by Bell, Ian
The obvious point is always worth repeating: Bob Dylan was born a Jew, which is to say born of a beloved Jewish mother. In the religion’s law, that’s what counts. Perhaps it didn’t matter much to Dylan in his childhood and youth, but the faith was an enfolding fact of his life. He was raised Jewish, too, in a place that knew few of his people. In 1941, year of his birth, religious affiliations in Hibbing were divided between overwhelmingly preponderant Roman Catholics and Lutherans of various flavours. Nor were Jews gathered in numbers in Minnesota as they were in the great cities. The North Country was far from the communities in which American Jewry achieved its cultural critical mass. Still: Robert Zimmerman was Jewish, circumcised and named within days of his birth. At 13, he had marked his religious majority and become a bar mitzvah, a son of the commandment, thanks to an old rabbi shipped in from New York to help the boy memorise his texts. In May of 1954 the congregation had chanted the old words – ‘This is the Torah which Moses placed before the children of Israel’ – and Robert was given responsibility for his own religious observances.
You can throw these things aside, no doubt, if you fail or cease to believe. Discarding them for the sake of Christianity, the sect that has been the source of so many Jewish woes, is another matter. Besides, as far as Judaism is concerned the prophesied events presaging the coming of the Messiah have not occurred. Demonstrably, it is argued, those events did not occur in the first century. So Jesus/Yeshua ain’t Him.
For good measure, the Christian idea of the Trinity, the belief that God is divisible, counts as heretical for Jews. The belief that it is the Messiah’s job to save the world from its sins is also rejected. Jews have no truck with the idea that God could be made flesh, or with the weird notion of praying to this Jesus. They are opposed profoundly to what is called replacement theology, ‘supersessionism’ – the Messiah’s advent means that older stuff can be dumped – and its motives. For most, it is very simple: anyone who claims that Jesus is his saviour is no longer properly a Jew. In this contest over the one God, the gulf between the two sides cannot be bridged. The solution adopted eventually by Dylan would be no defence against the charge of apostasy. For those who believed as his forefathers had believed, it would only make matters worse.
In any case, the artist did not ‘receive Jesus’ thanks to just any New Testament study group. Irrespective of any peculiar political alliances then being formed between the American Christian Right and Zionism, the Vineyard crowd were not inclined to split theological differences. To accept one supernatural story, Dylan had to reject alternative versions. The Vineyarders were happy to welcome allcomers as grist to the conversion mill, but for evangelicals the deal rested, obviously enough, on one unbreakable condition: the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah.
It’s just possible that Dylan saw things differently. He might have felt that the gulf between the Torah and Christian fundamentalism was neither wide nor important. If so, he had part of a point. As one rabbi and scholar has put it: ‘To be a Jew means first and foremost to belong to a group, the Jewish people, and the religious beliefs are secondary, in a sense, to this corporate allegiance.’24 The writer adds, however, that the ‘contrast with Christianity is self-evident’. Christians are defined by their beliefs. And Dylan found himself believing, head over heels, before he was ducked in a California swimming pool. The act of submersion and submission could not be overlooked or ignored. Those ‘flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark’ are powerful still, it seems.
Others had followed the twisting path before Dylan. Conversion to Christianity by Jews had become a minor American phenomenon in the ’70s thanks in part to the relentless work of the evangelicals. Al Kasha, a former Brill Building songwriter and a double Oscar-winner in the early part of the decade, was a celebrity Angelino who had parted from his Brooklyn Jewish roots for the sake of born-again Christianity. Thanks to his work for CBS Publishing in the 1960s and to the songs he had written or co-created for numerous performers – Aretha, Jackie Wilson, Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, Donna Summer and more – Kasha was a music-industry player. That wasn’t what interested Dylan.
