A Chanukah Reflection in the Guise of a Review of the New Dylan Movie

            We spent Christmas Eve in the traditional Jewish manner: we went to the movies. And there was really only one movie I had any interest in seeing: the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which tells the story of Dylan’s arrival and departure from the Greenwich Village folk scene from 1961-1965.

            There’s a scene at the beginning of the film that reveals a lot in a very understated way. There are three characters in a hospital room in Morris Plains, New Jersey: Woody Guthrie (played by Scoot McNairy), who is dying of Huntington’s disease; his loyal friend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton); and twenty year-old Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet).[1] Dylan is singing “Song for Woody” to its namesake, his hero. It was the first great song that Dylan ever wrote.[2] The camera pans to each man’s face, and without a word of dialogue, each shot speaks volumes.

Dylan’s eyes are focused far away, on a land that only he can see, as if he knows that his musical journey will soon travel far beyond the confines of “trad. arr.” music.

Woody, devastated by illness, has a look of awe in his eyes, as if this young acolyte whom he’s just met already has absorbed all of his influence and transcended it; as if the dying legend knows that Dylan will inhabit a space towards which he could only gesture.

            And Seeger’s eyes, too, indicate that he can see where this is going. Seeger is a political radical but a cultural conservative, determinedly preserving old forms and styles. His gaze indicates that he intuits that Dylan will take Woody’s legacy to unimagined places—and yet Dylan’s progress will bring no small amount of pain and destruction in its wake, at least for those who refuse to get out of the new road if they can’t lend a hand.

            It’s all unspoken and subtle, and my interpretation may be wrong. Still, I liked the movie a lot. The 2:20 running time flies by, and it’s one of those rare films that I wished was longer. But be forewarned: the title of the movie should be a tipoff that there are no astounding revelations about Bob Dylan’s life and art here. If anything, the greatest songwriter in American history remains an enigma, even as the movie explores some important ideas.

            In fact, I’m sure the real Bob Dylan wouldn’t have it any other way. No one is a bigger liar about his past than Dylan—and I consider that to be one of the fascinating things about him. Robert Zimmerman famously arrived in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s with a new name and a farcical biography. In retrospect, his stories about hopping freight trains and joining traveling carnivals are so funny and ridiculous that it’s hard to imagine people took him seriously. But part of the folk music scene of the day was so sanctimonious that they took him at his word; after all, you can’t recognize a joke if you don’t have a sense of humor.

            To this day, Bob Dylan loves obscuring his background. His memoir Chronicles was published to great fanfare in 2004, and immediately Dylan’s biographers howled about all its distortions, inaccuracies, and outright fictions. Even more to the point, many people pointed out that the book managed to ignore many of the moments that most fans would actually be curious about! (But there sure is a lot about the Oh Mercy! sessions in 1987...!) As ever, Dylan performed a biographical sleight-of-hand and delivered only what he wanted to deliver.

            I think there’s integrity in that position. By stubbornly refusing for seven decades to reveal too much about his personal life, Dylan has just as stubbornly made his songs his definitive statement. Just think about how contrarian that is today. When “CELEBRITY” is the primary cultural value in our world—far more than “ART”—then the art simply becomes saleable product. The TikTok revelations of today’s “influencers” who want to tell you all their private thoughts, likes and dislikes, political views, and fashions preempt creating anything in particular. Or, more to the point: THEY have become the product, more than their creations.

            This has never been a problem with Bob Dylan. He flees from making his biography the focal point, so much so that even the most dogged biographers can’t really keep track of how many times he’s been married or how many children he has.  He is the anti-celebrity in an age when Nothing is Private. And—in a postmodern twist—that attitude has made him one of the most famous performers in the world. Crazy.

            So A Complete Unknown is decidedly not history—and I don’t think that mitigates the movie. Much of it is terrific. The key performance at the heart of the film is stellar: Timothee Chalamet is just superb. He looks and sounds just like a youthful Bob Dylan without seeming forced or self-conscious at all.

            Other aspects of the movie are less satisfying. Some of the supporting characters are flat and one-dimensional. The weakest part is the romance with Dylan’s first “true love of mine,” Suze Rotolo. Her character is far enough removed from the real Suze that the filmmakers had the courtesy to change her name. (They call her “Sylvie,” which is a nice allusion to the old-world folk scene represented by the Lead Belly song, “Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy.”) The real Suze Rotolo was a sophisticated and worldly denizen of the cultural and civil rights scene in Greenwich Village, but in the film she is basically a jilted lover who spends most of her scenes on the verge of tears.

            Joan Baez gets slightly better treatment. She was a star before Dylan and jumpstarted his career when he needed it. Monica Barbaro does a fine job portraying Baez, and again the musical performances are impeccable (although Baez’s music is much less interesting than Dylan’s). Still, the real Joan Baez has much more gravitas than her onscreen character, and in the film she’s largely reduced to being the “other woman” in a love triangle. I imagine that the real Joan isn’t too thrilled with this movie.

            The biggest liberties in the film concern elevating Pete Seeger as the full-fledged second protagonist in the story. Again, the performance is fantastic: Ed Norton completely inhabits Seeger’s persona, with its contradictory aspects of Pete’s inherent decency and goodness, passionate love for tradition, and egoless support of artists who deserve recognition alongside his flashes of anger, frustration, and self-doubt.  There’s a grain of truth in the way their relationship is presented, but it’s also a convenient ruse for the filmmakers to set up Seeger as Dylan’s foil. He is an emblem of the old-world folk scene that Dylan quickly found stifling, but I sense that Pete didn’t loom as large in Dylan’s life as he does in the film.

