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

Happy 80th Birthday in the Next World, Jerry Garcia: Three Jewish Things I Learned from the Grateful Dead

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.

Miles Davis and the Art of Living

Miles Davis (1926-1991) was one of the most important American musicians of all time—completely reinventing musical categories three or four times over during his turbulent career. Here’s the opening track of his 1971 album A Tribute to Jack Johnson, called “Right Off”:

Miles was a great trumpeter, but he was even more important as a bandleader, putting together some of the greatest groups in history. And he was known for giving cryptic instructions to his players, like a Zen master. He’d say, “Don’t just play what’s there, play what’s not there.” And: “Sometimes you have to play for a long time in order to play like yourself.” And: “There are no mistakes.”

There’s a moment in “Right Off” that illustrates Miles’s attitude of “no mistakes.” And in this instrumental drama, there’s a spiritual lesson.  You can hear the moment—Miles’s entrance after a dramatic introduction of drums, bass, and electric guitar—between 2:00 and 2:20 in the audio clip.

Here’s how jazz critic Paul Tingen describes what we’re hearing:

At 1:38 the guitarist takes down the volume, and at 2:11 he modulates to B-flat to heighten the dramatic effect of Miles’s entry. However, the bass player misses the modulation, and carries on playing in E.

In other words, the two principle players are now accidentally playing in different keys. It’s a train wreck. Surely they should stop and start the take over?

But that’s where Miles’s genius – his flexibility and his careful listening to his fellow musicians – comes in. Tingen continues:

In the middle of this clash of tonalities, Miles decides to make his entrance.

He starts by playing a D-flat, the minor third in the key of B-flat and the major sixth in the key of E. It is an ingenious choice – because the note is effective in either key. Miles than plays twelve staccato B-flat notes, phrasing them on the beat to drive the band on, and also as if to nudge [Michael] Henderson [the bass player] towards B-flat tonality. Henderson gets the message, comes into line by modulating to B-flat, and Miles carries on, giving one of the most commanding solo performances of his career.

 Tingen explains what’s so stunning about this:

Most musicians would have regarded the point when the 2 musicians were clashing in such incompatible keys as E and B-flat as an embarrassing mistake and would have stopped the band… Very few would have considered, or have had the courage, to come in at such a moment. And even fewer would have been able to make it into a resounding success.

Miles could have stopped the music, corrected the musicians, and started over. Instead, he picks the perfect note that takes the so-called mistake and makes it art.

Abraham Joshua Heschel told us that our task is to construct our lives as works of art, and what Miles does is illustrative of this.  On these days before Yom Kippur, we are tasked with having the courage to look honestly inward, reflecting on our choices and our deeds and their consequences. 

One important lesson of the Season of Teshuvah is that we don’t get to go back and erase our actions. They are done, with a ripple effect that has gone out into the world.  Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur are not spiritual erasers, blotting our sins from the Book of Life.

But the Days of Awe are something else:  They are opportunities to transform those deeds and shape them. Every living soul is a work-in-progress. It’s been said: No one can make a brand-new start, but anyone can make a brand-new ending.

That’s what’s so empowering about Yom Kippur. It’s only for people who make mistakes. Perfect people are not invited:

 Rabbi Abbahu says: In the place where a baal teshuvah [one who has turned back to a good and decent path] stands, even a completely righteous person cannot stand. [Talmud, Berachot 34b]

Think about it this way: Teshuvah is one of 613 Mitzvot. That means if a person is perfect and has not sinned – then she can only do 612 of them! The rest of us get the upper hand!

To take what we’ve damaged and mangled and turn it into art: that’s the trick. Miles knew it; so did the Talmud. Maybe this year Yom Kippur can spur more of us in that direction. 

Quotes are from Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 1991), p.106.

Nuclear Dreams

If you can stomach just a few more words about the State of the Union…

I have no intention here of analyzing Donald Trump’s speech—nor the First Lady’s clothes, the opposition’s behavior, or any of that nonsense. States of the Union are usually non-events, and this one was no different.

But there’s one part of his speech that chilled me to the bone, and in the newspapers and websites that I read, I didn’t see any particular mention of it.

He said:

As part of our defense, we must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so strong and powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression. Perhaps someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.

On the page, those words are grotesque enough. But there was an insidiousness to how he said it—especially that last sentence, which had a sickly, condescending tone. It triggered some old, primal fears.

