that many people do - especially politicians and activists. Thankfully, though, the singer-songwriter-poet-novelist-monk's apolitical platform is marked by enough mystique and individualism to keep him from having to wave any specific flag, perhaps even allowing the show to serve as a true "Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace," as it has been billed.
Rumors circulated for well over a year that Cohen, now in his mid-seventies and on tour since May of 2008, would make a Tel Aviv concert appearance. But when word got out early this past summer that a September 2009 concert was in the works, Palestinian activists were up in arms, demanding that the iconic Canadian singer cancel his performance in Israel. A group of academics under the mantle of the "British Committee for the Universities of Palestine" even issued a plea to Cohen, brazenly stating, "You will perform in a state whose propaganda services will extract every ounce of mileage from your presence."
Cohen's camp responded with the announcement that he'd be playing a show in Ramallah two days after the September 24 Ramat Gan concert, but this move was also not to the liking of Palestinian activists, with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel announcing that "Ramallah will not receive Cohen as long as he is intent on whitewashing Israel's colonial apartheid regime by performing in Israel."
Once talk of a Ramallah concert fizzled out, Israeli Tourism Ministry Director-General Noaz Bar Nir, together with Nazareth Mayor Ramiz Jaraisy, appealed to Cohen to perform instead in Nazareth, Israel's largest Arab city, which would have allowed the performer to play to an Arab audience in a less politically loaded venue.
Why is everyone so up in arms over a folk singer from the '60s entertaining some civilians with large wallets? Perhaps Cohen's appearance in Israel was taken to be a potentially partisan threat because of the perception that he is "one of ours," having grown up in the upscale Montreal neighborhood of Westmount, where he attended Herzliah High School and Camp Mishmar in his teens and played in the Hillel Band at McGill University.
Later, he would be known for having played impromptu sets for IDF troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
BUT COHEN'S world view is hardly oriented towards taking sides in any given conflict - it is, rather, strictly a vehicle for expressing his artistic ideas. Cohen's oft-uniformed "Field Commander Cohen" persona, which has informed several works and inspired the title of a 1979 concert tour, grew out of his posturing as a guerrilla of verse, a rogue revolutionary who champions the cause of the underdog.
Not necessarily as conceptually developed as other artists' alter egos, such as Bono's "The Fly" or David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," "Field Commander Cohen" made his first appearance when Cohen visited Havana as a young man in 1961, sporting faux fatigues and a beard and reveling in all-nighters alongside the international bohemian set that remained in town after Castro's takeover. "I had this mythology of this famous civil war in my mind," he later said of the stint. Cohen ultimately ended up encountering considerable difficulty escaping Cuba when the country's diplomatic relations with the West crumbled during his visit.
In his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, Cohen's own militant Quebecois nationalism temporarily came to the fore, although primarily as a poetic device in the context of the work, which was concerned mostly with personal relationships, exemplified by lengthy odes to St. Catherine Tekakwitha.
"Field Commander Cohen" only came into his own in the fall of 1973, when Cohen, facing crises in his career and family life, dropped everything to participate in the Yom Kippur War. Arriving in Tel Aviv from his habitual haven in Hydra, he announced to the press that he had come "to make my atonement" - and to entertain the troops. He also noted that while he had once advocated an unconditional return to the 1967 borders, recent events had inspired a change of heart. Cohen joined a group of local musicians that included Ilana Rovina and Matti Caspi on an informal performance tour of bases close to the front in Sinai, at one point even pocketing a firearm so that he could feel like he was ready to participate in the battles.
In his unpublished memoir, The Final Revision of My Life in Art, Cohen reflected on having shared a bottle of cognac with General Ariel Sharon at a makeshift desert wilderness fort. "I want his job," he wrote of the 1973 meeting, in a sentiment more significant for its self-conscious romanticism of military strength than for its political alignment. After all, the trip to Israel was possibly more about personal redemption for the artist than anything else. In Cohen's mind, Israel was "a place where you may begin again," he would write. To this end, he was determined to perform a pilgrimage from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on foot before his return to Hydra; he ended up wandering back to the cafes of Dizengoff Square after a few hours, of course.
ELEVEN YEARS later, Cohen's public Middle Eastern anti-politics surfaced once again, this time in the context of his compilation of personal psalm-like essays, The Book of Mercy. The work includes several references to the nation of "Ishmael," and in one passage, Cohen tears down all of the region's constructs of alignment: "Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation - none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy... Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless."
So when it came time to satisfy all of the activists and politicians hoping to latch on to Cohen's on-stage message of love this week in Ramat Gan, concert tour planners were charged with doing it outside the box. "Leonard had a very simple thought," Cohen's manager Robert Kory explained to The Jerusalem Post's David Brinn in July. "He said, 'I'd like to play, but I just can't take any money out. I want it to stay there.' It wasn't any more complicated than that."
As a result, both Cohen and AEG Live, the corporate entity behind the tour, will be donating all of their profits from the concert to a new, dedicated charity fund. "We didn't want it to be identified as a Palestinian or Israeli charity," Kory said.
The new fund will consequently be donating proceeds to little-known but groundbreaking grassroots initiatives like the Parents Circle - Family Forum, the Peres Center for Peace Children's Medical Program, Combatants for Peace and Ramallah's Palestinian Happy Child Center. What about those who will argue that some of these causes are themselves biased? "So be it," said Kory. "Leonard's an artist, not a politician, and he doesn't want this to be seen as a political act."
For the perpetual Canadian-American-Jewish-Zen-Greek exile, traditional trappings of nationalism and alignments are to be scoffed at and simply employed as tools for conveying one's own artistic statements.
As Cohen wrote in "Democracy," a 1993 song, which, based on recent set-lists, he's likely to perform on Thursday, "I love the country but I can't stand the scene / And I'm neither left or right / I'm just staying home tonight / getting lost in that hopeless little screen."
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen’s Legacy for His Concert in Israel
New York Times - September 23, 2009 by Ethan Bronner
TEL AVIV — Leonard Cohen’s path to his sold-out concert here Thursday night has been strewn with obstacles.
Those seeking to ostracize Israel through an international boycott demanded that he call it off. When he offered instead a matching concert in the West Bank, Palestinians said no thanks. Amnesty International agreed to help him distribute the concert’s proceeds to peace groups; Amnesty International withdrew. Then last Friday, three days before turning 75, Mr. Cohen collapsed onstage in Valencia, Spain, in the middle of his classic “Bird on a Wire” and was rushed to the hospital.
But he recovered from what was food poisoning or stomach flu, performed smoothly on Monday in Barcelona and is now in Tel Aviv, his manager, Robert B. Kory, said by telephone. Mr. Cohen, he said, is “in great shape.”
Mr. Cohen has billed the performance, in front of 47,000 in the soccer stadium of the suburb Ramat Gan, “A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace” and is giving the expected profits of $1.5 million to $2 million to a new charity he has created of the same name, run by a board of Israelis and Palestinians, which will distribute money to groups focused on coexistence here.
In particular, Mr. Kory said, the money will go to organizations composed of people who have paid a great personal price because of the dispute and yet are working for peace. Prominent among such groups is the Parents Circle — Families Forum, made up of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost close family members to the conflict.
“When people meet face to face, the walls fall,” said Roni Hirshenson, one of the Israeli founders of the 14-year-old group, who lost his son, Amir, in 1995 when two Palestinian suicide bombers mingled among a group of Israeli soldiers waiting at a bus stop. “We reconcile by learning each other’s narratives, both personal and national.”
Ali Abu Awwad, who lost his older brother, Yusef, in late 2000 to Israeli soldier gunfire outside their village near the West Bank city Hebron, said that the Parents Circle reached out to him and saved him from the depths of anger and despair. He is now an activist promoting nonviolent resistance among Palestinians.
Asked his view about the boycott of Israel, Mr. Awwad said: “We have to open our doors so the whole world can see what we the Palestinians are facing. We should not stop any voice for peace because at the end of day being angry and boycotting will not help. I believe Leonard Cohen has taken a very important step, using his power and investing his energy into finding a solution.”
Mr. Cohen’s goal is larger than this single concert. He wants to inspire fellow musicians to donate the proceeds from one performance in the coming year to Israeli-Palestinian groups focused on reconciliation.
“We’re hoping this is an invitation,” said Mr. Kory, who will be on the board of the new charity. “There are many conflicts and much suffering in the world, but this is one that really puts the whole world at risk and is really worthy of attention.”
Mr. Cohen, who feels his Jewish identity keenly, last performed in Israel more than two decades ago. He also performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Middle East war.
Efforts to persuade popular artists to boycott Israel have had mixed results. The Pet Shop Boys, Lady Gaga and Madonna have all performed here recently. Madonna, an avid follower of the Jewish mystical tradition called cabala, even wrapped herself in an Israeli flag at her concert and asserted that the country was “the center of the world’s energy.”
Tel Aviv, Israel
Singer Leonard Cohen Performs in Israel, Against Backdrop of Criticism
Washington Post - September 25, 2009 by Howard Schneider
RAMAT GAN, Israel, Sept. 24 -- Singer-poet Leonard Cohen's first concerts for Israelis weren't in Israel. They were for troops in the then-occupied Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, part of a morale-boosting tour that the Montreal native gave during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Thirty-six years later, for what has been billed as the Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, the 75-year-old grandfather of angst-pop is again embroiled in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This time he has been the target of a boycott campaign that aims to discourage artists, writers and others from performing or touring in Israel.
