Tribes Of America
Thoughts On Bob Dylan, Jews On The Hot-Seat, and The Bourbon Street Massacre
Twenty - Twenty - Five …
So far it’s been a rocky start. I’ve been busy preparing for the benefit concert that I’m co-hosting and co-producing for next weekend. Very busy. But my mind can’t outrun thinking about a man so aimlessly angry that he steered a pickup truck up Bourbon Street in order to kill and maim as many people as he could. Complete strangers to him. None that had ever done him harm, or had even known that he existed.
At the moment that it happened - as far as I can figure - I was sitting in a car outside my little hideaway in peaceful Altadena CA, talking with my closest confidant in all of the world. The two of us had just come from a thoroughly enjoyable evening with friends in the cozy Glendale home of mutual friends. There’d been good food, lively conversation, and music made by hand and by heart. People who can’t imagine a better way to celebrate a brand new year, than by singing to one another over the ringing sounds of guitars and piano and laughter.
Alexia and I sat in her little Honda, listening to the distant explosions of fireworks down the slope and across the big and troubled city we both love; doing what we always do. And that is to discuss what we’d observed during the previous hours. This is a tradition with us. What we call the ‘post-mortem’. Having combined our efforts well over a hundred times across the last 16 years, to bring people together inside the safety of a shared camaraderie.
This to discuss what we got right, what we could have done better, what we might want to do next time. This little habit of ours has spread from re-capping our own events to giving the once over to any event we both attend. We often see the world through different lenses, but we are both obsessed with understanding the humans that we know, and that we are.
Certainly, in that hour, in a darkened car, under an old oak tree, in the first hour of 2025, we could not have imagined the human mind that even then was flooring his vehicle of vengeance up that narrow historic street halfway across the country. A street that the two of us had strolled together years ago.
More is now known about this killer. His years of military service. His failed marriages, and various attempts to find a satisfying career. How he’d become possessed by the religion that his father had adopted more casually decades earlier. How he’d moved to a Muslim community an hour’s drive from Houston, where he lived between two mosques, and apparently never joined either.
Maybe I’m still hungover by the grinding hostility of an election year, but I cannot see this horrendous act as other than a disconnected man trying desperately to find a tribe. By all accounts, he’d been happy in the US Military. ‘Grounded’ was the word used by one of his family members. But since leaving that enormous purposeful American tribe, he’d somehow become so deeply unaffiliated that he saw himself as an avenging warrior for a radical army whose language he didn’t even speak.
A couple of days later, Alexia and I saw ‘A Complete Unknown’ in a cavernous, sparsely populated theater in Pasadena. A fine film. Beautifully done. With more than one performance that will garner awards. And there too I saw the markers of American Tribalism.
There’s a moment where Bob Dylan attends a Civil Rights rally mostly out of curiosity. The camera catches this young ambitious folk singer in close-up as behind him, others speak passionately into microphones. And you can just hear his wheels turning. “Oh … so this is a thing. This is where the eyes of the nation will be. This is where I need to be.”
The film makes no bones about Dylan’s sometimes veiled, and sometimes ruthless march toward fame. In the early moments we see him, just off the bus from Hibbing Minnesota, seeking out the disabled Woody Guthrie in a dank sanitarium. There he finds Pete Seeger cheering the fading Guthrie with road songs.
And in that one scene, we see the 1940’s populism of Guthrie, and the 1950’s socialism of Seeger, turning to acknowledge something new and as yet undefinable. If Dylan is indeed the voice of his generation, his absolute unwillingness to be pinned down does speak restlessly for that bunch of Americans who once scorned the conformist materialism of their parents, and went on to such excess as to make those parents seem positively Amish by comparison.
Much of the last third of this well-told story sees Dylan going out of his way to make Pete Seeger miserable. We all know the story of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and how Dylan staged a coup with a scruffy band of New York rockers. It’s hard to imagine Ed Norton’s portrayal of this Hudson Valley icon not winning an Oscar for best supporting actor.
The writer and director show an acute sensitivity to Seeger’s plight, as this earnest man, secure in his own role as charming banjo-toting radical, is forced to be the voice of musical conservatism … trying to hold to the ‘traditions’ of this festival and its well-heeled, well-read attendees, as this rough newcomer snatches the genre away from them and throws it outward to the rowdy world in a storm of drums and electrical feedback.
On the ride home, I remarked to my friend, that I’d always thought of Seeger as a little bit too self-righteous. We agreed that sometimes the seemingly self-righteous are actually just righteous.