II.

            What’s missing is Dylan’s Judaism, which, in my viewing, received a nanosecond of screentime. The scene is a house party at Sylvie’s place, where Dylan has been crashing. Someone spots his old Minnesota yearbook and some other memorabilia and says, “His name is Zimmerman?” The scrapbook seems to be open to a few photos of teenage friends at summer camp. Yes: Camp Herzl, where Dylan learned about Judaism and Zionism. It goes by in a flash; I’ll have to freeze the scene when it’s available to stream to see if my suspicions are confirmed. But nothing else in the film alludes to his Jewish identity.

            That doesn’t bother me much. At this time in his life, Dylan was obscuring everything about his past.

            But in a world where there are scores of Dylan biographies, critical analyses, and annual scholarly seminars, it’s important to note how Dylan’s Jewish identity is constantly shortchanged. Perhaps that’s because so many Dylanologists aren’t Jewish themselves, so they miss that essential feature in his make-up.

            That’s why Louie Kemp’s 2019 biography Dylan & Me a is so important. Kemp has the advantage over other Dylan biographers of actually being an intimate friend of the artist. Kemp was a childhood pal and a recurring figure in most of Dylan’s life: he was there for Dylan’s teenage “first public performance” at Camp Herzl, he was a producer on the barnstorming Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan was best man at Louie’s wedding—and his frozen fish business even catered The Last Waltz! Kemp is also a baal teshuvah who takes his Judaism seriously—and has shared many Jewish moments with Dylan. His book is important because it fills in this dimension of Dylan’s character where every other biography falls short. (Louie Kemp made Aliyah in the summer of 2024 in a show of solidarity while Jewish people were under attack. When asked if he has family in Israel, Kemp answered, “I have 7 million family members in Israel.” Kemp is a mensch.)

III.

            The essential conflict at the heart of A Complete Unknown is centered on that lefty cultural and political scene of the early ‘60s, indeed a portentous moment in U.S. history. There’s no wonder that a young Dylan was drawn there. He was in love with songs, the “Old, Weird America” that murmured beneath the surface of “official” post-War history, as recorded by hillbilly and blues performers. Dylan was already a walking encyclopedia of that secret history.

            But the folk scene was also stifling. One thing that comes through loud and clear in Chronicles is how nauseating Dylan finds the idea of being called the “voice of a generation.” He devotes significant space to saying, essentially, who the hell would want to be the “voice” of anyone’s generation?!  He has an ornery streak—a need to do the opposite of people’s expectations—which I’ve written about elsewhere and which I personally find appealing.

            In the movie, we see how the folkies’ embrace starts with warmth but soon becomes suffocating. “Blowing in the Wind” is a revelation when Suze/Sylvie first hears it. But soon everyone was solemnly intoning it like scripture, especially the humorless Peter, Paul and Mary who drove it to the top of the charts. So the expectation was that he would continue to rewrite such anthems for pious liberals, as they nodded and stroked their goatees.

            But Dylan always was more than that. At one point in the film, he warms to a TV appearance of Little Richard, his teenage favorite, before the Seeger-character shuts it off, as if rock and roll was beneath them. (The fact that Little Richard and Chuck Berry were African-American, and that early rock was as Black as folk music, raises interesting questions whether or not the folkies, for all their activism, were really more racially enlightened than other music scenes in the 60s.) The Beatles don’t appear in the movie at all, but in real life, hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time was, for Dylan, a revelation opening up entire realms. Rock was open-ended, anarchic, and filled with possibilities; folk was orthodox and governed by rules and hierarchies.

            The film’s climax is the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, where Dylan showed up with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band behind him, a mixed-race electric group with the great Jewish guitarist Mike Bloomfield playing icepick leads. The conservative curators of the festival freaked. So did many fans. (The film conflates the events of Newport with the drama in Manchester, UK from the following year, where an outraged folkie yelled “Judas!” at Dylan, the Jew on the stage.) In real life, after Dylan’s scorching three songs, a desperate Peter Yarrow returned to the stage, coaxing “Bobby” back out, “This time with an acoustic guitar.”

            What A Complete Unknown is really about is: the fight for an artist to be true to himself, and to prevail over the stifling orthodoxies where “everybody wants you to be just like them.” That is much easier said than done. We’d still be talking about Bob Dylan today even if he never left the rarified air of the folk scene—I mean, he’d be immortal for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” alone. But we wouldn’t be talking about a once-in-a-lifetime artist who upset established pieties and pushed boundaries. Instead, he’d be remembered as one who stayed in his lane and wrote anthems of validation for people who were already believers.

IV.

So, Chanukah. Does the timing of the movie’s release shed any light on Chanukah this year? I think it does.

“Civilization looked at Jewish difference and said, “Really, how is it that you are still here?””

Chanukah celebrates the world’s oldest fight for religious freedom. The Maccabees fought against the anti-Jewish edicts of Antiochus IV and his regime. But the bigger backdrop of the Chanukah story is the world of Hellenization.  Greek clothes, Greek philosophy, the gymnasium, the celebration of the human body… this was the cultural zeitgeist of the era. Greek civilization was seductive for everyone, including the people of Judea.