As he went onstage Thursday night in a 45,000-seat soccer stadium near Tel Aviv, it was amid accusations that he had betrayed his humanist and Buddhist principles. The concert was "a kind of validation" of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, said Shir Hever, an economist and activist with the Alternative Information Center, a group opposed to Israel's policies toward Palestinians.
The proceeds of the show were intended for a Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation fund started by Cohen, but the singer also decided over the summer to balance the schedule with a smaller companion concert in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "He was mindful of the conflict" when he decided to perform here after a long absence, said manager Roger Kory. The Ramallah concert came under fire as a "pity performance" and was canceled.
At a reception before Thursday's concert, members of the mainstream Israeli peace movement criticized what they regard as fringe groups trying to undercut cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.
But it was Cohen who "missed the point," Hever said. "Palestinians don't want appeasement, they want recognition of their rights." Israelis "point out the willingness of people like Madonna and Leonard Cohen to give shows as a sign that Israel is normal, like a European country. It evades responsibility," he added.
"I had no idea it would be so difficult to do something simple and good," Kory said on the eve of the concert. The charity Cohen set up was designed around his desire to help Palestinians and Israelis who have lost family members in the conflict and are working toward reconciliation -- the type of "transcendence," Kory said, that Cohen often talks about in his songs and poetry.
Boycotts are nothing new in Israel. The Arab League has had one in place for decades, and even countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which have made peace with their neighbor, have been reluctant partners. But a scattered collection of grass-roots boycott efforts, organized here and abroad by Israelis, Palestinians and others, has scored enough recent successes that it has registered with Israeli businesses and politicians. Alongside a recent U.N. Human Rights Council report on last winter's war in the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials have stepped up diplomatic and other efforts to push back against what they see as a challenge to their country's international standing.
In the aftermath of the Gaza war, a survey by the Israeli Manufacturers Association found that about 20 percent of its members said their business had been affected by overseas efforts to boycott Israeli products. Norway recently ordered a government-held investment fund to sell about $5 million worth of stock in the Israeli high-tech company Elbit Systems because the firm has supplied surveillance equipment for the security barrier running around and through the West Bank. A college in the West Bank settlement of Ariel was kicked out of a solar-architecture competition in Spain.
Cohen was, going by the standards of such things, a significant target. A Jew but not an Israeli, his body of work is more deeply philosophical and his outlook more universalist than that of, say, Madonna, who blithely wrapped herself in the Star of David flag during her recent concerts here, dined with top Israeli politicians and kept the profits as well.
But Cohen has a special place, and Kory said the politics surrounding his show here registered deeply and almost forced a cancellation.
The singer is a bit of a national obsession. The counterculture favorite "First We Take Manhattan" and renditions of the anthemic "Hallelujah" are radio staples. Cohen's concert Thursday, which was part of an extensive world tour, sold out quickly.
There is no doubt, Kory said, that Cohen's Jewish heritage and connection with Israel have influenced his work, but his decision to perform meant to send a broader message.
"How can you boycott a good heart like Leonard Cohen?" said Ali Abu Awwad, a West Bank resident whose brother was killed by Israeli forces and who now works on reconciliation efforts. "We have loss and pain but still believe in peace and reconciliation. We come without labels to talk in one voice. It's not our destiny to keep dying."
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen concert in Tel Aviv goes ahead despite criticism
Montreal Gazette - September 24, 2009 (Photo: Gil Cohen Magen, REUTERS)
TEL AVIV, Israel — Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen crooned to a stadium crowd of 47,000 in Tel Aviv on Thursday night, wowing it with a series of iconic ballads that are as deep and complex as the region that fought over where and how to host him.
Wearing his trademark fedora, Cohen smiled as he spoke of how pleased he was to be performing in Israel for the first time in almost 30 years, but he did not address the controversy that almost prevented him from singing here.
"It's a great honour to play for you and to play for the bereaved parents of peace," he said.
But he wasn't exactly given a peaceful reception when he first announced he was coming to Israel.
Hours after the Tel Aviv date was set, the pro-Palestinian group for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel pleaded with the singer to cancel the show, in solidarity of its campaign to end Israel's control in the Palestinian territories.
Cohen responded by announcing a second concert date in the West Bank city of Ramallah, but it was eventually cancelled after the group said he was only welcome if he skipped Israel altogether.
"Singing in Tel Aviv is an act of compliance that is unacceptable to Palestinian civil society," said spokesman Omar Barghouti, who highlighted Israel's recent invasion in Gaza as a key reason for artists to boycott the country.
Aimed at stopping Palestinian militant rocket attacks into neighbouring Israeli towns, the January invasion killed more than 1,150 Palestinians, many of them civilians.
"This is not against Leonard Cohen as a person, as an artist, as a progressive artist . . . but he seems to have a blind spot when it comes to Israel."
Cohen's manager said complaints from both sides of the debate almost kept the gig from happening, but added the band was well aware that performances in Israel often invite controversy.
"If that's their view, we respect it. We wouldn't suppress their freedom of speech and we would hope that they wouldn't suppress ours," said Robert Kory.
Dubbed a concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, all the proceeds from the Tel Aviv show will go to a fund that Cohen established in the same name. Money from it will be used to help bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen wows sell-out crowd, and promotes peace too
Haaretz - September 25, 2009 by Neri Livneh
Exactly as scheduled, singer Leonard Cohen took the stage in Ramat Gan's stadium at 8:45 P.M. sharp last night. Meticulously dressed in a tailored suit and hat, he started singing, clutching the microphone as he sang. He showed no apparent ill effects from last week's incident, when he fainted during a concert in Spain.
The fact that he began his show on time appeared almost miraculous, considering the impossibly long lines before the stadium gates. But the crowd - made up primarily of older Ashkenazis - was not terribly pushy. Cohen's show broke an Israeli record when all tickets for the concert were sold out in less than 12 hours, despite costing between NIS 1,000 and NIS 1,200. The crowd kept pouring in even after the concert had started, and all through the show, scalpers were trying to sell tickets for very low prices near the entrances.
The 75-year-old Canadian, whose last performance in Israel took place more than 20 years ago, played many of his best-known hits, including "Suzanne," "Bird on the Wire" and "Dance Me to the End of Love."
Before the concert, an event was held in the VIP section of the stadium for the Leonard Cohen Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, which gives support to bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families. At this event, grants were given to people who have suffered personally from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but continue to believe in peace and work to achieve it.
Around 200 bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families attended the concert, among them renowned novelist David Grossman. Many other celebrities and movers and shakers of Israeli society were there as well.
Cohen had announced about two months ago that the proceeds from his performance in Israel would go toward the reconciliation fund, after his plan to perform in Israel sparked opposition. A pro-Palestinian group called "Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel" urged the singer to cancel the show and launched a protest campaign. And some Palestinian activists called for a boycott because of Israel's invasion of Gaza, which was aimed at stopping daily rocket attacks.
Cohen, who is Jewish but was ordained as a Buddhist monk, responded by offering to perform in the West Bank city of Ramallah. However, that offer was rejected by the Palestinian protesters. He then said all proceeds would go to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations.
Initially, Cohen asked Amnesty International to help him distribute the funds, which he hoped would help smaller groups that work for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. But Amnesty backed out of that arrangement, so Cohen started his own charity to distribute money to community groups. The charity is run by a board of Israelis and Palestinians.
During the concert, organizers screened some of Kobi Meidan's translations of Cohen's songs. But it seemed as if almost everyone knew the English lyrics by heart.
Cohen last performed in Israel in 1975. Before that, he entertained Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Israel Discount Bank, one of the sponsors, used the concert for a publicity campaign in which its employees placed bags with flashlights bearing the bank's logo on all the seats. Tens of thousands of spectators waved their hands to Cohen's music while holding the flashlights, in the dark, creating a camp-fire ambience.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Cohen builds a glorious, spiritual Tower of Song
Jerusalem Post - September 24, 2009 by David Horovitz and Dsvid Brinn
Leonard Cohen, 75, the Canadian singer-poet sometimes derided for making music to slit your wrists to, energized and transported a packed Ramat Gan stadium to a vibrant spiritual high on Thursday night.
"I don't know if we will pass this way again," he told the audience early in the concert, but then promised "to give it everything tonight."
And so he did, with a set list drawn from throughout the decades of his career.
Live, however, and backed by a sumptuous group of musicians, his songs transcended their recorded versions. A magnificent "Who By Fire," for instance, began with an oriental flourish and featured an exquisite harp passage.
The biblical basis of songs like that one have always resonated uniquely in the Israel psyche, and hearing them delivered with such poignancy and conviction, in these days ahead of Yom Kippur, made for a particularly unforgettable experience.
On a warm summer evening, with a light breeze, the crowd applauded ecstatically when Cohen played favorites like "Bird on the Wire" and "Dance Me to the End of Love," but were utterly, respectfully silent in the quieter passages of songs, responding to Cohen's obvious passion and sincerity.