I was a teenager in the 1980s, at the height of U.S.-Soviet anxieties. I’m sure I’m not the only one of my generation who remembers waking in the middle of the night from nightmares about nuclear war. Our schools and popular culture scared the hell out of us with the prospect of the annihilation of the planet.

My memories of ‘80s pop culture echo the helpless fear that our leaders would be “forced” by our enemies to use nuclear weapons—the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. Like a lot of ‘80s detritus, much of it today seems campy and silly—but we took it very seriously. 

For instance, my favorite movie around the time of my Bar Mitzvah was WarGames, which imagined that two computer nerds (with their crackling antediluvian modems and monochrome computer screens) could inadvertently set off a chain of events that would lead to war. Today, we giggle at some of the dialogue:

 “Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?”
“Later. Let’s play global thermonuclear war.”

But back in 1983, it wasn’t so funny. It scared the hell out of us.

Pop music at the time got on the nuclear fear-stoking bandwagon, too. U2—when they were young, vaguely punky, and cutting-edge—recorded War and The Unforgettable Fire, which seemed to nod toward these themes. Pink Floyd released the vinyl quaalude The Final Cut, which droned on about nuclear apocalypse. Even a disposable act like Frankie Goes to Hollywood released a hit single called “Two Tribes” about the dangers of nuclear proliferation—this is what passed as dance music in those days!

In school, they gave us books like Alas, Babylon (a holdover of the previous generation’s atomic terror) which depicted the aftereffects of a nuclear war. But the worst, by far, was The Day After—a televised movie “event” that was considered so important that it was aired without any commercials! It was about the futility of survival after the nukes go off, because of the environmental cataclysm that comes afterwards, making the planet uninhabitable. By the end of the film, the blast’s survivors have succumbed to radiation poisoning, nuclear winter has started to settle in, and the extinction of the human race seemed assured. Everybody watched it; it was one of the highest-rated TV programs of all time.

This is what we were raised on. One night in June 1989 there was an explosion at the Hercules munitions plant in my hometown, shattering windows miles away. I remember falling out of my bed from the blast, but the worst part was the sheer terror that this was it:  it was so loud, surely that it meant that the Soviets had launched their nukes (and we all knew that Picatinny Arsenal, not far away, would be a primary target when doomsday actually came). I don’t think I’ve ever been so metaphysically terrified at any other time in my life.

Even as teens, we knew the numbers: that our nuclear arsenal was so large it could destroy the planet hundreds of times over. We couldn’t comprehend the logic: if we could only completely destroy the entire Soviet Union 178 times, was it really more of a deterrent to be able to wipe them out 212 times? 

Miraculously, the Soviet Union collapsed without any of these horrors coming to be, and the Doomsday Clock slipped backwards a few clicks from midnight. But I presume I’m not the only one who senses that keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists and lunatics couldn’t be more important. It’s a big part of why I take Israel’s warnings about Iran’s nuclear threat so absolutely seriously: a nuclear weapon in the hands of an apocalyptic regime is the stuff of real nightmares.

So to hear the President speaking of the need to “rebuild” our nuclear arsenal triggers certain long-dormant reflexes in me. Conservatives and progressives alike should be able to find common cause in being able to restrain this insane return of a ghost that should be resting permanently in peace.

Jews, especially, should know that exponential power of nuclear weapons is a moral anathema. A tradition that demands that when you go to war, you must not destroy the fruit trees in enemy territory (Deuteronomy 20:19) should be appalled at the idea of devastating entire ecosystems with weapons of ghastly force.

Moreover, the standard interpretation of an obscure passage in the Talmud (Shevuot 35b) is that a war that would kill a massive number of civilians—a sixth of the population, an atomic proportion—is absolutely prohibited.

Furthermore… my God, do we have to do this? Do we really need religious prooftexts to say that we shouldn’t contemplate wreaking devastation on a planetary scale? Can we just call this one of those things that the Talmud considers סברא הוא, just plain common sense?

As Joshua said back in ’83—and everyone in Eisenhower Middle School in Roxbury, NJ could quote it—it is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

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

All You Need is Love

It’s mid-summer and Love Is All Around.

