By Seth Rogovoy
Frank Driggs Collection/ Hulton Archives/ Getty Images
For Bob Dylan fans, reading the Bible—the original, not the sequel—is an experience filled with moments of déjà vu.
"No human can see my face and live," God warns Moses at one point. "The soles of their feet …their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches," reports the prophet Ezekiel at another.
These verses sound familiar to those who have already absorbed a different kind of Torah passed down from a different kind of Jewish prophet: the received words and wisdom of Bob Dylan. "The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning," sings Dylan in "The Wicked Messenger." And on the chorus of "I and I," Dylan’s voice sneers, "No man sees my face and lives."
One of the most rewarding ways of approaching Bob Dylan’s lyrics is to read them as the work of a poetic mind apparently steeped in Jewish texts – Torah, Talmud, liturgy, and works of mysticism, or kabbalah—and engaged in the age-old process of midrash, riffing on the texts in order to elucidate or elaborate upon their hidden meanings.
One of Dylan’s best-known works of mystical midrash is his whimsical retelling of the Akeidah, the story of Abraham and Isaac, which Dylan posits as a conversation between two jaded, cynical hipsters in "Highway 61 Revisited":
G-d said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son.’ Abe said, 'Man, you must puttin’ me on.’ G-d said 'No.’ Abe said, 'What?’ G-d said, 'You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run.’ Abe said 'Where you want this killing done?’ G-d said, 'Out on Highway 61.’
The Abraham and Isaac story, of course, is one of the core myths of Western civilization. But as far back as 1965, lyrics by the son of Abe Zimmerman reveal a familiarity with Torah far beyond the basics of the average Sunday school education. The song "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," one of his most beautiful and enduring love songs, gains added heft and resonance when one realizes how much of its symbolism is drawn from chapter five of the book of Daniel. And any Dylan fan stumbling on these verses in chapter 26 of Leviticus—"Your strength shall be spent in vain… I will make your heaven like iron… You shall eat and not be satisfied..."—will recognize them as the raw material from which he shaped the 1967 song, "I Pity the Poor Immigrant."
"All Along the Watchtower," another staple of Dylan’s repertoire from the late 60s, draws its imagery explicitly from the book of Isaiah, and as if to make the connection more explicit, in recent years in concert Dylan’s guitarists have prefaced the song with the opening theme music from the Zionist film epic, Exodus.
Although facts about Dylan’s Jewish upbringing and practice are hard to come by given his notorious penchant for privacy and outright deception, evidence from his lyrics, his public statements, and some undisputed biographical items add up to a convincing portrait of a mind profoundly shaped by Jewish study and belief. Although Dylan grew up in the cold, hard, iron-mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, isolated from any semblance of Jewish communal life, his family retained enough connection with Jewish tradition to observe the dietary laws, to mark the weekly Sabbath, and to bring a rabbi to town when it came time for Dylan to become bar mitzvah in 1954. Teenage Bobby Zimmerman spent the next three or four summers at a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin, and as a freshman at the University of Minnesota in 1959, he enrolled in a Jewish fraternity.
After his father died in 1968, Dylan began re-exploring his Jewish roots at the urging of famed folk presenter Harold Leventhal. The next two summers Dylan took the first of many subsequent trips to Israel. He was photographed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on his 30th birthday in 1971, and on a visit to a kibbutz he and his wife Sara reportedly flirted with the idea of settling their young family there. After attending the wedding of friends in New York’s Hasidic community, Dylan faced accusations of being a "Zionist" who supported Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League—charges which he says in his recent autobiography, Chronicles, came as a welcome diversion from the burden of being labeled "the voice of a generation."
Around this time, Dylan’s lyrics became infused with imagery drawn not only from the Bible but from works of Jewish mysticism as well as liturgy typically familiar only to practitioners of traditional Judaism. Several of the songs on the 1970 album New Morning, including "Father of Night" and "If Not for You," for example, are freely restated versions of the morning prayers and blessings recited daily by Orthodox men.