The first meaning of the Chanukah battle is: the right to be a Jew in the face of overwhelming opposition—against political persecution, sure; but also against a raging cultural tide that mocks our values. In the Maccabees’ time—quite like today—civilization looked at Jewish difference and said, “Really, how is it that you are still here?”

Sometimes that that opposition was expressed as oppression. Sometimes it was expressed with excessive love. (Yes, there are those out there who will love you to death. Just ask Bob Dylan.)

At the heart of freedom is the freedom to be different, to go against the grain. Freedom includes the assumption that the majority is not always, or even often, right.

That may sound platitudinous. I don’t mean to say that all forms of cultural assimilation are wrong. Obviously there are elements of secular society that we accept into our lives. After the Chanukah revolution, Jews became free to experiment with Hellenism, to figure out for themselves what aspects of assimilation made their cultural identity stronger, versus those aspects that merely diluted their Jewishness away. (After his electric revolution, Bob Dylan would return to folk music forms throughout his career—but on his own terms.)

That ancient challenge recurs in every generation. That is the Chanukah battle yet to be won.

Especially in the past year, Jews have felt this tension. Everywhere since Oct. 7—in the press, in social media, and especially on America’s disgraced college campuses—we have slanders thrown in our faces. “We’re not antisemitic,” the world keeps telling us, “we just hate Zionism”—as if the impulse for peoplehood and building up our homeland were somehow separate from authentic Judaism. And we’ve spent an enormous amount of capital trying to defend ourselves, explain our positions, build bridges.

Perhaps it is time for Jews—especially young Jews—to realize that there is something fundamentally countercultural about Judaism. For all our efforts to explain our story, and Israel’s, more cogently and directly, for all our efforts to conform and adapt and build coalitions, we should recognize the places where we embrace “the dignity of difference” (in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s phrase). Being true to one’s self and one’s people can be challenging and occasionally painful. Periodically someone may howl “Judas!”—or worse—in your face on your way across the quad.

But in the end, the Chanukah struggle for integrity—to “know my song well before I start singing”—is worth every tear. Just ask Bob Dylan.

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[1] The scene is a fiction. Of course Dylan famously did visit Woody’s bedside and sing Guthrie’s songs to him, but there is no indication that these three men were ever there alone together.

[2] More precisely, “Song to Woody” is the first great lyric that Dylan set to music; the melody is Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre.”

Rags and Bones: Remembering Robbie Robertson

The death of Jaime Robbie Robertson this week had lots of baby-boomers-and-people-who-love-them returning to some of his classic songs with The Band: “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Chest Fever,” and so on.

For me, I went back to a song of Robbie’s that appeared on one of The Band’s lesser-known, later efforts:  “Rags and Bones,” from their 1975 album Northern Lights—Southern Cross:

Catch a taxi to the fountainhead
Blinking neon penny arcade
A young Caruso on the fire escape
Painted face ladies on parade

The newsboy on the corner
Singing out headlines
And a fiddler selling pencils
The sign reads: Help the blind

Coming up the lane callin’;
Working while the rain’s falling
Ragman, your song of the street
Keeps haunting my memory…

“Rags and Bones” evokes an immigrant saga in the New World at the turn of the 20th century. It could be one of many North American cities, although in this case it happens to be Toronto. And it’s significant because it’s as close as Robbie Robertson ever got to really exploring his Jewish roots with The Band, a motley assemblage some of the most important musicians of the rock era.

For those who don’t share my obsessions, here’s a quick background. In the late 1950s—really at the dawn of rock and roll—a teenage Robbie Robertson joined up with a Canadian rockabilly group called Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks, where he quickly became not only a skilled lead guitarist, but also a prolific songwriter. The group traveled around North America, where they became intimately familiar with indigenous American music (including rock, country, and blues) and indigenous American dysfunction (racism).

But their immortality came from hooking up with Bob Dylan, providing the electric backing for him in 1965 and in his world-changing tour of 1966. After that, they moved to Woodstock and, under the very democratic moniker “The Band”, began producing some of the greatest music of the 1960s.

The rest of the story of The Band is important: Watkins Glen in 1973 with the Dead and the Allman Brothers, the largest rock concert of all time; the barnstorming 1974 tour with Dylan; the tragic self-induced chemical hell that consumed so many of the generation, including Band members Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. And of course the legendary “final show” on Thanksgiving Day 1976 that was filmed as The Last Waltz. But those are just the broad outlines.

Robbie Robertson is never included in those perennial lists of “Jews in Rock.” His songwriting, incredibly rich as it is, rarely has allusions to Judaism or the Bible beyond its mythic status. (There are exceptions, like “Daniel and the Sacred Harp.” Although I’ve read that Robertson insisted that the line “I pulled into Nazareth” in “The Weight” refers to Nazareth, Pennsylvania.) But it’s noteworthy just how many Jewish musicians were part of Dylan’s revolutionary mid-60s scene, including Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and Harvey Brooks (who still advertises his services as a music teacher in Jerusalem).

As Robbie Robertson tells it, his mother Dolly was Mohawk, and he spent part of his Canadian childhood on the Six Nations Reservation where she had grown up. The man whom young Robbie was told was his father was named Jim Robertson, an alcoholic who abused Robbie and his mother. Eventually Dolly and Jim split up.

