On a surface level, of course, the famous Leonard Cohen song above is about the story of David and Bathsheba, and Delilah and Solomon. But these are allegories for the way he, a deeply Jewish Buddhist monk, thought about God. And it actually resonates quite a bit with me, although I’m an atheist.

You can see that his concept of God is different from the traditional concept at the beginning of the fifth verse:

You say I took the name in vain

Leonard Cohen was a deeply spiritual Jew. He was also a Buddhist Monk. Why? If you listen to his Zen Master Eidi Roshi answer the question, “Does God Exist?” you see that this “God” is what most Christians would call an idea…Christians would call its believers “atheists,” most likely:

If you mention God as creator of heaven and earth, or creator of human beings, then Buddhism will not agree with that way of thinking. However, there is a term called “Dharma,” which is another word for saying “Truth.” So, Buddhism undoubtedly accepts the existence of something unnameable, something greater than…something great. And if that isn’t different from God, I have no objection to calling it God. In fact, I often say “God.” But not as a creator. One of the really serious problems in talking to Western people is this dualism. As long as we are speaking in English, and as long as we are talking about this kind of subject, as long as you use dualistic questions, I’m in trouble. So you say “bigger than,” “stronger than” — but you can say “smaller than,” “weaker than” if you prefer that. But I assume, in your mind, bigger is better, and stronger is better too. And therefore we are small, but something bigger would be more powerful. Something like that is your preconceived idea, right? So the English language itself forces us to use dualistic terms.

Leonard Cohen’s story is about seeing this kind of God-concept as the center of his Judaism. But is that corrupting the religion? Is this agnostic/atheistic center at the heart of this God-concept…is calling that “God” misleading? Did he take the name of “God” in vain? He answers:

But I don’t even know the name

It’s honest. What is the “right” way to think of “God”? It’s unclear to him, and what he once called “God” is hard to describe. I feel the same — that feeling I felt as a Christian is not connected to what people told me was “God” and never was — so it’s hard to determine what inspires those feelings. Although I can figure out the psychology of it, it still seems a mystery to me when I feel it; I still, an atheist now, am somewhat in awe of it. Perhaps, to borrow from another part of the song, he, too, did think it was connected to a concrete God (“there was a time you let me know/ what’s real and going on below”) but now, in the light of the beauty of the world that showed him its complexity (“her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you”) he can’t access that “God” or even remotely understand it (“but now you never show it to me do you”). So if he can’t pinpoint the source of that inspiration as a distinct and perfect, Holy Being, how would he begin to respond to the charge that he’s mischaracterizing the god-concept that inspires his feelings?

And then he says:

But if I did, well really, what’s it to ya?

Like, why do the different concepts of God matter? We may have different conceptions of “God” but there’s a beauty and light in several conceptions. So why would one care that it was not connected to a distinct and specific definition of “God”? He says this in the next lines.

“There’s a blaze of light in every word

It doesn’t matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah.”

The “holy” hallelujah is, in the Hebrew, “set apart” — it’s distinct from the world and above it. Like an ideal of overarching and distinct perfection and purity. And there’s “blaze of light” in it, something that inspires intense devotion.

The “broken” Hallelujah is what happens when the “set apart” hallelujah fails to be separated and distinct. It’s a Hallelujah because it still has that feel, that aura, but the world has “broken” it. Like the beauty of Bathsheba broke into David’s worship of a holy God, and yet it was a beautiful Hallelujah in those moments of connection with her, for him. Same with Samson and Delilah.

This also explains the verse,

Maybe there’s a God above

But all I ever learned from love

Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you

That’s saying that maybe this holy, “set apart” God exists…but all that he ever learned from loving this God was rituals and meditations aimed at reaching something that was constantly beyond you, because the beauty of your experience juts in and you can’t escape it, you can’t “shoot” beyond it to really touch that ideal. The meditation in religion is the attempt to do that. It’s the look of triumph, at times, and of confident declarations, but it’s all an attempt — at least for Cohen — that is never fully realized.

Which is why the verse continues:

It’s not a cry you can hear at night

It’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

The rest of the song seems to clearly play on the concept of this broken Hallelujah after that. It’s what I feel…this reverence, but not segregated from the world, something I’m trying to reach. It’s an awe-inspiring beauty haunting my experience that at the same time feels like something cold, raw, and flesh-and-blood real.

Looking at the first verse:

I heard there was a sacred chord

That David played and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do ya?

That “you” is that set apart “God” — who doesn’t care for music, because He is set apart from His creation. Or, alternatively, it’s the person he’s talking to who created the “brokenness” in the Hallelujah…and maybe, in that broken Hallelujah that is broken by the beauty of your experience, the agents of that experience do care for music and aren’t separated from it. So that doubt is the “ya.”

