by Bob Dylan
kamash shanim nizrech od lamut
lifnei shenilmad eich l'chyot
V'kamah namshich l'chakot l'shalom
Im zayit v'shtei charavot
V'kamah eitzim y'rokim yisarfu
B'glal milchamot v'kavod?
Ein li teshuvot vkol hatikvot
Halchu lahen l'kol haruchot
kamah aznaim tzarich ben adam
L'shmoa echad shezo'ek
Vkama namshich lsovev tapanim
Lifnei shenabit v'nireh
V'kamah shanim nihiyeh po s'gurim
Lifeny shel'chophesh netzeh
Ein li teshuvot vkol hatikvot
Halchu lahen l'kol haruchot
kaman tzarich la'avor ben adam
Ad sheyihiyeh ben adam
Kamah shanim ya'mdu heharim
Lifnei sheyiru et ha yam
V'kamah p'gazim od tzarich l'fotzetz
Lifnei she yamutu kulam
Ein li teshuvot vkol hatikvot
Halchu lahen l'kol haruchot
By Larry Yudelson
How many more years will we have to die
Before we learn how to live?
And how many will we continue to wait for peace
With an olive and two swords?
And how many green trees will be burned
Because of wars and honor?
I have no answers and all the hopes
Have dispersed to all the winds [directions]
How many ears does a man need
To hear one who screams?
And how many will continue to turn their faces
Before they will look and see
And how many years will we be closed here
Before to freedom we depart?
I have no answers and all the hopes
Have dispersed to all the winds [directions]
How much does a man have to pass through
Before he is a man?
How many years will the mountains tand
Before they see the ocean?
And how many more shells still have to explode
Before everybody dies?
I have no answers and all the hopes
Have dispersed to all the winds [directions]
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Are Dylan's lyrics simply a restating of 13th century Kabbalah? Can they be understood without years of Talmud study? Or is it all a hoax?
This page explores possible references in Dylan's lyrics to Jewish ideas or customs. Some are clearly p'shat, meaning the obvious interpretation. Others may be more far fetched. Ours is but to argue, not to judge.
The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
Bread crumb sins may be a reference to the Tashlich ceremony.
The Tashlich ceremony takes place during the period of repentance beginning with the holy day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Jews gather near a body of water (or a well, for the landlocked), shake the crumbs from their pocket, and recite from the Psalms and from the prophet Micah: "Thou wilt again show us mercy and subdue our iniquities; thou wilt cast all our sins into the depths of the sea" (Micah 7:19)
Then again, the bread crumb sins could refer to the Passover holiday, when possession of bread -- even crumbs -- is banned by Jewish law.
Back to the Starting Point! The Kickoff, Hebrew Letters on the wall, Victor Hugo's house in Paris, NYC in early autumn, leaves flying in the park... ...snapshots of Apache poets searching thru the ruins fora glimpse of Buddah -- I lit out for parts unknown, found Jacob's ladder up against an adobe wall & bought a serpent from a passing angel... where Baudelaire lived & Goya cashed in his chips, where Joshua brought the house down!
Strictly speaking, these aren't lyrics, and strictly speaking these are not purely Jewish references -- because Dylan's Bible was, at least at the beginning, the Bible of the Christian folkies and bluesmen.
But I believe the Hebrew letters on the album sleeve have a prophetic voice, particularly in the early months of 1974 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, particularly on a record where the publishing rights are assigned to Ram's Horn Music.
Dylan is here boldly including the Jews -- Joshua and Jacob -- with the rest of the cannon of the Western artists, the native Americans, Buddah and Baudelaire. It may not seem revolutionary, but remember: This is less than a decade after Einstein (the Jew) had to disguise himself as Robin Hood (the protypical Anglo- American outlaw folk hero) to crash the party on Desolation Row.
May God bless and keep you always....
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
And may you stay forever young
"May God bless and keep you" are the words by which the kohanim - - the Jewish priests -- bless the Jewish congregation, in the time of Moses (Numbers 6:26) and today. The words have been incorprated into every daily worship service. An amulet with these words has been found from the time of the First Temple. And they are used by parents to bless their children.
This song is widely assumed (i.e. I read it on the Internet once) to have been written for Dylan's son Jakob. It was Jacob who dreamed of the ladder whose top reached the heavens.