2017 is the 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love,” and The Beatles spearheaded the moment in July 1967 with “All You Need is Love.” The song was recorded as Great Britain’s contribution to “Our World,” the first live global television transmission: 400 million people in 25 countries watched John, Paul, George, and Ringo sing:

Nothing you can know that isn’t known
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love
Love is all you need

Love is also in the air because it’s Tu B’Av, the date on the Jewish calendar devoted to love. (And not the rabbis’ kind of love—you know, “God’s love for the people of Israel.” It’s about the good kind.)

Tu B’Av, the 15th day of the month of Av, falls just six days after the bleakest day on the calendar, Tisha B’Av, as if to offer comfort and consolation after that day’s commemoration of tragedy and destruction.

Tu B’Av is unmentioned in the Bible, but appears briefly in the Talmud, Ta’anit 26b and 30b-31a. There we are told:

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said:
There were no days as joyous for the people of Israel as the Fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur, for on those days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in borrowed white clothes—borrowed, so as not to embarrass one who did not have [any of her own]. 

…They would go out and dance in the vineyards. And what would they say? “Young man! Raise your eyes and see what you are choosing for yourself. Do not set your eyes on [surface] beauty, but rather on [a good] family.

[As it says in the Bible,]
Grace is deceptive, beauty is illusory
But a woman who fears God is to be praised.
And it further says,
Extol her for the fruit of her hands,
And let her works praise her in the gates. (Proverbs 31:30-31).

So early Israel had a day devoted to frolicking and partnering up, long before your mother’s friend had “someone she wanted you to meet.” Note especially that the Talmud’s description of “a good family” has nothing to do with money or social status. My favorite part of this description is how the young women of Jerusalem would borrow their festive clothes from one another, so that there was no rich or poor on this day, no humiliation or shame for the Cinderella who isn’t invited to the white collar criminals’ ball.

The Talmud goes on to link this day to events that happened in Israel’s past—days when relief from suffering came to a blessed end, and normal life could resume. One Sage says Tu B’Av was the date when it was determined that members of different tribes of Israel could intermarry with one another. Another Rabbi says that it was the day that Israel was permitted to marry members of the tribe of Benjamin, who had been declared off-limits after the intertribal war described in Judges 19-21. And a third opinion says that Tu B’Av was the day when the deaths of the Israelites in the wilderness—the generation that was doomed to die and not enter the Land of Israel—came to an end; a new generation was now established and they could prepare to enter the Land.  (For all five explanations of Tu B’Av, see Ta’anit 30b-31a.)

It is wonderful to simply note that ancient Israel, like so many other cultures, had a day devoted to love. But what is “love” in the Torah, anyway?

Jews have many words for love, just as, so they say, Eskimos have many words for snow. The most common is ahavah, a word that appears frequently as a noun and as a command (“v’ahavta”). But many have wondered: how can the Torah command love?

I think the key is to understand what, exactly, the Bible means by ahavah. We are, after all, commanded to love many things:  God; fellow Israelites; the stranger (= the immigrant, the minority in our society); and most famously, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).  What does it mean?

Biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom explains that “love” in the Torah is not simply an emotion. Love necessarily entails action:

How can love be commanded? The answer simply is that the verb ‘ahav signifies not only an emotion or attitude, but also deeds… The ger [minority] is “loved” by providing him with food and shelter (Deut. 10:18-19). God is “loved” by observing His commandments (Deut. 11:1, 6:5-6,9) and God, in turn, “loves” Israel by subduing its enemies (Deut. 7:8).  (Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, p.1653).

That is to say: of course love is deeply rooted as an emotional complex of compassion, affection, desire, gratitude, and nurturing. But the Bible’s definition of love demands behavior that stems from those feelings.

All of which makes perfect sense. If someone says they love you, you expect that means something more than simply sending flashes of warmth in your direction; it means you can expect certain kindnesses and acts from that person. When my wife, whom I love, needs something, it is a privilege to put my own will aside and to get her what she lacks. When my children, whom I love, hurt, then I hurt.

Or phrased in the negative—if someone disappears in our time of need, or speaks cruelly behind our back, or simply doesn’t have time for us, we may suspect that person didn’t really love us in the first place.

