The Holy and the Broken: The Songs of Leonard Cohen

Raised in an observant Jewish family whose lives revolved around their Orthodox synagogue in Montreal, Leonard Cohen grew up in a world rich in Jewish learning, practice and song. When he went on to create a lifetime of memorable music, it’s not surprising that many of his songs were informed by religious, spiritual and explicitly Jewish themes – poems of love and hate, the body and the soul, pain and redemption, and what Cohen called “the Holy and the broken.“ Each week, we will pair one of Cohen’s songs with a Jewish text — Torah, Talmud, midrash, mysticism — and explore how they inform, expand upon, and illuminate each other.   Finally, we will come together for a Saturday morning Mishkan service on June 1 that incorporates some of Cohen‘s finest Jewishly-inspired and inspiring music.