Hallelujah

I feel like many people have a religious attachment to the song because it says Hallelujah in the chorus and has Biblical references. Leonard Cohen was a songwriter/poet so while he may have had strong spiritual/religious beliefs, what he chooses to write about and how he chooses to write is often heavily tempered through life experience; and so any religious connotations are less idealistic and more about how those ideals confront reality.

So, one thing he does is take King David out of the Holy Bible, where he seems far away and from an old time, and bring him 'back to life' with modern conversational narration and placing his emotions and actions within the context of a modern song. In doing so, Cohen also takes biblical Judeo/Christian morals, attitudes, and modes of thinking into a modern context.

He does with the word Hallelujah what he did with David. He takes it from a just being a word to express purely religious thanks to Yahweh (God), to serving the function of giving thanks to all that feels divine in the course of our lives, from making love to being baffled, from being humbled to feeling righteous, from feeling moved to feeling empty. Instead of knowing what is right and being morally superior, the subject of the song seemingly does everything wrong and that is precisely what brings him closer to God. He, her, us, everyone can mutter Hallelujah because of the wonder we feel when our weaknesses and frailty humble us throughout life and prove to us our fallibility. In the moment we feel small, we feel the presence of that which is bigger, and that is why we say Hallelujah.