August 1 marks Jerry Garcia’s 80th birthday, and that milestone is provoking a whole lot of recognition across the cultural map: on musical fronts where it most certainly belongs, and a few other places where it probably doesn’t (like Garcia Bobblehead Day at Fenway).

Garcia made a big impact on my life, so even though he died in 1995, this occasion prompts some reflection.

First and foremost: It needs to be said upfront that when the Grateful Dead came to town, it was the best party around. On a good night—and not every night was a good night, G-d knows—the Dead were the greatest rock and roll band in the world, I’d stake my ears on it.

It’s important to make that point before jumping off the deep end, because for decades people have sought to overinflate the Dead’s significance in ways that are, often as not, kind of embarrassing. This essay is, no doubt, part of that trend. Sanctimony has always been the Achilles heel of this band and its fans, and all those liberal arts courses on “Philosophy and the Dead” and “The Sociology of the Dead” don’t help.

I do think popular culture, including rock, is worth studying, and I do think the Dead were an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. But let’s remember that Garcia often had the glimmer in his eye of a holy fool, implying: “Look, don’t take this too seriously, I’m in it for the laughs as much as anyone.” In other words: Don’t forget, it was primarily about fun.

Yet there were a whole lot of reasons why people latched on to the Dead and puffed up their importance. In part it was holding on to a countercultural vision that kicked back at the corporatization of things that once had been fun.

For a while, a very realistic middle class suburban alternative to the norm was to get in a car and follow the Dead around for a few weeks. It was a great way to visit other parts of the country, make new friends, semi-randomly run into old friends, and feel like you were part of something against that ran against the grain of the conformist American cultural product, even as the scene expanded to gigantic proportions. And—again, on the good nights—you got to hear fun, musically sophisticated, and occasionally risky performances.

Still, a lot of the Grateful Dead nostalgia among boomers and Gen-Xers is as much about themselves as it is about Jerry and the Dead. I remember where I was on August 9, 1995, when Garcia died: somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I had spent the summer in Israel and was traveling back to the States for my cousin Stacy’s wedding. And my brother Andy met me at the airport with the words, “Garcia died.” Like lots of people, I cried that day. Now, I’m not one to weep for dead celebrities, but in retrospect I realize that the tears were for something much more than a guitar player whom I never met: His death sealed a chapter of my youth that was inevitably coming to an end anyhow. (And, it should be said, some of those tears were also for an artist who touched me more than just about any other.)

While I do want to write about the music, it’s worth pointing out that the Grateful Dead were a significant cultural zeitgeist during their thirty years of existence. The band morphed out of a California scene around Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters, who, just as the psychedelic ‘60s really got going, had a great time traveling around the country on their Day-Glo bus scaring the children and shaking up Middle America. Kesey’s bona fides rested on his great novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cassady was intimate with Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the 1950s. Therefore, from their inception the Dead were operating in a literary-cultural milieu as much they were creating cutting-edge electric music. They and their fellow travelers were the inheritors of the Beats and other cultural nonconformists in postwar America, which, it turns out, actually is a big deal.

Musically, the Dead pioneered high improvisation in rock music (along with a few others, like their East Coast nemesis the Velvet Underground and Cream in London), and committed to it a lot longer than anyone of their generation. There are moments in the Dead’s ’73-’74 incarnation that make me think of what John Coltrane’s group would have sounded like if they played electric guitars instead of traditional jazz instruments. Those are the moments I love most—along with the outright avant garde cacophony that they also were able to conjure.

They also brought on Robert Hunter as their non-performing lyricist, which shows a certain commitment to making the words as significant as the music. It worked; they created some songwriting masterpieces (like this one) that deserve recognition beyond the Cult of the Dead.

Hunter wasn’t Jewish and his writing, masterly as it is, doesn’t have the touchstones of the Bible or semitic spirituality the way, say, Dylan’s does. Finding Jewish meaning in the lyrics depends on the interpretative skills of the listener. But I want to emphasize that I learned some Jewish lessons from the Grateful Dead experience—as opposed to exegesis of, say, “Eyes of the World” or “New Speedway Boogie.”