Cohen's voice was strong, and gravelly, as ever, his delivery clear, and his eyes closed in concentration during key verses.
Cohen spoke admiringly of the The Parents Circle-Families Forum group, to which part of the proceeds from this concert are going, praising bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents for "the nobility of this exercise" in reconciliation.
Their effort, he said, represented a "holy holy holy response to human suffering" and "God willing" it could mark the beginning of a process toward peace.
Earlier in the evening, Cohen's manager Robert Kory, novelist David Grossman and other local dignitaries inaugurated the Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace in a tent outside the stadium.
The fund will be financed with proceeds from the concert, which are estimated at $2 million, and will be directed to organizations working with Israeli and Palestinian organizations committed to reconciliation.
Besides The Parents Circle, the initial recipients of the funds include the Palestinian Center of Research and Information, Radio Kol Hashalom and Saving Children-the Peres Center for Peace.
"Leonard decided that if he was going to play in Israel, he wanted the money to stay here," Kory said. "We've met so many Israelis and Palestinians in doing this who are committed to peace."
Grossman, whose son Uri, 20, was killed in the Second Lebanon War in August 2006, praised the initiative.
"It seems so easy to believe that war is the only possibility and that Israelis and Palestinians will continue to kill each other," he said. "But those gathered here tonight know what we have inflicted upon each other and the price we have paid. Leonard Cohen, through his art, indicates that he understands this suffering."
Ali Abu Awwad, an activist in the Parents Circle from the village of Beit Umar, whose brother was killed by the IDF, said that the common bond of the gathering was a group of broken hearts.
"We are stuck in being right; we came here to be successful," he said.
Talking about pressure from Palestinians that led to a boycott of a proposed show in Ramallah, Awwad said, "I can't boycott a heart as big as Leonard Cohen's."
Upon leaving the event to go to the concert, Kory told The Jerusalem Post, "That was the hard part. The concert is going to be easy."
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen performs in Israel, defies boycott
Associated Press - September 24, 2009 by Ian Deitch
RAMAT GAN, Israel — Leonard Cohen wowed an adoring audience Thursday night, crooning his iconic ballads at his first show in Israel in 30 years and ignoring a political storm over his appearance.
The 75-year-old singer entertained fans at Ramat Gan stadium near Tel Aviv for more than three hours. Some in the audience wore black fedora hats, a tribute to one of Cohen's trademarks.
The concert sparked a protest long before it took place on a warm night near the Israeli seashore.
Some Palestinian activists called for a boycott because of Israel's punishing invasion of Gaza, aimed at stopping daily rocket attacks. More than 1,150 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, were killed in the three-week offensive that ended in mid-January.
Cohen responded by offering to perform in the West Bank city of Ramallah as well. He said all proceeds from the shows would go to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations.
But a pro-Palestinian group called "Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel" urged the singer to cancel the shows and launched a protest campaign.
"There are a lot of people who don't want us here, and anything done here invites controversy," Cohen's manager, Robert Kory, told The Associated Press. "But we believe freedom of speech is very, very important."
Kory said the singer established a foundation, "The Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace," to distribute proceeds from the concert.
At an event launching the foundation before the concert, Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose son was killed in Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon, said he hoped for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. "We are here today to show that with a joint effort, we can redeem each other from this hate," he said.
"Cohen wants the money to go toward changing hearts and to bring peace," Kory said. He said most of the money will go to the Parents Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved parents that helps families from both sides who lost loved ones in the conflict.
During the concert, Cohen praised the Parents Circle several times. Palestinian members of the group were seen in the audience.
Top international musicians are slowly returning to perform in Israel after years of staying away due to violence and political tensions. Madonna, Depeche Mode, Faith No More, and others have appeared this year.
The 47,000 tickets for Cohen's concert were snatched up within hours when they went on sale earlier this month. Prices ranged from $90 to $315.
Cohen performed Thursday night meticulously dressed in a tailored suit and hat, clutching the microphone as he sang but showing no apparent affects from an incident last week, when he fainted during a concert in Spain.
The Canadian songwriter, best known for his dark poetic lyrics, has been making music since the late 60's. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.
He has been on a worldwide tour since May 2008, and earlier this year played in Australia and Europe. After Israel, he goes on to perform at U.S. venues.
Cohen had to come out of retirement five years ago when he discovered that most of his retirement fund had disappeared in a disputed case of mismanagement while he spent time at a Buddhist monastery.
He last performed in Israel in 1975. Before that, Cohen entertained Israeli troops during the Mideast war in 1973.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Cohen Counters Israeli Concert Protest With Songs, Donations
Bloomberg - September 25, 2009 by Calev Ben-David
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Like a bird on a wire, the title of one of his best-known songs, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen had to perform a balancing act after pro-Palestinian activists protested his decision to hold a concert in Israel on Thursday night.
The 75-year-old Canadian-Jewish troubadour’s answer was to donate proceeds from the concert to local groups working for peace and coexistence, including the Parents Circle, whose membership is comprised of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members to the violence of the Middle East conflict.
The concert, which attracted an audience of some 47,000 to Ramat Gan stadium just outside Tel Aviv, is expected to have raised about $2 million after expenses for those groups, according to Cohen’s manager Robert Kory, speaking at a reception just before the performance.
Cohen addressed the controversy from the stage, saying the concert and the groups it will support represented a “triumph over the inclination of the heart to despair, revenge and hatred.”
His gesture hasn’t mollified activists who urged him to boycott Israel over its policies toward the Palestinians. A plan to hold a second concert in the West Bank city of Ramallah was canceled in the face of their protests, Kory said.
Channeling Anger
Palestinians from the Parents Circle who attended the concert defended Cohen’s decision to perform in Israel.
“There are people who haven’t had a voice for a long time and have no place to put their anger, and the boycott is part of that,” said Ali Abu Awad at the reception, adding that his brother died in a clash with Israeli troops.
“I was in Israeli prisons for four years, and lost my brother, and am proud to have Leonard Cohen supporting us.”
Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose son was killed fighting in the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and who supports a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, said at the reception that Cohen’s music shows he understands the suffering on both sides.
Other performers, including Madonna, who performed in Tel Aviv earlier this month, have faced similar protests from pro- Palestinian activists, who have also sought to get Israeli movies boycotted at film festivals in Edinburgh and Toronto.
The controversy didn’t appear to distract Cohen during the concert, as he growled his way through an impassioned three-hour performance that ranged across his songbook of classics including “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne” and “Hallelujah.” He seemed to answer recent concerns about his health -- he collapsed during a Barcelona concert this month -- by dancing off stage in Ramat Gan at the finish of each of several encores.
Cohen’s music has been popular in Israel since he first appeared there during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to perform for troops. He ended the concert by blessing the crowd with the traditional prayer known as the “Birkat Ha’Cohenim,” or the priestly benediction, closing with this line:
“May God lift his face upon you and give you peace.”
Tel Aviv, Israel
'Hallelujah' in Tel Aviv: Leonard Cohen Energizes Diverse Crowd
Tel Aviv — Despite the row ahead of his performance, when Leonard Cohen began his sell-out Tel Aviv concert Thursday, September 24, there wasn’t a hint of awkwardness about coming to Israel.
Pro-Palestinian activists called on him to boycott Israel, but he came anyway and was brimming with enthusiasm about his host country. “How goodly are your tents Jacob, your dwellings Israel,” he declared, using the original Hebrew from the Biblical book of Numbers.
Almost 50,000 people crammed in to Ramat Gan Stadium — a far bigger crowd than Cohen is used to. Judging by the numbers mouthing along to each and every song, most were dedicated fans. And judging by numbers on the look out for tickets outside the stadium at the last minute, many who were equally devoted didn’t get in.
Cohen’s Israel following isn’t only surprising for how large it is, but also how mixed it is. There were plenty of people in the stereotypical Cohen fan age-range, forties and upwards, but there was a large much younger following — many of whom were not born when he last performed Israel in 1975.
This is what a couple of square yards near the stage looked like: a couple in their late fifties stood arm-in-arm; a young couple in their early twenties sat on the ground transfixed, the woman in her army uniform evidently on the way home for the weekend; a girl in her late teens, drunk in the extreme, danced enthusiastically singing along word-perfect. A middle-aged man wearing a kippah and his wife with a headscarf were nearby, as were two young Israeli Arab women, one in a headscarf.
When Cohen started his classics, like “Chelsea Hotel” and “First We Take Manhattan,” the crowd erupted into rapturous applause and sang along for sections. But for much of the concert the crowd was surprisingly quiet, doing something that Israelis don’t tend to do: watching respectfully and in almost-silent appreciation. The concert was un-Israeli in another respect: It started right on time at 7.45 p.m., even though people were still on their way in.
The audience found Cohen’s rendition of “Who By Fire” particularly poignant, as it is based on the liturgy from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Throughout the whole concert, as Cohen sang lyrics were translated in to Hebrew on giant screens, and it was surreal seeing the lines from the liturgy he had switched to English translated back to Hebrew and matching the prayer book word for word. A policeman who had kept an on-duty stern expression throughout the performance welled up, reached in to his pocket and pulled out a camera to capture the moment.
