Even writing it out here, with the O instead of a dash, feels sacrilegious. In the Jewish tradition, we don’t pronounce God’s name. Its connotations are very, very religious. (To borrow briefly from Christianity, that’s why Handel’s Messiah is so effective – it feels like a command.) The word is used repeatedly in psalms dedicated in a special prayer of praise, sung on major Jewish holidays. In Hebrew, the grammatical phrasing of the word “Hallelujah” is in the imperative: “Praise God!” It commands you. Praising him shows devotion and recognition of his greatness, and when done in community, demonstrates affiliation to his people. Rather, we praise him for our own benefit, acknowledging that God has created all that is praiseworthy. I was taught in my Judaics courses that God doesn’t need our praise. Praising the divine is a mainstay of religion. One cannot exist with the other.Ĭohen sings: “It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah.” If the results are the same no matter the cause, does it matter how we got there? Cohen describes different hallelujahs in his lyrics: The cold and the broken the holy and the broken. The song’s central premise is the value, even the necessity, of praise in the face of confusion, doubt, or dread. “Hallelujah” is a love song, the narrator trying to woo a woman, despite knowing she is lost to him. By the time I played them Cohen’s version at the end of class, the chorus of groans filled me with satisfaction. The rhyme scheme wasn’t, though, and neither was the structure, which helped guide the conversation. Understanding the narrator’s intentions and the second person was difficult.
It was difficult to dissect the difference between the biblical and the personal. We went line by line, interpreting the song as a poem. I taught high school English and wanted to shock my students a little, so I brought in “Hallelujah” knowing that it would be familiar. His version is an interpretation insofar as it’s an interpretation of himself. Yet despite his smoker’s growl, as the writer, he brings more to “Hallelujah” than any adaptation. The nuances of cover versions-the singers’ harmonies, whispers, their pauses and silences between the notes-weren’t present in Cohen’s version and I missed them. It took some time, but I eventually listened to Leonard Cohen’s original. The version in Shrek is less inflammatory, less obviously blasphemous, neutralized somewhat of the agnostic undertones. Knowing about unused stanzas fed into my hipster desire to be first among the initiated. Later, the existence of “Hallelujah” apocrypha intrigued me. I swore off Wainwright for the painful lore of Buckley’s death. His “Hallelujah” was gentle and tortured. I couldn’t understand the interplay between author and source material, couldn’t grasp that the narrator was seeing himself in holy texts, interjecting his own experience into the context of mythical figures and making them as human as he.įrom there I found Jeff Buckley’s Grace in my sister’s CD collection.
But why was he tied to a kitchen chair? Did they even have kitchen chairs in the age of the Plishtim?
I knew it was Dovid who saw Batsheva bathing on the roof I knew it was Delila who cut Shimshon’s hair. The lyrics were deceptively simple words, referencing biblical passages I recognized. I was a preteen and baffled that my grown siblings were interested in the soundtrack. My first “Hallelujah” was sung by Rufus Wainwright in Shrek.