Dylan the family man seems to be consistently Jewish, which makes one suspect that the question of Sara Dylan's spirituality and religion is of crucial importance to this whole saga. Bob, after all "seemed to function as a sort of visitor in his kids' lives" as one rabbi who officiated at a Dylan bar mitzvah put it.
So swiftly the sun sets in the sky
Your rise up and say goodbye To no one
In short: The setting sun brings the end of one day and starts the next. The Sabbath begins and ends at nightfall. Jewish mysticism personifies the Sabbath as a bride and queen. She is welcomed in and escorted out with special prayers.
The parting prayers are called Havdalah. Are they to no one? Ask the Jokerman.
We live in a political world
Everything's hers and his
You can jump into the flame
And shout God's name
But you're not even sure what it is.
There are two Jewish aspects to this verse. First is the notion of jumping into the flame. That was the fate of the three prophets in the Book of Daniel -- cast into the fiery furnace for their allegiance to God. In Jewish tradition, however, the first jump into the flame was that of Abraham who, according to legend, was cast into a fiery furnace by Nimrod, ruler of Ur.
The simple (p'shat) explanation of "not even sure what it is" is that Dylan is lamenting that we are so far removed from God that even if we want to throw ourselves into his care, we don't know how to. We have forgotten God's name.
One the level of d'rash -- a slightly more convoluted interpretation -- this is a reference to a literal Jewish predicament: We have forgotten the literal name of God, the tetragrammaton pronounced by the High Priest in the Temple only on the holiest day of the year. All we have are its consonants -- YHVH -- but we don't know the vowels. (The English translation Jehovah is only a guess, and a wrong one at that.)
Here, the central metaphor is profoundly Jewish. In Kabbalistic theology, the flaws in the world reflect the "breaking of the vessels." When God began to create the world, the Divine light proved to powerful for the vessels that were supposed to contain it, and they shattered. What we see around us is the wreckage of the broken vessels. It is our task to gather up the fallen sparks of holiness, and mend the vessels. But until then, everything is broken.
Ring them bells so the world will know
That God is one.
The unity of God is at the center of Jewish theology. "Hear Oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One" is the central Jewish prayer. And the debate as to whether God is one or (l'havdil) three is what helped make the Middle Ages such an exciting time for Jewish-Christian relations.
Drinkin' man listens to the voice he hears
In a crowded room full of covered up mirrors
Lookin' into the lost forgotten years
For Dignity
This seems a reference to the Jewish custom of covering up mirrors in a house of mourning. During the week of "sitting shiva" the room may often be crowded, particularly during the daily worship services held in the house.
by Bob Dylan
Im i pa'am tered el ha'emek
Sham haruach macah bashvalim
Al tishcach limsor shalom
L'zo shepa'am haytah sheli
Im tavo c'shehachoref matchil
V'hatal kafu v'haor cheever
Sim az lev shtilbash mi'il
Ani lo rotzeh shetitkarer
Latef b'shmi et hataltalim shelah
V'al titbayesh l'hitkarev
V'habet al hapanim shelah
Bakesh slichah she'ani lo kotev
Tishal otah im hi zocheret oti
Ki ani zocher otah tamid
Baleilot ha'afelim
Bayamim hachi chamim
Az im i pa'am tered el ha'emek
Sham haruach macah bashvalim
Al tishcach limsor shalom
L'zo shepa'am haytah sheli
zo shepa'am haytah sheli
By Larry Yudelson
If sometime you go down to the valley
There the wind rustles the sheaves
Don't forget to give greetings (shalom)
To that one who once was mine
If you come as the winter begins
And the dew is frozen and the light is blind
Then pay attention that she wears a coat
I don't want her to get cold
Caress in my name her curls
And don't be embarassed to get close
And look on her face
Ask forgiveness that I don't write
Ask her if she remembers me
Because I remember her always
In the dark nights
And in the hottest days
So if sometime you go down to the valley
There the wind rustles the sheaves
Don't forget to give greetings (shalom)
To that one who once was mine
To that one who once was mine
by Bob Dylan
Note: This is still a work in progress. Objections, revisions and suggestions -- particularly for the unwritten final stanza -- are welcome.
