We will be learning about Leonard Cohen’s life, art and contribution to Canadian culture much later in the year. I mention him now because he would have turned 90 years old this week – and we could have used his voice to help us in what will arguably be the most challenging High Holy Day season in recent memory.

The Canadian Encyclopedia (a trusted source we employ frequently in our Canadian history class) described Cohen as “[a] sage, mystic, bohemian and romantic.”

I am not alone in also adding “prophet.”

Leonard Norman Eliezer Cohen was born on September 21, 1934 in the heavily Jewish/Anglophone enclave of Westmount in Montreal. His family’s story is a familiar one to most North American Jews. His immigrant parents, daughters and sons of scholars, came to Canada to build new lives. They, like many of our grandparents and great-grandparents, were part of a grand project that had been going on for decades: the construction of Jewish life in North America. In Montreal, this included the establishment of Jewish institutions, like Congregation Shaar Hashomayim and Herzliah High School, two entities that figured prominently in the life of young Leonard.

Leonard Cohen attended Shaar Hashomayim throughout his young life. His grandfather and great-grandfather served as its president.  And at Herzliah High School, he would meet his literary mentor (and later inspiration) Irving Layton. He would later transfer to Westmount High School, where taught himself to play the acoustic guitar.  From there, he would go on to become one of the world’s most renown musicians and a literary icon.

Dr Stephen Hazan Arnoff wrote the following on the occasion of Cohen’s shloshim in December, 2016.  His words need no embellishment. 

Leonard Cohen was a poet of impossible paradoxes drawn together as a way of defining what’s possible. He put the remnants of the liturgy of the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem on turntables with “Who By Fire,” ancient sacrifices and a golden robe becoming barbiturates and a lonely slip. He was bankrupted by his manager in what should have been his time of professional ease, re-obligating him to recording and the road — making him not only millions of dollars before millions of fans, but transforming him into a happy warrior, singing himself to both life and death. He was a Zen Buddhist monk — Jikan, the Silent One — who signed his personal letters Eliezer. And in the future of “The Future,” he described a world rotting with corruption while at the same time confidently calling out for love as the source of all things… In the future — as in “The Future” — despite people of bluster, violence, corruption, and arrogance claiming to be greater than creation itself, there remains a resigned, generous, gentlemanly invitation humming beneath the noise, a flame that never dies, an engine of survival. If the blizzard of the world threatens to overturn the order of the soul, just listen more closely and you’ll hear it. Leonard Cohen, beloved teacher: May his memory be for a blessing, and may his blessing be heard.