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Friday, August 15th, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish Mystical Tradition
Though the pop-cultural moment that gave rise to the association has passed, when many of us hear about Kabbalah, we still think of Madonna. Her study of that Jewish-mystic school of thought in the nineteen-nineties has been credited, at least in part, with the sonic transformation that led to her hit album Ray of Light. A few years later, when she recorded the theme song for the 2002 James Bond movie Die Another Day, she managed to include in its music video such Kabbalistic imagery as the Hebrew letters lamed, aleph, and vav — which come, as Religion for Breakfast creator Andrew M. Henry says in the video above, from one of the 72 names of God according to Jewish tradition. But what, exactly, is Kabbalah? That’s the question Henry takes it upon himself to answer, attempting to separate the real thing from the pop-cultural ephemera that’s come to surround it. This entails first going back to the earliest Kabbalists, “Jewish teachers, theologians, and philosophers” among “the educated elite of medieval Europe, living in Spain and France, writing new and innovative studies on Jewish texts and concepts about mystical contemplation of the divine realms, the nature of God, the purpose of humanity, and the creation of the universe.” They searched, and their successors have continued to search, for secret divine wisdom originally vouchsafed to Moses at Mount Sinai. The word kabbalah can be translated as “that which has been received,” but that may make the enterprise sound simpler than it is. Henry frames Kabbalah as a series of traditions “encompassing several modes of reading, a library of texts, a series of concepts, and a range of practices within Judaism that is concerned with mystical contemplation.” But whatever their differences, most Kabbalists revere concepts like Ein Sof, “an infinite impersonal god or supreme entity or supreme entity that we cannot describe with our own human faculties,” and vast works like the novelistic Zohar, or “The Book of Radiance,” in which “even the search for mystical knowledge becomes sexualized”: an aspect that, given the skill with which she’s crafted her provocative pop-icon image, Madonna could hardly fail to appreciate. Related content: The Talmud Is Finally Now Available Online Walter Benjamin’s Philosophical Thought Presented by Two Experimental Films The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism The Ark Before Noah: Discover the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
| 9:00a | Watch Joan Baez Endearingly Imitate Bob Dylan (1972)
Joan Baez was already heralded as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the burgeoning folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his television set long before he met her. He was smitten. He would write much later in Chronicles, Vol. 1, that she had “A voice that drove out bad spirits… she sang in a voice straight to God… Nothing she did didn’t work.” And for a couple of years they became collaborators, partners, lovers, and folk royalty. It was Baez who introduced a then-unknown Dylan to the crowds at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. But soon, fortunes changed: Dylan became an unstoppable cultural force and Baez would be on the receiving end of several betrayals, artistic and otherwise. An excerpt from an Earl Scruggs documentary, the cute video above, shot by David Hoffman and posted on his YouTube channel, shows Baez imitating Dylan after she sings a verse of “It Ain’t Me Babe”. (She does this while holding her baby and trying to get it to drink from a pitcher, too.) A 16-year-old Ricky Skaggs—not looking anything like a teenager—accompanies her on guitar. For one thing she does a crackin’ good Dylan impression. The other is watching the emotion behind that impression—there’s a lot of history there, a bit of sadness, a bit of nostalgia, nothing bitter or mean, but evidence of a shared life together that once existed. By this time in 1972, Dylan’s voice had matured. The crooner on Nashville Skyline was a different person from the man on Blonde on Blonde, all those rough corners sanded off and the register deepened. Yet when anyone imitates Dylan, they head on back to those mid-‘60s albums, the “braying beatnik” as writer Rob Jones calls him. (Jones posits that Dylan has had eight particular voices during his career.) Remember, as Slate’s Carl Wilson points out, when Dylan first started out, he was commended for his voice, and was considered “one of the most compelling white blues singers ever recorded,” by Robert Shelton, who wrote the copy on the back cover of Dylan’s 1962 debut album. He came from a tradition of both Woody Guthrie and Howlin’ Wolf, and several other idiosyncratic singers who didn’t sound like Frank Sinatra. (Although Dylan’s last few projects have been covers from the Great American Songbook.) Dylan himself, in a 2015 award acceptance speech, turned his ire towards critics of his voice:
Fast forward to the present and Dylan’s voice shows the wear of years of performing and years of indulgence. It’s gravelly and phlegmatic, smoky and whiskey-soaked, but Wilson points out: “Even the rasp and burr of his late voice, several keen listeners have noticed, is very much like a more genuine copy of the old-bluesman timbre he pretentiously affected as a young man. It’s almost like this is what he’s been aiming toward.” Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018. Related Content: Joan Baez Live in 1965: Full Concert Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Getting Worse 17-Year-Old Joan Baez Performs at Famous “Club 47” in Cambridge, MA (1958) Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965) Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts. |
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