Well it goes like this:

The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

The variety in music — from “minor” to “major” — being composed by the King shows he is having a hard time creating truly Holy Music for a God set apart from everything earthly, supposedly. He’s baffled at how to proceed in his project.

But more than that: the production of it. You can hear his devotion and haunting sense of worship in every word. It’s a deeply personal song for him.

And the words are so genius that they have been applied to many different situations. It’s not a “holy” song with just one meaning. It’s a “broken Hallelujah” that means something different to everyone who hears it.

For me, it’s pretty much my life story, up to this point, more or less. I came into literature trying to show how all those stories connected to a holy God, but I found that a holy God didn’t make sense; by it’s nature, a set apart God can’t be distinct from its creation. And in that confusion, I left Christianity, and I’ve been singing a broken Hallelujah ever since.

I think that this is what people often don’t understand. I did not leave Christianity in spite of it, but because of it. Like, I went THROUGH the praise of God to reach my atheism on the other side; in falling in love with the people the concrete beauty in the world — which I found because I found because I was searching it for evidence of God — the “Hallelujah” dedicated solely to the Christian God got drawn away from the concept of something “holy” or set apart and distinct from his “creation”…and towards the beautifully broken beauty of the real world. But it was, I think, my belief in God that originally made a lot of it seem beautiful in the first place.

So I’ve been trying, ever since I left, to convince people that I was being as honest and straightforward as I knew how — I was looking for beauty in God, and found its source in the “real world.” I’ve been saying that I was not trying to “trick” people; my love for God was never dishonest. It was, in fact, a yearning for a deeper love for God that was my downfall. Or as the lyrics say, “I told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya.”

To many — and, in darker moments,even to myself at times — it feels like it all went wrong. I left Christianity. I left a possibly illustrious career in Christendom. I left an Almighty God I felt cared about me who turned out to be a fictional monster, and a happy-ever-after in paradise. And yet…I was still looking for that touch, that hard meeting with reality, that I had been looking for all my life, so I could see its beauty. So even though I failed in a way, I feel that, in a deeper and broader way, I’m finding the source of what caused me to praise God in the reality I experience and embrace in all its confusing, contradictory conceptualizations of a concrete reality.

As the song puts it, “And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

In other words, if there is beauty, if there is love, if there is that “song” at the center of all our dreams and utopias…It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

On an even broader plane…it’s dawned on me, lately, that for most of my life I’ve been trying to locate the ONE opinion all men should have. The ONE right way to think. The ONE perfect God-Concept, be it conservative Christianity, strident anti-theism, Marxism, strong gender norms…a zillion others. I’m not saying that those are wrong, necessarily (although some are). I’m saying that the reality that kept threatening to “break [my] throne” was that I kept seeing glimpses of the cold and broken hallelujah in all of these concepts. And the world got really complex in its beauty. I see the ugliness of conservative Christianity –but, to be honest, I see glimpses of beauty there, too. And even beauty in the ugliness, as disturbing as that might be, from a certain angle. And this can be very confusing.

And this song seems to realize that.

Sure. I still have ideals. I still am against conservative Christianity. But my point is that there is beauty everywhere, in all kinds of unexpected places. Again, it’s why I left God. I entered the field of literature trying to show that there was a God who bound all stories. I left because it was a game of control. I was trying to capture a beauty more complex and problematic and multifaceted and contradictory and confusing and cold and broken and beautiful than I had ever anticipated.

And right now, I guess there are tears running down on my face because I’m realizing that I will never fully find what I looked for all my life. But then again, I think that this cold realization also releases me to see the constantly confusing and mysterious and wavering and conflicting and beautiful and ugly shades of color that have been my life when I was looking for one brilliant white. Like, that realization that I would never find what I was looking for is the realization that I was looking for. And that left me free to dance through the broken beauty that is my life.

Hallelujah…

Thank you for reading.

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Further Reading:

If you want to read more about what I’ve written about my relationship, as an atheist, to religious people, imagery, and questions of beauty/meaning, check out the blog posts below.

The Atheist Version of Total Depravity

A Reaction to Penn Jillette’s Discussion on Atheist Prayer

An Atheist’s Heaven

Atheist Confessions: I Wish There Was A Heaven

4 Ways My Christian Upbringing Helped Me Become The Atheist I Am Today

Advice For Consuming Leftovers (Or, Thoughts On The Words I’ll Leave Behind)

My Religious Dad, His Anti-Theist Son, And The Struggle To Love And Understand

“Everyone In The World Is Christ, And They Are All Crucified”

Is Obama An Atheist?

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