Oy Robert Zimmerman

In D.A. Pennebaker’s classic documentary Don’t Look Back, a young Bob Dylan is asked by a British journalist if he is religious.   Dylan responds, “I don’t see anything to believe in.   I can’t see anything anyone’s offered me to believe in, to put all my trust and faith in…”   At this moment, Bob Dylan might as well have been speaking on behalf of an entire generation of young adults who were increasingly feeling that organized religion was antiquated and forced down their throats.

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 and grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota.   Both his paternal and maternal grandparents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants and his parents were active members of Hibbing’s small Jewish community.   Although he had a Bar Mitzvah in 1954, Robert Zimmerman was never interested in his Jewish identity.   As biographer Howard Sounes writes, “It was not that he was ashamed of being Jewish; it seemed more that he did not want to be limited in the eyes of others by being defined simply as Jewish.”  

In the fifties, religion was a celebrated aspect of America’s new conservative social behavior.   During this decade, images of families sitting down at dinner to say grace were commonplace.  The words “under God” were added to the pledge of allegiance and “In God We Trust” was added to all U.S. currency.  President Dwight Eisenhower told Americans that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”   America’s Jews were not immune from this social development.    Indeed, the fifties saw the largest increase in the building of synagogues than any decade before it.

It was this world in which Robert Zimmerman grew up.   Like so many others of his generation, he found the new conservative values to be cumbersome and meaningless.   He found solace in the images of the new teenager that were portrayed by actors such as James Dean, folk music that addressed social justice and blues music that addressed the inner turmoil of African-American’s lives.  He would eventually leave Minnesota and play the Greenwich Village Folk music circuit in New York during the early sixties.   He called himself Bob Dylan after reading poems by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.   While working the clubs in the early sixties, Bob Dylan created an entirely new personality for himself.   He sang about social issues, spoke about authenticity and told friends that he had been brought up under the tough conditions handed out to America’s blue collar workers.

The youth of the sixties were ready for this kind of personality.  This was a decade in which half of the American population was under the age of thirty.  It was also a decade which experienced an incredible amount of social upheaval.   The possibility of nuclear devastation had become very real as the Cuban Missile Crisis took America close to war.   The Civil Rights movement revealed the deep racial tensions that were ripping the country apart.   The assassinations of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. exposed a violent reaction to change.  The Vietnam War, and the draft that came with it, forced America’s youth to come face to face with their own mortality.   Bobby Zimmerman’s transformation into Bob Dylan came on the brink of an era in which America’s youth would be asked to grow up very quickly.

Although he would later travel to Israel after his father died, Dylan never really connected to his Jewish roots – even converting to Christianity for a brief period of time in the late seventies.   Despite this rejection, Robert Zimmerman’s transformation to Bob Dylan is an important American Jewish story.    Like so many American Jews who came before him, Dylan rejected his Jewish past in an attempt to find a more authentic and meaningful lifestyle.  

For the generation of Jews who grew up in the fifties and sixties, Judaism was not an open spiritual journey but a set of fixed practices that were limited by their very nature.   This generation wanted to invent a new lifestyle for itself, a lifestyle that was exciting and transformative.   For this generation, Bob Dylan represented an opportunity to deal with the rising angst of being a teenager.

Yet time would change and Bob Dylan would eventually speak to the generation of American Jews growing up today.   This generation has a very different experience with Judaism.   Their Rabbis are more welcoming, their synagogues are more open and their experience with Judaism enables them to ask questions instead of only being told answers.   For these Jews, Dylan’s music actually parallels Jewish ideas and values.   As Jewish children are becoming Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and learning that their parents no longer control their destiny, Dylan’s line that “..your sons and your daughters are beyond your command” resonates.   As Jews read through the Book of Ecclesiastes and read about the ancient struggle to find pleasure in life, Dylan’s line that “Life is sad, life is a bust, all ya can do is do what you must” resonates.   As Jews recite the words “Who shall die by fire and who by water” during the High Holy Days, Dylan’s line that “God knows there’s gonna be no more water but fire next time” resonates.

The great irony of Bob Dylans’ rejection of Judaism is that so many Jews are now listening to his music through a Jewish lens.   Perhaps the great lesson in his story is that his generation’s search for meaning is a search that has been going on for thousands of years.   Because he saw Judaism through the prism of 1950’s America, Dylan and so many other Jews could not recognize that the journey they were embarking on was a journey that had long been taken by their ancestors.