I want to remember Leonard Cohen and celebrate him, not grieve him - for with his last album he almost told us not to. He had done all he had set out to do. A great light has gone out of the world just as things do indeed seem to be about to "slide in all directions", just as he foretold. The Future might be Leonard Cohen's darkest album but it also contains his simplest and most important truths: "love's the only engine of survival" and "there is a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in". The physical being of Leonard Cohen, that gorgeous twinkling sparkling man in a magnificent suit is no more, but he will endure for you, for me, for everyone, forever. We have his words and his music, the lessons he taught us, that will continue to give us the most profound and indelible strength just when we need them the most. Hallelujah.
There are cracks and imperfections in our country, there are cracks and imperfections in Judaism, and there are cracks and imperfections in each one of us. How beautiful and hopeful to think that it is through our cracks that light enters the world.
leonard cohen there is a crack
What happens, they debate, in the case of an individual who violates one single commandment of the Torah? (Remember, in theory, the entire Torah was given by God, so our obligation ought to be to implement its every command. This all-or-nothing mentality is still present today). What surprises me is not that some rabbis would hold to such an opinion. What remains astonishing is that the ancient rabbis as a group resisted that perfectionist perspective. Rabbi Meir argues that an am ha-aretz (an uneducated person) who accepted upon themselves the laws of Haverut, the laws of a stricter level of purity, if suspected to merely one violation of a particular law is therefore presumed to be violating the entire Torah. According to Rabbi Meir, you can't trust this person for any legal matter: he cannot give testimony, enjoy communal privileges, engage in commerce. For Rabbi Meir, any single imperfection ruins the whole, such a flawed, cracked person loses all standing. 2ff7e9595c
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