Unetaneh Tokef and Leonard Cohen

Some prayers comfort. This one counts. On the Days of Awe the congregation reaches a passage that drops the temperature of the whole room: on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water, who in their time and who before it. Unetaneh Tokef does not soften the year ahead. It opens the ledger and reads the columns aloud. And then, having frightened the room half to death, it refuses despair: repentance, prayer and charity, it says, can temper the severity of the decree.

It is a piyyut, a liturgical poem, and it is one of the oldest and starkest things the Jewish year asks a person to sit through. Roughly nine hundred years before Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal, the same lines were already making congregations flinch. He did not invent the dread in his song. He inherited it, the way you inherit a face.

The legend and the page

The story most people are told is dramatic and consoling. A certain Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, pressed to convert to Christianity and brutally mutilated for refusing, is said to have composed Unetaneh Tokef on his deathbed and then to have appeared in a dream to dictate it for posterity. It is a story about a Jew who chose his people over his own body, and it has clung to the prayer for centuries because it fits the prayer's mood so well.

The trouble is the page. Fragments recovered from the Cairo Geniza, the great storehouse of discarded Jewish documents, carry versions of the text that predate the supposed life of Rabbi Amnon by a long way. On stylistic grounds many scholars now associate the poem with the Land of Israel in the Byzantine period, even with the early payetan Yannai, centuries before medieval Mainz. No independent record of Rabbi Amnon survives at all. So we keep both: the legend, told with pride as our story, and the manuscript evidence, which quietly puts the poem in a different country and a different age. The site's whole habit is to mark which is which, and here the two registers pull in genuinely different directions.

What Cohen heard as a boy

Cohen came from a serious Jewish family in Montreal, and the liturgy was in his ear early. When he wrote Who by Fire he was not borrowing an exotic source; he was reaching back into his own childhood and pulling out the most frightening thing in the prayer book. The genius of the song is restraint. He does not set the whole piyyut to music or translate it line for line. He keeps the litany of "who by" and lets the listener supply the dread that the synagogue had already installed. Then he adds the modern wound: the original poem knows who is calling, and Cohen, writing in 1974, is no longer sure.

That uncertainty is the whole distance between the medieval cantor and the modern songwriter, and the song is honest enough to leave it open. The tune travelled out of the synagogue and into concert halls and films and other singers' mouths, carrying the High Holy Day shiver to people who have never opened a machzor. A prayer about being written in a book became a song that put the book back in front of a much larger congregation.