Though having become an ordained Southern Baptist pastor after ‘praying to receive Jesus’ during a bout of agoraphobia, Kasha was also what is known as a messianic Jew, a follower of Christ who nevertheless considered himself Jewish. In 1979, he and Dylan met at the Vineyard. Subsequently, the artist would become a regular participant in the ‘Bible study’ held at Kasha’s Beverly Hills home. In 2011, the evangelical journalist Dan Wooding was given one version of Dylan’s conversion. Kasha said:
Bob’s nature is that he’s a very much a seeker and he was interested to see why a fellow Jew would come to know Christ. He started at the Vineyard church and then, when we met there, he came to a first Bible study. And at the second Bible study he gave his life to the Lord.
I prayed the prayer of confession, which he repeated, about his sins and that Jesus was the Son of God and is God … I pointed out to him in John 4 that ‘salvation shall come through the Jews’ and that Jesus came to this earth as a Jew. I’m a Jewish believer now going on since 1978, so it’s a long time. That Bible study started in ’79 and never ended until this past year.
Bob would stay until three or four o’clock in the morning asking me questions beyond my knowledge. The interesting thing is that he felt a comfort that I was a fellow songwriter.25
Presumably it was in Kasha’s home, therefore, that the artist made the decision, ‘privately and on his own’, alluded to by Larry Myers in 1994. If that’s the case, Jesus was accepted in the presence of a Jewish convert. In a later interview with Wooding, Kasha would say that Dylan ‘came to the house every week for six months’ – given the artist’s known whereabouts in the first half of 1979, this can’t be exactly true – and that he was baptised near Malibu by ‘Vineyard people’.26 The composer would also claim that Dylan wrote Slow Train Coming ‘mostly in our home. I gave him a key and I’d be sleeping upstairs with my wife and he’d come in at three or four o’clock in the morning, and I’d hear him picking as he felt a kind of holy spirit comfort.’ At this point Dylan was also writing under the gaze – supervision might be a better word – of his Vineyard pastors. Myers was sticking closely to him. Whether the artist was actually having his songs vetted for their fidelity to the church’s understanding of Scripture is unclear. That’s how they would sound to many listeners, nevertheless.
In his interview with Wooding, Kasha would have a couple of other interesting things to say. In 2011, when the popular account still insisted that Dylan had long since put aside his born-again experiences, his former host would be able to state, with apparent confidence, that the singer ‘has never renounced his faith’. As Kasha explained it, ‘once you’re saved, you’re saved forever’. But he also had this to offer:
If you want to know the truth, and I always try to be as honest as possible, I think some Christians took advantage of him. They would tell him, ‘Go out and sing for nothing.’ Why should he sing for nothing if he’s being paid by other people? So I think that that bothered and hurt him.27
Cajoling Dylan to work for free – but with no gain for the Vineyard? – does not sound like the worst kind of naked exploitation. Nor does it sound like the whole story of his parting from the fellowship. Thanks to long and sometimes bitter experience, Dylan was sensitive to anyone trying to take advantage of his name and fame, but a few free shows would not have killed him. It might even have counted as that favourite celebrity hobby ‘giving something back’. Disenchantment, if that’s what it was, would come later, in any case, and probably had more to do with the fact that some in the Vineyard sect proved too eager to drop his name when advertising their spiritual wares.
Dylan had begun to put Scripture into rhyme – the most generous description of the Slow Train Coming songs – almost from the instant Jesus had shaken up his hotel room. His band had heard versions of ‘Slow Train’ during the last days of the 1978 tour. The audience at the Holly
wood Sportatorium in Florida had meanwhile been granted the sermon entitled ‘Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)’ on the global roadshow’s final night, 16 December, as a strange sort of preface to the Judaic ‘Forever Young’. Jesus was accepted into Dylan’s life in January of 1979 and work on the album began in the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, on Monday, 30 April. In the interim, therefore, the artist was putting the Word into bad verse and interrogating Al Kasha on ‘why a fellow Jew would come to know Christ’. Plainly, conversion had not answered every question.