Of course, we are human beings, and by nature we are imperfect and doomed to disappoint. So we should hasten to add that falling short and forgiveness should be built-in parts of a genuine loving relationship as well. Some of the actions that love demands include what the Torah calls tochecha - critique and correction, in order to help the object of our love be the best that they can be. (This is an important part of what we mean by loving one's country.) We believe in teshuvah, the opportunity to return and repair. The point is, “love” demands both presence and action in addition to deep-seated emotion.

So was Lennon זצ״ל right when he sang, “All You Need is Love”? We need more than that. We need justice. And truth. And the ability to support ourselves in a dignified way. We need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. And God knows we need more peace.

But if “love” is a multidimensional thing that includes feeling and acting on those feelings, maybe Lennon was on to something. If love spurs us to action, maybe Love Is All You Need.

Happy Tu B’Av!

Oslo on Broadway: The Long Shorter Road

“There is a short road that is actually long, and a long road that is actually short.”
—a young boy to Rabbi Yehoshua, Talmud, Eruvin 53b

The play Oslo opened this week on Broadway: a timely, talky drama set in 1993 during the secret talks between Israelis and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, at a time when it was illegal to speak to the PLO, which was rightly considered a terrorist organization. 

Like many shows and movies—Titanic comes to mind—the playwright has a challenge from the start. Everyone knows how the story ends: on the White House lawn, with a famous handshake between Yasir Arafat and a visibly ambivalent Yitzhak Rabin, and a sense of euphoria in the air that perhaps the Israeli-Palestinian conflict truly is over. And after that: waves of Palestinian terrorism; Rabin’s murder by a Jewish extremist; the ascent of Hamas in Gaza; failed follow-up deals; the Second Intifada; 9/11; the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza; several wars with Hezbollah and Hamas; and the election of Israel’s most right-wing government in history. Spoiler alert: peace doesn’t break out.

The playwright J.T. Rogers has discovered real drama not in headlines, but among second-tier politicians who struggle, negotiate, and yell (a lot) behind closed doors. It begins almost on a whim, by a married couple who want to see if peace can be negotiated away from the media, with the parties sequestered in a distant land. Mona Juul was a Norwegian foreign ministry official (later she became Ambassador to Israel) and her husband Terje Rød-Larsen a renowned sociologist. They launched the secret negotiations in Oslo, shuttling back and forth as intermediaries, and on occasion all but locking the adversaries in a room to deal with each other. Rød-Larsen constructed strict rules of organizational psychology—in the common spaces, over food and drink, everything was off-the-record, and the participants’ real humanity was allowed to materialize.

The playwright makes clear that the people are real, but the dialogue is invented and chronologies condensed. Onstage, it works: the soliloquies are big and passionate, the arguments are turbulent. As an audience member with a perspective on these things, I wanted to jump on stage and argue and point out distortions.

Best of all, real human beings are allowed to emerge. Ahmed Qurie, a Palestinian banker and key figure in the Fatah Central Committee, is drawn as funny, impassioned, and articulate; the Israeli Chief Negotiator Uri Savir steals many scenes with his outrageous exuberance. The characters drink lots of Scotch, which may be a suggestion for future negotiators.

Oslo artfully sidesteps hoary clichés—that the first step to peace is knowing your neighbor; that you don’t make peace with dinner-party guests, you make peace with enemies. One of the most insidious things about clichés is that occasionally they turn out to be true. In this case, we observe… if not warmth, at least a sense of recognition between the parties across the table. That alone should be a source of both aspiration and inspiration.

Today Oslo is bandied about in Israel as political shorthand: by the left as the seedling of an inevitable process, and by the right for futile dreams when there is no willing peace partner.

As for me, I remember the morning of September 13, 1993, watching the White House ceremony on C-Span in my Jersey City apartment. I remember how Arafat showed up in military fatigues, violating one of the understandings. I recall Rabin’s extraordinary speech, where he uttered the prayer Oseh Shalom Bim’romav, and invited everyone to seal it with an “Amen.” And, my God, I remember sobbing when that handshake happened.

It was as close as we’ve ever come. Subsequently it all fell apart. So was Oslo worth anything, or was it a pipe dream?

I stubbornly believe that Oslo was about possibility; that is the play’s perspective as well. As an anonymous child taught Rabbi Yehoshua in the Talmud, there are apparent shortcuts that ultimately turn out to be endless. And there are roads that seem long and arduous, but ultimately are the most direct path to a destination.