There was a sense of Cohen advancing a claim-of-ownership when he came to “Hallelujah.” This song has been covered by so many artists, including Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, but Cohen sang it with such feeling and gusto it was as if he was questioning why anyone else would bother.
During some of his recent concerts Cohen has spent a lot of time speaking to the crowd, but in Tel Aviv it was all about the music, he kept the chat to a minimum. When he spoke he was gracious, verbosely introducing and praising his band and thanking the audience for welcoming him.
The only other topic that merited a break in the music was Middle East conflict. He is under no misapprehension that he can solve it, he said, but he is determined to help those he believes can play a part in doing so. He praised those on both sides who have lost loved ones and still strive for peace, saying this is why proceeds from the concert would go to help them. Theirs is a “healthy response to human suffering, baruch hashem,” he said.
When Cohen finished his third encore, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” ending with the perfect sign-off line, “sincerely L Cohen,” everyone was sure he was finished, but he was having too much fun, and carried on. In the light of his discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict his song “Whither Thou Goest,” went down particularly well. “Thy people shall be / My People” he sang, drawing on the Biblical book of Ruth.
Then there was a surprise that nobody could have anticipated. Cohen, an ordained Buddhist monk, put his hands together in the special formation reserved for Cohanim, members of the Jewish priestly caste, to use when giving the Priestly Blessing in synagogue. He then pronounced the words of the blessing, which come from the Biblical book of Numbers. “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord let His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look kindly upon you and give you peace.”
Even that wasn’t the last that concert-goers saw of Leonard Cohen. On the way out of the stadium, there were Leonard Cohens everywhere. Next to the shopping carts purloined from supermarkets by street sellers using them to sell hot bagels was a stall offering black fedora hats, Cohen’s trademark. It sold hundreds, and so Leonard Cohen has left a behind a different Israel to the one that greeted him. Today, you don’t have to be Haredi to wear a black hat.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Cohen defies critics with Israeli gig
Independent (UK) - September 26, 2009 by Donald Macintyre
Veteran plays to 47,000 in Tel Aviv despite accusations of 'immorality'. Donald Macintyre was in the crowd
It was vintage Leonard Cohen. "We don't know when we'll pass this way again," he told the sell-out audience at the Ramat Gan football stadium: "But we promise to give you everything we've got tonight." And he did.
Any worries fans had after the 75-year-old Canadian poet-singer-songwriter collapsed while performing "Bird on the Wire" in Valencia last week (apparently from food poisoning) quickly dissipated.
Disbelieving laughs rippled through the crowd at those familiar lines in "Chelsea Hotel", the beguiling elegy to his late Sixties fling with Janis Joplin: "You told me again you preferred handsome men/but for me you would make an exception". And certainly the maestro, in customary suit and fedora, looked as good as he sounded in the still warmth of this Tel Aviv September night, his first concert in Israel for more than 25 years.
He – literally – danced off the stage before each of three encores, one of which charmed the enraptured crowd to their feet in an excited singalong, thousands waving their green glow sticks in time to "So Long Marianne". He and his gravelly bass baritone voice were at peak form, from a gloriously funky "I'm Your Man" to the dark and haunting "Famous Blue Raincoat" and, of course, "Hallelujah" (which served as a reminder that none of the many cover versions are as good).
But this is Israel, and the political context cannot be ignored.
Mr Cohen, Jewish like the vast majority of his audience, had billed the gig on Thursday night as "A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace". And this was not the usual vacuous platitude. For he had also agreed to donate its $1.5m to $2m proceeds to a new fund he is behind to promote coexistence projects.
One of these is the Parents Circle – Families Forum, a unique organisation of bereaved Israeli and Palestinians who have lost close relatives in the conflict and who meet regularly together to share their painful experiences across the divide.
In the face of protests by proponents of a cultural boycott of Israel that he was playing Tel Aviv at all, Mr Cohen had planned a similar concert in the West Bank city of Ramallah, with proceeds earmarked for a Palestinian prisoners' charity. But that was successfully blocked by boycott campaigners – including, according to his American manager, Robert B Kory, a number of "British academics" – who argue that concerts like this and Paul McCartney's last year validate Israel as a "normal country" as it tramples Palestinian rights.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said that such attempts at "balance" not only "immorally equate the oppressor with the oppressed ... [but] are conscious acts of complicity in Israel's violation of international law and human rights".
The campaign has been given fresh impetus by Israel's winter offensive on Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead.
But the Parents Circle was undeterred. At a reception before the concert, the writer and long-time peace campaigner David Grossman said: "It seems so easy to believe that war is the only possibility and that Israelis and Palestinians will continue to kill each other." But Mr Grossman, whose tank commander son was killed on the last weekend of the 2006 Lebanon war, added: "But those gathered here tonight know what we have inflicted upon each other and the price we have paid. Leonard Cohen, through his art, indicates that he understands this suffering."
Another of the 47,000 at the concert was Ali Abu Awwad, a 37-year-old Palestinian who was jailed for four years for his part in the first intifada, and whose brother Yusef was shot and killed at the outset of the second.
Mr Awwad has since toured mosques and synagogues in Europe and the US on behalf of the Parent's Circle with Robi Damelin, a 65-year-old Israeli, who has complained that the occupation is "killing the moral fibre of Israel" and whose son David was killed by a Palestinian sniper while serving in the Army in 2002.
"It's not our destiny to keep dying," Mr Awwad said. "I can't boycott a great heart like Leonard Cohen. I was jailed for four years, my mother was jailed for four years. I lost my brother. I am proud that Leonard Cohen is supporting us."
For PACBI, "those sincerely interested in defending Palestinian rights ... should not play Israel, period". But for Mr Cohen, grassroots reconciliation, however modest in its reach, reflects the words of "Anthem", the song he pointedly sang straight after plugging Parents Circle work from the stage: "There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in."
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen's blessed summer finale
Jerusalem Post - September 26, 2009 by Ben Jacobson
Israel's summer season of international concerts came to a finale on Thursday night at a sold-out performance in Ramat Gan's National Stadium.
TV crews were clamoring to interview tour management, activists and civil servants were offering their own spins on pop-inspired peace-making, and a special paparazzi area had been established to enable photographers to record the arrivals of local celebrities.
With the buzz-meter this far off the charts, it was almost as if Madonna hadn't performed nearby just three weeks ago. And who was all this pop circus fuss about? Leonard Cohen: an elderly folk singer who honed his chops in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village and Montreal; an ex-monk of a Californian Zen order; the "grocer of despair" of Seventies singer-songwriters; the man who by the mid-Eighties was considered by Columbia Records' then-honcho Walter Yetnikoff to be too much of a has-been to warrant the distribution of his new recordings in the United States.
Cohen is hardly MTV material. His music is far more suited to candle-lit lonely nights than soccer stadiums, and he is known for referring to his "career" with tongue always in cheek, telling the BBC in 1994 that he was grateful for "the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living."
But he's been on a world tour now for about a year and a half - a tour that isn't just maintaining momentum, but is instead getting bigger and bigger. He might have played New York's Beacon Theater this past winter, but when he returns to Manhattan next month, he'll pack Madison Square Garden.
Approximately 50,000 tickets were sold for Thursday's Ramat Gan show in less than one day, making for Cohen's largest seated audience so far this year, a fitting finale to the summer European leg of his journey. Cohen's last gig in Israel was over 20 years ago, and before that, when he landed in the fall of 1973 to support IDF troops with a series of impromptu concerts, he told the press that he was also here "to make my atonement."
Thursday's show had a similar agenda. Cohen had collapsed on stage mid-concert last week, on Rosh Hashanah eve, in eastern Spain, but he wowed a Barcelona crowd three days later with a rousing show on his 75th birthday, blessing the audience, "May your life be sweet as apples dipped in honey."
The liturgical, spiritual, introspective and biblical traits of Cohen's repertoire suited the pre-Yom Kippur timing of Thursday's performance well, with far too many poignant and resonant moments to enumerate here.
Descended from members of Judaism's priestly caste, Cohen concluded the concert by raising his hands and reciting the traditional Priestly Blessing, one of the anchors of the High Holy Day services in synagogues around the world.
One concert-goer was overheard smilingly and favorably comparing the experience to having been through Yom Kippur's arduous if elating prayer services, while others brought the liturgical link to more literal levels, taking the opportunity to convene for an Aravit prayer minyan in the intermission between the show's two halves.
During that 1973 visit to Israel and the Sinai battlefront, legend has it that Cohen was plagued with feelings of guilt when he caught himself being relieved to learn that a convoy of bloody bodies that passed him one day were Egyptians and not Israelis. Thursday's concert was given the moniker "Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace," and it served as the launch party for a peace-themed fund, which was established to allow Cohen to channel all of the profits from the concert, estimated at $2 million, towards reconciliation initiatives. Approximately 200 bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families were welcomed to the performance as guests of the fund. Cohen more than once commended them from the stage, championing a "holy, holy, holy response to human suffering" while making it clear that he is not so naïve as to think that his songs or dollars would instantly usher in the age of peace. Instead, he urged us to open our hearts and "ring the bells that still can ring."
THE CONCERT lasted in all for close to three and a half hours, and the crowd, which was comprised of fans with a wide range of dedication levels, transfixed and mesmerized for most of the duration. Favorites going back to Cohen's 1967 studio debut, Songs of…, were represented heavily, including a faithfully free-meter "Suzanne" and an appropriately meandering "So Long, Marianne."
