Article
Culture
Music
Sin
Suffering
5 min read

The holy or the broken: Hallelujah at 40

What’s the magic sauce Leonard Cohen mixed into his masterpiece?
A black and white photo shows, singer Leonard Cohen to the right hand side, eyes closed and head inclined slightly upwards.
Leonard Cohen, 2008
Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s summer 1984 – Richard Branson has just launched Virgin Airways, the Soviet Union have boycotted the Olympic games, the miner’s strike is still raging on, and Footloose is pretty much the only thing you can watch in the cinema.  

Amidst it all, happening miles under the cultural radar, a songwriter of astronomical talent and middling success walks into a pokey studio in New York. He’s clutching a battered notebook which contains eighty verses of a song that he’s been writing and re-writing for multiple years. A song that has been driving him to utter madness, residing tormentedly in his mind. The metre is running in the recording studio, so the eighty verses are promptly whittled down to just four and the song is finally wrestled into existence.  

A barely noticed existence, that is.  

Those four chosen verses, the ones lucky enough to have escaped the confines of the notebook, continue to dwell in obscurity for a while yet. This seemingly cursed song is housed in an album that the record company have refused, claiming it to be of no real commercial value. Subsequently, it will enjoy a tiny release in Canada in December 1984, but nowhere else. It is, to sum up, profoundly ignored.  

Now, let’s fast-forward exactly forty years. 

That obscure, over-looked and under-estimated, little song has been covered by more than three-hundred artists, including Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, and Lou Reed. Its lyrics have been dissected and studied by the likes of Bono and Salman Rushdie. It’s a movie soundtrack favourite, a talent show staple, and a part of the furniture at weddings and funerals the world over. Books have been written about it, documentaries made about it. I don’t think it’s a major exaggeration to say that it’s in the cultural air we breathe. 

 A song that once had its maestro banging his head against the floor in frustration, now belongs to us all. Can you hazard a guess at which song this may be the origin story of? I can give you a hint, if you’d like? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls and the major lifts… 

You’ve got it.  

This humble tale is the story of ‘the baffled king composing Hallelujah’

Generation after generation finds itself notably and profoundly moved by this song. We treasure it, we value it, we let far too many people cover it (looking at you, Justin Timberlake).  

So, I guess I’m wondering - why?  

It’s one of those odd questions to which everyone, and no-one, has the answer. And it’s not that I don’t recognise the outright genius of Leonard Cohen and accredit the success to his mastery, I do. But, apparently, not even Cohen himself fully understood why this song has become such a phenomenon. Its success is an oddity, really. So, we have every right to ask ourselves - what’s the magic sauce that’s mixed into this song?  

Cohen... makes a bee line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there.

It opens with Cohen telling the biblical story of King David, who played the harp so beautifully it had a kind of mystical effect – it supernaturally calmed the spirit of the dangerously erratic Israelite king, Saul. David, who himself would go on to become the ruler of Israel, is the ‘baffled king’ about whom and to whom Cohen appears to sing. As Alan Bright notes, 

‘He (Cohen) has placed us in a time of ancient legend, and peeled back the spiritual power of music and art to reveal the concrete components, reducing even literal musical royalty to the role of simple craftsman.’ 

The second verse mingles two further biblical stories together – that of (afore-mentioned) King David and Bathsheba, and Samson and Delilah. Both stories, both men, are brought to despair by abuses of power, moral failure, violence, and death. Their lives are truly toppled by their own brokenness and their own breaking-things-ness. To borrow a phrase from Francis Spufford, their stories act as a signpost for the ‘human propensity to f*** things up’. 

These verses are so particular in their subject matter yet so universal in their resonance. Most people have a vague-at-best understanding of the biblical stories its lyrics are alluding to, but a precise-to-the-point-of-painful understanding of the way that old ‘human propensity’ can have its way.  

And here is Leonard Cohen, using such despair and brokenness to house a sacred cry. Here’s Leonard Cohen, placing his finger on our vulnerability and telling us that it’s right there – right in the place of pain and shame – where we can engage with the divine. Here’s Leonard Cohen, telling us that if the God of the Bible exists, he can handle the very worst of us.  

This song, whether we know it or not, steels past our defences. It makes a bee-line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and it plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there. It tells us that brokenness is inevitable, but it can be made holy. Isn’t that our deepest desire? To know that we’re not too far gone? To be told that we’ll fail, all the time, but never one time too many? 

I think, if you were to put that message in any context less real and raw, we’d be suspicious of it. If this song was less gritty, it would have stayed ignored. But it’s just messy enough to have us trust it, Cohen just about honest enough for us to believe him when he tells us that he ‘didn’t come to fool’ us.  

So, long may it continue. Long may it sneak past our emotional barricades and wreak havoc in our guarded hearts. Long may the four-minute-long weep-a-thon reign (just, not Justin Timberlake’s version, I beg).  

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Mental Health
Trauma
5 min read

The battle between seen and unseen pain

Jesse Eisenberg explores how the generations cope with pain.

