Kabbalah in America
Ancient Lore in the New World
Edited by
Brian Ogren
LEIDEN | BOSTON
For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Contributors xi
1
Introduction: on the Formation of Research on Kabbalah in America
Brian Ogren
1
part 1
Kabbalah in Colonial America
2
“They Have with Faithfulnesse and Care Transmitted the Oracles of God
unto us Gentiles”: Jewish Kabbalah and Text Study in the Puritan
Imagination 11
Michael Hoberman
3
The Zohar in Early Protestant American Kabbalah: on Ezra Stiles and
the Case for Jewish-Christianity 31
Brian Ogren
part 2
Nineteenth-Century Western Esoteric Trends
4
The Abyss, the Oversoul, and the Kabbalistic Overtones in Emerson’s
Work: Tracing the Pre-Freudian Unconscious in America 51
Clémence Boulouque
5
The Qabbalah of the Hebrews and the Ancient Wisdom Religion of Asia:
Isaac Myer and the Kabbalah in America 72
Boaz Huss
6
Kabbalah in the Ozarks: Thomas Moore Johnson, The Platonist, and the
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor 94
Vadim Putzu
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vi
Contents
part 3
The Nineteenth-Century Jewish Interface
7
A Kabbalistic Lithograph as a Populariser of Judaism in America—
Max Wolff, The Origin of the Rites and Worship of the Hebrews
(New York, 1859) 115
Peter Lanchidi
8
Isidor Kalisch’s Pioneering Translation of Sepher Yetsirah (1877) and
Its Rosicrucian Legacy 138
Jonathan D. Sarna
part 4
Early Twentieth-Century Rational Scholars
9
Pragmatic Kabbalah: J.L. Sossnitz, Mordecai Kaplan and the
Reconstruction of Mysticism and Peoplehood in Early
Twentieth-Century America 147
Eliyahu Stern
10
Solomon Schechter, Abraham J. Heschel, and Alexander Altmann:
Scholars on Jewish Mysticism 161
Moshe Idel
part 5
The Post-War Counterculture
11
Jewish Mysticism as a Universal Teaching: Allen Ginsberg’s
Relation to Kabbalah 183
Yaakov Ariel
12
Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
Pinchas Giller
13
Aryeh Kaplan’s Quest for the Lost Jewish Traditions of Science,
Psychology and Prophecy 211
Alan Brill
199
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vii
Contents
part 6
Liberal American Denominationalism
14
American Reform Judaism’s Increasing Acceptance of Kabbalah:
the Contribution of Rabbi Herbert Weiner’s Spiritual Search in
9½ Mystics 235
Dana Evan Kaplan
15
American Conservative Judaism and Kabbalah
Daniel Horwitz
254
part 7
Ultra-Orthodoxy, American Hasidism, and the ‘Other’
16
The Calf Awakens: Language, Zionism and Heresy in Twentieth-Century
American Hasidism 269
Ariel Evan Mayse
17
“The Lower Half of the Globe”: Kabbalah and Social Analysis in the
Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Vision for Judaism’s American Era 292
Philip Wexler and Eli Rubin
18
To Distinguish Israel and the Nations: E Pluribus Unum and Isaac
Hutner’s Appropriation of Kabbalistic Anthropology 316
Elliot R. Wolfson
part 8
Contemporary American Ritual and Thought
19
Kabbalah as a Tool of Orthodox Outreach
Jody Myers
343
20
Everything Is Sex: Sacred Sexuality and Core Values in the Contemporary
American Kabbalistic Cosmos 358
Marla Segol
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viii
21
Contents
Identity or Spirituality: the Resurgence of Habad, Neo Hasidism and
Ashlagian Kabbalah in America 377
Ron Margolin
Index
391
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chapter 12
Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
Pinchas Giller
Abstract
This article will examine Shlomo Carlebach’s emergence on the general spiritualistic
scene of the West Coast in the 1960’s, at gatherings that focused exclusively on religious
teachings. This period followed his sojourn in Greenwich Village, New York. At these
events, Carlebach appeared with a number of prominent leaders in the new spiritual
revival of the age. After that, the euphoric Zionist project of the late 20th century
clearly overtook him, and he turned his activities towards his Israeli projects, particularly the Moshav in Modiʾin, and the demands of his peripatetic life.
It is a paradox of Kabbalah that, while its pretentions are to its being the most
recondite, secret body of teachings, its ideas have continuously crossed over
into the esoteric traditions of its host cultures. An example of this would
be the purveying of kabbalistic ideas, and specifically, Hasidic ideas, by two
major agents of change in the Jewish community of the twentieth century,
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Shlomo Carlebach. This article will examine
Carlebach’s emergence on the general spiritualistic scene of the West Coast in
the 1960’s, an arc that runs from the Berkeley Folk Festivals of 1966 and 1968,1
to the “Holy Man Jam” gatherings sponsored by “The Family Dog” production
group in the late 1960’s.2 These were followed by the “Meeting of the Ways” in
Berkeley and Boulder, gatherings that focused exclusively on religious teachings, to the exclusion of musical entertainment.3
1 Cohen, “A Holy Brother’s Liberal Legacy”: 500; Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission
and Legacy p. 116 note 13, 179; Coopersmith, Holy Beggars p. 25.
