On song: Alastair McIntosh’s Thought for the Week

‘A prophet sees and names the doom and gloom, but also points beyond it.’

I felt sorry at the news this week that Britain is to shift funding from overseas aid to defence. As a Quaker, committed to nonviolence, you might expect me to say that. But my sorrow is not just linked to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

My sorrow lies in thinking back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. This was also the time when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, proclaimed glasnost and perestroika: ‘openness’ and ‘restructuring’. For a brief window of time we could talk about the ‘peace dividend’, and make a shift from funding the cold war towards things that make the world a better place.

As I listened to wave after wave of world news this week, some lines from Leonard Cohen’s song ‘The Future’ came running through my mind:

Things are going to slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned the order of the soul.

Then:

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother:
it is murder.

The lines run on in driving testimony. I don’t know another song from just a little over thirty years ago that’s quite so chillingly and accurately prophetic. 

But Leonard Cohen, Jewish prophet that he was, doesn’t leave us stranded in the misery. For a prophet is a poet who sees and names the doom and gloom, but also points beyond it. And so his chorus:

When they said repent, repent
I wonder what they meant?

Cohen would have known that the Hebrew word usually translated as ‘repentance’, teshuvah, means a return to what it is we’ve strayed from.  

As I listened to the lyrics, my once-stray cat jumped up and purred. It made me think how easily we’re overwhelmed by things that are outwith our locus of control. 

To influence the world, we have to dig from where we stand. To stroke the cat. To cook and share a meal. To not forget to smile as well as cry: for spring is in the air, and if we don’t notice that the crocuses are out right now, we’ll miss them.

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Comments

A donation from Leonard Cohen helped establish “Road to Recovery” an Israeli charity that connects Israeli volunteers with Palestinians in need of transportation to doctor’s appointments and other medical care within Israel. Volunteers continue to support Palestinians needing assistance to get medical treatment since 7th October.

The hostage Oded Lifshitz was a Road to Recovery volunteer, his funeral was held at Nir Oz kibbutz on 25th February.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Recovery_(charity)
https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/israel/road-to-recovery-341175

By Ol Rappaport on 13th March 2025 - 10:45

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