A wild week of Jewish Dylanology
It’s been quite a week for Jewish Dylanology, featuring the release of a classic concert of Jewish Dylan parodies created by a Reform cantor; an article in an online Orthodox journal arguing that Bob Dylan’s most recent album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” should be heard as echoing major 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas; and the posting to YouTube of a video in which charedi Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair placed his emotional reaction to Bob Dylan’s apostasy at the center of a brief discourse on Mesillat Yesharim, the influential 18th-century ethical text by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (whose life story, incidentally, truly deserves a Timothée Chalamet biopic).
Rabbi Sinclair recounted a conversation he had over Shabbat in a less-charedi community in which someone was telling him about the movie “A Complete Unknown.” His interlocutor explained the focus of the movie: Dylan’s choosing to play electric rock’n’roll rather than just folk music.
“I said, ‘Hang on a second! What do you mean Bob Dylan betrayed his tradition by becoming a rock ‘n’ roller? Bob Dylan betrayed his tradition by becoming a Christian!”
And then came the ethical point he wanted to make: “I suddenly realized that I got angry.”
After Shabbos, the rabbi apologized, and his interlocuter replied, “It’s all good” — a possible reference to Dylan’s 2009 song with that title.
For Rabbi Sinclair, this was a reminder you always have to monitor yourself to stop angry outbursts. Though perhaps Rabbi Sinclair might have avoided anger had he remembered a bit more of his history and showed more empathy. After all, Dylan’s “betrayal” of the folk music movement took place a decade and a half before he embraced evangelical Christianity (which in turn was a decade before Rabbi Sinclair abandoned a career as a music producer and actor to study Torah at the Ohr Sameyach yeshiva in Jerusalem.)
Or perhaps he could have taken the ethical approach of Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas, whose philosophy Michael Blank aptly summarizes as “Our first responsibility is for the Other; when we see their face, we are obligated to respond.” That’s from his article “Has Bob Dylan Been Reading Emmanuel Levinas?” posted Tuesday to TheLehrhaus.com.
Blank tells of attending a recent Dylan concert, where he had to deposit his phone in storage before entering the concert hall. Without his phone, Blank turned to a volume of Levinas in his bag while waiting for the show to start; the show featured almost all the songs of “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”
“Once I was attuned to noticing Levinas in Dylan, it became difficult to unhear,” Blank writes. For example, he argues that the line in “I Contain Multitudes,” where Dylan chants “I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones / And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones,” Dylan is castigating “critics who want to define him by trite Universalisms. Like Anne Frank, who has been emptied of her particularism, he fears being objectified too, and ironically mocks the idea that everything can be made good in that realm of Universalism.”
Cantor Jeff Klepper’s “Like a Rolling Cohen: A Jewish Parody Tribute to Bob Dylan” takes a less academic approach. Mostly recorded in concert at the Reform movement’s Adult Study Kallah in the summer of 1999 and released now on Bandcamp, the song titles include “Tangled Up in Jews,” “Cantillation Row,” “Ballad of a Minyan,” and “Just Like a Chazzn.”
The chorus of the latter: “Oh he sings just like a chazzn / Yes he does and he shrais just like a chazzn / And he davens mincha just like a chazzn / But he acts just like an opera star….”
As Cantor Klepper explains in the liner notes, “Personally I feel a kinship with Bob Dylan, the Jewish kid with a guitar who had a vision and stayed true to it in spite of hardship, self-doubt, and the pitfalls of showbiz and fame.”
comments