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Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Bob Dylans Jokermans Sister

From Bob Dylans Jokerman (1983):


Youre a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds Manipulator of crowds, youre a dream twister Youre going to Sodom and Gomorrah But what do you care? Aint nobody there would want to marry your sister Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name

Michael Gray in Song & Dance Man III (2000) p 495 on the Jokermans sister:
I can find no scriptural rationale for Dylans envigoratingly deviant surprise ending to these lines. Its a twister (on the positive side).

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in a London Evening Standard article (10 May 1999) by finger-in-every-pie utterly assimilated North London Jewess Victoria Coren called The Whole World is Turning Jewish said:
We say ambition is fine; make a million dollars, but be charitable. You are obligated to feed the poor, but not necessarily to feel his plight, which is where Christianity puts the emphasis. You can be a selfish bastard businessman, who thinks a man with his hand out is a lazy parasite; Judaism doesnt care what you think, as long as you feed the guy.

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge defines charity in this way:


Zedekah (righteousness). A nearer Hebrew equivalent to the connotation of charity is gelimut hesed, bestowing kindness, a term which however has come to be used for non-eleemosynary efforts and acts. Whilst there are ample words in Hebrew to denote all the degrees of indigence the lack of a word which should exactly express what charity or philanthropy has come to the poor as well as its proper meaning of righteousness, crystallize the concept that acts of charity were ordained duties. It would be an exaggeration to say that the welcoming phrase of the Seder ritual, whosoever wishes to partake, was the keynote of life in any period of Israelite history.

The opening of Jokerman, the opening song of Bob Dylans Infidels (1983):
Standing on the waters casting your bread While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.

Michael Gray p 482 on Eccles(iastes) cakes chapter 11:1: . . . is the textual basis for the Jewish Passover ritual in which people take bags of
breadcrumbs and throw them into the river to symbolise the casting out of their sins hence Dylans lovely breadcrumb sins in The Gates of Eden.

In the moderately uncompelling Michaels footnote to p 566:


An artist as immoderately compelling as Bob Dylan is to those he gets his hook into inevitably attracts oceans of this specious amateurish commentary, as you will know

if you have ever wandered through the websites and newsgroups devoted to him the muddiest superhighway in the universe or the deliberately unedited pages of the Dignity magazine.

What Swiftian vitriol (p 475), or should that be Popean? A little learning is a dangerous thing indeed (p 486n). From Andrew Muirs erstwhile Judas! Number 7 October 2003, Michael Gray on Christopher Ricks Dylans Visions of Sin
Penguin Books, 25 September 2003: Where there is criticism there is often much hissing and venom. Worse, poor critical writing is plentiful and can strangle up your mind (p 56)

Gray p 464:
By the standards Dylan so toweringly set over the years, Infidels is a real mudcake creature, failing in a small-minded, cheating way, so that to listen to that voice trying to do a salesmans job on it is distinctly discomforting. As I wrote in reviewing the album at the time, what comes across is a lack of self-regard on Dylans part: as if he were beginning to piss away his stature as an artist . . .

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Soggy breadcrumbs? Zedekah? Luke 16 King James Version (KJV)


20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, 21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

Christ notes approvingly that the unnamed rich man in hell begs mercy in vain -- in the Gospel of Luke 16:19-31 According to St Michael p 496:
Yet as lines addressed to Christ, though they seem to allude to his inconsistency, they no longer carry the earlier acerbity. The biblical allusions here point the contrast

between Christs compassion for the woman of shame and his stern parable about a certain rich man.

Gray p 486:
When Dylan cites Ecclesiastes in the opening line of Jokerman (not by naming it but by quoting directly from it), he is not labouring its centrality to any understanding of what hes on about, but he is certainly returning to biblical territory . . .

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:


You can be a selfish bastard businessman, who thinks a man with his hand out is a lazy parasite; Judaism doesnt care what you think, as long as you feed the guy.

The Jokermans sister decoded. But what do you care? From Henry Millers surreal My Dream of Mobile: a chapter in The AirConditioned Nightmare (1945):
Events transpire in all declensions at once; they are never conjugated. What is not Gog is Magogand at nine punkt Gabriel always blows his horn. But is it music? Who cares?

2012 Paul Kirkman, Messianic Dylanologist.

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