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May 22: Dylan’s Bar Mitsve

lawrencebush
May 22, 2011

Bob Dylan - Hava NagilaBob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) became a bar mitsve on this date in 1954, two days shy of his 13th birthday, at Agudas Achim, the only synagogue in Hibbing, Minnesota. The guest list numbered 400; Dylan’s father was president of B’nai Brith, and his mother was president of the local Hadassah chapter. “The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitsved,” Dylan would later tell the tale. “Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs above the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock and roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. I use to go up there every day to learn the stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour or so, I’d come down and boogie.” Seven years later, during his debut at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, Dylan said into the microphone, “Here’s a foreign song I learned out in Utah,” and then sang a flat-footed parody of “Hava Nagila” ending with a yodel. “With the yodel and a finishing harmonica flourish,” noted Larry Yudelson in the Washington Post (1991), “Dylan had outlined an epitaph for the Hebrew folk songs sung by folksingers like Theodore Bikel and the Weavers as part of a vaguely leftist, workingman’s ethnic repertoire. The mockery was prescient: The left would not be strumming love songs about Israeli soldiers much longer.” In 1962, Dylan would record his first album, Bob Dylan, for Columbia Records, and launch his historic career.

“While Jewish leaders are preaching continuity, Dylan quietly raised five children, saw them to bar mitsves and Jewish weddings, but is most at home perpetuating the culture of the Woody Guthrie and the old blues singers. At the same time, he has an intense desire for God and salvation, a tremendous awareness of man’s sinfulness and an appreciation of how much compassion is required in this world. His is an intense, spiritual emotional message, very Hasidic, with much to teach the Jewish world.” —Larry Yudelson

Watch Bob Dylan accompany on harmonica his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and Harry Dean Stanton in “Hava Nagila” at a Chabad telethon in 1989:


Bob Dylan Hava Naguila by yahadoute