Betach yesh derech l'tzet m'kaan
El ganav diber leitzan
Zeh yoter midai m'vulbal
Ee efshar l'hakim purkan
Anshei esek gonvim admotai
Et yeinai kol echad shoteh
V'af echad m'baladai
Yodea kamah zeh shaveh
Shum sibah l'hitlahev
Higiv haganav, b'neimut
Yesh hayom harbei imanu
She choshvhim chayim, rak leitzanut
Aval zeh lo goraleinu
Avarnu et zeh, kvar
Az m'dvar sheker nirchak
Hasha'ah, hu m'uchar
Greenwich Village, 1961: Bob Dylan takes the stage at Gerde's Folk City. The 20-year-old Dylan hasn't yet written the soundtrack to the sixties, been anointed prophet of his generation, converted to Christianity or dabbled with Lubavitch Hassidism. But already he's going after an establishment--a Jewish establishment, for that matter.
"Here's a foreign song I learned out in Utah," he twangs into the microphone. He strums his guitar, and continues tunelessly: "Ha! Va! Ha-va! Ha-va-na! Havah Nagilah. Yodeleihoo!"
With the yodel and a finishing harmonica flourish, Dylan had outlined an epitaph for the Hebrew folk songs sung by folksingers like Theodore Bikel and the Weavers as part of a vaguely leftist, working- man's ethnic repertoire. The mockery was was prescient: The left would not be strumming love songs about Israeli soldiers much longer. Dylan, with his inspired instinct for the authentic, was first to smell the phoniness.
"Talkin' Havah Negeilah Blues" appears for the first time on the new Bootleg Series compilation of "rare and unreleased recordings," an album that fills in many gaps in Dylan's musical career -- particularly this past decade, when the trail-blazing rock star seemed to weave between fundamentalist Christianity and Hasidic Judaism. This most recent period is well documented in Clinton Heylin's new biography, Dylan: Behind the Shades. Both the book and the record were released in time to salute Dylan's 50th birthday in May, 1991 -- a suitable occasion to reexamine his Jewish life since the days when he mocked the quintessential American Jewish tune.
Dylan has, if only from the ironic sideline, taken part in --and sung at-- the deepest spiritual crises of his generation of American Jews: the drama of the civil rights struggle, the comforts and exoticism of the Jewish homeland, and the spiritual excitements of Lubavitch.
He also became a Christian--the one leader he followed--and never really looked back and renounced it--because, like many a hasid, he found God through the music. And in America, the roots of the music is Christian.
Copyright Larry Yudelson, 1991
First published in the Washington Jewish Week
Greenwich Village, 1961: Bob Dylan takes the stage at Gerde's Folk City. The 20-year-old Dylan hasn't yet written the soundtrack to the sixties, been anointed prophet of his generation, converted to Christianity or dabbled with Lubavitch Hasidism. But already he's going after an establishment--a Jewish establishment, for that matter.
"Here's a foreign song I learned out in Utah," he twangs into the microphone. He strums his guitar, and continues tunelessly: "Ha! Va! Ha-va! Ha-va-na! Hava Nagila. Yodeleihoo!"
With the yodel and a finishing harmonica flourish, Dylan had outlined an epitaph for the Hebrew folk songs sung by folksingers like Theodore Bikel and the Weavers as part of a vaguely leftist, working- man's ethnic repertoire. The mockery was was prescient: The left would not be strumming love songs about Israeli soldiers much longer. Dylan, with his inspired instinct for the authentic, was first to smell the phoniness.
"Talkin' Hava Negeilah Blues" appears for the first
time on the new
Dylan has, if only from the ironic sideline, taken part in --and sung at-- the deepest spiritual crises of his generation of American Jews: the drama of the civil rights struggle, the comforts and exoticism of the Jewish homeland, and the spiritual excitements of Lubavitch.
He also became a Christian--the one leader he followed--and never really looked back and renounced it--because, like many a hasid, he found God through the music. And in America, the roots of the music is Christian.
The young Dylan's desire for a story more real, exciting, romantic, and gritty than true initially led him to deny, or at least hide, his Jewishness. He affected an Okie accent when he first came to New York, recounted a tall-tale autobiography about running off to join the circus and told nobody that his name was really Robert Zimmerman.
Was this apparent self-hatred Dylan's attempt to efface his middle-class Jewish childhood in order to become "a real American"?