This might have been Dylan’s meaning when in May 1980 he told a journalist that being born again ‘is a hard thing’, a ‘painful’ thing. Joy and exultation were not mentioned at any point in the interview. Dylan also said that ‘I’m becoming less and less defined as Christ becomes more and more defined’.28 The person disappearing had once been Jewish. Dylan was supposed to relinquish himself in being born again – that was, for what it was worth, the idea – but he did not quite manage it. Instead, he effected a distinctive sort of compromise. It holds to this day.
When the album Saved appeared towards the end of June 1980 its inner sleeve carried a quotation from the Bible. The verse from Jeremiah (31:31) reads, ‘Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.’ Why this passage? There are complicated arguments over these two ‘houses’, over the ten lost tribes of the ancient Kingdom of Israel who might (or might not) have emerged from captivity to become the Gentile ‘multitude of nations’, and other arcane issues besides. One point is more or less agreed: for house of Judah read ‘the Jewish people’. Dylan was pointing to God’s deal with humanity, but drawing specific attention to himself, a Jew, and to the ‘new covenant’ that had been offered to him and his community. You could say the artist had been searching the small print for a way to justify his position. On the Saved album, typically, he would find a personal meaning in God’s promise and express it in the song ‘Covenant Woman’.
Covenant woman got a contract with the Lord
Way up yonder, great will be her reward
Covenant woman, shining like a morning star
I know I can trust you to stay where you are
Jews for Jesus and messianic Judaism are not one and the same thing. Members of the former organisation, founded in 1973, are one part of the latter movement, but the movement itself is more diverse than the activities of a single group of evangelicals might suggest. There are those born Jewish who recognise Yeshua as the Messiah but refuse to recognise him as God, or who draw the line at the strange idea of a three-in-one deity. There are also those who accept the claims made for Christ, but who detect the unwelcome hand of Protestant evangelicals interfering in Jewish debates. Jews for Jesus, it is often alleged, is just another front for Christian missionaries engaged in the age-old effort to detach Judaism from its faith, traditions and roots.
Whether Dylan understood as much, or cared, in 1979 and 1980 is not clear. Whether the differences truly matter is, equally, not our problem in these pages. In its modern form, the phenomenon of Jews accepting Christ had only been evident for a few years when Dylan was writing Slow Train Coming. Nevertheless, it seemed to solve the problem he had posed to Al Kasha. Through messianic Judaism he was able to go on living as a Jew and regarding himself as a Jew while recognising Jesus as his saviour. Everything he has said and done since involving religion, whether turning up at Hasidic synagogues for the High Holidays or extolling the Christian Book of Revelation, accords with a dual affiliation. At a press conference in Hamburg at the end of May 1984, Dylan would be asked, ‘Bob, are you Christian or Jewish?’ The entirely truthful answer: ‘Well, that’s hard to say.’ Pressed on the matter, the artist would simply respond, ‘It’s a long story.’
When messianic Judaism first began to appear in the early 1970s its proponents differed from earlier ‘Jewish Christians’. The young men who established Beth Messiah in Cincinnati and Beth Yeshua in Philadelphia might have launched their congregations as offshoots of familiar Christian ‘missions to the Jews’, but they soon asserted their independence. The point, as the converts realised, was to be both Jewish, even ostentatiously Jewish, and Christian. These followers of Jesus were not prepared to be assimilated. As their critics still argue, they wanted it both ways, retaining most of the outward forms of traditional Judaism while participating in the all-singing, all-dancing evangelical charismatic Christian revival. The messianic Jews would retort, as one history of America’s alternative religions has put it, that they were ‘working to “make things right” and bring together the truth and beauty of both religions: the faith in Jesus, or Yeshua, with the belief in the special role of Israel in history and the traditional symbols of Judaism’.29 That’s probably a fair enough summary of Dylan’s position in the months after his conversion.