2 A number of contributors to the volume of American Jewish History devoted to Shlomo
Carlebach, pointed out that scholars risk descending into hagiography when discussing the
period. (American Jewish History. Volume 100 Number 4). I was active with the Israeli contingent of the House of Love and Prayer in the early 1970’s, and I am afraid my own addenda will
come into play in this article. See Coopersmith, Holy Brother p. 25; Magid, Havruta Vol. 2 #1,
Spring 2009: 18–21.
3 Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 190.
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Giller
At these events, Carlebach appeared with a number of prominent leaders
in the new spiritual revival of the age. Was this activity a great flirtation, on
Carlebach’s part, with a cross cultural intra-spirituality? That was a niche that
would occupy his friend and apposite partner, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi,
from 1955 through the remainder of his career, even as Carlebach stepped
back from inter-religious dialogue and “New Agism” just as it became a dominant religious trend in the 1980’s.
1
The Ground Was Fertile
Whatever Carlebach’s inclinations, the ground was fertile. In the counterculture of the late 1960’s, there was popular receptivity to a decontextualized
version of Hasidic thought. The romanticization of Martin Buber’s idealized
recension of Hasidic tales had been embraced by the counterculture.4 In The
Last Whole Earth Catalog, Ken Kesey (!) reviewed Buber’s I and Thou, stating
“you can read ‘I and Thou’ for two hours and not get over it for the rest of your
life. Buber tells you how you stand, either in a dialogic relationship with the
creative force or in a position of ‘havingness’ where you are a thing bounded by
other things.”5 At the end of Abbie Hoffman’s “Revolution for the Hell of It” is a
pamphlet called “Fuck the System,” which intersperses statements from “Tales”
and the works of D.T. Suzuki with a lot of charming countercultural advice
(interestingly, later editions of “Revolution for the Hell of it” removed the statements by Buber and Suzuki). So Buber’s deracinated version of Hasidism was
already a counter-cultural icon and Buber and Suzuki were very much equated
in the eyes of that counterculture, an idea that was explored by Whelan
Lai.”6 In both cases, Western intellectuals in the shadow of the bomb were
drawn to the narratives of cultures decimated in the War, to a representative of
Eastern European Judaism and the type of Buddhism specific to ruined Japan.
Judah Cohen has referenced the popular embrace of Chasidic music as part
of the cultivation of Jewish ethnicity in Jewish culture.7 Contemporary with
Carlebach, “Fiddler on the Roof,” the founding of the Chassidic Song Festival
in Israel, the early emergence of Habad and the Israeli production Ish Chasid
Hayah,8 all signaled the cultural embrace of what would be Carlebach’s social
4
5
6
7
8
Cohen, “A Holy Brother’s Liberal Legacy”: 487.
Restated in Kesey’s Garage Sale, p. 180.
Lai, “Inner World Mysticism: East and West” in Heifetz, Zen and Hasidism pp. 189–205.
Cohen, “A Holy Brother’s Liberal Legacy”: 488.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 214.
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Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
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template.9 Shaul Magid and Ari Kelman have vividly portrayed the milieu of
the late 1950’s/early 1960’s Greenwich Village folk scene in which Carlebach
moved, and the representation that would gain him access to the Berkeley Folk
Festival.10 Their work leaves Carlebach at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Festival; this
article moves beyond that.
In the Village, Carlebach portrayed himself as the living incarnation of the
colonial object of desire. As the Blues were to the late 1960’s, as Reggae was to
the 1970’s, and Hip Hop thereafter, so Jewish artistic forms, whether Eastern
European, Israeli or an Orientalized MENA presentation, was the object of
appropriationist fascination in the 1950’s. From Los Angeles to New York, hipsters and spiritual seekers alike appropriated the argot of what they perceived
as Jewish culture, which was really a pastiche of both high and low refracted
elements. Carlebach, in his early work, made use of this fascination, especially
as it manifested in Northern California, far from its natural host culture.
