For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work
–Exodus 20:13–14
The Grateful Dead experience gives you something we all need, time out...There's something that happens there, and when it's over, you go back to the world and your TVs, and you punch the clock and it's no longer 'time out.'
– Bill Graham, legendary concert promoter
600,000 is a number which many music fans will recognize. It is the approximate number of attendees at the legendary Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, held on Max Yasgur’s 600–acre farm in Bethel, New York on a rainy, mid–August weekend in 1969. With its gate–crashing, rain, unprecedented attendance, and fantasy lineup of performers, Woodstock is popularly viewed as the largest and greatest festival ever held. Yet in terms of size, Woodstock was surpassed four summers later by another, often–overlooked upstate New York concert. Watkins Glen, which was held on a racetrack in the summer of 1973, featured only three acts: The Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, and the Band. But it had 600,000 attendees, putting its more legendary predecessor to shame.
The number 600,000 carries a multitude of connotations. According to Jewish tradition, it is the number of Israelites (or at least male Jews who were of “fighting age”) present at Mt. Sinai when God divinely revealed the Torah to the Jewish people. Twelfth–century Jewish poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi connected the number to the very legitimacy of Judaism, arguing in The Kuzari that Judaism must be the most universally true faith, as those 600,000 eyewitnesses established both the event’s certainty and, by extension, the religion’s validity.
There is a fairly powerful connection between Sinai and Watkins Glen. These watershed moments in religious and rock history demonstrate that religion (in this case Judaism) and music—particularly improvisational, “jamband” music—are two of the very few phenomena that can attract over half–a–million people. The American Jewish community is over three centuries old. Prosperous and suburbanized, it has developed a complicated and even estranged relationship to its religious and ancestral heritage. Consequently, some young and mostly upper–middle class Jews have sought another, seemingly unrelated community in which to participate: the jam music world. Despite their many differences, jam culture and Jewish culture bear a spiritual and structural resemblance that allows Jews to maintain some kind of Jewish identity amidst a social and cultural milieu that challenges traditional concepts of Jewish community and practice.
The jam world is a unique, largely unparalleled subculture. It is based around guitar–driven, rock–based improvisational music that incorporates other genres, but places an emphasis on improvised live performance rather than staged concerts and studio recordings.
Since its emergence as a cultural force in the late 1960s, jam music has spawned an entire subcultural movement—the jam scene. While the music itself remains the primary focus of jam’s many enthusiasts, the jam scene has transformed into a lifestyle for fans and bands alike. Jam lovers travel far and wide to summer concerts held in remote and often rural areas. They come not simply for the music, but to experience the panoply of drugs, the vendors, the dreadlocked fans, the tie–dyed shirts, the twice–daily meals of grilled–cheese, and the opportunity to camp out with thousands of other fans.
There are a surprising number of kipot (yarmulkes) and tzit ‘tzit (Jewish ritual fringes worn on undergarments) in the crowds at Bonnaroo, the mega–festival held each June in Manchester, Tennessee, or at the Allman Brothers Band’s annual ten–night stand at the Beacon Theatre in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “There are a lot of Jews that like jambands” said Jonathan Schwartz, the vice–president of marketing at Relix Magazine, the premier publication of the jam world. “There are a lot of Jews who are in jambands and there are a lot of Jews who work in jambands.” The Forward, one of New York’s quintessential Jewish publications, estimated that Phish, the now–defunct kings of the jam world, enjoyed a fan–base which was over 30 percent Jewish. And the Jewish presence in the jam scene transcends mere fandom. Jews have made their mark in all capacities: as musicians, journalists, promoters and producers.
One of the reasons that Jews may be so attracted to (and consequently, disproportionately represented in) the jam world is the communal sentiment central to both cultures. When one Deadhead (Grateful Dead enthusiast) sees someone wearing a Grateful Dead t–shirt, an immediate sense of camaraderie is evoked, even if it is only through an acknowledging nod or smile. This sense of kinship could be similar to that felt by Jews who spot each other wearing Kippot or speaking Hebrew. Both instances represent a sense of shared history, culture, and community. While participation in a musical subculture only a generation old cannot supplant religious association, the feeling associated with membership is analogous.