Perhaps predictably, Christian evangelicals and some messianic Jews have described the coming together of two traditions as uncomplicated, as though recognition of Jesus solved every possible problem. In a 2006 book on Dylan and the Protestant God, for example, Stephen H. Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College in Indiana, makes this faintly audacious statement:
Many people attracted to the Vineyard were Jewish, and they actually became more Jewish when they became Christian. Like many evangelical churches, the Vineyard emphasized Christianity’s connection to Judaism and treated authentic Judaism as compatible with Christian faith in Jesus the Messiah.30
They actually became more Jewish? You could call that a large claim. If you happened to be Jewish, even of the messianic persuasion, you could probably call it a few other things. Webb, who describes Dylan as ‘best understood as a musical theologian’ and as one of the rare American artists ‘to develop an essentially conservative view of Jesus’, does not give much attention or weight to the singer’s Jewish upbringing.31 The professor, himself from an evangelical background, prefers to believe that Dylan was in some osmotic manner rendered unconsciously Christian by his surroundings years before he (or anyone else) came to terms with the fact. Given numerous other known facts, particularly the facts of the artist’s life in the aftermath of his time among the Vineyarders, that counts as presumptuous, but not untypical of evangelical Christian attitudes. So the Vineyard ‘treated authentic Judaism as compatible with Christian faith in Jesus the Messiah’? By setting aside just one small technicality, presumably, after the church had decided what was ‘authentic’. Dylan was never so cavalier.
In the 1970s, politics was also at work. The pioneering young ‘Jewish believers in Jesus’ (as the contemporary compromise term has it) were avowedly conservative refugees from counter-culture decadence. Drugs, alcohol, sex before marriage: these delights were forbidden. The attitude was appealing, predictably, to the Christian evangelical movement. The 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, fought out by Israel and its Arab neighbours, had meanwhile given right-wing charismatic Protestants a renewed interest in any Jew who might be won for Christ. The evangelicals’ obsession with imminent Armageddon – among the ‘dispensationalist’ wing, that is – played a very big part in encouraging a collaboration.
The Christians were afflicted by the old notion, cobbled together from two faiths, that the Jews had to possess their own country before Jesus could return and the last battle could commence. Israel therefore became essential to the promised final showdown between good and evil, even if Judaism’s conception of Acharis HaYomim, the ‘End of Days’, doesn’t quite accord with the fantasies of the ‘Armageddon lobby’. Dylan’s 1983 song ‘Neighborhood Bully’, defending Zionist Israel against allcomers, would be one expression of the new alliance. Israeli governments were meanwhile delighted to fund hundreds of ‘familiarisation’ trips to the biblical lands for evangelical pastors at a time when the Christian Right was influential in Washington. Jews prepared to accept Jesus and charismatic worship were part of a grand political bargain as the last days of
this planet earth, ‘rapture’ and all, approached. Unswerving American conservative support for the Zionist-dominated state, it is too often forgotten, has a ‘theological’ basis.
In the summer of 1984, even after his supposed return to secular music, Dylan would still be confirming his belief in the literal truth of the Bible, still talking about Revelation and end times – though those had been postponed for ‘at least 200 years’ – and still discussing ‘the new kingdom’. He would assure his interviewer that he could ‘converse and find agreement with’ Orthodox Jews and Christians alike.32 Dylan’s quoting of Jeremiah on the Saved sleeve, his song ‘Covenant Woman’, his public statements and much else besides, had by then provided plenty of evidence of his messianic Judaism. It was no private eccentricity. Nothing else explained his choices or his rhetoric.
In July of 2005, the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC), a grouping founded in 1979, significantly or not, would publish a statement attempting to define its collective beliefs. The statement would speak of ‘congregations and groups committed to Yeshua the Messiah that embrace the covenantal responsibility of Jewish life and identity rooted in Torah, expressed in tradition, and renewed and applied in the context of the New Covenant’. Boldly, the UMJC would assert that together ‘the Messianic Jewish community and the Christian Church constitute the ekklesia, the one Body of Messiah …’ Further: ‘Messianic Judaism embraces the fullness of New Covenant realities available through Yeshua, and seeks to express them in forms drawn from Jewish experience and accessible to Jewish people.’33