Bob Dylan: America’s Jewish moral muse

In my first college semester, even before I finished buying my textbooks, I enlisted a guitar coach to walk me through the simple chord progression of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

It was 1968, and the times were indeed changing. Dylan, who sang passionately in his craggy voice about civil rights and war with such tunes as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was already being hailed as the musical-poetic voice of a generation. A generation including young Jewish people like me. The new historically inspired movie “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet, is well worth seeing, if only for the glorious ’60s music strongly rendered by Chalamet as Dylan and Monica Barbaro as his frequent collaborator, Joan Baez.

Early in the film, the then-20-year-old singer’s New York girlfriend complains to him, “You came here with nothing but a guitar. You never talk about your family, your past.” Dylan begins his unsatisfying reply with the words, “You make up your past.”

I found myself wishing for a better answer to Dylan’s origin story, which is only vaguely alluded to in the film by the references to his trek from the Midwest and his Minnesota driver’s license in the name of Robert Zimmerman. This absence is probably not the fault of the filmmakers, since Zimmerman/Dylan, who will turn 84 this year, often has gone to great lengths to obscure much of his life story. An infamously grouchy interview subject and trickster, he has also promoted some fanciful fabrications. Time and again, he has also doubled back and seemingly renounced earlier values and versions of himself, perhaps out of anger that some critics or fans might pigeonhole him as “only a protest poet.”

Like many other young people of his mid-20th-century generation, Zimmerman “walked off to look for America,” as his contemporaries, Jewish singers Simon and Garfunkel, put it. In Bob’s case, this meant musically exploring down U.S. Highway 61. That 1,300-mile artery rolled close to Bob’s birthplace in the upper Midwestern city of Duluth and followed the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The radio that carried various stations up this route from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Shreveport, Louisiana, included rock and roll but also thrilling country and western tunes from Hank Williams. Before the young Zimmerman dropped out of college at the University of Minnesota, he had turned to American folk music, then experiencing a post-World War II revival. The Depression-era African-American folk/blues artist Lead Belly was a part of this, and especially the Oklahoma-born Woody Guthrie. Interestingly, Dylan began his seminal 1965 tune “Highway 61 Revisited” with the words, “God said to Abraham kill me a son,” which leaves us to wonder if, as he was setting out on his personal journey, he was also struggling with the Jewish covenant his grandparents, the Zimmermans and Stones, brought over from their native Ukraine and Lithuania during the heyday of the pogroms.

Should Dylan be considered a modern-day prophet? Some of his more apocalyptic lyrics with their scathing social commentaries might suggest it. His 1962 “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” for example, invoked the “pellets of poison” that are “flooding [the] waters.” If he’s been a prophet, though, he should certainly be considered a reluctant one. Think of our biblical Jonah, who initially fled from the Lord’s command to go to the sinful city of Ninevah to preach to and redeem its inhabitants.

In any case, Horace Engdahl, a member of the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee, described Dylan on the occasion of his recent award as “a singer worthy of a place beside the Greek bards … beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.”

Jewish American poets and musical artists have been prominent in defining our country and our unique relationship to it since we first arrived here. Much of this will be important to nourish our spirits in the year 2025, when a new political regime in our country has called down dark sentiments and policies like scapegoating immigrants.

Emma Lazarus certainly had people like Dylan’s grandparents in mind when she penned the 1883 sonnet she contributed to the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Such words echo in some of Dylan’s best work. In 1964, his masterful anthem “Chimes of Freedom” drew on the imagery of Lady Liberty, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the Liberty Bell to remind us of all our country’s unmet promises to underdogs here and everywhere. “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse. An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe. And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.”

You could leave the theater after viewing “A Complete Unknown” wondering how Jewish Bob Dylan is and how he has contributed to our country. There is an answer to this question. We have gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing, “Tikkun olam.”

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair is recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.

Opinion

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