Halloween falls on a Sunday this year, and hence it feels apropos to examine a pair of religious songs that fit in with the holiday’s vibe. At the risk of sounding like a freshman essay, Halloween is a study in contrasts: we have on the one hand an almost-gleefully morbid fascination with death, degradation, and corruption in our decorations, contrasted against a very childlike innocence in the costumed kids we send out trick-or-treating door to door. The pair of songs selected for today reflect this dichotomy–and they are also, incidentally, both by Jewish singer-songwriters, in songs rooted in religious ritual.

Halloween of course is not in any way, shape, or form Jewish (there remains heavy scholarly debate as to whether it is even pagan in origin). Nevertheless, the holiday’s unique blend of the deathly and the youthful align it unusually well with concerns that Judaism has meditated upon for ages–and given how much kinship the LDS faith claims to share with ancient Israel, it’s worth exploring these themes for ourselves.

First off is the title-track to Leonard Cohen’s 2016 album–released the same year as his death at 82–his swan-song “You Want It Darker.”

Though not a Sunday song per se, it nonetheless participates in that same Sunday Morning mood, when the love of God can almost feel like an oppressive thing: “If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame/If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame,” he sings–a frank recognition that to glorify God means to abase ourselves. We talk a lot about a broken heart and a contrite spirit; Cohen seems to actually understand the depths of what that really means.

Throughout the song, he mentions firing squads, suffering, inner-demons, heartbreak, and “a million candles burning for the help that never came,” which, coming from a Jewish man, can’t help but feel like an allusion to the Holocaust. “You want it darker,” he says, not as a question, but a statement–addressed to the God who let the Holocaust happen, and to you the listener, and even just to himself.

But the kicker of the song (and what made it almost too on-the-nose that he passed away the same year it was released) is that he’s not just broodingly debasing himself in a fit of melancholia, but in preparation for his own imminent passing: “Hineni, hineni,” he intones in the chorus, “I’m ready, my Lord.” Hineni here is the Hebrew for “here I am,” the answer that Father Abraham gave to God when called upon to sacrifice Isaac. It is also the name of a prayer uttered by the cantor on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

In that “Hineni,” Cohen has re-situated all of the darkness and suffering of the world as Abrahamic, even redemptive. “Therefore, they must needs be chastened and tried, even as Abraham, who was commanded to offer up his only son. For all those who will not endure chastening, but deny me, cannot be sanctified,” reads our own D&C 101:4-5, but the thought is not original there; Cohen well intuited it, as had so much of Jewish thought before him. It’s an attempt to make our sufferings matter—not to be spared them (we know there’s no hope of that), but for our sufferings to not just be random, capricious, or senseless, but to have actual meaning.

In this manner does Cohen prepare himself for death, and it’s a thought well-suited for Halloween, which also reminds us of our last end (it’s always the Last Day for someone), no matter how much we may try to trivialize death under an avalanche of kitsch and camp.

But as mentioned earlier, death and darkness during Halloween are also strangely juxtaposed against innocence and youth–and the latter is the subject of Bob Dylan’s beloved 1974 track “Forever Young.”

Bob Dylan, that grandchild of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, has rarely let his Jewish flag fly much over the course of his long and storied career (even flirting with straight-up Christian Rock in the late-’70s), but this song is one of those few moments where his Judaism is unmistakable. A reworking of Jehova’s blessings upon Aaron and his sons as found in Numbers 6:24-26 of the Torah (“The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace”), the lovely song features a series of blessings pronounced upon Dylan’s own children, the sentiments of which will feel familiar to any new parent (certainly I finally learned to strum it on guitar once my first child was born): that they “may always do unto others” as they have others do unto them, that their “wishes may all come true,” that they may “grow up to be righteous” and true, that their “hearts always be joyful,” and so on and so forth.

But the melancholy of the song–and hence what makes it so appropriate for a Sunday morning–is right there in the title and the chorus: “May you stay forever young.” Because of course that is impossible: each of those kids we send out trick-or-treating tonight will one day–much quicker than we prefer, even–grow up, grow out of it, grow crow’s-feet on their eyes and stray gray hairs on their head, as the weight of adulthood and attendant responsibilities will inevitably come to weigh upon them as heavily as they have come to weigh upon us. Bob Dylan, like all new parents, would spare them if we could, even as we know full well that God Almighty will no more spare them that He has spared us the same.

Hence, the almost unspeakable irony of watching these sprightly young children run carefree around the neighborhood under the deathly banner of Halloween.

It’s strange, because we are supposed to grow up in light and knowledge–to engage in Eternal Progression, as we call it–but we are also to become as little children, for of such is the Kingdom of God. Bob Dylan expresses the strange paradox of all the Abrahamic religions, of both the impossibility and the necessity of being Forever Young, yes, even in the face of certain death. It’s a paradox well worth contemplating as the trick-or-treaters ring your doorbell on this Sunday Halloween.