You Want It Darker
Some artists dare to touch the places we would rather leave untouched—love, lust, betrayal, death. Poet-musicians like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen guide us there with tenderness and unflinching honesty.
I have long been a fan of Leonard Cohen, knowing well the dark shadows he wrestled with. Yet, like a fine wine aging into deeper notes, Cohen ripened into something wiser with time, moving from the songs of love and longing in his youth to meditations on death and dying at age 82.
Today, Cohen’s final song, You Want It Darker, feels less like a farewell and more like a hymn for the living. Drawing from the ancient story of God giving Abraham a miracle child only to demand his sacrifice, Cohen does not flinch. He lifts the words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead (“Magnified, sanctified be Thy holy name”), and offers us a way to respond to darkness with sacred defiance: Hineni. Hineni. Hineni.
Here I am. Here I am. Here I stand.
There is a lover in the story
But the story’s still the same
There’s a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it’s written in the scriptures
And it’s not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame
A hundred days into Trump’s reign, the world teeters on the edge of chaos. These seem like dark times full of anxiety, yes—but they are not new. They are not our first. They will not be our last.
Let us draw strength from the deep wells of our prophets, poets, and philosophers. Let us remember what they have always told us:
To stand. To stay. To be present.
Hineni. Hineni. Hineni.
Here I stand—resolute as always—committed to building a Securus Locus for our community, a shelter from the gathering storm.
— Sina.