The setlist, which has remained relatively static since the spring of 2008, also included several mid-career gems like "Famous Blue Raincoat," "Lover Lover Lover," "Chelsea Hotel #2," "Take This Waltz" and "Hallelujah," the latter inspiring a collective chant of exaltation, tens of thousands strong. The show wasn't devoid of duds ("Ain't No Cure For Love" should never have earned live show staple status, and 2001's "Boogie Street" is much stronger as verses on a page than it is as a stab at crooner-funk), but when backing vocalists Charley and Hattie Webb took over lead duties for a stripped-down version of "If It Be Your Will," the stadium fell into a thick, appreciative silence. Overall, the band was a classy, strong and tight outfit, especially during the exceptionally intense second half. It's true that nowadays Leonard Cohen regularly takes off his fedora and gives his thanks to sizeable crowds for having shared a memorable evening with him, but it's hard, when actually watching him do it, to question his sincerity.
The fact that standout shows have become almost commonplace events for Cohen on this tour does not diminish from their power. As Lou Reed put it last year when inducting Cohen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, "We're so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is." And with so much reverberating context of atonement, homecoming and post-nationalist opening of the heart, there were many moments when Thursday's concert felt truly outstanding even by Cohen's own recent high standards - an event of genuinely meaningful significance.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Dear Leonard Cohen
Sky News - September 25, 2009 by Yonat Frilling
Dear Mr. Cohen,
People say that sometimes you have an experience that changes your life.
I never shared this thought. You see, as a journalist in the Middle East I thrive on cynicism - it is the way I cope with the bloody and violent scenes I face, the suicide bombers, the wars, from evacuating settlements to failed peace negotiations.
Last night was different. Last night was the experience that would change my life and possibly others, writes Yonat Frilling, Fox News Middle East Producer.
Last night you honored me with your music and inspiration.
For more than 3 hours you shared your music and soul with us - regardless of who we are.
Me, and 50,000 people. Israelis and Palestinians. Young and old. Religious and secular. We all can say that we have met you.
We will tell our children and grandchildren that you tried and made us try and for 3 hours you succeded.
You dedicated hallelujah to all the families that have lost their children in the ongoing conflict, and to all those who sometimes are considered naive, that keep on fighting for peace - that is usually all we need to hear.
You sang, and 50,000 people prayed with you, embracing and holding their loved ones.
You sang, we prayed, and all my cynicism washed away. For one moment, I thought, I felt, this could be possible.
At the end of the concert, around midnight, you blessed the audience in Hebrew, seasoned with a heavy accent and emotions, so appropriate for the holy days between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and Yom Kippur, the day of fasting and atonement.
Your songs have always been about letting go and giving things up, but last night we all had trouble obeying your preaching.
We all wished that the night would never end. That you would sing for us forever. Rarely one or some have an experience that changes their lives even for a mere second - last night you did it for all of us - Israeli, Palestinian, Middle Eastern.
Thank you Mr. Cohen.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen’s Manager: Western Academics Scuppered Ramallah Concert
Tel Aviv — Leonard Cohen’s plan to play a sister concert to his Israel gig in Ramallah was scuppered due to pressure from western academics and not primarily due to objections from within the Palestinian community, Cohen’s manager, Robert Kory, told the Forward.
As the sellout Tel Aviv concert was about to get underway, Kory gave a frank interview speaking of the upset he felt when the singer’s Middle East visit became a source of controversy.
He revealed that he and his colleagues came close to pulling the plug on the Tel Aviv date as they were “swamped” with messages of protest — both from people who objected to Cohen playing in Israel because they felt it gave legitimacy to the occupation of land captured in the Six Day War, and from people who objected to the conciliatory tone of the concert, billed an event “for reconciliation and peace.”
Kory said: “At one point the noise level on the left and the right got so loud that we thought: ‘why we need to do this?’ Our promoter Rob Hallett thought: ‘maybe we’ll do the concert; maybe we wont’ — it depended on which day.” Kory said that this is why the concert was not confirmed until the beginning of August.
In June, amid of the controversy about playing Tel Aviv, community groups from Ramallah invited Cohen to play a sister gig there. Cohen was enthusiastic. But as widely reported, in mid-July, his hosts revoked their invitation.
Kory said that the main factor in the cancelation was not internal Palestinian pressure, as was widely assumed, but the fact that “there were academics from the U.K. that came raising hell.” Britain is home to a strong academic lobby that backs the campaign to boycott Israel.
Kory told the Forward: “We have a disagreement. I am an American, I support free speech. They are British academics and I don’t know, they’re ‘right’… I don’t want to name names but there are those in the academic community who suppress speech because they know what’s right.”
After the Ramallah plan went pear-shaped Israeli Tourism Ministry Director-General Noaz Bar Nir and Nazareth Mayor Ramiz Jaraisy issued a joint plea for Cohen to perform the heavily Israeli Arab city of Nazareth. This plan never got off the ground.
In a Cohen’s VIP tent before the Tel Aviv concert there were dozens of Palestinians who part company from those who were against the Ramallah concert.
The singer set up a charity, The Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, which will be kick started with the net profits from the Tel Aviv concert, expected to be $2 million. In the tent were Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members in the conflict and who run initiatives together trying to promote peace. The fund will bankroll their initiatives. They include The Parents’ Circle-Families Forum, which sets up face-to-face meetings between bereaved families from both sides, and an Israeli-Palestinian radio station Radio Kol Hashalom.
“I am Palestinian,” said one man who got up to speak at the event, Ali Abu Awad, from the West Bank. “I was in prison for four years. My mother was in prison for five years. I resist the occupation and I taste the violence. I was wounded and I lost my brother, and I am proud to have Leonard Cohen supporting us.”
Other speakers included the Israeli author David Grossman, who paid tribute to the beneficiaries of Cohen’s new fund. Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the 2006 Lebanon War when serving in an armored IDF unit, described them as people who refuse to “turn their wound in to a weapon,” instead opting for “decisiveness and courage to choose life again … to act all the time against the gravity of grief and the gravity of despair.”
Tel Aviv, Israel
Cohen's Tel Aviv concert a plea for peace
CBC News - September 25, 2009 by Margaret Evans
Canadian music legend Leonard Cohen is in Israel bearing an olive branch after a concert Thursday night to fund the movement for peace.
Cohen was greeted with an adoring audience for the concert at Ramat Gan stadium in Tel Aviv that included some of his most beloved songs. The 47,000 tickets sold out in a few hours earlier this month.
The Montreal singer-songwriter showed no effects of the collapse he suffered in Spain on the weekend, reported to be the effects of food poisoning.
Planning the concert, like everything to do with Middle East politics, was fraught with dangerous politics.
Cohen called the gig A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace and plans to give the expected profits of $1.5 million to $2 million to a charity he has created of the same name.
The singer has run into problems from the moment he announced the show in Israel, where he had not played for more than 20 years.
The Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the same group opposed to the recent spotlight on Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival, asked him to cancel the concert.
"We're asking Leonard Cohen to respect our boycott against Israel, our cultural boycott against Israel, similar to what artists were asked during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa," said Omar Barghouti, one of the committee's founding members.
Buddhist background
Cohen, who is Jewish and was ordained as a Buddhist monk, responded by offering to perform in the West Bank, but that offer was rejected by the same Palestinian group.
He had asked Amnesty International to help him distribute the funds, which Cohen hoped would advance smaller groups that work for the co-existence of Israelis and Palestinians.
But Amnesty backed out of that arrangement and Cohen had to start his own charity, run by a board of Israelis and Palestinians, to distribute money to community groups.
There is no guarantee that Palestinian groups will accept it. Palestinians who are against what they call the "normalization" of relations with Israel are urging small groups to reject the funding.
The Parent's Circle, which unites Israeli and Palestinian families who've lost loved ones to the conflict, is one of the groups set to benefit from Cohen's peace fund.
Member Ali Abu Awadd , whose brother was killed by Israeli gunfire at a checkpoint in 2000, says he doesn't see how refusing Cohen's money would help Palestinians.
Awadd said he doesn't believe hatred will bring back his brother, nor does he agree with banning Cohen from the West Bank.
"Leonard Cohen is not coming to play to encourage the settlement, and he's not coming to encourage the attack against Israel. He's coming to say there is no other choice [but to seek peace]," he said.
In the audience for Thursday's concert were 200 bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families who had lost relatives in the ongoing conflict.
Among them was Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose son was killed in Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon.
"We are here today to show that with a joint effort, we can redeem each other from this hate," Grossman said at a fund-raising event ahead of the concert.
Cohen has said he wants to inspire fellow musicians to donate to Israeli-Palestinian groups focused on reconciliation.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen performs in Israel, defies boycott
YNet News - September 25, 2009 by Associated Press (Photos: Yaron Brener)
Nearly 50,000 people wowed by legendary Canadian songwriter at Ramat Gan stadium; most proceeds will go to joint Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved parents, manager says
Leonard Cohen wowed an adoring audience Thursday night, crooning his iconic ballads at his first show in Israel in 30 years and ignoring a political storm over his appearance.
