Going back to Monterrey, I think that this is a tremendous, dynamic, scorching version of Highway 61 Revisited from that February 29th gig in Mexico. The ability of Bob and the band to make this song new again in tour after tour is mind-boggling. Listen to how Dylan riffs exuberantly on the vocal from somewhere about the third minute onwards. And his organ playing is just white hot these days. Fantastic.

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And if you dig your Dylan live clips compressed or otherwise, don’t miss the treasure trove currently offered at this location.

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For those who are inspired by the themes of faith in the songs of Bob Dylan, I think that considerations of the nexus of Judaism and Christianity hold a special interest. Thanks to Bob Cohen for an e-mail forwarding a link to this article in TIME magazine, which provides a thumbnail sketch of some current debate in that area.

Recently a popular blogger — let’s call him Rabbi Ben — zinged the scholarship of a man we shall call Rabbi Rob. R. Ben claimed R. Rob did not “understand the difference between Judaism prior to the two Jewish wars in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. and later Mishnaic and Talmudic Judaism.” He helpfully provided a syllabus.

Actually, neither man is a rabbi. (Sorry.) Ben Witherington is a Methodist New Testament scholar, and Rob Bell a rising Michigan megapastor. Yet each regards sources like the Mishnah and Rabbi Akiva as vital to understanding history’s best-known Jew: Jesus.

[...]

The shift came in stages: first a brute acceptance that Jesus was born a Jew and did Jewish things; then admission that he and his interpreter Paul saw themselves as Jews even while founding what became another faith; and today, recognition of what the Rev. Bruce Chilton, author of Rabbi Jesus, calls Jesus’ passionate dedication “to Jewish ideas of his day” on everything from ritual purity to the ideal of the kingdom of God — ideas he rewove but did not abandon.

What does this mean, practically? At times the resulting adjustment seems simple. For example, Bell thinks he knows the mysterious words Jesus wrote in the dust while defending the adulteress (”He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone,” etc.). By Bell’s calculation, that showdown occurred at the same time as religious Jews’ yearly reading of the prophet Jeremiah’s warning that “those who turn from [God] will be written in the dust because they have forsaken [him].” Thus Jesus wrote the crowd’s names to warn that their lack of compassion alienated their (and his) God.

A trickier revision for readers involves Paul’s Letter to the Romans, forever a key Christian text on sin and Christ’s salvific grace. Yet this reading necessitates skipping over what seems like extraneous material in Chapters 9 through 11, which are about the Jews. Increasingly, says Jason Byassee, an editor at the Christian Century,, scholars now read Romans through those chapters, as a musing by a lifelong Jew on how God can fulfill his biblical covenant with Israel even if it does not accept His son. Byassee the theologian agrees. But as a Methodist pastor, he frets that Romans “is no longer really about Gentile Christians. How do you preach it?”

Towards the end of Romans, Chapter 11, referenced above, Paul writes of the olive tree:

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.
You will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.”
That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe.
For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.
Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off.
And even the others, if they do not persist in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again.
For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree.

Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion,
he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”;
“and this will be my covenant with them
when I take away their sins.”

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O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

From my unlearned point of view, I’m always impressed by the interest of practicing Jews in any of these questions, since, at least as it appears to me, Christ can have no theological significance in Judaism. No doubt the subject may nonetheless be fascinating on its academic merits, and I guess it also can have a very practical and social application for Jews living in a society which is largely Christian. It clearly is good to understand one another, and to value that which we have in common. I think that Christians, on the other hand, have additional and very compelling reasons for grappling with the subject matter. The Bible that Christians read (or sometimes read) is, per pound, mainly Hebrew scripture. Even the part we know as our New Testament consists largely of things written by Jews about Jews. All of this should make anti-semitism, from a Christian point-of-view, all the more of an inexplicable evil.

Recently I’ve been attending a class on the Psalms given by the pastor at my church. The Psalms provide a great example of the gulf which can separate a Jewish versus a Christian reading of the same scriptural text, and yet individuals of both faiths can pray them as fervently. That’s pretty nifty when you think about it. It is possible, and I guess it has been quite common in certain times and places, for Christian interpreters to relentlessly present Jesus as being present in the Psalms, both as an addressee of the psalmist and an addresser of God (the Father). And, indeed, there can hardly be anything wrong for the average Christian reader in reading them in this manner, except to the extent that it might exclude other ways of appreciating the text. Understanding — to any degree — the historical and spiritual context in which they were written only enriches one’s sense of the depth and truth of God’s word; how it can be true both then and now, from this point of view and from that point of view. For a Christian, I think, any journey down this avenue increases one’s understanding of what it means that we worship not just any god, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And so another Dylan connection: Years of listening to and reflecting on the songs of Bob Dylan is a kind of training for this understanding of a text that holds true on multiple levels. It is one of the defining characteristics of his work, after all. As one small example, take the song It Ain’t Me, Babe. Taken one way — the most immediate and obvious way — it addresses a romantic lover who expects too much, who wants the singer to live up to her notion of the ideal mate, and is ignoring the reality of who he actually is. Taken another way, it is a singer and balladeer — or any kind of artist — addressing an audience who demands of him to be that which they want him to be; to articulate their opinions and to reinforce their world-view. (Arguably, depending on how it’s sung it can lean one way or the other. I think of the rollicking Before the Flood version as being very much addressed to a lover; I think of the Real Live version as being addressed to the audience, and all the more poignantly so as a result of the audience participation which takes place.)

You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Never weak but always strong,
To protect you an’ defend you
Whether you are right or wrong,
Someone to open each and every door,
But it ain’t me, babe …

One interpretation need not deny the validity of the other interpretation. Part of the pleasure is in feeling how the emphasis can shift moment by moment, performance by performance. Accepting both angles enriches the listener’s experience of what is taking place. There are many other examples in Dylan’s oeuvre; too many to list, and many which have a faith-oriented nature (even It Ain’t Me, Babe tells the listener that he/she really seeks someone “who will die for you and more”).

Dylan’s music is not holy scripture, although he is someone who takes holy scripture seriously, and who has expressed the thought that he would not consciously write something that was anti-scriptural (1985 interview with Bill Flanagan). Although his life is not an open book, nor one that we should force open, it is one that has brought to many people’s attention the deep question of this nexus of Judaism and Christianity. He is someone who can attend and participate in a Yom Kippur service while being able contemporaneously to perform in concert a song of his own composition which says that “there’s only one road and it leads to Calvary.”

So, I guess the lesson we might draw is, “Be not afraid.” There should not be an insecurity in considering how God’s word can be true on one level and on a quite different level at the same time. It is not something to shy away from, but rather something in which we can rejoice. And that, I think, is very good news indeed.

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