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two male cousins converse across the aisle of a train.
Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg.

In today’s ultra-developed world, where technological and medical advances have reached unprecedented heights, suffering remains an unsolved problem. While the World Health Organization claims the successful prevention, elimination, or treatment of more diseases than ever before, it also highlights significant increases in anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders worldwide. This paradox raises questions not only about the root causes of mental health suffering but also about the way we understand its current prevalence and impact. Are today’s struggles any different to those others have experienced before us? Is the pain equally real? As we approach the eightieth anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day, can we truly equate the silent struggles of contemporary emotional health challenges with the unimaginably harrowing experiences of those who endured the worst horrors of war, violence, and genocide?  

Jesse Eisenberg dares to tackle these complex questions with his directorial debut, A Real Pain, a masterful exploration of trauma, resilience, and the search for meaning. Co-starring Kieran Culkin in a career-defining performance, the film takes viewers on a journey that is part road trip, part comedy-drama, part historical reflection, and wholly compelling. I believe it offers a timely and deeply thought-provoking challenge to consider how we recognise and process pain across generations as well as understand the way pain shapes – and reshapes – our lives.  

In the film, Eisenberg and Culkin portray two estranged Jewish-American cousins, David and Benji, who embark on a shared mission to retrace the steps of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. What begins as a simple road trip to Poland quickly transforms into something much more as the brutal reality of intergenerational trauma and mental health struggles rise to the surface.  The film’s themes can be explored through three key lenses: the passing on of pain, the proximity of pain, and the problem of pain. 

The passing on of pain 

At its heart, A Real Pain is a story about legacy—the burdens and blessings passed down through generations. Though their shared grandmother is no longer alive, her story of survival, resilience, and eventual flourishing has left a profound impact on her descendants. Her story draws the cousins in, but it also draws them together and apart in different ways over the course of the trip. There is tragedy and comedy, and poignant moments of connection as well as frustration as Eisenberg explores how trauma echoes through generations, affecting different people in different ways, weighing heavily on those who did not live through the original events. This theme is handled with nuance showing both the strength and fragility that come from confronting a painful past. Ultimately it brings us to a new question – how do we honour the suffering of those who came before us while also finding our own path, or paths, to healing? 

The proximity of pain 

As the cousins delve deeper into their family’s history, the film juxtaposes the grandmother’s resilience in the face of antisemitism, war, and Holocaust with Benji’s struggles. Despite severe loss, grief and trauma, the grandmother went on to live a meaningful life. Benji on the other hand struggles to keep on top of his daily responsibilities, hold down a job, and maintain relationships. He struggles to find any meaning in his life and reveals he has attempted suicide. How, he wonders, did his grandmother find the strength to fight for her life against the backdrop of the Holocaust when he can’t even navigate the relative peace of middle-class America? This question seems to add to his despair. He seems thoroughly beaten.  

Eisenberg does not provide easy answers but instead invites viewers to wrestle with these complexities of life and death, resilience, and vulnerability. He forces us to confront our assumptions about suffering and strength. By making us reflect on which pain is more real, he seems to have found a way to challenge us both to honour the reality of past trauma and recognise the reality of the struggles faced by those around us.  He has certainly found a way to help us empathise both with the millions of people who are currently displaced and traumatised by violence, conflict, and displacement, and, equally, with the millions whose mental health is in tatters.   

The problem of pain 

At its core, A Real Pain tackles the universal question: what do we do with suffering? Do we bury it in the past? Do we pretend it does not exist? Do we insulate ourselves from the pain of others? Do we respond with frustration and anger or with patience and empathy? Do we accept pain as a tragic by-product of existence? Do we struggle under the burden of it? Do we let it defeat us? Do we find ways to learn from it? Can pain make us stronger? Can it make us better people? Does it point to something deeper within us or, indeed, something beyond us? 

Right in the middle of the film, David and Benji meet a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. who provides a stark reminder that the horrors of the Holocaust are not just consigned to history, that even today there are places where entire people groups are being targeted, destroyed, and displaced. This character has clearly found solace and meaning through his faith, in contrast to the cousins’ secular Jewish identities. The tension between belief and unbelief runs through the film and reflects the wider experience of many for whom pain has been a critical factor in their journey either to faith or away from it.  

For C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia chronicles who offered spiritual solace to the nation during the Second World War and who was personally familiar with suffering writes: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Pain, for many Christians like Lewis is supposed to draw us towards faith – it is an urgent invitation to seek meaning and connection in a fractured world. Pain reminds us of our mortality and vulnerability, and our dependence not just on others, but perhaps too on an Almighty being who offers hope, healing and the promise of a life beyond this in a world where there is no more death, no more tears, no more pain.  

With A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg has crafted a film that will make you laugh and cry and think and discuss and reach out to others, or even to God.  This film invites you to reflect on the past, present and future, to wrestle with the pain we carry and to seek meaning beyond it. It’s a must-watch for anyone who dares to reflect on life’s most profound questions.  

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