The Torah of Dolly - Parashat Ki Tavo - 16 Elul 5786 / August 28, 2026
THE TORAH OF DOLLY
I was born not that far from where Dolly Parton grew up in Sevierville, Tennessee. I was born in the Smokey Mountains near Bristol, and Dolly was born and raised in “the hollow” about 90 minutes south of that.
Dolly made her debut at the Grand Ol’ Opry in 1959 at age 13. She was introduced by Johnny Cash.
The day she graduated high school she packed all the songs she had written in a cardboard suitcase and went to Nashville. She met her husband that first day in the “Wishy Washy,” what we called laundromats growing up.
She didn’t really enter my life until I was about 8, when she joined the Porter Wagoner Show on TV in 1969, a show my Nana with whom I lived almost every summer watched religiously. She had an absolutely beautiful voice, and she dressed like an Appalachian female version of Liberace, who my grandmother also loved.
Tim’s father adored Dolly, and they made pilgrimages to the Grand Ol’ Opry to hear her live. If you knew how hard it was to get Tim’s father to leave the farm, you’d have a sense of how much he loved Dolly. Everybody did.
She was a smart, powerful woman and a very savvy businesswoman, who combined toughness, common sense and a lot of humor to get where she did. She insisted on running her own career, but despite some of that less than ethical things Porter Wagoner did to her, she always thanked him for what he had done for her, writing and singing “I will Always Love you” as a tribute to him on her last day on the show.
In High School, as you know, I was a band geek. Our high school marching band regularly competed against the Sevierville High School marching band, and we all noticed that they had all new fancy instruments, new fancy band uniforms and flags, all of which were in the most hideous shade of lavender I’ve ever seen. We all knew Dolly had bought them for the band because she was already famous for how much she gave back to the community she grew up in.
Instead of just accumulating wealth, she gave away over ½ a billion dollars in her life. She exemplified what we would call ‘tzedakah.’
She founded the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which gave free books to children, starting in Sevierville and then spreading out. She did it to honor her father who never had books and never learned to read and write.
Harold Grinspoon, a famous Jewish philanthropist in Massachusetts, interviewed Dolly about her Imagination Library, and after paying for it to expand into Massachusetts, he then started the PJ Library, as a Jewish version of Dolly’s program.
When fire ravaged the country she grew up in, she gave every family whose house had been destroyed $1,000/month until they could get back on their feet.
Where we grew up, Dolly was a patron saint.
Of course, I also knew Dolly through another part of my life: gay life. Dolly was an icon in the gay men’s community. She was up there with Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Streisand. Dolly was pure camp. She embodied the campy drag sensibility, humor and love that was part and parcel of the gay community at that time. She made for great drag – she once said if she hadn’t been born a woman, she’d have been a drag queen – and she was always loving and kind to the gay community in an area of the country where that was not what most churches were preaching. Dolly, it seemed, had her own gospel and strong moral compass about right and wrong, and it was clear that she loved people for who they were. She seemed to exemplify the Jewish value of seeing others as made in the image of God and having inherent value because of that.
But there is another value that Dolly exemplified that I think is a lesson for all of us these days. As the world became more polarized, more extreme, and culture wars raged especially in the South, Dolly always somehow managed to stay above it. She had opinions, but she had a gift of saying things that reminded people of deeper values, core values rooted in faith and forgiveness.
Dolly knew how to make a soundbite that was funny, loving, positive, and gently poked fun at bigotry. Dolly exemplified Hillel’s rule to not do to other people things that you hate done to you. It is so simple, and yet so blindingly powerful these days.
Which is why it has been so disheartening to see the flood of posts on social media calling her all sorts of names for not speaking out about Israel and Gaza. There are swastikas on her feed, and people accusing her of genocide and being a Zionist.
And there are some Jews who are focusing on something she once said when she couldn’t get a series she was pitching about a gospel singer making it big signed. She said in an interview that there were a lot of Jewish people in Hollywood and they are afraid of promoting Christianity. She immediately apologized for sounding like she was saying Jews ran Hollywood, and that was not what she meant. She meant the subject of her series was not one they were drawn to.
And if you want to learn more about this amazing woman, I highly recommend listening to the outstanding podcast series Dolly Parton’s America. It was made by Jad Abumrad, the guy behind Radiolab. It turns out that he grew up in Nashville, where his father was a doctor, and when Dolly happened to have a car accident there, his father treated her in the ER, and they became close friends over many years. The series is really good, exploring her music, her business, her struggles with sexism, her beliefs, and her generosity. Five stars.
So for this week’s Torah, we are turning to the Torah of Dolly. We lost a powerful woman, a great soul, a legendary singer and an exemplary human being and as we head into the Jewish New Year and reflect on how we can do better and what the world needs of us, let’s let Dolly and her generosity, her humor, her kindness, and her ability to love across strong disagreements; let’s let Dolly be among our guides.
Shabbat Shalom
