“Holy Insecurity”: Thinking about Dabru Emet with Martin Buber and Leonard Cohen
by Maeera Y. Shreiber
Dabru Emet seeks to dismantle some of the ideological obstacles typically inhibiting interfaith encounters with eight bold claims, including the assertion that “a new relationship between Jews and Christians will not weaken Jewish practice.” More than merely defensive, the claim potentially preempts the kind of spiritual growth interfaith encounters can engender.
My own claim begins with the work of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber who, in his masterwork I and Thou, lays out a dynamic model of relationship described as a “genuine meeting”—an unstable process defined by uncertainty and peril, for any genuine encounter with an Other (human or divine) means putting the boundaries of the Self at risk. That is, meeting the Other may well effect change; to enter into a relation expecting otherwise is disingenuous and guaranteed to produce only a shallow sort of interaction. Buber arrives at this understanding after years of thought during which he took some real theological risks, crossing religious boundaries to enter the “kingdom of holy insecurity.”
This provocative locution belongs to Daniel, a highly eclectic text reflecting Buber’s commitment to traversing both disciplinary and religious boundaries so as to better understand the meaning of being. In these pages, we find traces of Nietzsche and the German mystic Jakob Boehme, alongside chunks of Chinese philosophy, interspersed with Christian imagery. Initially overwhelmed by his fear of “the abyss,” the fictional protagonist Daniel comes to understand that to live with one’s whole being means cultivating an ongoing willingness to descend “anew into the transforming abyss [to] risk your soul ever anew.” Perhaps more than any other text, Daniel reflects Buber’s conviction that, as Arthur Cohen explains, religious dogma obstructs spiritual growth. The sorts of spiritually expansive encounters so central to Buber are potentially at odds with Dabru Emet’s urgent guarantee.
Indeed, such rigid assurances may entail real aesthetic and spiritual loss—as illustrated by a curious episode in the annals of Jewish popular culture, the recent “Judaizing” of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah.” At least in practice, Cohen roamed even further afield than Buber, who famously embraced Jesus as his “great brother.” After studying for three years at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California, Cohen was formally ordained as a Buddhist monk. But as he understood it, this affiliation did not mitigate his attachment to Judaism.
At once firmly rooted in his Jewishness and theologically open, Cohen’s poetry is steadily informed by longing, as Buber puts it, “to breach the barriers of solitude [and build] a bridge across the abyss” (I and Thou). This is the Cohen we hear in his most well-known, widely discussed, and widely covered song, “Hallelujah.” Striking a self-consciously defiant stance, the speaker engages in a disaggregated internal monologue—a dialogue with the Self, whom he addresses as “You.” The utterance thus bespeaks a desire to engage an Other, even knowing the effort may be futile. Cohen negotiates the abyss with a fragile offering—a “holy,” “broken” song of praise.
This “Hallelujah” is hard-won. Cohen spent years wrestling with the lyrics, discarding nearly 80 other variations before settling on the four stanzas that constitute the standardized and strikingly nonsectarian version. Other than a brief gesture toward Psalms by way of a reference to “David…the baffled king,” there is nothing to suggest that Cohen is speaking within a fixed religious tradition. Despite the absence of theological markers (or perhaps because of it), “Hallelujah” has been claimed by at least three world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism—some more aggressively than others.
Shortly before Cohen’s death in 2016, American poet and musician Daniel Kahn uploaded a Yiddish rendition of “Hallelujah” that is surely one of the most sustained, indeed chutzpadik, efforts to confine the lyric to a securely boundaried religious container. When Kahn’s video went viral (at least among Jewish viewers), he confidently explained, “‘Hallelujah’ is essentially a Yiddish song Leonard Cohen wrote in English, by which I mean it’s Jewish.” A banner at the bottom of the video simply reads “Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’—in Yiddish,” suggesting that what follows is merely a translation. But actually, Kahn gives us what he calls a “tradaptation”—a fusion of translation and adaptation.
Amplifying a narrative frame toward which Cohen merely gestured, Kahn’s “Hallelujah” buffers Cohen’s raw, ragged, cri de coeur by giving us a full-blown midrash on the tortured tale of King “Dovid” (in Yiddish) and his troubled affair with Bathsheba. Kahn thus pulls the song back from a religious no-man’s land, firmly asserting its Jewish pedigree. But even more interesting is how Kahn wields Yiddish to shore up the very boundaries that Cohen’s song overrides, by exploiting its function as a lehavdel loshn, a “differentiation language”—a strain of vocabulary deployed in the interest of setting “insiders” apart from “outsiders.”
Kahn starts off slowly, calling David’s song a mishibayrach—a term referring specifically to the traditional prayer for healing, rendered in the subtitles simply as “prayer” (Ha mavein Ya vin, “Those who understand will understand”). Then in the fourth stanza, taking full advantage of Cohen’s “additional verses” where Eros meets Agape, Kahn firmly overwrites the Christological reference to the “holy dove” by recalling how “The Shekhinah”—a Kabbalistic term for the feminine incarnation of the divine—“glowed in our blood.” Then the Yiddishisms really begin to pile up, all left untranslated:
Cohen’s “pilgrim who’s seen the light” becomes a mensch;
Dovid’s desire burns “hot through every letter, from alef, beys;” and
the song is brought to a triumphant conclusion: “Though all is lost / I will praise Adonai / And cry L’Chaim, Hallelujah.”
With that, Kahn dispels all vestiges of spiritually charged uncertainty—or what Buber might call “holy insecurity”—that may have called Cohen’s mutable song into being in the first place, giving us a reason to pause when contemplating Dabru Emet’s seventh claim. Do we want our interactions with the Other to be relatively painless and risk-free, or do we want to plumb the depths of a genuine encounter in which mutual transformation and growth are possible?
Maeera Y. Shreiber, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Utah. Her new book, Holy Envy: Writing in the Judeo–Christian Borderzone, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.