Leonard Cohen defied those who demanded he boycott Israel on his recent concert tour, instead finishing that tour with a show in Tel-Aviv last Thursday, just before Yom Kippur. From the Washington Post:

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.

And from the Jerusalem Post story on the concert in Tel-Aviv:

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.

Leonard Cohen’s 1984 song Hallelujah has been recorded to an amazing extent in the past several years, and has been a big hit for several artists. To me, however, there’s no question that Cohen’s own version is the truest and the best. The song is something of a high wire act, and the performance of it requires the same, and I think that Cohen is the only bird who really stays on that wire. And the song surely can never have sounded better than it did last Thursday night in Israel.

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