The 75-year-old singer entertained fans at Ramat Gan stadium near Tel Aviv for more than three hours. Some in the audience wore black fedora hats, a tribute to one of Cohen's trademarks.
The concert sparked a protest long before it took place on a warm night near the Israeli seashore.
Some Palestinian activists called for a boycott because of Israel's punishing invasion of Gaza, aimed at stopping daily rocket attacks. More than 1,150 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, were killed in the three-week offensive that ended in mid-January.
Cohen responded by offering to perform in the West Bank city of Ramallah as well. He said all proceeds from the shows would go to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations.
But a pro-Palestinian group called "Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel" urged the singer to cancel the shows and launched a protest campaign.
"There are a lot of people who don't want us here, and anything done here invites controversy," Cohen's manager, Robert Kory, told The Associated Press. "But we believe freedom of speech is very, very important."
Kory said the singer established a foundation, "The Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace," to distribute proceeds from the concert.
At an event launching the foundation before the concert, Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose son was killed in Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon, said he hoped for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. "We are here today to show that with a joint effort, we can redeem each other from this hate," he said.
"Cohen wants the money to go toward changing hearts and to bring peace," Kory said. He said most of the money will go to the Parents Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved parents that helps families from both sides who lost loved ones in the conflict.
During the concert, Cohen praised the Parents Circle several times. Palestinian members of the group were seen in the audience.
Top international musicians are slowly returning to perform in Israel after years of staying away due to violence and political tensions. Madonna, Depeche Mode, Faith No More, and others have appeared this year.
The 47,000 tickets for Cohen's concert were snatched up within hours when they went on sale earlier this month. Prices ranged from $90 to $315.
Cohen performed Thursday night meticulously dressed in a tailored suit and hat, clutching the microphone as he sang but showing no apparent affects from an incident last week, when he fainted during a concert in Spain.
The Canadian songwriter, best known for his dark poetic lyrics, has been making music since the late 60s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.
He has been on a worldwide tour since May 2008, and earlier this year played in Australia and Europe. After Israel, he goes on to perform at US venues.
Cohen had to come out of retirement five years ago when he discovered that most of his retirement fund had disappeared in a disputed case of mismanagement while he spent time at a Buddhist monastery.
He last performed in Israel in 1975. Before that, Cohen entertained Israeli troops during the Mideast war in 1973.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Leonard Cohen performs in front of 50,000 in Israel
Haaretz - September 25, 2009 by City Mouse Online and Haaretz Service
Veteran singer Leonard Cohen took to the stage at Ramat Gan stadium on Thursday night after breaking an Israeli record when all the tickets for his show were sold out in less than 12 hours, despite costing between NIS 1,000 and 1,200.
Seconds after Cohen took to stage in his legendary tailored suit and hat the 75-year-old singer-songwriter softly uttered a Hebrew prayer in front of some 50 thousand people curious to see how the frail looking man planned to overcome the distance between the stage and the people tens of meters in the back.
Ramat Gan stadium was not the most suitable venue for a Leonard Cohen concert. The sound was not at its best and the intimacy factor between the singer and his audience seemed at first somewhat non-existent.
But the very instant the music began and Cohen opened his mouth to sing "Dance Me to the End of Love," his celebrated deep voice overcame each and every centimeter of distance and signaled the triumphant tone of the entire evening.
In the first half of the concert the Canadian virtuoso played his early hits such as "Bird on a Wire" and "Chelsea Hotel" before skipping off the stage like a young boy for a 15 minute break.
As expected Cohen saved his most anticipated songs for the second and most memorable half of the show, "Famous Blue Raincoat," "Hallelujah" and "First We Take Manhattan" which raised the entire stadium to its feet.
Everyone in the audience felt like Cohen was personally singing to them and the enthusiastic and even ecstatic crowd wouldn't let the singer leave until his third encore.
Cohen himself appeared touched by the gesture and in return held one of the most inspiring concerts of the season.
Before the concert, an event was held in the VIP section of the stadium for the Leonard Cohen Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, which gives support to bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families. At this event, grants were given to people who have suffered personally from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but continue to believe in peace and work to achieve it.
Around 200 bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families attended the concert, among them renowned novelist David Grossman. Many other celebrities and movers and shakers of Israeli society were there as well.
Cohen had announced about two months ago that the proceeds from his performance in Israel would go toward the reconciliation fund, after his plan to perform in Israel sparked opposition.
A pro-Palestinian group had called "Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel" urged the singer to cancel the show and launched a protest campaign. And some Palestinian activists called for a boycott because of Israel's invasion of Gaza, which was aimed at stopping daily rocket attacks.
Cohen, who is Jewish but was ordained as a Buddhist monk, responded by offering to perform in the West Bank city of Ramallah. However, that offer was rejected by the Palestinian protesters. He then said all proceeds would go to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations.
Initially, Cohen asked Amnesty International to help him distribute the funds, which he hoped would help smaller groups that work for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. But Amnesty backed out of that arrangement, so Cohen started his own charity to distribute money to community groups. The charity is run by a board of Israelis and Palestinians.
During the concert, organizers screened some of Kobi Meidan's translations of Cohen's songs. But it seemed as if almost everyone knew the English lyrics by heart.
Cohen last performed in Israel in 1975. Before that, he entertained Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Hallelujah: Cohen Plays 'Historic' Israel Gig
Sky News - September 26, 2009 by Yael Lavie (Photos: REUTERS)
Legendary crooner Leonard Cohen has played a "historic" gig in Israel just a week after collapsing on stage in Spain.
The concert, at Tel Aviv's Ramat Gan stadium, had drawn controversy and criticism but still attracted a crowd of 50,000 for a three-hours performance.
Prior to his arrival several groups in Europe had called for the cancellation of the concert in protest at Israel's war with Gaza last January.
Cohen offered to deliver a performance in Ramallah in the West Bank as well, but those plans never came about.
However, once word of the 75-year-old's concert in Tel Aviv was confirmed 50,000 tickets were sold in the record time of 24 hours.
Following the controversy surrounding the gig Cohen established The Fund For Reconciliation, Tolerance And Peace to distribute proceeds from the concert.
The fund was formed to support both Israelis and Palestinians who paid a personal price, losing family members in the ongoing conflict, yet who continue to work together for peace.
On stage a very emotional Cohen talked about those who manage to cross lines in spite of loss and reach out to the other side as the only hope for progress.
The crowd comprised both Israelis and Palestinians, who gave him a standing ovation after a five-minute rendition of Hallelujah in which the audience sang along with every word.
The much-covered classic hit the number one spot in the UK after being released by X Factor winner Alexandra Burke late last year.
Cohen's gig in Tel Aviv was his first in Israel since 1975. The Canadian singer, poet and sometime Buddhist monk also volunteered to sing for Israeli troops in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War.
Returning after 34 years, frail yet determined, the press hailed his deliverance, stamina and determination to carry out the concert in Israel following his collapse in Spain as "historic".
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Leonard Cohen sings during a rehearsal for his concert at the Ramat Gan stadium, near Tel Aviv September 23, 2009
Tel Aviv, Israel
Hallelujah! Leonard Cohen’s Israeli triumph
When Leonard Cohen drew back from the stage slightly at the end of his marathon three-and-a-half-hour set in Ramat Gan, and recited the Birkat Cohanim — the blessing of the priests — complete with outstretched arms of benediction, there was a collective sigh from the enraptured crowd.
It was a sign that Israel’s often battered sense of itself still had a moral basis. Here, after all, was one of our own, come back in triumph.
Taking to an Israeli stage for the first time in more than 20 years, Leonard Cohen, at 75, seemed to have a revitalised spring in his step. His international tour has led to worldwide praise, even by his erstwhile critics, who loved to say that Cohen’s was music to which to commit suicide.
But, having seen him twice in London, I can say with certainty that in Israel Leonard Cohen surpassed himself. So many of his lyrics have a religious, biblical resonance that hearing them in Israel lent them a new meaning. It was only days before Yom Kippur and there was Leonard Cohen singing Who by fire, taken from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. His back-up singers, Hattie and Charley Webb, gave a coruscating rendition of If it be thy will.
For me, probably the most hair-on-the-back of the neck moment came with his song The Partisan, written in French and English. In English, he sings “and then the soldiers came.... she died without a whisper”. In French, he sings “Les Allemands”, rather than “the soldiers”. The Germans came. And this he sang to a crowd of 55,000, in which there were almost certainly the sons and daughters of survivors — and yes, many of them were and had been soldiers.
This was billed as a Concert of Peace and Reconciliation and much of the near $2 million proceeds have gone to the Bereaved Parents Circle, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost members of their families to the continuing conflict. Cohen made several references to the group from the stage and said, in yet another reference to liturgy, that theirs was a “holy, holy, holy” undertaking which should receive support.
A friend told me that in recent years, any big pop star who took the trouble to learn “Shalom, Israel” when they took to the stage has been greeted with an almost pathetic, longing, response. Gosh, the outside world isn’t all bad. They don’t all hate us. See, Madonna said “Shalom”!
But with Leonard Cohen the response was different. What might have been thought cheesy or kitsch — his declaration of “Mah tovu”, “How goodly are thy tents” — achieved a different connotation.
