A PSA (Prophetic Service Announcement)

Some poets tell it like it is. Leonard was a prophet and told it like it might well become:

At the end of the chorus Cohen sings “Hineni, hineni; I’m ready, my lord.” Hineni is Hebrew for “here I am,” and is the response Abraham gives when God calls on him to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is also the name of a prayer of preparation and humility, addressed to God, chanted by the cantor on Rosh Hashanah.  (Emphasis mine.)

The entire song is a prayer – an audacious prayer, and a terrible one. (In the old school, bronze age sense of the word "terrible".)

Is this really what you want, Lord? Darker? Really? But yeah, I guess so. Well alright then. We human beings can make that happen. Count on it – we know you do.

Cohen is of course writing near the end of his life, and one suspects that in a sense he was indeed ready. But he was writing for all of us too, and writing his sense of the zeitgeist, and where the world was headed. He saw further than most, perhaps because he was less attached to the outcomes.

As others have observed: the lights are going out all over. It seems to me Cohen perceived this as God's will; this has happened before, this testing, and it will happen again. That's the thing about Covenants. They need an Audit from time to time.