DylanCelebration

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

This is one of my favorite Dylan works—a little-known song that Dylan never included on any of his studio albums and only performed in a few live appearances. He wrote it in 1963, in the home of his then-partner, Joan Baez. Many folks came to know it through the version released by the Byrds—perhaps the best and most important interpreters of Dylan’s songbook—on their 1965 album, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

“Lay Down Your Weary Tune” deserves to be better known, because it is one of Dylan’s finest compositions—and that, of course, is a very high bar. As music critic Michael Gray notes, it offers “a vision of the world, that is, in which nature appears not as a manifestation of God but as containing God in every aspect.” It brims with lyrical images from the natural world, some of which are reminiscent of the biblical psalms. This effect is magnified by the music, which is hymn-like in its glorious simplicity. Indeed, in the verse before the final chorus, a river sings its hymn of praise, like a heavenly harp:

The last of leaves fell from the trees

And clung to a new love's breast

The branches bare like a banjo moan

To the winds that listen the best

I gazed down in the river's mirror

And watched its winding strum

The water smooth ran like a hymn

And like a harp did hum

In the liturgical song “Adon Olam” which frequently concludes our services, we exult the Holy One while at the same time recognizing that ultimately, God is beyond our human capacity to bless. Dylan expresses this same dynamic in the song’s chorus where he asks us to rest and enjoy the music of the Divine that “no voice can hope to hum.” But all the while, Dylan is singing nonetheless, because this is our calling: to praise, even if we know our words will fall short—because the effort alone is beautiful and even heroic:

Lay down your weary tune, lay down

Lay down the song you strum

And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings

No voice can hope to hum

As Shabbat draws near, fill your day with praise. Listen to The Byrd’s version of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.” And don't forget to join us on Zoom tonight at 6:00 pm. 

The second blessing after the evening Sh’ma—Hashkiveynu—asks the Holy One to watch over us during the night. It is, essentially, a prayer for safety and security, cataloging our fears—plague, hunger, war—and petitioning God: U’fros aleynu sukkat sh’lomechah—Spread over us the shelter of your peace.

Bob Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece “Blood on the Tracks” is filled with pain and suffering—as the title suggests. Its songs reference plague (“Idiot Wind”), murder (“Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), war and post-war disillusionment (“Tangled Up In Blue”), and omnipresent despair. It is known as Dylan’s divorce album—perhaps his finest record (certainly my personal favorite) and, at the same time, his saddest.

But the penultimate song hits the listener like Hashkiveynu’s plea to the Divine, emerging from the list of horrors that precedes it—a generous gift of real, though tenuous, comfort and light breaking through the dark night of the soul.

“Shelter from the Storm” offers up that gift in poetic language that feels almost biblical:

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood

When blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud

I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form

Come in, she said

I'll give ya shelter from the storm

This morning, reflect on what brings you comfort in difficult times. 

In the first blessing before Sh’ma—Yotzer Or—we recognize the power of the Divine in the ongoing work of creation. The opening line praises the Holy One as: “Yotzer or u-vorei choshech, oseh shalom u-vorei et ha-kol—Creator of light and darkness, Maker of peace and Creator of everything.” The line is taken verbatim from Isaiah 47:5 with one very significant emendation; the original text refers to the Holy One not as “Creator of Everything” but “Creator of Evil.”

Theoretically, this doesn’t alter much. After all, “everything” includes evil. But the Rabbis changed the word because they felt it was too hard to begin the morning by explicitly praising God as the source of pain and suffering. They were right, it is very difficult—yet that is precisely what Isaiah asks of us.

Bob Dylan does this beautifully and courageously in his song “Every Grain of Sand” from his 1981 “Shot of Love” album. He draws from William Blake’s famous poem “Auguries of Innocence,” which urges the reader: “To see a world in a grain of sand/And heaven in a wildflower. . .” But Dylan, like Isaiah, tackles the hard question, searching for God in the dark moments as well as the joyous ones; indeed, the focus of the entire song is the quest to find holiness in brokenness:

In the time of my confession,

in the hour of my deepest need

When the pool of tears beneath my feet

flood every newborn seed

There's a dying voice within me

reaching out somewhere

Toiling in the danger

and in the morals of despair. . .

In the fury of the moment

I can see the master's hand

In every leaf that trembles,

in every grain of sand

This morning, reflect on where and when you experience holiness—in joy and in sorrow, too.