“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. (“This does not mean that most Jews think those things are good,” Alan Cooperman, deputy director of Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project, said at the time. “They are saying that those things do not disqualify a person from being Jewish.”)
In contrast to Oppenheimer, there was the reaction by Rabbi Josh Feigelson, president and CEO of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. In a Facebook post, he addresses Brooks with “compassion,” wondering if the writer turned to Christianity because the ideas that draw him — sanctity, service and intimacy with God — were missing from his own Jewish upbringing.
“So much of what Brooks describes in his piece sounds, to me at any rate, familiar: Someone raised in a Jewish home and in institutional Jewish life who didn’t find what he was looking for on a spiritual level and, eventually, sought it in other traditions,” writes Feigelson. “Over and over as I read his column, I found myself wondering if Brooks was aware that these same rich concepts exist in thick, rich Jewish language — that he could find many of the jewels he sought right in his own backyard.”
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.
Brooks’ essay appeared in the week before Christmas and the first day of Hanukkah, which owing to the quirks of the Jewish calendar only rarely overlap. That’s led to inevitable reporting on “Chrismukkah” and how the convergence is being marked, especially by interfaith families. The Times had another essay last week, this one by a Jewish man married to a Catholic woman describing the Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations his family planned.
The essay by Dan Saltzstein makes no theological claims, but I was struck by a comment left by a reader. “The meaning of Christmas is lost on many, but not most,” writes “Bunkhars.” “After Easter, Christmas time to me is the most sacred and filled with deep spiritual meaning. I don’t take offense easily, but I do this time around. Chrismukkah or whatever they call the birth of Christ — my Savior and Redeemer — is just not so. Call it Shoppukkah or Drinkukkah or Giftukkah, but not in my face and not [in] a national paper.”
It turns out a Christian reader can also feel threatened by “sort of Christian-ish, sort of Jew-ish” mashups. I can only wonder what Bunkhars thought of Brooks’ essay.
Bob Dylan’s Jewish fans take comfort in his trips to Israel since his Gospels phase. He’s done fundraisers for Chabad and showed up in a California shul for Yom Kippur services. In 1983 he recorded “Neighborhood Bully,” which a former colleague of mine called “the most passionate, stinging advocacy of Israel’s situation ever written.”
Still, if not a complete unknown, his religious journey seems to be a complicated one. “I’m a religious person,” Dylan told The Wall Street Journal in 2022. “I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.”
For all their qualms about syncretism and heresy, Jews have been hesitant to cast other Jews out of the fold. It’s a principle that goes back to the Talmud: “Even when the Jewish people have sinned, they are still called ‘Israel.’” More recently, Jews remember how Nazis persecuted people as Jews without drawing distinctions around belief, belonging or even self-definition. These days, when extreme voices call other Jews heretics, the topic is more likely to be Israel than religion.
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.
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