So it is with peacemaking. There are those on the left and the right who claim to have magical, simplistic formulae, which often involve the demonization of one side or the other. But the truth is: the situation is complex. There are no simple solutions. Yet Oslo showed that breakthroughs can happen, that honest people can talk to each other, and that the long road of negotiation ultimately is the only road there is.

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?

"Into the Woods," Freedom, & Happily Ever After

December 30, 2014

There’s a fine, thoughtful movie about the meaning of freedom in theaters now, and it’s not “Exodus: Gods and Kings.” It’s “Into the Woods,” the new cinematic version of the Sondheim musical.

“Into the Woods” intertwines several classic fairy tales:  Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack & the Beanstalk, and Little Red Riding Hood all merge together in Act 1, along with a Baker & His Wife and a witch who manipulates the plot in order to undo a curse that was placed on her. There are vengeful giants, a big bad wolf, and two Prince Charmings who are as shallow as you always imagined they would be. All of the characters discover that fate has sent them “into the woods” – a psychosexual place of innocence-shedding (although not as sexualized as I remember the play being when I saw it on Broadway years ago).  

There is a lot going on in those dark woods. The show’s themes include: moral development, community vs. the individual, parenting, leaving home, spoiled teens, infidelity (Prince: “I was raised to be charming, not sincere!”), friendship, sacrifice, and fate.  But there are two Torah themes in the story that particularly resonate with me.

The first is the show’s wonderful two-act structure (especially poignant on stage, where there is an intermission between parts). Act 1 braids together the well-known fairy tales, and it climaxes exactly the way that every fairy tale does:  They all live happily ever after.

The beauty of “Into the Woods” is:  There’s an Act 2.

In other words, what happens after “happily ever after”? Cinderella discovers she isn’t cut out for the life of a princess. The baker discovers that the baby he yearned for isn’t so easy to care for. Several characters die before their time. In other words, there is no “happily ever after”—because there remains work to do and lives to live and there are still giants (who are threatening everyone’s survival) to slay.

“Happily ever after” is for fairy tales. Life isn’t a fairy tale—and neither is the Torah.  The entire saga of the Torah – from the expulsion from Eden, the descent to Egypt, and the sojourns in the desert – can be seen as a quest towards reaching (returning to) the Promised Land. Four and a half of its five books take place along that road. At the culmination of Deuteronomy, the Israelites stand on the edge of the Land, and Moses goes up to Mt. Nebo and surveys all of it. And in shul on Simchat Torah, we read the final words of the Torah – never again did there arise a prophet like Moses – and then… “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth.”  The cycle of reading starts over again, and we never quite get to the Promised Land. Why not?  Because there is still work to do. The best we can do is move a little closer towards that goal, and set up the next generation to be that much closer to the Promised Land of the future.

“Into the Woods” is also about freedom.  When Act 2 opens, the characters are free agents, having fulfilled their dreams and desires. Then fate intervenes. A wrathful giant wants to demolish the kingdom, the survivors have to decide: give up Jack (of beanstalk fame) or stand united. There is a temptation to offer him as a sacrifice for the sake of the greater good. There is a lot of self-doubt, the presumption being that only princes are qualified to do battle with the forces of evil.  (This recalls a great liberal falsehood: That because we’re not perfect, we’re not qualified to make moral arguments against evil.)

Jewish tradition makes a similar argument about freedom.  Pirkei Avot 6:2 quotes the Torah, The tablets were the handiwork of G-d, with G-d’s writing engraved on the tablets. Then it creatively says:  Don’t read “engraved [charut] on the tablets” but rather “freedom [chayrut] was on the tablets.” It may be counterintuitive to say that subscribing to a life of religious prescriptions and service to G-d and others is a life of freedom, but that’s precisely our tradition’s claim.

What is freedom? It doesn’t mean just doing whatever you want. That’s not freedom; that’s anarchy, irresponsibility, frivolousness. In Jewish spiritual thought, freedom means encountering your own unique destiny and seizing the responsibility that has been uniquely given to you. Not running away, but sharing the responsibility that fate and history placed before you.

The protagonists in “Into the Woods” discover that nuanced understanding of what it means to be free. They come to learn that by working together, they can halt giants in their tracks and even eke out a hopeful future—even if it’s not exactly going to be “happily ever after.”