It was a few years later in late adolescence that Robbie discovered the identity of his real father: a man named Alexander David Klegerman, a Toronto hustler and gambler and the child of Jewish immigrants, who had fallen in love with Robbie’s mother. Alex was apparently a pretty sketchy figure. Long before Robbie’s maturation, he was killed in a hit-and-run, which was rumored on the streets not to have been an accident.

Robbie learned this from his uncles Morrie and Natie Klegerman, Jewish underworld figures who took a liking to the kid. In his 2016 autobiography Testimony, Robbie wrote about regular trips to the heart of Toronto’s Jewish neighborhood, and how even though it was completely different from his upbringing in the suburbs or on the reservation, it struck something deep in his soul.

The most Jewish event in Testimony occurs when Morrie and Natie take teenage Robbie to meet his paternal grandfather for the first time. Shmuel Chaim Klegerman was a devout Yiddish-speaking Jew. Robbie describes their introduction this way:

The old man trembled with emotion. He put his hand on his chest and lowered his head as if in prayer. Then slowly he raised his eyes to look at me, a combination of joy and sorrow on his face. I felt frozen in the moment as he studied me, searching, I’m sure, for traces of his departed son. He gave a nod of recognition and a tear rolled down his cheek.

Then he spoke in English. “Alex was my favorite. Your father was my favorite.” I managed a slight smile in acknowledgement before glancing at Natie with sympathy, concerned he’d be upset by his father’s stark favoritism, but he waved it off—as if it didn’t bother him in the least. He signaled for me to join them. I walked over and took both their outreached hands, profoundly moved by the whole experience. But though I knew Natie meant for it to bring me closer, in this strange new world I still couldn’t help feeling like an outsider. (Robbie Robertson, Testimony, p.66)

His Uncle Natie said, “Well, Jaime, how about that? I bet you didn’t know you were Jewish.”

Again, this background doesn’t make Robbie Robertson a “Jewish songwriter.” But it seems important to me that someone who spent so much time exploring the mythology of America in his writing has a strong fiber of Judaism running through his makeup.

In the liner notes to Northern Lights—Southern Cross, Robbie recalled Old Toronto (again, in language that could just as well describe Old Boston, or Newark, or Baltimore, or a dozen other places in the New World):

People would come from the old country that were intellectuals and scholars… I had a grandfather who was one of these people. He was an intellectual but he made his living in Toronto as a rag man. I remember as a little kid, there was a lane behind our home and I remember hearing this guy coming up the land singing this song ‘Rags and bones, old iron.”

…As a kid, there was something a little scary about this. Then, years later finding out that it had a connection to my heritage inspired me to write this song.

The song was “Rags and Bones,” with its refrain:

Keep haunting my memory
Music in the air
I hear it everywhere
Rags, bones, and old city songs

One of Robbie Robertson’s gifts is to remind us that the collective culture we call “Americana” is a polyglot of immigrant stories—including the stories of transplanted Jews. Like Philip Roth—and, for that matter, Bob Dylan—Robbie Robertson’s legacy is much bigger than “Jewish writing.” But his (North) American writing includes Judaism in its DNA, an important acknowledgment that our presence here is as authentic and distinct as anyone else’s. And, for that matter, it reminds us that to begin to understand “America” includes understanding the story of the Jewish experience here.

That was one of his blessings to us—alongside some of the most immortal songs of the century.
!יהי זכרו ברוך

Image: Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson, Forest Hills, New York, 1965 © Daniel Kramer

Why Do Parents Cry When Their Children Leave for College?

The Talmud (Shabbat 151b-152a) recognizes that people cry different types of tears. There are tears of sorrow and pain, of relief and catharsis. According to the Talmud, some kinds of weeping are beneficial and some are not.

Today, as Heidi and I bring our oldest child to his first year of college, the Rabbis’ observation seems especially insightful. Of course we are tearful. But we are well aware that there are many reasons why parents may cry when their children leave for college.

Some parents may cry because of the realization that their family structure will now be different. Sure, their son or daughter will return home in the future, even many times, but with less and less frequency as the years pass. And inevitably the day will come when their parents’ house is no longer what their children mean when they say the word “home.”

Some parents may be drawn back to the hopes and dreams and promises they made when their child arrived eighteen-or-so years ago, when life was nothing but potential waiting to be realized. And we may think about how wildly divergent life’s path actually turned out to be.

Some may weep because of the realization that time passes so quickly, and that the sweet toddler who reached for your hand is now, all too suddenly, an adult. 

Some may cry because of undifferentiated longing for their child. That is to say, their tears are not for their child’s new beginnings, but because of the loss of the parent’s own youth.

And some tears come from a new vulnerability, a realization that we can’t be there to shield and process and interpret every challenge, failure, and risk that our children are about to discover. When we discover how vulnerable we really are, the tone of our prayers changes, as Dylan identified so perfectly:

My only prayer
is if I can’t be there
Lord protect my child.

And then there is the sensation of wanting just a little bit more time. There’s a great joke from The Simpsons about the last day of school: As the last bell rings, the children leap for the door and the freedom of the summer. Then a teacher exclaims, “WAIT! You didn’t learn about how World War II ended!” The students freeze. The teacher peers into a book. “We won!” The students shout “Hooray!” and now, fully satiated with the teacher’s wisdom, can enjoy their vacation. 