Some chroniclers have seen it that way. But biographer Clinton Heylin says no: The disguises were built up not against his religion but against the insularity of his life in the small Minnesota town of Hibbing. If anything, the son of store-owner Abraham Zimmerman was fortunate to have wide family ties which insulated against the town's cool anti-Semitic undercurrent. Dylan's Jewish education included summers at Camp Herzl and bar mitzvah training.
Much later, he would tell this tale:
"The town didn't have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs above the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock and roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. I use to go up there every day to learn the stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour or so, I'd come down and boogie."
The potent combination of religion and rock 'n' roll was
written deep in Dylan's soul. The music he loved, from the blues
to Hank Williams's country ballads, mixed faith with its funk and
had its roots in African religion and Negro spirituals. But the
new rock 'n' roll went only halfway, tacking shallow popular song
lyrics onto denatured rhythm and blues, Dylan, perhaps inspired
by his rabbi, pressed on to a higher calling. His musical path
from the North Country via Highway 61 to the Mississippi Delta
continued "all the way from New Orleans unto Jerusalem,"
as he sang in "Blind Willie McTell," the 1983 song that
is a high point of the
When Dylan first came to New York in 1961, he was a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself as a new Woodie Guthrie. Other hootenanny singers were combing newspapers to write topical songs on poverty, war and injustice, but Dylan, like Maggies' Ma, was already "telling all the servants about man and God and law." Those first months of his apprenticeship produced forgettable topical songs like "Who Killed Davy Moore".
The classic Dylan protest songs all have a shot of something more, be it God and Jesus in "The Masters of War" and "God on our Side", or the more indirect sense of apocalypse and mystery of "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" an "Blowin' in the Wind."
A motorcycle accident in 1966 forced Dylan to slow down and drop out of the gypsy life of concert tours. While living in the upstate New York country town of Woodstock, he wrote music with The Band that was quieter, the lyrics more elemental. The songs show a new- found faith and hope, best captured by the most famous song of that period: "I see the light come shining/From the West down to the East/Any day now/Any way now/I shall be released."
Sixty-one biblical references have been counted on the next
Dylan album,
Over the next few years, the domestic life Dylan led with his wife and five children seemed to overpower his creativity. He recorded shallow love songs and duetted with whitebread country star Johnny Cash.
But now, far from the whirlwind of stardom, he began to explore his Jewish roots. The search may have been prompted by his father's death. Returning to Hibbing for the funeral, Bob surprised his brother by reciting the Kaddish prayer. On his 30th birthday he was in Israel and visited the Western Wall. He told one confidante of plans to buy an apartment in Israel; he investigated moving to a kibbutz.
This did not please the activist Left, who still hadn't forgiven the Voice of Their Generation for abandoning politics, and which since the 1967 war had increasingly supported Arafat's Fatah. The story was told that when Dylan met Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the singer chided the revolutionary for opposing Israel. ("Go ask Huey," Dylan told writer Anthony Scaduto when asked about the rumor; Newton was in exile at the time.)
Similar rumors pegged his 1974 comeback tour as a fundraiser for the Israel Emergency Fund. Folk Singer Mimi Farina even picketed his San Francisco concerts.
According to Stephen Pickering's book
In late 1978 Dylan himself was busy being born again. His widely-publicized conversion to Christianity made him perhaps the most famous Jewish apostate in American history. Suffering from a painful divorce, a tiring world tour and too much alcohol, Dylan began looking for answers. He found one:
"There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anybody but Jesus. I truly had a born-again experience, if you want to call it that.... It was a physical thing. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble."
Pressed into vinyl as the slick
"I told you the times they are a-changin' and they did. I said the answer was blowin' in the wind and it was. I'm telling you now Jesus is coming back, and He is! And there is no other way of salvation."
The followup album,
But Dylan's evangelical phase didn't last long. His third "Christian" album, included such departures from fundamentalism as "Lenny Bruce," a paean to the Jewish comedian.
More importantly, he had begun to synthesize his old vision
with the new light. The results ranged from the soaring religious
poem "Every Grain of Sand" to a trio of surrealistic
songs left off the album but included on the
Soon after, the rumors went round that Dylan had returned to Judaism and was studying with the Lubavitch Hasidim in Brooklyn. The summer of 1982 he went to Israel for the bar mitzvah of his son, already 15, and was photographed at the Western Wall. Had he returned?
