By Andrew Silow-Carroll
(JTA) — “A Complete Unknown,” the new Bob Dylan biopic set in the early 1960s, ends years before the singer’s controversial “gospel” period. Starting with 1979’s “Slow Train Coming,” Dylan recorded three albums exploring his apparent embrace of Christianity. For his 1980 tour, he played gospel music exclusively.
It was a confusing time for Dylan’s Jewish fans. As the movie suggests only obliquely, the guitar-carrying hitchhiker who tried to pass himself off as a former carnival barker was actually Bobby Zimmerman, a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. As the New York Jewish Week once explained, “His parents were presidents of the local B’nai B’rith and Hadassah, and he grew up kosher, in a home that knew tefillin and Yiddish. He was sent to the religious Zionist Camp Herzl.”
Dylan’s “conversion” felt personal to those fans, who saw him as both a role model and a delegate to the non-Jewish world. “It would be hard to overstate the horror that many Jewish Dylan fans and followers felt during this period,” Eric Alterman has written. For some, the “horror” led to rationalizing Dylan’s Christian phase or even denying it. As Alterman himself wrote, “rebellion against Jewishness turns out to be one of the most productive ways to be a Jew.”
Well, maybe. But such contortions can also be a little patronizing, telling the apostate that their conversion didn’t “count.” Or they falsely promise that other Jews will accept you as Jewish no matter what you believe. Celebrating the “Jewish heretic” doesn’t account for how threatening it was and still can be when prominent Jews embrace Christianity or other faiths. It’s hard to be sanguine when so much antisemitism was postulated on the idea that Judaism was a historical mistake Jews can fix by taking Jesus into their hearts.
“For the Jew, Christianity is a heresy, an elevation of a false messiah,” Mark Oppenheimer, editor of the newly revamped religion site ARC, wrote last week. “Which is not to say that the Gospels are not great literature, or don’t have worthwhile teachings; but for the Jew, they are not divine.”
Oppenheimer was responding to a Dec. 19 essay by David Brooks, “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be,” in which the New York Times columnist describes his spiritual journey from “practicing Jew” (as he was once described in The New Yorker) to “one who believes in the Old and New Testaments.” It’s a journey certain kinds of Jewish readers have been following for years, the way Taylor Swift fans track the details of her love life.
“Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew,” writes Brooks, describing his deep dive into Christian theology. “For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang.”
I am hesitant to call Brooks a Christian, because he doesn’t describe himself that way. Oppenheimer has no such qualms. “There is a name for people who believe in the ‘whole shebang’ of Judaism and Christianity: they are called ‘Christians,’” he writes.
Oppenheimer acknowledges that Brooks’ faith is ultimately his own business, and that Judaism is a big tent that includes the nonobservant, doubters and even atheists. (“Judaism is not only a faith but a tribe, a culture, and a life style, and the motivations behind conversion are as varied as Jewishness itself,” writes Jeannie Suk Gersen in a New Yorker essay about her own recent conversion to Judaism.) But he describes how Brooks’ syncretic, “sort of Christian-ish, sort of Jew-ish” beliefs are not just historically incompatible, but lead Brooks to distort Judaism itself. Judaism is not an attitude or a “nostalgia trip” that can neatly accommodate divergent spiritual beliefs, including Christianity; it is a counterculture that, Oppenheimer writes, “comes with obligation, to practices and to people.”
Oppenheimer’s pique with Brooks reminded me of a New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast, in which a Jews for Jesus recruiter sits behind a sign reading, “Jews for Jesus and also for pissing off one’s parents, even if they weren’t religious, in a way that the Hare Krishnas can’t even begin to imagine.” That kind of Jewish anxiety was compounded by a Pew study in 2013 that found that a third of all Jewish respondents said they had a Christmas tree at home, and 34 percent who said belief in Jesus as the messiah was compatible with being Jewish.
Oppenheimer faults Brooks for creating a false dichotomy between an “earthy, fun, perhaps mischievous” Judaism and a Christianity more attuned to the “sublime.” Feigelson sees what Brooks calls his “overly intellectual nature” standing in the way of the spiritual. Not surprisingly, Oppenheimer asks Brooks to “stop writing about Judaism, now.” Feigelson invites Brooks to come on a retreat with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.
Dylan is 84 and he should live to 120, pu pu pu. But when he dies, I am confident that Jewish outlets like ours will eulogize him as a Jew. As “A Complete Unknown” tries to make clear, the “real” Bob Dylan is impossible to pin down. Besides, Jews consider winning a Nobel Prize its own kind of mitzvah.