I know the teacher’s feeling. As we drive away from the university, the car one seat emptier, I want to hit the brakes and say, “WAIT! There’s still something I haven’t taught you!”

But that moment is gone. What we hope for, of course, is that our children leave home with the spiritual and emotional confidence to navigate life’s inevitable disappointments and challenges. We hope that they have pride in their Jewish identity, and the knowledge that the prerequisite of functioning in a multicultural society is an assurance of yourself and where you come from.

But we also hope for something more than pride: We hope that we have given them literacy in Jewish wisdom and competence in Jewish practice to allow Judaism to inform and deepen their lives every single day. We hope that we have encouraged them to develop unquenchably thirsty minds built upon a solid bedrock of faith.

The Talmud understood that tears are complex, and the mixture of many conflicting emotions at the same time is what all of life’s most poignant moments are about. As a strange city recedes in the car’s rearview mirror and we return home, we appreciate the complexity of those feelings. We’re full of confidence, pride, and excitement for new beginnings. And we utter a short prayer, perhaps the most honest and basic prayer that there is: “God, protect our child.”

Bob Dylan's "Trouble No More: 1979-1981": Understanding an American Apikoros

I.  Carrying a Light Bulb

The official release of Bob Dylan’s “Gospel Shows” is bringing a lot of people back to a time when, for them, the ‘60s counterculture really died. Here was Dylan—Hebrew name, Shabtai Zissel ben Avraham—singing songs of born again Christian faith, the glories of being saved by Christ, and condemning the unbelievers of Sodom. From 1979-1981 he released a triptych of albums of these songs—Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love—and, starting in November 1979, would only perform songs in concert that reflected his newfound covenant with God.  In so doing, a lot of old fans ran for the hills.

Dylan—that is, Robert Alan Zimmerman—had a Jewish upbringing in Hibbing, Minnesota. His parents were American-born children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He trained for his bar mitzvah with Rabbi Reuben Maier in the rabbi’s apartment above a local café (his father later related that Bob showed great proficiency with Hebrew). He attended Camp Herzl, a Jewish and Zionist summer camp in Wisconsin, during his teen years.

The release of these Gospel Shows (and it’s momentous; I’ve been waiting for the so-called “Bootleg Series” to get around to this era) raises again questions that dogged music fans back then: What happened to America’s greatest songwriter in the late ‘70s? How could Jewish fans listen? And as for these songs of heavenly salvation—what the hell?

I’ll offer one fan’s interpretation. I’ve never met Bob Dylan, so I may be way off base. But I’ve read many biographies and interviews of the man, and more importantly, I’ve tried to pay close attention to every note of his recorded oeuvre (and many bootlegs, which are essential for understanding Dylan’s art).

Dylan himself can be hard to trust when it comes talking about himself or his music. While there are many pearls in his autobiography Chronicles, some reviewers noted that he totally avoided writing about the moments that most people would actually be interested in. In the ‘60s, his press conferences were a hoot—because most journalists were totally clueless about his efforts to bring poetry and art to popular music, he messed with them:

Interviewer:  What is your real message?
Bob Dylan:  My real message? Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.

He tends to speak in parables, especially when he’s feeling like a trapped animal. I imagine he felt that way through much of the ‘60s, but it persisted in the subsequent decades. For instance, in 1991 he was presented with a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement. I suspect that Dylan recognized the Grammys for what they were:  hollow trophies given out by self-congratulatory ghouls from the music business, and “lifetime achievement” is even worse—what they give you when they acknowledge that your relevance is long past, and that if you’d just hurry up and die they can start reshaping your legacy to fit their own preconceptions. So Dylan—50 years old—slithered to the podium and virtually spoke in tongues, as far as the corporate throng was concerned.

Well, um… uh, yeah. Well my daddy, he didn’t leave me too much. My daddy once said to me… [looooooong uncomfortable pause. Nervous laughter from everyone. Security puts their hands on their holsters.] Well he said so many things, y’know?  [laughter] 

He said, son, it is possible for you to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways. Thank you.

Add to his list of accomplishments: the best awards speech ever.

But in that speech (and its allusion to Psalm 27:10), which is a total fiction (Abe Zimmerman said no such thing) and a dodge (please get me off this godforsaken stage), there is also a great reveal: a desperate statement from a man “so defiled” who has been to hell and back, including the depths of alcoholism. And who believes in salvation—but only from an external force, a rock of ages.

II.  Apikoros

To understand Dylan’s gospel years, one has to understand that he has never been halfhearted with his art. When he commits to a guise, he dives in completely. I believe that Dylan was a true believer during these years. It proved short-lived and eventually he resumed performing non-Christian-themed songs (“Thank God,” said many old fans), but from 1979-1981 he was sincere in his devotion.

I sense that Dylan has a streak in him that makes him say, “You think you can put me in a box? Why should I be what you want me to be?” I find this orneriness to be very appealing—perhaps because I have some of  it myself. He devotes a lot of space in Chronicles to spitting with disgust when people tried to call him the “Voice of the Generation” of the ‘60’s. Who in hell, he asks, would want to be anyone’s “voice of the generation”? For a long time he was publicly putting down people who would pin a label on him—surely that’s what “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Positively Fourth Street” (“You’ve got a lot of nerve / to say you are my friend…”) are about?  And in case there was any doubt, there was “Idiot Wind,” the most vicious put-down song ever:

Even you, yesterday, you had to ask me where it was at
I couldn’t believe, after all these years, you didn’t know me better than that, sweet lady

A recap of Dylan’s career shows this bait-and-switch. He’d adopt a certain style, and throw himself into it completely. He’d write such compelling music in that mode that fans would hop on board. Then, abruptly, he would discard that mode for another one… enraging those who thought they had embraced the “real Dylan.”

