"Hallelujah"

© Michael Kushner

The great arti-vist Lauren Molina asked me to be a part of this incredible evening celebrating Equal Rights (with an all female band!) at 54 Below months ago. It’s always an honor to contribute my voice to the chorus crying out for peace, equity and freedom.

The world is in crisis, and I think about it privately far more than I discuss in internet spaces— partially because these spaces can be didactic and unforgiving of nuance, but equally because … there is sometimes simply nothing to BE said. 

I don’t exclusively adhere to the belief that silence ALWAYS equals violence. Sometimes silence is golden— because in that silence we can deeply listen and hear one another, our inner voices, and sometimes even the Divine.  

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I’ve been so deeply "in the wilderness" recovering from surgery #4, that I'd put it entirely out of my mind that I'd (joyfully!) agreed to participate in the Equal Rights concert at 54 Below. Something that’s usually medium-fun (and can be medium-stressful).

I got there and …. Absolutely out of nowhere, I felt like something whispered to me

          “You must sing Leonard Cohen’s 'Hallelujah.'”

I’ve never sung it before. I didn’t really know the words. But a force was saying “do this.”

One of music’s greatest poets— the peerless prophet Leonard Cohen penned this in [my birth year] 1983, and “Hallelujah” has been lullaby, prayer and battle cry ever since, in countless voices. And although I joined this genius group of women to uplift my voice for the entire world, for me personally, this was a “cold a broken Hallelujah.” 

I’m emerging from another health miracle, experienced within a season of solitude— I am “a baffled King;” I am “beauty and moonlight” —all all all. I crawled to 54 below, not knowing what would emerge “from my lips” and what’s left of my guts… and surrounded by friends and strangers I was just: transported. It was like Gd (one I don’t always adhere to or believe in, the way we’re conventionally “supposed” to?) but — That Divine Force was with me. For sometimes songs are prayers indeed — and I felt a force move within me that whispered:

“Hey kid. You made it. Now sing. Now LIVE.”
 

Hallelujah.

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah. That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say, ‘Hallelujah!... The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a thing at all—
Hallelujah!’ That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.”

- Leonard Cohen