Who By Fire – Leonard Cohen

Who By Fire is about as solemn and spiritual as you are ever likely to hear from Leonard Cohen, and given his propensity for heavily laden lyrics of religious significance, you know I am not beating around the bush when I say that. I have always found it to have the feel of a meditative, transcendental chant that just flows right through you as if it were ‘water’ in song.

The opening line – And who by fire, who by water – immediately shows how the divine can seem to pervade the natural world, even down to our very skins. It is taken from the Unetanneh Tokef prayer, where fire, water and other forces are part of the larger question of how human beings may die.
Now, if that doesn’t get your song juices flowing! This is like Blowin’ in the Wind for grown-ups.

Most of the following was abridged from the two references shown at the end of this article. If there was ever a song that required background detail, then Who By Fire surely sits at the top of the list, and it is important to get it right:

The song was written after Cohen’s improvised concerts for Israeli soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula during the Yom Kippur War which you see him doing in the image above. On October 6, 1973, the Yom Kippur War started when an Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria, launched a surprise attack on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

Amid high fatalities among Israeli soldiers and a sense of despair in the country, Cohen arrived in the country to perform on the battlefield in the Sinai Peninsula for small groups of soldiers. He said: “I am joining my brothers fighting in the desert,” adding “I don’t care if their war is just or not. I know only that war is cruel, that it leaves bones, blood and ugly stains on the holy soil.”

The song was included on Cohen’s 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony, his fourth studio album. The original cover art you see was an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum. The two winged and crowned beings in sexual embrace caused his U.S. record label, Columbia Records, to print one early edition of the album minus the image substituting instead a photo of Cohen.

Who By Fire is rooted in Cohen’s Jewish background and features backing vocals from American singer Janis Ian. It is adapted loosely from the Hebrew prayer “ונתנה תוקף קדושת היום” [“U’Netaneh Tokef Kedushat Hayom” (“Let Us Tell How Utterly Holy This Day Is”)], chanted on Yom Kippur.

According to a Jewish legend, Rabbi Amnon of Mainz was punished for refusing to convert to Christianity by having his limbs cut off. Dying from his wounds, he was taken to the synagogue, where he recited the Unetanneh Tokef prayer, which includes the words “Who by fire and who by water?” before he died.

Like the original, Cohen’s song tells of a litany of ways and reasons one might meet their death: fire, water, suicide, drugs, and so on-some of which appear in the original prayer.

The prayer that inspired Cohen reads, in part:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire…

Cohen took this ancient litany of mortality and transformed it into his own unsettling meditation on death, fate and uncertainty.

[Verse 1]
And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?

[Verse 2]
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt
And who by avalanche, who by powder
Who for his greed, who for his hunger
And who shall I say is calling?

[Verse 3]
And who by brave assent, who by accident
Who in solitude, who in this mirror
Who by his lady’s command, who by his own hand
Who in mortal chains, who in power
And who shall I say is calling?

References:
1. Who By Fire – Genius Lyrics
2. Who By Fire (song) – Wikipedia