The next day was Saturday. I woke up feeling like I wanted some backup at my own performance a week further on. So I messaged another friend who’s played percussion with me a number of times as I busked on the bluffs of Santa Monica’s Palisades Park. I asked if she’d like to join me on the 11th, and she said sure. We’d need to decide which songs to play and give them a good run-through, so we decided to meet right there where we’d often played - this time just to practice.
It was a beautiful warm day. We met up at 3:00, and talked and played, and generally re-connected after too long apart. As the sun began to fall, people gathered at the railing, as they always do when a particularly fine sunset is at hand, Shelley and I ran through the three songs that we’d decided on. And when we finished the last one, we heard applause, and looked up to see that people had turned from the horizon to show us a little love.
It hadn’t occurred to us that we were performing. Our thoughts were a week away on the other side of town. But somehow we’d unwittingly contributed to the mood.
When they’d turned back to the fiery sky, and we’d packed her drum and my guitar into their carry-bags, I took this shot. People gathered in unspoken agreement about something none of them had made. There on the west balcony of North America.
I had one more mission for the weekend. Again with Alexia. We’d been invited to morning service at the Church in Ocean Park. The big room that we’ve rented many times, and that has been donated for this week’s fundraiser. Pastor Janet McKeithen had invited Rabbi Josh Katzan, from a synagogue just blocks away.
These are both caring and genuine people whose congregants are mostly progressive. And here was a charming and articulate Rabbi in his late forties perhaps, wading into what he knew might be a lion’s den. He opened his comments by saying that all pro-Israel Jews feel that they are now expected to be ambassadors. And then he walked right into the fire, addressing the turmoil that has spread here to Los Angeles from the much greater turmoil of Gaza.
This little church is one where people are encouraged to speak their minds. And after the talk by Rabbi Josh as prompted by Pastor Janet, people did not hold their tongues. One African American gentleman named Craig, said that we’d all agree about the problem with White Christian Nationalism. He then asked the Rabbi how Israel’s actions are not simply White Jewish Nationalism.
Another woman admitted that on October 7, 2023, watching the news reports of Hamas atrocities, she’d turned to a friend and said “Kill them all!” And then she went on to recount how gradually, as Netanyahu’s war dragged on, she had come to agree with the wide-spread left-wing opinion that what we’re watching is a genocide.
The Rabbi did his very best to respond. And knowing that it would take hours to parse the nuances of the conflict in a land where he’s lived and studied, he invited each challenger in turn, to have coffee with him at a little shop midway between that church and his synagogue, promising that he’ll listen and discuss for as long as they need him to. Even picking up the tab.
The ancient tribalism of the Middle East has indeed been exported to our shores by the attack on Israeli innocents, and the retributive attacks that have left so many innocent Palestinians dead and maimed.
Did all of this contribute to Trump’s decisive victory in November? Did it contribute to a Texas veteran’s mental delamination in the earliest hours of the New Orleans new year? Who can say?
In his talk, that patient kind-hearted Rabbi said that one of the most important things that he’s learned from his long studies of The Torah and The Talmud … is that - when faced with an idea or opinion or belief with which one disagrees strongly - one need feel no obligation to change that belief. This being an explanation for how openly opinionated many Jews are, and also for why Judaism is not an proselytizing religion.
When offering to buy the coffee, he said “I’ll listen to what you think, and I’ll tell you what I think … with no intention to convince you.”
Wow, I thought. That’s a pretty radical idea in the US in the 21st Century. Maybe I should try that.
Anyway. I admire the efforts of both leaders of these little flocks. It took courage for Josh to show up, and it took courage for Janet to invite him.
As for Alexia and myself, it will take less courage to raise money for Braver Angels. But there is still much work yet to do before the show can go on. So I better wrap this up and get on with it. If you’re looking for some good music and some good food next Saturday, here’s the flyer.
You are welcome and valued, whether we agree on most issues or few issues or any issues at all.
Hopefully, by the time the last song is sung, and the last of the soup has been sopped up by the last of the sourdough bread … and another sunset has filled the windows of that funky little hippie church in Santa Monica … we’ll all be reminded that humanity is the one tribe from which we’ll never be expelled. And for which membership has no purity tests.
I’ll let you go for now. Thanks for hearing me out.
So good. My mother read it and said "absolutely lovely." She wants a flyer...
Is Rabbi Josh invited to the concert this Saturday? Would love to meet him!