Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 5, 2020

Is U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres a Talmudic scholar or a Bob Dylan fan? Or both?

Close students of Dylan and the Talmud immediately recognized Guterress assessment that a wind of madness is sweeping the globe as an allusion to one or both of these original sources.

In Tractate Sotah 3a of the Talmud, Reysh Lakish is quoted as having said, 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 madness enters into him.

In his remarks on Tuesday, the Secretary-Generals equivalent of a U.S. State of the Union address, Guterres inveighed against military instability, economic dislocation and manmade climate crisis, blaming it all on the Talmudic wind of madness. How else could rational world leaders be so irrational?

There is another way to translate ruach shtus, and that is the wind of idiocy. In other words, youd have to be stupid to foment wars, build great wealth at the expense of the 99 percent, and to take measures that will increase rather than decrease global warning.

This is the version that Bob Dylan no stranger to the Talmud chose to use as the key phrase of one of his all-time greatest songs: Idiot Wind. For Dylan, the ruach shtus is the breath of idiocy, or wind of idiocy. He uses both constructions in the song, which was originally contained on his landmark album, Blood on the Tracks: Idiot wind, he sneers in the song which can easily be read as Dylans own 1975 state of the union address its a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

The use of the term by Dylan and Guterres implies an equation between idiocy or madness and sin, that the acts of stupidity recounted in the formers song and the latters address can only be explained as the wages of sin.

In Dylans case, his use of the central image of wind also echoed that earlier anthem that addressed sin and idiocy of a sort the kind that was blowin in the wind.

Today, theres idiocy, madness, and plenty of hot air blowing like a circle around my skull, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol, as Dylan put it.

Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at the Forward and the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner, 2009).

Read more:

Wait was the U.N. Secretary General quoting Bob Dylan or the Talmud? - Forward

Category: Talmud
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