The inner sleeve of this 1983 album, "Infidels," showed him crouching on the Mount of Olives above Jerusalem. Jesus had vanished from his lyric vocabulary (though New Testament allusions remained), replaced by "The Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy." "Neighborhood Bully," his first political song since 1976, discomfited the rock press with a hard-rocking defence of Israel's attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor and invasion of Lebanon. In "Man of Peace," to this listener at least, Dylan seemed to turn on the Christian missionaries who had saved him.
And in what could be interpreted as a Jewish justification of his Christian phase, Dylan sang in "I and I":
"Took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice's beautiful face/ And to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
He told an interviewer about his born-again period, "that was all part of my experience. It had to happen. When I get involved in something, I get totally involved. I don't just play around the fringes."
The problem was, at least for one Washington-area rabbi who had painfully excommunicated Dylan from his record collection when the singer converted, was that Dylan's return to Judaism, if it was that, was taking place without the publicity of his departure. Dylan would not leave his Christian stepping stones behind. Even as he recorded "Infidels," he still professed belief in the Book of Revelations.
"Whether you want to believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah is irrelevant, but whether you're aware of the messianic complex, that's all that's important...people who believe in the coming of the Messiah live their lives right now as if He was here. That's my idea of it anyway," he said in 1985.
Earlier he had acknowledged his heritage, while separating himself from the Jewish community:
"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. 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," he said in 1983.
Evidence of his Jewish involvement continues to mount. One friend of mine saw him at a Minneapolis bris (circumcision ceremony). Another heard he davens at the UCLA Hillel. One writer tells the story of how Dylan attended synagogue in jeans, scruffy beard and a battered hat and was recognized by the rabbi and invited to open the ark. The congregation was abuzz: Why was this apparent bum being honored?
Most recently, Dylan he wrote a cover blurb for Rabbi Manis
Friedman's
In a musical contribution to Lubavitch -- one well short of the album of Hasidic songs he was rumored to have recorded in 1983 -- Dylan appeared on a 1988 Lubavitch telethon playing harmonica while his Sabbath observing musician son-in-law played guitar and sang. The tune: Hava Nagila.
An ironic choice, certainly, because whatever Dylan has gotten from Lubavitch, it does not seem to be the philosophy of singing and rejoicing extolled in "Hava Nagila." "Arise, brothers, with a happy heart!" is not the message of Dylan's recent music. His 1989 album "Oh Mercy", which was hailed as his best of the decade, reveals instead an intensely lonely man of faith, closer to the spiritual uncertainty of the Kotzker rebbe than the gregarious Lubavitch.
The first side of the album focuses on a "Political World" where, as in the Kabbalistic myth, "Everything is Broken." His only solution: is to "Ring Them Bells" (so the world "will know that God is one.") The side ends with "The Man in the Long Black Coat," who comes to town quoting the Bible and takes the
narrator's woman away. A Hasid, perhaps?
The flip side is soul-searching and introspection, summed up by one title: "What Good am I?"
The same religious tension suffuses the more recent "Under The Red Sky," despite a light-hearted boogie-woogie tone: "God knows there's a purpose/God knows there's a chance/God knows you can rise above the darkest hour of any circumstance."
The album concludes with "Cat's in the Well," which, like much of the songs on this album, sounds at first like a nursery rhyme, a reminder that "Ring Around the Rosie" was about the plague. In Dylan's last words so far, the leaves fall like ashes, like the hard rain. "The cat's in the well and the servant is at the door/The drinks are ready and the dogs are going to war/The cat's in the well, the leaves are starting to fall/Goodnight my love, may the Lord have mercy on us all."
The age of 50, taught the Sages of the Mishna, is the age of counsel. Other rock stars of his generation may still be singing silly love songs, but Dylan seems, in his elusive way, to be counseling, even during the Grammy Awards where he preached, in the name of his father: "Son, it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if this happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend you ways."
For most of his career, Dylan shrugged off efforts to crown him a prophet. From the beginning he knew the spiritual power and responsibility of the singer. He described it in a hymn to his first folksinger idol, "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie." Toward the end of this long poem, released on "The Bootleg Series," he asks: "Where do you look for this hope that yer seekin'?" He concludes with his own answer:
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to the Brooklyn State Hospital
You'll find God in the church of your choice
You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown.
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