Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (34 page)

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.
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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’.
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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.
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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 Hollywood 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’.
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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’.

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 e
kklesia
, 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.’
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That might have counted as a working definition of Dylan’s Christian faith were it not for the fact that, as ever, he resists definition. In the summer of 1986, for example, a slightly startling report would appear in the New York
Daily News
. This would state that Dylan had spent ‘parts of the last four years’ living and worshipping among Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Members of the community would tell the newspaper that the artist had been ‘taking instruction from Talmudic scholars and listening to talks by Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson’. Pressed on Dylan’s activities, a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch sect would reply: ‘He is a very private person and we respect his wishes to remain so. You never know when he will drop in – he can come or go at any time.’
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In fact, by that date the diarist for
New York
magazine had already published a small, overlooked item (on 6 June 1983) to much the same effect and received a ‘no comment’ from Dylan’s representatives. By the end of 1983, nevertheless, one of the Lubavitch rabbis would be talking freely to
Christianity Today
about the 40-something student who had made his way to Brooklyn.
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