In Judaism, this is called being an apikoros—as close a word to “heretic” that we have. But we have a funny relationship with our apikorsim. Some of them are some of the most important Jews in history.

So in 1961 he shows up in New York completely enamored with Woody Guthrie’s Americana: work shirt, acoustic guitar, and hokey humor (to make sophisticated points about the human condition) intact. From there was an evolution to the coffee houses of Greenwich Village, hanging with Joan Baez and Dave van Ronk, and singing at the 1963 March on Washington for Martin Luther King.

The insular folk scene was so self-righteous and cocksure that to leave it was an act of blasphemy. So when Dylan showed up at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a raucous electric band, whomping out songs of surreal poetry, the self-appointed gatekeepers revolted. Pete Seeger tried to cut the electric cords with an ax. Peter Yarrow, the distressed master of ceremonies, tried to nudge “Bobby” back out for an encore… “This time with an acoustic guitar.”

That’s what Dylan left behind when he started his barnburning world tour of 1966 with his electric band The Hawks. But the folkies wouldn’t let it go. Some fans embraced this loud electric rock, but the old timers booed, and slow-clapped between songs. The zenith was in Manchester, England, when, just before the band tore into “Like a Rolling Stone,” a distressed old folkie had enough. “Judas!” he howled at the Jew standing on stage.

But the heckler was already a fossil. Dylan had recorded three electric albums that made him a hero to new rock counterculture. And we know what Dylan thinks about heroes, right?

So he retreated. After touring the world as one of the biggest and loudest rock acts… he shut up, and disappeared for 1967 and its hallucinatory Summer of Love. When he emerged, it was in a new guise: Country Bob, singing on the Johnny Cash show, and recording with Nashville session pros. Gone were the amphetamine screeds of 1965. And the counterculture was pissed. In 1971 Dylan released Self Portrait, two records of country songs and covers, and Greil Marcus opened his famous review of the album in Rolling Stone with the words, “What is this shit?”

Country music at the turn of the ‘70s was not the sterile commodity that it would become. It represented the antithesis of the ‘60s counterculture; the enemy of the hippies and all they stood for. Again, Dylan had adopted the pose of the heretic. He was saying, again, to his fans:  You really want to follow me? Well, let’s see if you’ll follow me here…

For all its integrity, this does show a rather perverse relationship with his audience, to say the least.

In the mid-70s, his star was ascendant again.  He reunited with The Band, and through 1974 performed the highest-grossing rock tour of all time. He made hugely well-received albums that reflected his mastery of the ‘70s singer-songwriter convention. By 1978 was performing a 115-date world tour with a big band, full of horns and back-up singers.  

But his was a tormented soul, and it was time for another sharp turn.

III.  Dylan & Religion

One other thing before we approach the Gospel Years. Religion—the Bible, specifically—has always been part of Dylan’s neshama.  Christopher Ricks has written an excruciating treatise on this, but I can add one or two points minus all his exegesis.

Dylan knows the Bible backwards and forwards; it pops up when you least expect it. There are moments like the “slain by a cane/Cain” line in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” for instance. But—hands up—how many people know the title of “Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35” (“everybody must get stoned!”) comes from Proverbs 27:15?

An endless dripping on a rainy day
And a contentious wife are alike

But I like to think that even in his early days, Dylan was attracted to the Old-Time Religion of America, the kind that includes periodic Great Awakenings and embraces Jonathan “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards, Jefferson’s Bible, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dorothy Day, and the apocalpyticism of bluesman Blind Willie Johnson. These were all forms of a distinctly American faith.

Even a Jew like Dylan—even a Jew like me—can love Woody Guthrie’s version of Jesus Christ. For Woody, this was the true Jesus:

Jesus Christ was a man that traveled through the land
A hard working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your money to the poor,"
So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

And:

This song was made in New York City
Of rich men and preachers and slaves
If Jesus was to preach like he preached in Galilee
They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave. 

Amen, selah, and tell me that those lines aren’t even more prophetic in Trump’s America than they were back in Woody’s dust bowl days?

It’s not hard to imagine a young Dylan absorbing the lessons, and assimilating them into the work.

IV.  Saved

With that background, I think there are three parts to understanding Dylan’s embrace of a born-again Christianity in 1979.

First:  As we’ve seen, it follows his pattern. When his fan base becomes enormous, he suddenly takes a sharp turn, shaking off fans who feel “betrayed” by his “heretical” embrace of something new, often the polar opposite of where he’s been.

Second:  Dylan is a polyglot of American music. He’s been an authentic purveyor of Woody Guthriesque Americana, protest folk, delta blues, electric rock, straight-up country, bluegrass, and, since 2011, jazz standards and the Great American Songbook. Since he’s embraced virtually every indigenous form of American music, it would be strange if he didn’t explore gospel music.

