Northern Mockingbird : Bob Dylan’s Torah

This is a Northern Mockingbird. Some birds are defined by their flight, others by their appearance. Mockingbirds are defined by their songs. These phenomenal singers have hundreds of different songs in their repertoire, and their singing goes on for hours, like a never ending tour. Some compositions are original, others syncretic mimicry. This vast range often makes them hard to identify, to pin down definitively. Rasps, and trills, and whistles - Is that the Mockingbird? Or one of their countless sound-alikes?

Torah is a song. By this I mean much more than merely to “read Torah” is to chant it. Torah’s narrative is recurring motifs: separated holiness, care for the Other, grateful service to HaShem. Torah soars to a crescendo at Sinai and plummets to the elegy of the Golden Calf. Miriam’s call-and-response at the Song of the Sea is writ large in the covenantal relationship between Am Yisrael and HaShem. Time itself is created in eternal cycles: “year” and “repetition” sharing the same Hebrew root. The Composer and Conductor established Shabbat, the metronomic heartbeat of our lives, as the steadily recurring beat of it all.

Bob Dylan now begins his 80’s. Born a nice Jewish boy in Minnesota’s North Country, he is today an enigmatic icon, a mocker of expectations and conventions. Dylanologists (futilely) debate: Is he a Jew? Highway 61 Revisited and Neighborhood Bully say Yes. His public conversion and Christian album trilogy say No. Ignore the nonsense; listen to his Literature Nobel speech. It’s set to piano. It invokes divine inspiration. He lauds the millennia of oral tradition. Close your eyes, and you can almost see the trope symbols. Is there Torah in Dylan’s poetry? Ask the Mockingbird. The answer, my friend, is Blowin’ in the Wind.