Is Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" a Christmas song, yes or no?
I mean, choose your own adventure, but obviously, yes.
There are two types of people in this world: those who believe Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” can be sung as a Christmas song, and those who do not.
Growing up, ours was a different kind of “Hallelujah.” More prone to Handel than to a Jewish Buddhist who penned a “ballad about sexual ecstasy, crushing heartbreak, and existential doubt,”1 we weren’t exactly singing about major falls and minor lifts between an anointed king and a woman he wasn’t supposed to love.
But the song. My God. I know there’s not a word about Christmas or the Advent season, let alone about a tiny boy child found in any of its stanzas, but come to my house in the four weeks leading up to Christmas Day, and an endless chorus of broken hallelujahs is likely all you’re going hear.
Music journalist Alan Light writes the following about it in his book, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’:
Usually, Christmas songs have some kind of reference to the actual holiday—or, at least, are somehow adjacent to Christmas, with mentions of snow or winter or Santa Claus or something that would make the lyrics specifically seasonal. “Hallelujah” has none of those things. So why does it qualify or function as a Christmas song at all? Billboard asked Scott Hoying of Pentatonix about the song, and the most he could offer was that “when people hear it, they feel something.”
That’s what it is: when I hear it, I feel something. I feel those hallelujahs, broken and jugular as they come, one after another, after another.
And I remember the broken hallelujahs of my past, especially in and of those moments that always seemed to fall in or around the month of December.
In 2016, our family of four packed up and moved to Seattle for twenty months. My husband had been offered a promotion; for all intents and purposes, the move looked really good on paper. We’d be close to my extended family. He’d be in a position of leadership. I’d be back in the Pacific Northwest, in a place I knew and understood, near some of my best friends from high school and college.
Everything happened so fast: James heard about the job. I said yes, go, apply. What could go wrong? He got the job, and we began to say goodbye, quickly. We started to mourn a city that had captured our hearts, a place that seemed to speak our language, a people that had become our people.
I recall that we moved a handful of days, or perhaps it was more like a week, after the 2016 election. We’d heard about the Seattle Freeze, but having lived in Washington state for college and in the early years of my time in ministry, I didn’t think much of it.
Ours would be a different situation, I reasoned. We knew people. We knew the culture. And having regularly picked up and moved throughout much of our marriage by that point, we knew what it meant to start over in a new place.
Until we didn’t.
Until we moved to Seattle, that is.
Now, this is not a knock on Seattle. There is nothing like a Seattle summer. Some of my favorite human beings in the world continue to call that gorgeous city home. But Seattle was a place of broken hallelujahs for my family.
And Seattle was the place that solidified “Hallelujah” as a song fit for the Advent season.
There’s a story I used to tell in sermons, a story of driving through Seattle traffic during rush hour, when rain pelted from a pitch-black sky and two little boys hungrily begged for goldfish crackers and all three of us soon found ourselves bawling in the middle of it all.
But when “Hallelujah” started playing on the radio,2 the chaos dissipated. Calm ensued. I can't explain the mechanics of that particular moment, but this I know: even though we were in a wild state of hurt, when that song started playing on the radio, something changed.
Maybe we knew we weren’t alone. Maybe we knew we’d be okay. Maybe we knew that singing broken hallelujahs is sometimes the only thing we can do.
I don’t doubt this is too far from the message of Advent, when in the weeks leading up to Christmas, we find ourselves in a place of darkness. We are alone. We don’t know if we’re going to be okay, because everything we’ve got rides on hope alone.
It’s in this place, when our hearts are broken and we do not know what will happen on the other side, that the holiest of choruses get sung.
The most broken of hallelujahs start squeaking out, one might say.
This was the case in an insignificant village called Nazareth, when “God’s peace was unfurled where life wasn’t working, where people hurt most, where hope was on the run.”3
Here, peace was given permission to bloom. Here, the hallelujahs were sung with gusto.
And here, a new kind of hope was born.
From “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen:
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah
https://variety.com/2022/music/news/hallelujah-leonard-cohen-book-excerpt-alan-light-expanded-edition-1235281084/
This time, the version from Pentatonix. This particular version also happens to have really put the nail in the Christmas-coffin for those haters who believe “Hallelujah” should never be sung during the month of December. Just sayin’.
Kelley Nikondeha: The First Advent in Palestine.
I "feel something" every time I listen to Cohen, especially his later offerings. A few months ago, I finally found it in me to listen to his post-mortem album... boy, I could preach on any one of those songs, they all give me shivers <3