G-d Bless the Rolling Stones

June 17, 2014

After the Rolling Stones packed up from their performance in Tel Aviv last week, I found myself wondering:  Is it possible to separate the artist from the art?  Is it possible not to?

That’s a classic conundrum, and most of the time we have to agree that we’d have to make such a separation. We can’t expect moral perfection from the artists, musicians, and writers who touch us, and why should we? If we did, we’d have a very short list of pretty much zero entertainment that we could enjoy guilt-free. Further, who would want to do an entire biographical vetting of every new performer we discover, just to make sure she or he was “clean”? 

But that said, I have to tell you:  I can’t listen to my old Pink Floyd albums anymore.

Pink Floyd was one of the first rock bands that ever really touched me. I was 13 when I got The Wall, and although I haven’t played it in 20 years (it could be the most depressing music ever made) it led me on to their earlier records which had a lot more staying-power on my sound system: Meddle, Animals, “Cymbaline,” “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

But for the past few years, Pink Floyd’s bassist and primary songwriter Roger Waters has emerged as the most crass and vehement support of the BDS (“boycott, divestment, & sanctions”) movement to marginalize the State of Israel. He’s missed no opportunity to name Israel as the primary villain in the Middle East and the sole source of the conflict with the Palestinians. When confronted by well-meaning people who have criticized the coarseness of his arguments, he hasn’t mitigated them a bit.

Let’s be clear: the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is a disaster; the world needs moral leadership to broker a just two-state solution that will ensure Palestinian dignity and Israel’s right to live in terror-free safety and security. There are people of good faith working every day to build those bridges and bring that about.  And the BDS supporters are not among them.The BDS campaign is a vile attempt to stigmatize the world’s only Jewish state, to make it a pariah in the world community, and, I believe, to delegitimize it to the point of its erasure from the community of nations. It is anti-Semitism – because no other nation in the world, including ones with genuinely horrific human rights records, is targeted for such bile. It completely ignores the fear and suffering of the Israelis, the astonishing racism that is taught from official Palestinian literature in their schools, and the unapologetic and unabated terrorism from the likes of Hamas, who have recently been legitimized in a unity government with the PLO. 

And that is the movement that Roger Waters and his ignoble ilk align themselves with. Thus they encourage other rock artists to boycott Israel as part of their campaign of pressure until Israel… does what, exactly? 

So as much as I may appreciate “Echoes” as a really terrific piece of progressive rock, I find that it makes me sick these days. Ditto the music of Elvis Costello, who never meant much to me.

On the other hand, the cultural boycott that Waters promotes is pretty leaky; there are far more performers who are saying yes to performing in Israel. Neil Young (hooray!), Paul McCartney, Radiohead, The Pixies, Lady Gaga, and others have recently appeared or will be performing in Israel – which isn’t so easy, when you consider how much money and energy it takes to shlep a modern day rock crew to Tel Aviv for a single show. (After all, where else in “the neighborhood” are these artists going to play?)

But this year’s gold star has to go to the Stones. The Stones acknowledged from the moment they announced they were going to be playing in Tel Aviv on June 4, that the BDS crowd was pressuring them to cancel. They refused. (Didn’t those haters read Keith’s autobiography?  No one tells him to do anything!) They arrived in Israel a few days early and took plenty of photo-ops: Ron Wood and Charlie Watts at the Western Wall; Mick Jagger, more in character, in the high-end Tel Aviv nightlife.                               

There was even in-house controversy: The concert was scheduled to start before the Jewish festival of Shavuot was officially over, which would have prevented observant fans from attending. Yet the Stones graciously delayed the start of the concert. 

And onstage, the real fun began. Mick’s patter between songs was full of Hebrew, from his opening “Chag Shavuot Samayach!” (“Happy Shavuot!”), to teasing Ronnie about whether the guitarist had purchased his ugly shoes in the shuk. I’m not a sucker; I presume a smart p.r. staffer was feeding Mick his lines. Who cares? The effort means so much to a community that has been called a pariah by lesser stars!

So G-d Bless the Rolling Stones. And Paul McCartney. And Johnny Rotten. And Madonna. And Metallica. And Dylan (saw him in ’93 on a soccer field in Beersheva!). And so many others who have defied racist boycotts, and brought a real message of peace: one that says we’re not going to demonize anybody, and that music can build bridges, not burn them.