Right now, Leonard Cohen is on many of his fans’ minds.

The Canadian poet, novelist and singer-songwriter died Nov. 7, 2016, just one day before United States President Donald Trump was first elected.

Ten years later, as the Democrat “blue wave” hopes to close the bracket on a president who once memed himself as Jesus personified, Cohen’s legacy has become effortlessly epic — even biblical — in quite a different way.

Tribute gatherings for the singer abound. Cohen was the subject of a sold-out event at the Toronto International Festival of Authors at the end of October.

Adam Cohen’s family tour, which began in Canada this month and reaches Europe in winter 2027, pairs his father’s music with archival photos and film.

Ottawa’s Gladstone Theatre advertised their “Ten Years Gone” commemoration with a question quite suggestive to people like me who study the evolution of sacred texts: “What would Cohen say today?”

Cohen’s ‘contemporary psalms’

As an answer, I highlight an under-celebrated part of Cohen’s poetry and song. As I detail in my 2023 book Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, all of Cohen’s work is infused with biblical allusions. But some of Cohen’s work does more than echo biblical themes.

It takes on biblical format, in the tradition of poetic prayer known in Hebrew as tehillim. Tehillim, or Psalms, inform the Jewish liturgical tradition of addressing God directly, not only in praise, but also in lament, desperation and challenge.

This is most explicit in what publisher McClelland and Stewart called Cohen’s “contemporary psalms” in........

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