This, after all, was Cohen, the grandson of a major Hebrew grammarian, the child of rabbis, and a committed Jew — even though he is also a Buddhist monk. This was Cohen who asked for the words of his songs to be translated into Hebrew subtitles, so that an awed crowd watched as the words of the Psalms, all of which they knew from childhood, floated across the screens.
And when in one of his three triumphant encores, Cohen let the crowd sing First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin, there was a real sense of affirmation. We are here and we are here to stay, was the message.
And Leonard Cohen is Our Jew, and he has come home.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Middle Israel: Why Leonard Cohen moved Israel
If there is one place along the notoriously hedonistic Coastal Plain that is even less spiritual than the rest of that restless urban sprawl, it is Ramat Gan. The city to Tel Aviv's east prides itself on assorted claims to fame, from the country's first mall, tallest building and largest stadium to the world's leading diamond exchange.
Inspiration and introspection, however, let alone repentance, were hardly on the minds of this town's builders - a set of liberals who were even more secular than Israel's socialist founders.
That alone, therefore, made last week's encounter in Ramat Gan Stadium between 50,000 mostly secular Israelis and the lone, frail, contemplative and unfashionably capped Leonard Cohen - seem like the unarmed Jonah's improbable conquest of sinful Nineveh.
Cohen the singer, poet and novelist needs no introduction to most Middle Israelis; and those who hadn't known of this graduate of Montreal's Herzliya High School who became Canada's leading poet could have learned all about him through the extensive coverage that preceded and followed his concert, a moving event that put to shame recent musical attempts by Madonna and Depeche Mode to sweep the country off its feet.
The question, therefore, is not what Leonard Cohen was trying to say here - unique though his inspiring lyrics and caressing tunes are, they have been with us for decades - but what his audience was voting for with its feet, artistically, politically and religiously.
ARTISTICALLY, Cohen defies two traits that frequently plague the popular genres to which his music partly belongs: noise and shallowness.
The thousands of Americans and Europeans who crowd this septuagenarian's concerts don't just tolerate the minimalism of his tunes, the near-silence of his tone and the quest for meaning that runs through his lines, they crave them. We Jews are passively reminded every fall that for centuries most people ordinarily heard hardly any artificial noise, even that of a shofar, let alone a musical orchestra, not to mention factories, highways, locomotives or jets. Now we have come full circle; modern man's ears are so infused and invaded by cacophony, blabber and clamor that he has come to thirst for the velvet touch of a whisper, the very kind that is Cohen's hallmark. That is why his music has won an estimated 2,000 different renditions over the years.
In yearning for this departure from contemporary musical routine, Cohen's Israeli following is no different than others. Moreover, some in the audience that packed Ramat Gan Stadium were there because everyone else was there, or because they wanted to be seen, or just for the heck of it. And yet, the critical mass was there for very Israeli reasons.
For Israelis, the sight of a successful man tenderly searching his soul and at the same time worshiping God in quest of repentance is rare.
When hearing words like "they sentenced me to 20 years," Israelis don't think of larger-than-life revolutionaries accused of "trying to change the system" but of smalltime politicians charged with wheeling, dealing, embezzling, skimming and double billing, too. When, they ask, will one, just one, of this snaking line of disgraced notables emerge from his jail term and confess, "I did my best, it wasn't much, I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch," and how many of these can credibly say, "I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you," or at the very least concede, as Cohen has to the crowd's delight, "And even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah?"
Now this is not to say that the large audience in Ramat Gan was really captured by, or even aware of the irony, from our Israeli viewpoint, in Cohen's follow-up on David's surrender to temptation. This context was there, at best, subconsciously. What was not subconscious was Cohen's kind of religiosity.
HAVING LOST his father as a child, Cohen was deeply influenced by his grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Klinitski, who taught him Bible, Talmud and mysticism, and inspired Cohen's The Spice-Box of the Earth, the book that made him famous back in 1961. There, in "Lines from My Grandfather's Journal," Cohen brought together King David and 16th-century sage Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, for a kind of dialogue that can only be imagined by someone who is intimately familiar with Judaism's sources and attached to its traditions.
Though a growing number of Israeli performers, from Shlomo Gronich to Meir Banai, are seeking their Jewish roots, there are very few in the country's cultural scene today, from novelists and painters to academics and rabbis, not to mention singers, who are capable of this sort of creativity.
That is why Cohen is an inspiration here. His is a kind of Judaism that has yet to emerge here in full force. That is why 50,000 Israelis joined Cohen in singing "Who by Fire," his version of the 12th-century prayer about the judgment on Yom Kippur of all people, some to life and some to death, and of all states, some to the sword and some to peace - a song he wrote after journeying to the charred battlefields of the Yom Kippur War.
Last week, so close to and yet so far from the Diamond Exchange, the Ayalon Mall and the Aviv Tower, and so deep within yet so well above the stadium that ordinarily hears the curses of Israeli soccer fans, a multitude of Middle Israelis swayed as this Diaspora Jew named Cohen, in what may have been his last appearance here, lifted his hands and blessed all at hand in the traditional blessing of the priests.
Yet this Cohen is a priest only by name.
In practice, he is the antithesis of the caste that cultivated ritual, frosted faith and suppressed spiritual spontaneity, let alone dissent. A man like Leonard Cohen - who in a 1964 conference of Canadian Jewish leaders said money had replaced for them the values of the prophets, and that the very term "Jewish establishment" was an oxymoron - is in his substance more prophet than priest.
And that's what is so unique in him to secular Israelis.
Here and now, Judaism is also often held hostage by an establishment that cares more for faith's legislation and imposition than for the souls of the people it is meant to inspire. That at least is what 50,000 Israelis voted last week by their feet as they flocked to Ramat Gan Stadium where they joined a distant cousin's prayer, some waving candlesticks, some moving lips and some wiping tears.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Editor's Notes: A blessing welcomed, a blessing spurned
The joy, and the heartbreak, of Leonard Cohen's visit to the Holy Land.
There was something uniquely poignant about Leonard Cohen's Ramat Gan concert last Thursday night. We were hearing a Jewish singer-poet, a descendant of the priestly caste, no small part of whose most resonant and beloved material derives from the Bible. He was bringing his musical offerings to the land where the audience probably appreciated them more than any other crowd could. And he knew - and we knew - that he was likely doing so for the very last time.
"I don't know if we will pass this way again," Cohen observed, a few songs into what would prove to be a ridiculously generous set-list. Indeed not.
He defied the passing years with a show that, lasting some three and a half hours, thoroughly contradicted the title of the final song he played, "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye." He delivered reams of his perceptive, beautifully constructed lyrics with passion and absolute precision. He sang, notably on the encore numbers "So Long, Marianne" and "First We Take Manhattan," with a force and a warmth that stripped the self-deprecating irony from his earlier line, in "Tower of Song," about being "born with the gift of a golden voice." He veritably skipped off-stage between encores - and in one appropriate case (after "Take This Waltz"), even solo-waltzed into the wings, his jaunty silhouette reflected larger than life on the backstage curtains.
But the man has just turned 75. Forget singing and dancing. At that age, I'll be happy to be talking and walking.
Leonard Cohen reminded us why we go to concerts. We brave the traffic and pay outrageous amounts of money to be pushed and shoved through security at the entrance gates, to stand or sit in acute discomfort, to inhale intolerant others' second-hand smoke. Sometimes, the artist deeply disappoints - appearing late or lackluster. If we're lucky, expectations are fulfilled - the music pulses like it never can through your speakers or your headphones, the audience responds, we go home enthused. But rarely, very, very rarely, something truly transcendent occurs, and the shared experience sends the heart soaring.
So it was last Thursday. The man on stage was an unremarkable, if spry, elderly figure in an unpromising dark fedora. Until he sang, in his tender, raspy, world-weary baritone. And his three female accompanying singers reached for the harmonies of angels. Then the songs - his stories, his philosophies and his prayers set to fragile, insistent melodies - rolled out in honeyed, irresistible waves from the stage to the tens of thousands of lip-synching disciples. And we, and he, were inspired.
SADLY, THOUGH, Leonard Cohen's visit is not solely a tale of inspiration. It is also a tale of stupidity and of dismal, bleak intolerance. The stupidity is marginal and Israeli. The intolerance is overwhelming and Palestinian.
Our septuagenarian balladeer had planned to perform twice in this neighborhood - for the 50,000 or so Israelis who packed the stands at Ramat Gan, and a day or two later in the West Bank, probably at the Ramallah Cultural Palace, which holds rather fewer than 1,000.
In both cases, the profits from the concerts were to have been directed toward various organizations that strive for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, under the direction of the Parents' Circle-Family Forum group. This is a grassroots partnership of bereaved Israelis and Palestinians whose "response to human grief," as Cohen put it from the stage at Ramat Gan - whose response, that is, to their own bereavement - has been to try to bridge the chasm, "to reach across the border into the houses of the enemy," and work to halt the futile violence of our abiding conflict.
The artist had not come to preach. Tellingly, he chose not to play the seemingly apt "Story of Isaac," with its stern rebuke to fathers not to "sacrifice these children." Eschewing the Bono-Bob Geldof rock-star-changing-the-world role, Cohen explained with humility that he was not presenting himself as the facilitator of some grandiose exercise in peacemaking: "This is not about forgiving and forgetting. This is not about laying down one's arms in a time of war. This is not even about peace, although, God willing, it could be a beginning."
