![]() “The percussion creates a rhythm that allows one to get into a meditative state, which allows prophecy to happen in Jewish thought,” says Lawton. In Exodus, after Moses leads his people to safety across the Red Sea and offers a prayer of thanksgiving, the women break out tambourines and start dancing. She says that music has always had particular importance to Jewish spiritual practice – particularly drums and percussion. Leora Lawton, a sociology professor at University of California in Berkeley, cites Kabbalistic belief in the divinity of music. The propensity of serious Deadheads to knowledgably debate every chapter and verse of the band’s live oeuvre – easily summoning dates, statistics and other minutiae with lawyerly acumen – has been likened to the Jewish tradition of Talmudic disputation in which long passages of theological analysis detail the unresolved arguments among rabbis over the fine points of Hebraic law. It gave you a place to be special in a world in which you were told that you were less than ordinary.” You’re deeply inside something that the uninitiated do not understand. It’s a feeling of being both outcast and deeply inside. “There’s a wink-wink understanding that we’re always in the same tribe. ![]() “Deadheads felt like outcasts in America, yet we were outcasts who built a very strong and vital and joyful community,” observes Steve Silberman, a writer who earned gold records for co-producing the So Many Roads (1965-1995) box set and penning liner notes for re-releases of Workingman’s Dead and Europe ‘72. But for much of the band’s life, they dwelled far from the mainstream. The Dead scene has largely been absorbed into broader pop culture – safely sterilized in the straight world as a tie-dyed postcard from a quaint but strange country. “And then they would don the apparel and be Deadheads very openly and freely and without paranoia.” “Deadheads lived fairly normal lives until they went to a Grateful Dead show,” recalls Barry Smolin, host of “The Music Never Stops” on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles. There is indeed the sense of a marginalized tribe assimilating into broader culture, while self-identifying with subtle cues – be it a Garcia tie or dancing-bear bumper sticker – and finally letting the freak flag (or yarmulke) fly once its members are assembled together in ceremony. “It’s an important way to help them live their lives in a moral and reasonable way.”īut what about this is specifically Jewish? “The Grateful Dead is a good example of people searching for the other, whatever that means, in terms of spirituality – trying to find something that goes beyond their own identity, beyond themselves,” argues Rob Weiner, editor of Perspectives on the Grateful Dead, a compendium of scholarly writings on the band. Yet, for secular Jews open to spiritual pursuit but uninterested in strict religious observance, the Dead may have provided a conduit for the sort of spiritual expression that they felt was lacking elsewhere. It played concerts in honor of the Chinese New Year, not Rosh Hashanah. Though the Dead dipped deeply into the reservoir of American music, it was not known to recast Hebrew prayers or treat in explicitly Jewish imagery. Only one Grateful Dead band member – Mickey Hart – is Jewish. ![]() But what’s the essence of the connection? The perceived overlap between the worlds of the Dead and Judaism has proven to be a fertile subtopic among fans, writers and academics who are used to scouring the Grateful Dead experience for bits of debatable theory. Many a Deadhead during the years has likely remarked offhandedly that a particularly deep “Dark Star” jam or a searing peak in “Morning Dew” amounted to a religious experience.įor Jews who’ve found a spiritual home within the sphere of the Grateful Dead, that just might be true.
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