From: khematite@gmail.com   
      
   Dylan’s mysterious 1975 masterpiece, is he referencing the Talmud?   
   Seth Rogovoy, The Forward   
   January 31, 2022   
      
   Inspired in part by all the Jewish artists on Rolling Stone’s list of the   
   500 Greatest Songs, the Forward decided it was time to rank the best Jewish   
   pop songs of all time. You can find the whole list and accompanying essays   
   here.   
      
   There are dozens if not hundreds of Bob Dylan songs that could be considered   
   “Jewish” in one manner or another. Indeed, you could write a book. (I know   
   because I did.) The most obvious ones include “Highway 61 Revisited,” the   
   top vote-getter on    
   our list of the Great Jewish Songs of the Rock Era; “All Along the   
   Watchtower,” whose imagery comes right of Isaiah; and “Wheels on Fire,”   
   a kind of midrash on Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot.   
      
   Scratch just below the surface, and there is Jewish and/or Biblical content in   
   “Jokerman,” “I and I,” “Forever Young,” “Tombstone Blues,”   
   “Not Dark Yet,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” and even a trifle like   
   “Man Gave Names to All    
   the Animals,” to name just a handful.   
      
   One of Dylan’s greatest songs is also my all-time favorite. “Idiot Wind”   
   was a cornerstone of Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece, “Blood on the Tracks,” a   
   searing, devastating examination of an American landscape riven by war (Saigon   
   fell within weeks    
   of the album’s release) and governmental corruption (Nixon had resigned just   
   a few months earlier), as well as a highly personal expression of lost love   
   (“Blood on the Tracks” is often called Dylan’s “divorce album” and   
   his son Jakob has said    
   listening to it is like eavesdropping on his parents’ painful conversations   
   from that time) and rage against critics, the media (the song opens,   
   “Someone’s got it in for me / They’re planting stories in the press”),   
   and all those who had “   
   double-crossed” him along the way.   
      
   Some of the song’s imagery is Jewish – the “smoke pourin’ out of a   
   boxcar door” could be a reference to the trains carrying Jews to the death   
   camps – and some is Christian – “There’s a lone soldier on the   
   cross” – and some combines    
   both: “The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while   
   the building burned.” Dylan’s sense of martyrdom infuses every line he   
   sneers – and he does not merely sing “Idiot Wind,” he veritably sneers   
   it: “You hurt the ones    
   that I love best and cover up the truth with lies….”   
      
   The essential lines of the song appear in the refrain, which rolls around   
   after every two verses, four times in all. Each time the lyrics change   
   slightly, but what remains the same (with one exception) throughout is:   
   “Idiot wind, blowing every time you    
   move your teeth / You’re an idiot babe / It’s a wonder that you still know   
   how to breathe.”   
      
   Now, clearly, one could rip the song and songwriter to shreds over a strain of   
   misogyny that runs through the song, if one believes that the “you” of the   
   song is a woman. But that’s not entirely clear, and in the song’s final   
   couplet, the    
   narrator implicates himself (and the listener) in this vicious indictment:   
   “We’re idiots, babe / It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”   
      
   What always interested me most about the song was the term “idiot wind.”   
   Where did that come from? Was it a term used in literature or poetry? Not as   
   far as I could determine. I once had the great privilege of having dinner with   
   renowned literary    
   scholar Christopher Ricks, whose writings on John Donne and John Keats are as   
   canonical as his terrific book on Dylan’s poetry, “Dylan’s Visions of   
   Sin.” I asked Ricks if he knew of any literary precedent for this odd,   
   idiomatic expression. He    
   knew of none.   
      
   Which is why I was startled when I stumbled upon a phrase from the Talmud   
   (Tractate Sotah 3a) attributed to Reysh Lakish: “Eyn adam over aveyre ela im   
   keyn nikhnas bo ruach shtus” [emphasis mine]. This translates approximately   
   to: “No one commits a    
   sin unless the wind of idiocy enters into him.” The ruach shtus is the   
   breath or wind of idiocy. Dylan relies on both meanings of ruach: “Idiot   
   wind, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.” The use of the   
   term implies an equation    
   between idiocy (or madness) and sin — that the acts of stupidity delineated   
   in the song can only be explained as the wages of sin. Dylan’s use of the   
   central image of wind also happens to echo an earlier anthem that addressed   
   sin and idiocy – the    
   kind that was “blowin’ in the wind.”   
      
   In what felt back then like Dylan’s version of a State of the Union address,   
   he sang, “Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the   
   wheels have stopped / What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll   
   find out when you reach    
   the top / You’re on the bottom.” Nearly fifty years on, with the   
   foundations of our democracy being shaken to their core and a respiratory   
   virus threatening our health and well-being, it’s still, unfortunately, “a   
   wonder that [we] still know how    
   to breathe.” The diagnosis? Ruach shtus. Idiot wind.   
      
   Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at the Forward and the author of “Bob   
   Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” (Scribner).   
      
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