Bob Dylan – A Loss to His People

Thanks to the hit biopic, A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan is cool again. The man is nothing if not prolific. Now in his ninth decade, he is still on the road performing on his “never-ending” tour.

And he’s one of ours, right? Another Nobel prize winner to make us proud?

Not exactly.

Born Bobby Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, the bard began life with a bris milah. He had a bar mitzvah, attended a Zionist summer camp, and traveled to Israel. Back in the 1970s, he briefly explored Orthodoxy. A yeshiva agreed to accept him as a student, but only on condition that he behave like the other students — this was at the height of his stardom. He couldn’t deal with that and walked away.

To his credit, Dylan married a Jewish woman and has Jewish grandchildren, some of them from his daughter Maria and son-in-law Peter Himmelman, who are even practicing Jews, but then the story turns icky.

Somewhere in the early ’80s, Bob found his way into an evangelical church, and from then on, Jesus became his savior. Yes, our Bob, the icon of all Jewish kids, is a Jew for Jesus.

This is no secret. Dylan publicly claims to read the Bible for inspiration, including the Book of Revelations, a collection of visions experienced by Saint John, which is very decidedly not part of the Holy Torah. Bob is what used to be called a meshumad — a Jew who abandoned the faith.

Years ago, Jews of this sort were publicly outed, but no more. This confusion has become quite common; even people you’d think would know better. The New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks, whom rabbis love to quote for his insightful distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues, is one of them. Born Jewish, Brooks is now a practicing  Christian. Why? Because the Judaism he was exposed to focused on Zionism and antisemitism, not on  Hashem.  .

“As a Jew,” he says, “I experienced Judaism as peoplehood, as the exodus story, as a procession of the centuries, as one’s responsibility to a people. ”

And as a Christian? Brooks believes that he’s found the missing link, the spirit, to fill his personal void. But we’ve got that in Judaism. Just watch the videos of families of released hostages singing the hit song “Od Yoter Tov,” which starts out affirming that Hashem always loves us.  Here in Israel, we are starting to understand that.

Look at Agam Berger, the former hostage who came out of captivity, writing the psalmist words “I chose the path of faith” on her whiteboard. Another hero of the spirit is Keith Segal, the 65-year-old American who found Hashem in the tunnels of Gaza. How did he survive? According to his daughter, he clung to the blessing “shehakol nihiya bedevaro,” meaning that everything is from Hashem, which, together with the words of the Shema, chimed in his head like a mantra, enabling him to survive. But that feeling is still alien in the US.

Brooks and Dylan are part of a trend.  A 2017 Pew survey found that 21 percent of Jewish millennials believe Jesus was god in human form. Another question on faith in the survey found that 14% of participants identified with Christianity, and 10% believed in a hybrid of Christian and Jewish beliefs.

This is a holocaust of the soul.

Why should a Jew living in a free country adopt a religion that has caused millions of Jewish deaths through the centuries?

And what have they traded their birthright for?

A spin-off of the mother faith and a poor one at that.

We’ve got it all–the Torah, the spirituality, the moral compass, the community. Just taste and see.

Dylan, David Brooks, and other Jews like them must encounter our contemporary Jewish heroes and hear their stories. Perhaps that will convince them that the answer isnt in church–it’s in their precious Jewish souls. END