It was, rather, he said, that he wanted to allocate the monies earned from his visit to people who were resisting "the inclination of the heart to despair, revenge and hatred."
"Baruch Hashem," he said in Hebrew. Blessed is Thy name. "I bow my head in respect to the nobility of this enterprise."
For a small minority of Israelis to whom I've spoken in the past few days, and others that I've heard about, Cohen's insistence on supporting and funding a mission of hope trailblazed by those with the greatest cause for hatred and mistrust was, incredibly, perceived as an act of Jewish disloyalty, of betrayal, of somehow siding with the enemy. Several people told me, rather smugly, that they had boycotted the Ramat Gan concert because of the destination of the proceeds.
Words almost fail me, but I'll try: How foolish and short-sighted and self-destructive can some of us Jews be? There is no future here - no future for Jews, no future for Arabs - if both sides are not committed to finding a means by which we can live alongside each other without fear.
As regular readers of this column will know, I believe the Israeli mainstream long ago internalized the imperative for an accommodation with the Palestinians, and that the failure to achieve it stems from the abiding Palestinian refusal to acknowledge Jewish sovereign rights here and to abandon the idea of destroying our country. I yield to no one in my bitter castigation of the duplicitous, terror-fostering Yasser Arafat for refusing to meet Israel on the path to peace, and of his ostensibly better-intentioned successor, Mahmoud Abbas, for choosing not to challenge the vicious, demonizing attitude to Israel he inherited. Until all this changes, we have no choice but to defend ourselves, and so we do, sometimes at wrenching cost.
But the way forward, the only way forward, is to empower those who do seek a better future - to encourage leaders who promote moderation, and ordinary people who are prepared, most especially in the case of the Palestinians, to defy the extremists and the inciters, and reach out across the divide. Well, those are the very people Cohen was seeking to encourage - the people who have lost loved ones of their own and want to see the killing stop. Supporting them is not Jewish disloyalty; it is Jewish defense.
Such closed-mindedness, however, was fairly marginal among Israelis, and demonstrably had no impact on the Ramat Gan performance: The show sold out overnight.
A short drive away in Ramallah, however, the hostility was decisive. The idea of the second concert, the West Bank concert, had barely begun to crystallize before it was shot down by the Israel-haters, the peace-haters, the boycotters.
So consumed by its hatred for Israel is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel that it has forgotten to love Palestine. So determined was this Ramallah-based group, and a great toxic mass of similarly hysterical agitators worldwide, notably British academics, to register their revulsion with Cohen for his crime of entertaining the citizens of "Israel's colonial apartheid regime," as PACBI described us in a statement in July, that his modest attempt at nurturing humanity through melody in Ramallah was discordantly stillborn. So feeble was the voice of Palestinian reason, it was drowned out before it could begin to sing its first verse.
What are we to make of the nascent nation alongside us when it slams the door, or allows the door to be slammed, on a troubadour who sought only to raise spirits and stir compassion? "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," Cohen sang, so wisely, in "Anthem." Not everything, it turns out. Some hatreds are hermetic.
TRULY OUR neighbors' loss - and in so many ways. A lost opportunity. A lost bridge. A lost symbol of something better. Oh, and a lost evening of glorious music.
Many of Cohen's songs are explicitly personal - dissections of failed relationships, self-deprecating reflections on his own fading light - but many more are universal musings on the human spirit, and some, last Thursday night, seemed unerringly particular to us.
The friend sitting alongside me was adamant that one of Cohen's most moving compositions, "Famous Blue Raincoat," was written about Israel, soon after he came here to play for our soldiers in the Yom Kippur War. "I hear that you're building your little house, deep in the desert. You're living for nothing now..." This could only be a reference to the kibbutz life. Perhaps the "Famous Blue Raincoat" itself was a metaphor for Israel - the Jewish people's layer of protection, nowadays a little "torn at the shoulder"?
But no, the song was written, and released, before that war - and is merely an imperfect account, in Cohen's overly critical self-assessment, of a doomed romance.
"Hallelujah," though, far and away his best-known song thanks to its association with John Cale, Jeff Buckley and a certain green, Scottish-brogued ogre, was reclaimed in Ramat Gan as our psalm. The singer's voice, truly a blaze of light in every word, was echoed by tens of thousands more. A standing ovation followed.
"Who By Fire," its lyrics inspired by the High Holy Days' "Unetaneh Tokef" prayer, was mesmerizing, too - its probing questions on the unknowable nature of death, and our helplessness before it, challenging our consciences, so appropriately, in the midst of the Days of Penitence. In its recorded version, the song's relentless rhythm and bleak vocals veer close to the funereal; hearing it rejuvenated now, with his wonderful band's lush propulsion, it was as though we had gathered to celebrate and to surrender, under the warm open skies of the Holy Land, to the impending annual Divine accounting.
And most affecting of all, with "If It Be Your Will," Cohen, like no other artist could, seemed to shepherd us back through the millennia, to the time, in these very lands, when our ancestors spoke and sang their prayers of fealty and supplication in absolute certainty that they were communicating with the Lord.
First, alone at center stage, with that perfect orator's diction, he uttered his plea to the Creator: "If it be your will, if there is a choice, let the rivers fill, let the hills rejoice. Let your mercy spill, on all these burning hearts in hell, if it be your will, to make us well."
Then two of his musicians, sisters Charley and Hattie Webb, took his words and flew with them, their voices swirling, dancing and triumphantly meeting in harmonies that rang out, crystal clear, across a hushed, awed stadium: "And draw us near, and bind us tight, all your children here, in their rags of light."
Here was the concert's most uplifting moment. Here, in a soulless concrete sports arena, in the neon shadow of signs from the adjacent shopping mall and furniture stores, an undeniably holy experience unfolded - the purest of voices rising to the heavens, carried by the collective will of 50,000 aching souls. This, surely, was how it was in Temple times.
THE SONGS, many of them, are four decades old. He's been playing them on this improbable late-life world tour, his first for 15 years, for the past 18 months. But as the concert went on, you sensed that the performer, too, his eyes closed often in concentration, was finding fresh nuances in his lyrics.
Sometimes he changed a word or two to raise an easy laugh. "I didn't come to Tel Aviv to fool you," is emphatically not in the "Hallelujah" original. Nor does "I'm Your Man" usually reference his "old man's mask."
But more often, it was the original, sacrosanct words that brought stadium-wide responses. "I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back," he sang in "Tower of Song," to sorrowful applause. "Here's a man still working for your smile" prompted ecstatic cheers near the end. The very title of the song from which that line comes, "I Tried to Leave You," found Cohen grinning wryly, and the audience with him.
When he did finally leave us, it was after pledging his solidarity by quoting from Ruth - "Thy people shall be my people. Whither thou goest, I will go." And it was after emphasizing his shared identity by bestowing the priestly blessing upon us - "Yevarechecha Hashem Veyishmerecha..." May the Lord bless and protect you... - in confident Ashkenazi Hebrew.
No, we don't know when, or even if, Leonard Cohen will be back. But he'd promised that "you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone. I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song."
Hey, that's the way to say goodbye.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Blogs, Photos and Other Fan Reports
Report and Photos - "The Leonard Cohen Files" - "A concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace"
Beautiful photos, comments and information about the Tel Aviv concert
Blog - "Heck Of A Guy" - "The Legacy Of Leonard Cohen's Tel Aviv Priestly Blessing Plus A New Video Of The Event"
Birkat Kohanim Concludes Leonard Cohen’s Historic Performance In Israel
Blog - "Global Voices" - "Israel: Leonard Cohen Performs to Rave Reviews"
Songmaster Leonard Cohen visited Israel this week, performing to a sold out crowd of 47,000 fans. Israeli bloggers who were lucky enough to attend gave rave reviews...
Blog & Photos - "Flickr - mikedarnell1974" - "Leonard Cohen Live in Tel Aviv on the 24th of September 2009"
On the 24th of September 2009 Leonard. Cohen gave an incredible three hour concert in Ramat Gan's stadium...
Blog - "Heck Of A Guy" - "The Leonard Cohen Tel Aviv Concert – A Personal Report & Perspective"
The audience of more than fifty thousand cannot hold back the emotion; the silence that accepts the blessing and the applause that greeted the offering of the musicians is more than a signal of appreciation – it is a union...
Blog - "Tat Tvam Asi" - "Leonard Cohen in Concert"
To me, the most beautiful moments of the concert were the occasions on which Leonard Cohen stepped aside and let his fellow musicians and singers fill the space. I was too far to see the faces of the people on stage, but there were several times when the cameras brought to the screens Leonard Cohen in waiting... – and those were magical moments – when his presence filled me – when he looked completely in tune, peaceful, attentive – meditating on stage...
Photos - "Ramat Gan Stadium, Israel, September 24, 2009" - "
Beautiful photos by Hen Altof with contributions by Valerio Fiandra
Discuss the tour and read fan reviews on The Leonard Cohen Forum and in French on the Leonard Cohen Forum (French site).
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