3 Things to Learn from a Child, 7 from a Thief: Bob Dylan’s Favorite Hasidic Teaching

On the value of remaining resolutely what you are.

Just before Christmas in 1977, the thirty-six-year-old Bob Dylan sat down for a long conversation with Jonathan Cott. Included in Cott’s endlessly wonderful book Listening: Interviews, 1970–1989 (public library), it remains Dylan’s most soulful and deepest-fathoming interview, replete with his reflections on vulnerability, the meaning of integrity, and the power of music as an instrument of truth.

One particular fragment of it has stayed with ...