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# Any Major Dude
- URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/any-major-dude/
- Published: 2005-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2005-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
- Author: JewsRock
- Tags: Words, #Import 2026-08-16 01:56, Essays

*By Rabbi Justin David*

Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend, Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again, When the demon is at your door, In the morning it won’t be there no more, Any major dude will tell you.

The summer after my grandfather died, I found myself listening to this Steely Dan song over and over, pondering its lyrics like an obscure Talmudic quotation. The sense of obsession and the reference to the Talmud is not meant to be ironic. I had just completed my first year of rabbinical school, and I was in the midst of an internship as a hospital chaplain at the UCLA Medical Center, where I was assigned to the neurology unit. For months, I had been battling my own hypochondria, convinced of the malignancy of successive "cancers" that had invaded various parts of my body, all dismissed and "cured" by a single visit to the doctor. Now, I was in the position of giving pastoral comfort to patients with rare tumors of the brain, pituitary gland and nasal passages, all the while convinced that I was also afflicted with the same conditions. In the middle of this self-obsessed period in which I provided a salve for the mortality of others but remained terrified of my own, my grandfather died.

Strangely enough, when my grandmother called with the news, my first reaction was one of acceptance. I witnessed death at the hospital every day; death was what happened to people, and now, it happened to my grandfather. But that thought flew out of my consciousness as quickly as it entered. Almost spontaneously, I cried with my grandmother into the phone. Upon hanging up, I cashed in some miles and flew back to New York for shiva, cloaked in sadness and the dread of greeting my mourning family. When I returned to Los Angeles, I attended the daily minyan at the shul down the street, carrying the anger predicted by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, which I directed toward old men for their strange social habits and standoffish behavior.

Back at the hospital, I took on extra weekend shifts to make up the time I had lost during shiva. I tried to spend those hours visiting patients and writing up charts, but truthfully, my motivation flagged. I made an honest show of visiting the new admissions and making notes. But I also spent copious time "reflecting" in the quiet of the pastoral care office and taking long walks on lunch breaks. On one of those breaks, I walked into one of my choice refuges, a record store where a customer can choose any CD and listen to it on headphones. I listened through parts of Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic album, and took it home.

To my surprise, I found myself hitting the "rewind" button (it was a cassette) on the song "Any Major Dude" repeatedly. It was a surprise because the first cut on the album is "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," whose fame should easily dwarf any other track. But "Any Major Dude" grabbed me. The song engages its listener as if extending a wise, unassuming and friendly hand. "Any Major Dude" has a jounciness to it, and its acoustic guitar and keyboards give a hint of comforting rawness in a homey, Carole King sort of way.

But what the song did, in a way that no one does as well as Steely Dan, was express a stark and confounding reality through attractive music. In the world of "Any Major Dude," things fall apart, and "demons" lurk "at your door." Violence, disease, decay, heartbreak constitute the world of this song, conveying a sense of inevitable loss. And yet the song offers its own reassuring promise, as the "minor world that breaks apart" will "fall together again." The demon, ominously present at night, will be there "no more" in the morning. In a tone that is coolly redemptive, the lyrics promise a new wholeness that is as inevitable as the loss that precedes it. This is universal, yet casual, wisdom that "any major dude will tell you."

Actually, from a Jewish point of view, it’s not quite so clear what "any major dude" will say about anything, much less about suffering and how it passes. One reason why I was so intrigued by this song was its allusion, intentional or not, to a pivotal moment in Sefer Beresheet, the Book of Genesis. The context is the story of Cain and Abel, and Cain is despondent, because God "regards" Abel’s sacrifice of choice cattle and flocks, whereas God "does not regard" Cain’s sacrifice of grain. Taking note of Cain’s hangdog countenance, God offers Cain a gem of advice, "If you act well, all be uplift. And if not, sin will crouch at your door like a demon; its urge will be toward you, yet you may master it." If the English appears awkward and clumsy, it is because the Hebrew is enigmatic. According to traditional interpretation, the message is clear: human beings can control sin, and thus the outcome of our lives, with the power of our will.

On the other hand, traditional Jewish commentary seems to favor a view that, no matter what we do, we can’t fully stave off the "demon." According to the rabbis of the Midrash, God’s advice to Cain implies that one should seek refuge in study, where one is safe from "sin." As an interpretation, it seems as if the rabbis are hedging, as keeping oneself safe from "sin" is not the same as insulating one from the calamity of disease or accident. The rabbis of the Talmud pose this question explicitly, asking, "Why does a righteous person suffer affliction, while a wicked person prospers?"

Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the great Hasidic master of the eighteenth century who was the founder of Habad Hasidism, interpreted God’s advice to Cain more expansively. The "demon" may always be present, but we can greet him differently. He says, "If you have lived an upright life, you will be able to bear any misfortune or affliction." While compassionate deeds can’t ward off catastrophes, they can help us deal with them.

We confront the same problem on the High Holidays, when we chant the famous prayer U’ne tane tokef. Its haunting refrain is, "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed." In between chanting the refrain, we meditate on the words, "Who shall live, and who shall die, who by fire, who by water, who will become impoverished and who will prosper." And then, as a relief from confronting the precarious nature of our lives, the prayer enjoins us, "Repentance, Prayer and Charity mitigate the severity of the decree."

I am continually amazed that so many people know this prayer and chant it with such conviction. Personally, I find it confounding to the point of anger. Does it mean, as God says to Cain, that if we perform such noble deeds as repentance, prayer and charity, we too can drive away the "demon" of calamity and disease? If I tried to say that from the bima, I would be skewered for insulting people’s intelligence. Can it mean, a la Reb Shneur Zalman of Lyady, that a life of righteous action provides us with the wisdom and spiritual strength to weather suffering? Personally, that is an interpretation that appeals to me. But what about the Steely Dan perspective? Perhaps U’ne Tane Tokef instructs us to focus our energies on the ways in which we can cultivate wisdom and even joy, through such worthy acts as drawing close to each other, developing a spiritual life, and doing acts of tikkun olam. The "demon" is present by night, it will pass by morning, and in the interim, we have meaningful choices to make about the course of our lives.

At the time when I first listened to this song, over and over, through Westwood, across Sunset Boulevard, and through the hills of Bel Air and the streets of West LA, I couldn’t tell you why I was drawn to it. But now, I know that I heard a reflection of the loss and pain I experienced, as well as the hope for which I yearned. For months, the fear of loss had pursued me in the form of imagined disease. And yet I knew that I needed to understand this sense of loss, or at least make peace with it, which explains why I put myself in a hospital with some of the sickest people in the nation. With the death of my grandfather, the feared and imagined losses of a healthy, newly married, 25-year-old man became real. And with this real loss, and its accompanying tears and anger, surprisingly, came an acceptance of catastrophe as something we live with. I was bereft, but whole, and this song acted as the mirror in which I could contemplate this newfound wholeness.

The demon had come to my door, but I knew that at some point, he would be there no more. And if he returned, I would know who he was, and therefore be less afraid. I felt hopeful that I had glimpsed a way of being that admitted sadness and fear, but tempered enduring despair. I was comforted because it felt real, part of a timeless experience that others had articulated with grandeur and wisdom. From my own experience, I came to believe that the relief from despair is there for all of us. But don’t rely on my testimony. Any major dude will tell you.

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*Rabbi Justin David is a dean at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and formerly led Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton.*