Hineni

A member of Cohen's family sent him the recordings of the synagogue's music — the choir he had grown up hearing, still singing every week in the building his grandfather built. That is how he came to know the work of its cantor. The two men began corresponding in 2009 and kept it up for years.

The letters were mostly holiday greetings. The line above came in reply to one sent before the High Holy Days. Zelermyer's response to it: he had never heard anyone distil into a handful of words what a cantor actually does.

Cohen signed every message the same way — Fraternally, Eliezer, using his Hebrew name.

Then, in November 2015, an email arrived asking whether he would be interested in collaborating on a new record. Cohen wrote that he was looking for the sound of the synagogue cantor and choir of his youth.

Zelermyer woke early, read it, shouted loudly enough to wake the house, and wrote back with two Cohen song titles: “Hallelujah, I'm your man!”

From Los Angeles came a rough track: Cohen's voice and a keyboard. Neither Zelermyer nor Shaar Director of Music Roï Azoulay knew what Cohen wanted, so they developed several possible versions, recorded each with the choir, and sent them all back for Cohen and his team to choose from. Within three weeks the choir was in a studio on the Plateau with Adam Cohen producing, working until two in the morning. Zelermyer has called it the most iconically Montreal night of his life.

The cantorial improvisation at the close of You Want It Darker was Zelermyer's own, offered during the sessions and kept in the final mix.

On It Seemed the Better Way, the team set a violin motif against the melody of the Priestly Blessing — an homage to Cohen being a Kohein.

He had asked Adam the obvious question — his father could get this kind of singing from anyone, so why come here? The answer: “Because The Shaar means a lot to Leonard.”

“I am pleased that my enduring association with The Shaar be known to the Congregation, and that our work together reflects our love for the place, the people, and the tradition.” Leonard Cohen

These are the only photographs of that night.

Eight days after the funeral, Zelermyer wrote his own account of the seven years: the invitation, the emails, the graves on Mount Royal, the last words.

“My first response was an ecstatic scream, followed by a feeble attempt to appear nonchalant by writing back ‘Hallelujah! I’m your man!’” On the invitation, November 2015

It is the fullest telling anywhere on this site, in his own words — including the concert tickets Cohen refused to let his rabbi and cantor pay for, asking instead that a donation go to “any food bank, the closer to home the better”; and the question he kept returning to afterwards.

“Leonard Cohen could go to anyone in the world for some male backing vocals. Why did he contact Shaar Hashomayim?”

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On the Shabbat after his death, Zelermyer chanted El Malei Rachamim, the memorial prayer, to the tune of Hallelujah.

A month later, Cohen's family brought him and the Shaar Hashomayim choir to Los Angeles to sing at the memorial service.

Then a year of tributes. In December 2016, at the Rialto Theatre, God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot: A Montreal Tribute to Leonard Cohen — sold out within days of being announced — where the choir sang You Want It Darker and an a cappella If It Be Your Will, chosen for the religious depth of its words.

In August 2017 came Montréal Symphonique, the free concert at the foot of Mount Royal for the city's 375th anniversary. It brought the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Orchestre Métropolitain and the McGill Symphony Orchestra onto one stage for the first time — some three hundred musicians under Simon Leclerc — and included a tribute to Cohen. The police put the crowd on the mountain at eighty thousand, with thousands more in parks across the city. Watch the performance.

The day before, two busloads of Cohen readers — from the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Andorra and Cyprus — came to the synagogue of his youth. Zelermyer stood in the sanctuary and told them the whole of it: the letters, the record, the choir. Listen to the talk, published by The New York Times.

And on the first anniversary of his death, Tower of Song at the Bell Centre before nearly sixteen thousand. Twenty-two songs, a twenty-five-piece orchestra, and a bill that included Sting, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Lana Del Rey, Feist, Ron Sexsmith, The Lumineers, Damien Rice, Courtney Love, Sharon Robinson, Patrick Watson, Basia Bulat, Cœur de Pirate and Adam Cohen, with filmed contributions from Céline Dion, Peter Gabriel, Chris Martin and Willie Nelson.

Sting came back near the end for Anthem — there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. Then the men of the Shaar Hashomayim choir came out in their kippot and sang You Want It Darker against Cohen's own recorded voice, the words projected on the wall behind them. They closed the programme.

They had not been on the announced bill. The Gazette's guide to the evening, published three days earlier, had explained the Cohen connection of eighteen performers and mentioned no choir.

“He came into the world a Montreal Jew and he left the world a Montreal Jew.” JTA, April 2018

Candice Breitz's nineteen-channel video installation, commissioned by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, gathers eighteen men over sixty-five — lifelong Cohen listeners, every one of them — each filmed singing his own complete rendition of the 1988 album in a Montreal studio. They appear on eighteen body-sized screens suspended in a darkened room.

“I was interested in this moment in life where one starts to look back and contemplate what kind of a life one has lived and what kind of a life one wishes to continue living.” Candice Breitz

The nineteenth channel is the Shaar Hashomayim choir — nine men, projected large and alone in the first room, through which visitors pass to reach the rest. Their fragmented vocals are the album's backing parts, reinterpreted, and with the instruments and the lead voice stripped away they become the thing you listen to. Breitz miked the room as well as the singers, so the recording carries the pages of the score turning and the conductor counting the bars: everything a session normally removes.

The visitor walks through the choir to reach the work. Writing in San Francisco, Genevieve Quick read the whole piece as a generational figure — a chorus of younger men holding up the elders who sing the lead.

Before the arrangements were made, Breitz and Zelermyer met several times to work through whether the idea could be done — whether a synagogue choir could take the backing vocals of a 1988 pop album and sing them as itself. The arrangements, once they came, were by Roï Azoulay and Conor O'Neil.

Zelermyer was present throughout the recording and sings on it, including solo lines that on the original album belong to Sharon Robinson.

Photograph — Guy L’Heureux

Cohen never answered the question Zelermyer is asked most often — why him, why these singers. His own conclusion, arrived at afterwards:

“They weren't just backup singers, they were religious singers, people grounded in a belief system that he subscribed to and that gave him a sense of comfort when he was facing down death. The first time he heard a cantor sing Hineni was in my sanctuary.”

On the night the Grammy was announced, he put the whole of it in one line: the relationship, the collaboration, the funeral, the memorials, the tribute concerts — and now this.

And, later:

“To have been a small footnote in the connection between Leonard, his religious identity, his identity as a son of Shaar Hashomayim — and ultimately to have been able to put him in the ground with dignity — that is an unforgettable part of my life's experience. And not exactly what you imagine when you become a cantor.” The Forward, March 2021