Here are three of those lessons:

(1) The value of spiritual transcendence.  Mickey Hart—the Jewish member of the Dead—has a great quote describing his band:  “We’re in the transportation business.” He was right: there was an invigorating energy at Dead shows for people who used music and dance as a meditative tool to leave their body behind. (Dead crowds also drew their share of religious nonconformists and outright cults.)

Where does that sense of transcendence exist in the Jewish world today? Let’s be honest: it is extremely rare in the world of mainstream synagogues, whether they’re Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or whatever. Most of those places are far too staid for worshippers to really shed their bodies for spiritual points unknown. And—let’s be real—the formal structures of Jewish prayer aren’t super-conducive to that kind of transcendence anyhow. (In a typical prayer service, there’s too much to do—voluminous prayers to recite, Torah to read, etc.—for real meditative flights of fancy to happen).  

Hasidim are better at ecstasy. But if you’re like me, their conservatism and exclusion of women from the ritual mean their shuls can’t be my permanent spiritual home, even though I enjoy visiting. So there aren’t a lot of options.

But we need that transcendence, and the failure of many western-mode shuls to cultivate it is a big part of the reason so many of those shuls are empty, especially for young people. For many young Jews, Dead shows provided a crucial spiritual option in a time and place (late 20th Century America) where opportunities were few.

It occurs to me that the absence of ecstasy is one of the primary problems of 21st century liberal synagogues and churches.

(2) Joy is the essence of life—but you gotta earn it. Dead fans did exhilaration pretty well—spinning, leaping, smiling and sharing with one another. But it always seemed to me that there was something lurking behind or beyond the image of a stoned hippie girl spinning in a circle. There was a phantom in the shadows, something dark and vaguely dangerous—after all, why do you think they called themselves the Dead??

Maybe it was all the loss that the band themselves suffered. There was some special sort of conviction—a knowing—when Garcia would step up and sing a ballad like “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” or “Black Peter” (“All of my friends come to see me last night / I was laying in my bed and dying”). Sometimes “Dark Star” would extend dissonantly out to some pretty dark and ominous seashores of the unconscious for 20 or 30 minutes… before the tide would roll back in and resolve itself with the country bounce of “Sugar Magnolia” (“Heads all empty and I don’t care”). Sugar Magnolia was pretty joyful, but often you had to earn your dancing by having made it through to the other side.

I think this is a spiritual truth that Judaism embraces, too. The Baal Shem Tov famously said, מצווה גדולה להיות בשמחה תמיד / “It is a great Mitzvah to be perpetually in a state of simcha,” but it is banal to think that simcha means “put on a happy face.” Long ago, Danny Siegel taught me that simcha can’t just mean “happy”—after all, it is a simcha to be involved in the Mitzvah of comforting mourners or burying the dead. So where is the simcha in that?

He proposed translating שמחה/simcha as “life force”; the essence of existence and being and why we were created. Therefore, anytime we are involved in a Mitzvah/primary Jewish action, we potentially connect to the Source of Being—and that is joyful, if not exactly happy.

Jewish history is filled with too much heartbreak and suffering to say, “just be happy.” But having come through the dark, bitterness, and hurt—the joy of being connected to Life is that much sweeter and more profound. You need a Dark to stick a Light into it. Death don’t have no mercy, indeed.

(3) Jewish living primarily takes place in community. אַל תִּפְרֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר said the great sage Hillel; “Do not separate yourself from the community” (Pirkei Avot 2:4). Sure, there are times when a spiritual being needs to be alone. Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav emphasized that each of his disciples needed to spend time every day in the practice of התבודדות, solitude and reflection.

But much of Judaism takes place only in a collective. Most famously, a minimum quorum of 10 adults is needed for the practice of many rituals and prayers. It’s as if to say that the fullest glorification of G-d can only take place in a spiritual partnership with one another.

The GD experience was hugely social as well. Sure, anyone can put on a pair of headphones and bliss out. But the touring and concert-going experience was almost always a group effort. I shared some of those sojourns with some of the best friends I’ll ever have, even if today they are far-flung across the country. But I’ll never forget Spring Breaks, piled into my pal Maurice’s ridiculous Country Squire station wagon, heading off for Atlanta, or Albany, or Ontario. Few Deadheads traveled to see shows by themselves.

So thanks for all this, Jerry. Even though we never met, you made a difference in my life (and so many others’). Happy birthday in the Olam Ha-ba.