Dylan’s 1974 album, Planet Waves, included self-penned liner notes referring to "Hebrew letters on the wall/Found Jacob’s ladder/Where Joshua brought the house down." The album’s most enduring song, "Forever Young," was a loosely poetic rewrite of the traditional blessing Jewish fathers give their children every Friday night before the Sabbath Kiddush, which Dylan personalized for his son Jakob with a reference to building "a ladder to the stars." This album also marked the debut of Dylan’s new publishing company, Ram’s Horn Music, presumably alluding to the shofar blown at the High Holidays. On the following album, Blood on the Tracks, Dylan referred to the obscure Talmudic notion of the ruach shtus, "the wind of idiocy," in one of his best songs of the period, "Idiot Wind."
But wait a minute—isn’t Bob Dylan a born-again Christian? Certainly his most overtly religious songs were the gospel songs he recorded between 1979 and 1981. Nevertheless, in 1982, Dylan’s son Samuel became bar mitzvah, and by 1983, when Dylan was reportedly hanging out with Lubavitcher rabbis in Brooklyn, overtly Jewish themes colored the songs on the album Infidels—the sleeve of which featured a photograph of Dylan overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, taken on a visit earlier that year for son Jesse’s bar mitzvah. The song "Neighborhood Bully"—a drippingly sarcastic overview of Jewish history and persecution through the lens of contemporary Zionism—evinced a strongly nationalistic identification with Jewish peoplehood.
Over the next decade, Dylan made several appearances on telethons for Chabad, in one calling the Jewish outreach movement his "favorite organization." During this time, he made several more visits to Israel; he opened a shopping complex in Santa Monica replete with an office, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, and a synagogue; and he saw his daughter, Maria, marry and begin raising a family with Orthodox singer-songwriter and fellow Minnesotan Peter Himmelman.
Dylan’s songs continued to reflect the mind of one steeped in a Jewish world view: on Oh Mercy, "Everything Is Broken" portrayed the kabbalistic view of a world in a state of disrepair, and "Political World" includes a vivid description of kiddush HaShem, the religiously-inspired martyrdom of those who were dying in Auschwitz around the time Dylan was born.
When Dylan accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 1991, his speech included this inscrutable passage:
"…You know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, G-d will always believe in your ability to mend your ways."
Those familiar with the traditional practice of reciting Psalm 27 every day for the month leading up to and the weeks following the High Holidays recognized these lines as a loose approximation of the psalm. Dylan apparently read them in the Metsudah Siddur—a modern prayerbook with English translation favored by baalei teshuvot, or returnees to Judaism—which includes a rabbinical commentary that elaborates, "Even if I were so depraved that my own mother and father would abandon me to my own devices, G-d would still gather me up and believe in my ability to mend my ways."
Dylan has apparently continued to find inspiration in scripture in recent years. In "Not Dark Yet" on his much hailed comeback album of the late 90s, Time Out of Mind, Dylan sings: "I was born here and I’ll die here against my will," paraphrasing Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers, from the Mishnah) 4:29: "Against your will you were born, against your will you die." And that album’s single, "Love Sick," borrows its unusual central complaint from King Solomon’s love poetry as expressed in the Song of Songs 2:7: "[Bereft of your presence], I am sick with love" or, to put it more poetically, as does Dylan, "I’m love-sick."
Most recently, Dylan was spotted at Yom Kippur services this past September at Congregation Adath Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is said to have received the third aliyah to the Torah, and to have returned in the evening for the concluding Neilah service, whose central imagery is of a penitent standing at a gate or doorway entreating G-d’s mercy to be written into the Book of Life, much as Dylan sang about in his 1997 song, "Tryin’ to Get to Heaven":
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore I’ve been walking that lonesome valley Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.
The author of The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin Books, 2000) and the editor-in-chief of Berkshire Living magazine, Seth Rogovoy teaches a course on Bob Dylan at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. He lives in Great Barrington, Mass., with his wife and two children. He can be reached via e-mail at seth@rogovoy.com or via his website at www.rogovoy.com.
Seth Rogovoy is an author and cultural critic who publishes The Rogovoy Report and writes for The Forward.