The two share other parallels in addition to their similar communal aspects. For example, members of both the Jewish and jamband worlds study their seminal “texts” with unbridled fervor. Just as Judaic scholars spend hours pouring over Biblical and Talmudic texts, Deadheads passionately analyze song lyrics and set–lists. Mike Greenhaus, the associate editor of Relix and the senior editor of jambands.com, explained this overlap. “Jewish people in general tend to be very inquisitive and passionate. They get really into things and explore things to the fullest and I think that’s something that is very attractive about the jamband scene.”
There could even be a spiritual angle involved in the Jewish attraction to the jam scene. Rabbi Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of liturgy at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a major Deadhead, sees a profound similarity between a Grateful Dead show and a Jewish service. “There’s something akin to a worship experience when listening to Grateful Dead music. It brings you to a zone,” Hoffman said of the legendary Northern California ensemble. “There can be a difference between music at a concert and music or a spiritual experience at a worship service, but the difference isn’t that big.”
Believers are supposed to repeat certain parts of the Jewish liturgy several times each day, whereas every jam show is a unique experience. But they evoke a comparable response, to the point that Rabbi Hoffman sees physical similarities between Jewish liturgical customs and the way fans physically relate to the music at Dead shows. “The Dead audiences move to the music. Literally, they shuckle,” he said, referring to the back–and–forth swaying that sometimes characterizes Jewish prayer. “That isn’t true of every concert.”
Jonathan Schwartz of Relix also strongly believes that Jewish and jamband “spirituality” might have something in common. Schwartz experienced this similarity firsthand during time he spent in Israel. “I would find ‘reformed Deadheads,’ who were now ultra–Orthodox Jews living in the Old City, who had done years of Dead tour,” he recalled. “There’s a commonality there.”
So for the American Jews who flock to the jam scene en masse, the Judaism–to–jam transition is an intuitive and fulfilling one. This idea is perfectly exemplified by one of the jam world’s major luminaries: Mickey Hart, the drummer and one of the founding members of the Grateful Dead.
Born Michael Steven Hartman to parents Leonard and Leah in Brooklyn, the future percussionist had a suburban Jewish upbringing in the Five Towns of Long Island. The Dead had a tendency to play in New York around Passover every year, supposedly because the drummer enjoyed spending the seders (Passover meals) with his mother. However, The Dead’s publicist, Dennis McNally, vehemently denies this. In a 1996 article published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, McNally claimed that Hart is neither religiously inclined nor affiliated. "Mickey is a drummer,” McNally said. “He worships the beat. His religion is percussion."
Despite Hart’s “worship” of percussion, he always did manage to make an appearance, even if just for five minutes, at the annual Grateful Dead backstage seder, held for the approximately twenty Jewish members of the Dead’s massive stage–crew and road–hand entourage.
Hart, like the legions of northeastern suburban Jews who once flocked to see Phish every summer, might find more meaning in music than in Judaism. His life, unlike the lives of his Eastern European or even Lower East Side ancestors, no longer revolves around the worship of the traditional Jewish G–d, but instead, around the drum beat which he produces. Hart may no longer necessarily feel fulfilled by the religious or communal aspect of Judaism, but still finds it oddly inescapable. His Jewish identity is fully subsumed into the jam world. Yet significantly, it remains present.
Hart fits into one of the most significant overarching narratives in modern American Judaism. In America, Jews have benefited from economic opportunities they have never had access to before—Âaccording to the December 2006 issue of American Jewish Life Magazine, the average American Jewish family makes between $75,000 and $80,000 annually. Yet this has contributed to assimilation—a general decrease in religiosity and the fraying of once–solid communal institutions and connections.
Yet as prosperity and capitalism have influenced religious observance and communal life, upper–middle class American Jews have had extra cash to burn and, according to Mike Greenhaus of Relix, a spiritual void to fill—a combination of forces which could explain the Jewish proclivity for the jam world. He explains:
Given the fact that one of the major places that the modern jamband scene developed is the northeast, particularly in New York and Boston, and given that going to experience live music requires a certain social and economic background, there happens to be in those markets a lot of Jewish kids who have disposable income.
With money and time on hand, young American Jews may be subconsciously gravitating away from the spirituality of Judaism, and towards the version offered by the jam scene.
 Legendary Grateful Dead cohort, mandolin player David Grisman, proudly displaying both major facets of his identity. |
Perhaps more fundamental than economics is the way in which the very structure of American Jewish life enables religious and secular life to reinforce one another. A rabbinic axiom summarizes one of the prevailing approaches towards the challenges of assimilation: “one should not separate oneself from one’s community.” Mordecai Kaplan, the Jewish philosopher and theologian who founded the Reconstructionist Movement, reconceived notions of how the Jewish community fit within the context of wider American society. Kaplan centered his philosophy of Judaism (which is outlined in his magnum opus Judaism as a Civilization) on the manner in which the Jews have coalesced as a communal people over the last 3,000 years. He believed that Judaism transcends mere religion, and is, more accurately, an “evolving religious civilization.” Kaplan wanted Jews to maintain their identities as Jews, but to embrace their context in the Western world, even if this required a compromise on observance and the traditionally respected letter of rabbinic law.
This uniquely American perspective on Judaism lends itself well to the jam world. It means that Jews can identify themselves as Jewish socially and culturally without being stigmatized for failing to connect with—or perhaps totally ignoring—Judaism’s purely religious dimension. In America, Jews can feel a strong sense of Jewish identity in a cultural or social sense: they can go to a String Cheese Incident show to, in a sense, fulfill their spiritual needs.
This Kaplanian prioritizing of community above all else is at play in the jam scene. Take the idea of needing a minyan (a group of ten Jewish adult males) to be able to recite certain Jewish prayers. You could just recite the liturgy alone, just as you could always put on a Grateful Dead album in your living room. But the meaning of the experience is magnified tenfold (literally) at a festival or concert, just as davening (partaking in Jewish prayer) in a packed synagogue on Yom Kippur is a much more powerful experience then davening alone.
To understand what the Jewish–jamband connection means in practical terms, one should look no farther than Phish, one of the most successful improvisational ensembles of all time. Phish was comprised of four virtuosic yet nerdy musicians who met at the University of Vermont. Two members of Phish, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman, are proud, self identified members–of–the–tribe. Gordon is even a graduate of the Solomon Schechter Day School in Newton, Massachusetts (Aron Magner, the keyboardist for the electronic–jam phenomenon the Disco Biscuits, is also a Schechter alumnus, albeit of the Schechter in Philadelphia). Phish, at Gordon’s prompting, often covered the classic Jewish liturgical piece Avinu Malkienu (G–d our King), as well as Israel’s unofficial national anthem, Naomi Shemer’s Yerushalyim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)—much to the excitement of their Jewish fans. In fact, they featured the latter song as a hidden track at the end of their 1994 album, Hoist. “That was an element which made it welcoming,” Greenhaus said of Phish’s decision to cover Jewish material. “They weren’t doing Christmas songs.” Shmuel Skaist, an Orthodox Rabbi, even toured with Phish for several years as the head of an organization called Gefilte Fish, which traveled to shows and catered to the spiritual needs of Phish’s Jewish constituents.
Like many Jews in his industry, Gordon is essentially secular. Yet if he wasn’t in some way connected to his Jewish identity, he may have never been initially attracted to the jam scene. As his story suggests, jam–culture provides an outlet for assimilated Jews that continue to yearn for some version of spiritual or religious fulfillment.
Above: Jewish jammer Mike Gordon, of Phish fame
SIMEON COHEN is a sophomore in List College majoring in history and Jewish philosophy. His favorite Grateful Dead era is 1970–1972 (the era of the Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty and Europe 72’ albums). Simeon can be reached at slc2144@columbia.edu.