Not Running The Show Poem by gershon hepner

Some believe that they’ve been put in charge
of all the shows that God’s supposed to run.
Leonard Cohen doesn’t, but a large
proportion of us think we are the one
who runs these shows, on God’s behalf, perhaps,
or even, uncommanded, without Him.
God doesn’t play at dice, but they play craps,
and with their snake-eyes, have the curious whim
that all the world revolves around them. Len
has disabused himself of this allusion
with the help, as he explains, of Zen,
but I have never come to this conclusion
because I’m as sure as that the earth
revolves around the son that I revolve
around my wife, and so regard with mirth
the fact it took so long for Len to solve––
by singing, surely, and not whining ever,
observing Sabbath faithfully as Zen,
as spiritual, and surely far more clever
than unenlightened, strict halakhic men––
the problem as to who is in control
of all his universe. D’you think it’s odd
of me to claim this most important role
for Linda, not for me, of course, or God?

Inspired by an article in the NYT on Leonard Cohen by Larry Rohter (“On the Road, for Reasons Practical and Spiritual”) :
The day after his first American concert in more than 15 years, Leonard Cohen sat in a Manhattan hotel suite warily submitting to an interviewer’s questions, including one about the music in his laptop’s iTunes. In response, he played a klezmer-style Hebrew hymn, then followed it by singing along with one of George Jones’s weepy country morality tales:
“I’ve had choices since the day that I was born, /There were voices that told me right from wrong, ” Mr. Cohen crooned in his stern baritone. “If I had listened, no, I wouldn’t be here today, /Living and dying with the choices I’ve made.”….
Mr. Cohen is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath even while on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So how does he square that faith with his continued practice of Zen? “Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago, ” he said. “Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief.” Zen has also helped him to learn to “stop whining, ” Mr. Cohen said, and to worry less about the choices he has made. “All these things have their own destiny; one has one’s own destiny. The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”


2/25/09