SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Kate Cohen & Jesse Cohen-Greenberg

SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, Craig Finn (The Hold Steady), and Questlove.

Kate Cohen is an avowed and public atheist. Which is why it is surprising (perhaps even a little cussed) that the story she chose to tell on SongWriter is about a profound moment of religious ritual. This was during her marriage ceremony, after she agreed to include a Hebrew phrase, partially under duress from the officiating rabbi. To her astonishment, this was the most intensely emotional moment of her carefully curated wedding.

“I remember feeling smaller than I was, and larger,” Kate recalls. “I remember disappearing from that moment, and at the same time appearing in thousands of moments. I remember the sensation of erasure.”

Dr. Arielle Levites, who is a scholar of contemporary Jewish American life, was particularly struck by this line in the story. To her, Kate is reflecting not just the power of religious ritual, but importantly, the breadth of religious experience.

“To me, this is a profoundly religious experience that she is describing,” Dr. Levites says, “because I believe that religion produces all kinds of feelings, and all kinds of dispositions, and all kinds of stances.”

Religious rituals are often used to bring communities together—after all, many of our holidays and gatherings have some element of, or vestigial link to, religion—but Dr. Levites says this can also cause people to feel alienated and alone. Religion is large enough to contain all of these experiences.

Kate, though, is quick to point out that she does not see the power of her experience as specifically religious. Instead, this was a moment of personal erasure, a moment of escape from her own ego as she connected her life to her husband’s. Religious ritual was the vehicle for these feelings, but Kate argues it could just as easily have been something else.

“You can have that in a hushed concert hall, you can have it on a mountain at sunrise, you can have it when you hold your baby for the first time,” Kate says.

The songwriter who was charged with writing a new song in response to the story has deep stakes of his own in this story: Jesse Cohen-Greenberg is Kate’s son. Freshly graduated from college, Jesse has recently released his first album, “When Will My Body Be Mine?”

“It was, for me, very fun to write something that felt specifically not about myself, but I guess it still sort of is,” Jesse laughs. “It’s hard to get away from yourself.”

Jesse’s song is called “Little Us,” and it’s available only on SongWriter.

Season six of SongWriter is made possible by a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation.