Of Bob Dylan’s Masterpiece and Living Not Far From Gaza

It’ll rattle your walls...

IDF calls up tens of thousands of reservists ahead of expanded Gaza offensive. (The Times of Israel)

Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” is, to my mind, one of the greatest songs of the 1960s. Along with the brooding, relentless beauty of the melody, the lyrics—the song was released in 1964—are amazingly prophetic. Dylan’s intuitive genius picked up what was in the air—the change from the proud, intensely patriotic, confidently optimistic post–World War II America to the hippie-driven “revolution” of the late ’60s, when a new ethos of grubby appearance, drugs, ear-splitting music, and fierce condemnations of America for the Vietnam War and other alleged sins almost violently displaced the old—maybe never recovered—world of the previous two decades.

I speak as someone who lived personally through the “change.” My healthy, happy, productive childhood was spent in the old, self-assured America; the “change” was well synced with the onset of my angry, rebellious, and, I might say, dysfunctional adolescence.

Yet now, so many years later, certain lines of Dylan’s masterpiece grip me more powerfully than ever: “And you better start swimmin’ / Or you’ll sink like a stone”; “Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command”; and then there’s this:

There’s a battle outside and it’s ragin';
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

But to understand why that now hits the spot so keenly, you have to know that eventually I left America altogether for Israel; and eventually, within Israel, moved to Be’er Sheva in the south of the country, 25 miles from Gaza.

I’ve now been here 16 years, and, 25 miles away, your windows and walls got jolted by the booms, too, in earlier, short wars and skirmishes in Gaza; but not like in this much longer, still continuing war. The booms, of course, are Israeli airstrikes, and tank and artillery fire. At any time of day for the last year and a half—including three or four in the morning—your whole apartment can suddenly rock and tremble like an apocalypse.

In “It’ll soon shake your windows, “It,” of course, is the “battle” in the previous line. Yet the word has a resonance for me beyond even that. Strange to say, in those lines—in all the words of the song—it’s that “It” that most mines deep feelings I have, and usually manage to keep down in the dark.

“It” is living in a Jewish state in a predominantly Muslim Middle East—which, so far, has made “booms,” from one direction or another, frequent and inevitable; “It” is the terrible Israeli misconceptzia and blindness that enabled the horrific jihadi massacre with which this war began; “It” is the almost unimaginable mindset of an enemy that, amid obvious defeat and ongoing pounding by a vastly stronger foe, cannot be diverted from his course of hatred and exalting death.

For the record, I think our political and military leadership’s current, tentative decision to ramp up the assault on our enemy in Gaza is the right one; but it will take a lot more shaking windows and rattling walls. For the times they are a-changing—and not changing.