And when he explores something, he gets completely immersed in it. (In 2003 he wrote the song “’Cross the Green Mountain” for the Civil War movie Gods and Generals. They say he spent days in the New York Public Library researching the Civil War to get the lyrics just right.)

Third:  None of this is to say that his religious conversion, even though it was short-lived, wasn’t authentic. I believe that he believed.

With an increasingly jaundiced eye he surveyed the music business of the ‘70s. Drugs and decadence were everywhere. He’d been living this life for a while. And he was living in Malibu, where friends and acquaintances were receding into their own chemical hells (see under: The Band).

Furthermore, his marriage to Sara Lowndes had collapsed. They had been together since the ‘60s, and with Sara he had five kids and fled the turbulent “Judas!” years to a farmhouse in Woodstock. He wrote love songs to their family on New Morning, grieved their break-up on Blood on the Tracks, celebrated their reconciliation on Desire and its song “Sara,” and ultimately the whole thing went south. 

So picture the man’s state of mind: exhausted, divorced, cynical, burnt-out.

The story goes that several of his backing musicians were already born again, and his interest was piqued by their religious discipline during the ’78 tour. And then there’s this incident from the end of the tour, San Diego, November 17, 1979:

Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd… knew I wasn’t feeling too well. I think they could see that. And they threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, “I gotta pick that up.” So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket… And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona… I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. I said, “Well, I need something tonight.” I didn’t know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, “I need something tonight that I didn’t have before.”  And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.[1] 

At 38 years old, Shabtai Zissel met Jesus.  

V.  The Music

So what about the music? 

It’s electrifying. Listening to the Gospel Shows reminds you that, at many points through his six decades of performing, Dylan is one of the greatest performers—and yes, one of our greatest singers. The opening cut was “Slow Train,” and it is amazing to hear the singer so engaged and so committed to every syllable that comes out of his mouth.

He’s also got a whip-tight band to ride this particular train. So it’s clear that finding religion was the jolt this particular artist needed at this moment in his life—the intensity of “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Solid Rock” and “Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” rival the power of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Like a Rolling Stone” from ’66, only this time no one had the chutzpah to yell “Judas!”

The quieter moments when he’s not preaching, but rather sharing his relationship with God—“Precious Angel,” “Pressing On,” “I Believe in You”—are as intimate a portrait of faith that any artist has ever shared. Even if, like me, you don’t share this specific vocabulary—Jesus is not my savior—there’s inspiration to be found in his inspiration.

My favorite song from this period is a late arrival, 1981’s “Every Grain of Sand.” Here’s a song of faith that Jew can approach without reservation: there’s no intermediary, just a very transcendent God who has ordained everything in Creation. It starts from the deepest depths of loneliness and despair:

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

 And then revelation that everything is the way it is meant to be:

Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand

Those words still give me chills, on the 1000th time I’ve heard them:  “…every hair is numbered…” They remind me of a story about Rav Kook that’s told in A Tzaddik in Our Time, the classic biography of Rabbi Aryeh Levin:

We chatted together on themes of Torah study… He went out, as his hallowed custom was, to stroll a bit in the fields and gather his thoughts; and I went along. On the way I plucked some branch or flower. [Rav Kook] was taken aback; and then he told me gently, “Believe me: In all my days I have taken care never to pluck a blade of grass or a flower needlessly, when it had the ability to grow or blossom. You know the teaching of the Sages that there is not a single blade of grass below, here on earth, which does not have a heavenly force (or angel) above telling it, ‘Grow!’ Every sprout and leaf of grass says something, conveys some meaning. Every stone whispers some inner hidden message in the silence. Every creation utters its song.”

VI. Still on the Road

When Dylan released an album in 1983 entitled Infidels, fans and ex-fans prepared for more of the same. As it turned out, there was still plenty of apocalypse to go around: “Jokerman” has dense imagery invoking the Book of Revelations, and the refrain of “Man of Peace,” is a paraphrase of 2 Corinthians (“Sometimes Satan / comes as a man of peace.”) And there was a cover photo (taken by Sara Lowndes of all people!) of Dylan crouched on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. But there were respites from the fire and brimstone as well. 

In concert, he started backing off from the preaching. He started mixing in his older numbers. His faith seemed to have ebbed.

Then something funny happened: Dylan started sounding Jewish again. He was reported to be hanging out with Lubavitcher chasidim, and performed on a televised Chabad telethon (grinning, with a kippah on his head). In September 1983, he was photographed celebrating his son Jesse’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. In September 1987, he brought along Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Roger McGuinn for concerts in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Was Shabtai Zissel back?

In a 1983 interview he said:

Roots, man—we’re talking about Jewish roots, you want to know more? Check on Elijah the prophet. He could make rain. Isaiah the prophet, even Jeremiah, see if their brethren didn’t want to bust their brains for telling it right like it is, yeah—these are my roots, I suppose.

Then he immediately qualified that search for his roots:

Am I looking for them?... I ain’t looking for them in synagogues, with six-pointed Egyptian stars shining down from every window, I can tell you that much.

So he’s never going to be what you want him to be. You might want him to be the old folkie that he was in his 20s; someone else might want him to sing “Forever Young” every night; I might wish he were more unequivocal about his Judaism. But the artist forges his own path, never tiring of wishing restless farewells to those who want to define him.

And you gotta admit, there’s a lot of integrity in that stance. He may be an apikoros, but he’s a damn righteous one.

