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14th and 1st

Celebrating Bob Dylan at Age 72-Love Minus Zero (No Limit)

Friday, May 24, 2013 10:15 am

Dr. Stephen Hazan Arnoff is the Executive Director of the 14th Street Y. We’re sharing this essay that he wrote in honor of Bob Dylan’s 72nd birthday. Happy Birthday, Bob!
-14th Street Y

Bob Dylan turns 72 years old on May 24. Happy Birthday, Bob! So what can we wish for a man who already has it all?

Dylan may be the most important figure in popular culture for the past fifty years. Others have sold more records and sold out more concert halls, but Dylan has made an indelible creative mark on the world by challenging popular culture to wrestle with questions of religion, philosophy, and meaning like no other contemporary artist.

The Beatles? They may be the band by which pop music genius is measured until today, but without encountering Dylan’s dismantling of expectations about what pop could be and do (and, as legend has it, getting them to smoke weed for the first time), there would be no Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s, let alone John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Dylan has for many years captivated filmmakers, writers, actors, directors, dancers, and poets, too. Allen Ginsberg, a standard-bearer for the place where pop, spirituality and art meet, bowed to the young Dylan, saying: “There is a very famous saying among Tibetan Buddhists: ‘If the student is not better than the teacher, then the teacher is a failure.’”

Dylan’s influence extended to visual arts as well. Andy Warhol was the only prime mover of hipness and meaning to approach Dylan’s artistic impact, and they stalked each other like two boxers in the ring of pop. During a visit to Warhol’s Factory Dylan nonchalantly tossed the artist’s famous cut-out image of Elvis pulling a gun on into the back of his convertible and sped away, symbolically triumphing in their duel.

On the religious front, Dylan has traveled many paths and one path all at the same time. Is he a devout Jew still known to appear at Chabad synagogues, a reformed born-again Christian, or a humanist iconoclast? On all of these paths he has modeled an artistic search for feeling, meaning, and truth.

As Joan Baez, a former lover and one of Dylan’s first patrons in Martin Scorsese’s Bob-umentary, said:

There are no veils, curtains, doors, walls, anything, between what pours out of Bob’s hand onto the page and what is somehow available to the core of people who are believers in him. Some people would say, you know, ‘not interested,’ but if you’re interested, he goes way, way deep.

So as Dylan turns 72 on May 24 — the Hebrew birthday of שבתאי זיסל בן אברהם is 27 Iyyar — what birthday wishes can we offer?

Seventy-two in gematria is chesed. In kabbalistic terms chesed means something like “Love Minus Zero (No Limit),” the title of a Dylan tune from 1965. What might be true of all great rock and roll is certainly true of Dylan: no matter their topic or instrumentation, all of his songs are love songs at their core. Dylan took these obsessions with love further than any pop star before him, particularly when it came to completing the divine.

Celebrating Dylan’s 50th birthday with a list of 50 things he loved about Bob, Bono pointed out mixing-up human love and love of God. This tangling of divine and human love while wrestling with their limits is the story of Dylan’s music in every era — from “Love is all there is it can’t be denied” on Nashville Skyline in the late 60s to “Shelter from the Storm’s” “If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born” in the 70s to a more recent album entitled Love and Theft.

Dylan’s songs interpret the balance and battle of chesed and gevurah — ultimate love, life, birth, and release in tension with the ultimate limit of destruction and death. “He not busy being born is dying,” Dylan sang some fifty years ago — a mantra for the creative life he has modeled for artists, thinkers, and teachers for more than half a century.

On his birthday of chesed we celebrate Dylan’s curiosity, confounding of expectations, shattering of myths, rebuilding of myths, crankiness and love of music. (Just listen to one of his one hundred radio shows Theme Time Radio Hour of a few years ago with hour-long musical explorations of themes from Drinking to Hair to Tennessee to enjoy the company of someone whose love of music is overflowing.)

As my friend and teacher Rabbi Ebn Leader has taught, “Existence itself is an act of chesed – ‘Olam chesed yibaneh’(Psalms, 89:3).” For the world of popular culture that matters, Bob Dylan is a foundation of the world.

Originally posted in Talkin’ Hava Nagilah Blues, Stephen Hazan Arnoff’s Blog. Follow for more great posts like this one!

http://talkinhavanagilahblues.blogspot.com/2013/05/celebrating-bob-dylan-at-age-72-love.html

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LABA Festival Preview: Talking Sweet, Salty and Spicy with LABA Fellow Erin Patinkin, Founder & Co-president of Ovenly

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 4:41 pm

Today we sit down with LABA artist fellow and baker extraordinaire Erin Patinkin to learn about what she is working on for the upcoming from LABA EAT Festival

Erin discusses experimenting in the kitchen and how she was inspired by ancient texts to come up with new recipes for the festival.

EAT, an arts festival from LABA with performances, music, art, teachings and tastings, will take place June 1-2 at the 14th Street Y. Come get a sneak peak, or…well, taste of Erin’s amazing food Thursday, May 23rd from 12-5 in the Y’s lobby.

So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do?

My official title is Founder and Co-president of Ovenly. Back in 2010, I started Ovenly–a creative kitchen specializing in pastries and bar snacks–with my business partner Agatha Kulaga. Last year, we opened our first retail space. People like to push us into the category of “bakery” and though we see ourselves as much more, we’re OK with that. We’ve had a lot of fun press<http://oven.ly/press/>. If you’re like me and love the combinations of sweet, salt, and spice, then you have to visit. Our salted chocolate chip cookies or our black caraway smoked salt shortbread or our gingery honey almond corn will knock your socks off. Promise.

For Ovenly, I devise recipes, experiment in the kitchen, make last minute ingredient runs, train staff, and run the financial side of the business; however, I’m also a trained actor with experience in the visual arts, so I dabble in other things. For example; this August, illustrator Julia Pott<http://www.juliapott.com> and I will be mounting a gallery exhibition that celebrates youth through the medium of cake. Finally a marriage of my past and present careers!

And what are you working on for the festival?

I am creating the menu that accompanies the festival. The food serves as a transition tool for the audience, connecting the artistic works with the teachings. Each dish is inspired by the ancient Jewish texts we’ve been studying throughout the year, or responds to my fellow fellow’s artistic works, or both. Ever wonder what bread tasted like in biblical times? You’ll try that. You’ll also have to feed your neighbors figs dipped in honey, so get ready.

Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration and process for this?

When I read about food, my mind immediately wanders to flavors. So, throughout the year, when we would read about bread, or wine, or vinegar, or game, or stew, I’d immediately think, well, what did that taste like? How’d those ancients eat that? If you survived only on bread, what would it feel like to have access to a luxurious dish? Each of the fellows has found a line or a tale that struck them in such a way that it inspired them to create or revise an artistic work, but I think I found inspiration everywhere. Since the entire year has been themed around eating (or on some cases starving), and since that’s generally all I think about, there was a lot of fodder to work with.

In LABA you study ancient Jewish texts in order to gain inspiration for your work. Which texts inspired you?
My biggest inspirations were the stories of Ruth and of Jacob and Essau<http://www.labajournal.com/archive/>.

Want to know more about Erin? Click here<http://www.labajournal.com/fellows/> for her bio. You can read more about Ovenly here<http://oven.ly/press/>. Don’t forget to stop by the Y lobby on Thursday from 12-5 for some amazing Ovenly treats!

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