[1] Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades—Take Two, 2000, p.491

Neil Young, Dylan, Stones, McCartney: Divest from Roger Waters!

Over the past few weeks, several of the world’s most venerable rock and roll acts—Neil Young, The Who, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan—posted vaguely enigmatic videos on their social media pages, culminating with the single word:  “OCTOBER.”

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the enigmatic teasers that came after the credits of many Marvel superhero movies—Captain America, Thor, Iron Man—in recent years; quirky epilogues that announced The Avengers, the blockbuster that would gather all these good guys together.

Well, the rock enigma wasn’t hidden for long. Quicker than you can say, “Old white guys, assemble!” it was revealed that in October rock’s Avengers will appear at a three day festival in Indio, California, on the same site where the annual Coachella Festival takes place. The organizers are calling the festival “Desert Trip,” although wags in the media have dubbed it “Oldchella.”  Unlike Coachella, which generally promotes artists who haven’t been featured on the cover of AARP Magazine, this festival will star six artists (all male, all white) who have been around since rock’s early days: The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Who (well, two of ‘em), Neil Young, and Roger Waters.

Which of these is not like the others? Clearly, it’s Waters, the former member of Pink Floyd who for the past 20 years has made headlines for two things: endlessly recycling his morose 1979 album The Wall and his visceral hatred for the State of Israel.

The five other acts all have Israel connections. Dylan, most notably, has sung of Israel’s challenges (“Neighborhood Bully”) and performed there on several occasions (I saw him on a soccer field in Beersheva in 1993!). McCartney defied BDS threats and played Israel in 2008. Neil Young performed in Israel in 1993, and was scheduled to play in the summer of 2014, before Operation Protective Edge made unfeasible the idea of a large outdoor rock concert in the shadow of Hamas missiles. He regretfully cancelled and promised he’d be back.

The Stones played a triumphant show in 2014, with Mick Jagger spouting Hebrew phrases to the crowd, including, “Chag Shavuot Samayach!” (The festival of Shavuot had ended at sundown the night of the concert.) According to their guitarist Ronnie Wood, the inspiration to perform in Israel came from Dylan himself, who gushed about how much he enjoyed playing there.

The Who never performed in Israel, but Pete Townshend visited the country in 1966, and apparently it made a deep impact on him. The experience inspired him to compose a dense allegory called “Rael” for The Who’s third album, and in the recent past Townshend has made clear his support for the Jewish State. 

Then there’s Roger Waters. While the others vie for the throne of King of Rock and Roll, he seems to want to be its Grand Wizard. For years, Waters has been at the forefront of the BDS movement, the pernicious anti-Israel crusade that urges cultural, academic, and business boycotts of Israel exclusively. Waters does not make the case for a just reconciliation of Israelis and Palestinians nor does he argue for a two-state solution. He has not articulated what the endgame of divestment from Israel should be.  (In fairness, Waters did perform a concert at Neve Shalom in 2006. Since then, however, he has exclusively attacked Israel for the conflict.)

Waters—and BDS in general—is notorious for failing to see any nuance in the incredibly complex Israeli-Palestinian situation. Especially in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, and an ever-growing list of Western cities, one might think that people could empathize with Israel’s challenges on her own borders. But if anything, Waters’s obsession with Israel as the world’s ultimate human rights abuser has ossified.

Nuance is the key. Is it impossible—especially for an artist—to recognize that there are two conflicting narratives? Is it incomprehensible for Roger Waters, whose English childhood was devastated by World War II, to sympathize with the Jewish need for a safe haven in their historical home? I, for one, believe in the just cause of a two-state solution and I can hear the authentic narrative of the Palestinian people… but, Roger, what about Hamas and Hezbollah?

Although Waters, like other BDS activists, protests that he’s not an anti-Semite, the evidence seems to indicate otherwise. For instance, when he toured The Wall in Europe and North America in 2010-2011, an animated film accompanying the song “Goodbye Blue Sky” showed Jewish stars morphing into dollar signs—one of the most constant and established stereotypes against Jews. And on his otherwise forgotten 1992 album Amused to Death, Waters compared Jews (Jews, not Israelis—not that it matters) to Nazis.

This is not a voice of peace. It’s a voice that guarantees future cycles of hatred, violence, and war.

Messrs. Young, McCartney, Dylan, Jagger, Richards, Townshend, and Daltrey: Divest from Roger Waters! He doesn’t belong on your stage! And I’m sure there are plenty of dad-rock performers who would be thrilled to fill in for him:

How about Bruce? He’ll fit in perfectly with your demographic—and he’s rumored to be playing in Israel this summer. (You can compare your favorite falafel joints!)

Or maybe Bobby Weir and whichever incarnation of the Dead he’s got touring this fall? You know that they’ll bring their own audience with them. (I’ve got a vinyl copy of Blues for Allah with lyrics in Hebrew, English, Arabic, and Farsi, a nice gesture towards peace.)

Or how about Eric Clapton—surely his number is in your contacts? (He played Sultan’s Pool in Jerusalem in 1989.)

Any of these alter rockers play the sort of music that will bring out the dads and their Platinum Cards in throngs—and without the anti-Semitism! Please: you can perform this gig without Roger Waters, who clearly stands for very different values than you do.

And if you can’t ditch him… how about adding a second series of shows in Park HaYarkon?