With regards to drug use characteristic of the period, Aryae Coopersmith
insists that Carlebach eschewed drugs. Shalom Goldman has revealed, based
on hagiographical testimony, that Carlebach took LSD in 1964, guided by
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Carlebach’s trip took place in the safe confines
of his father’s synagogue on the upper West side, in Goldman’s words, “the
small West Side synagogue headed by Carlebach’s father (and dominated by
Carlebach’s mother)” (this latter statement has the ring of verisimilitude).11
Schachter’s own initiation into LSD had occurred in 1962 at the Ananda
Ashram in Millbrook, N.Y. with Timothy Leary as his guide.12 Schachter, for a
time, became an ardent apologist for LSD, so much so that his colleague, the
Trappist monk Thomas Merton, wrote in 1965 that “I know my friend Zalman
Schachter is quite enthusiastic about psychedelics. I of course cannot judge,
never having had anything to do with them … Theologically I suspect that the
trouble with psychedelics is that we want to have interior experiences entirely
on our own terms.”13
This last statement regarding having inner experience on our own terms
does resonate with Schachter-Shalomi’s difficulty with Leary at the Ananda
9
10
11
12
13
Cohen, J.M., “A Holy Brother’s Liberal Legacy”: 499.
Kelman, Magid, “The Gate to the Village: Shlomo Carlebach and the Creation of American
Jewish ‘Folk’ ” American Jewish History. Volume 100 Number 4:462–484.: 512.
https://sacredmattersmagazine.com/lsd-and-the-rabbis-part-3.
My Life in Jewish Renewal pp. 143–153, Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and
Legacy p. 159, see Leary, Flashbacks, An Autobiography: A Personal and Cultural History of
an Era (Los Angeles, 1990).
Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love p. 531. Shalom Goldman, idem.
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Ashram. “I couldn’t express myself at a gut level,” he exclaimed,14 or couldn’t be
“yeshivish.” As for Carlebach, he was diplomatically agnostic on the subject of
drug use but unfazed by it.
I would argue as well, that even the physical deportment of Rabbinic figures was influenced by Carlebach’s sartorial demeanor, the point at which the
garb of the counterculture and the demands of ultra-orthodox tradition intersected. The larger kippot, beards and slovenly carriage have been a durable set
of identifiers for even liberal Rabbis since the late ‘60’s, but it was Carlebach
who was their initial avatar.
2
The Berkeley Folk Festival
Carlebach is widely remembered as first asserting himself in the Northern
California community at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Music Festival at the Hearst
Greek Theatre. By 1968, the festival was a 2-week event, including, in the fashion of the time, workshops and concerts, featuring such people as Doc Watson,
Howlin’ Wolf and Pete Seeger.15 Carlebach was listed on an eclectic bill, placed
between Howlin’ Wolf and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. He played at a
dance with Howlin’ Wolf in Berkeley on the 4th of July 1966. In one poster, he
is portrayed nestled in the tresses of Joan Baez’ hair. Carlebach’s movement
into these new markets is, in retrospect, unsurprising. He was, as Shaul Magid
and Aryeh Kelman have extensively documented, a signed recording artist on
the Vanguard label. He had every right to seek a booking at the Berkeley folk
festival, as much as Mississippi John Hurt, Richard and Mimi Farina or Joan
Baez, all Vanguard recording artists. It was from that professional position that
he began his flirtation with the new religious movements of the late ‘60’s and
early ‘70’s.16
The idea that sages from non-Christian traditions should be offered as
part of the entertainment at a music festival was a paradigm shift in culture
and entertainment, presaging the marketing of spiritual materials in the
“New Age” phenomenon that would characterize the 1980’s until the death
of retail. Who brokered this transition? Who posited the idea that spirituality could be merchandised like commercial music? Yogi Bhajan had been
invited to bless the New York Pop Festival at Randall’s Island in 1969 and Swami
14
15
16
My Life in Jewish Renewal p. 145.
Kelman, Magid, “The Gate to the Village”: 533–534. Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life,
Mission and Legacy pp. 108, 179.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 93 on the relationship to
Milton Okun. On Robert Shelton’s initial review see Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life,
Mission and Legacy p. 101.
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Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
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Satchidananda famously blessed the Woodstock Music Festival in that same
year. In fact, these associations were bubbling around for some time, from
Alan Ginsburg’s leading the Hare Krishna chant at the San Francisco Human
Be-in in 1967, as well as the “Legalize Pot” rally in Hyde Park, London, in 1967.17
Ginsberg also organized the “Mantra-Rock” dance at the Avalon ballroom
with A.C. Bhakdevadanta, the founder of the Hare Krishna sect, which also
included the groups Moby Grape, Big Brother and the Holding Company and
the Grateful Dead, also in 1967.18
3
The House of Love and Prayer
These events dovetailed with the formation of the House of Love and Prayer,
which has been addressed by Aryae Coopersmith, Natan Ophir, and especially,
Yaʾakov Ariel.19 Carlebach set up the House of Love and Prayer through appeals
to the Jewish community of the Bay area (I recall one letter that concluded “the
area is full of young people (which was true enough) and their hearts are full
of Shabbes!”). The first house, on Arguello Blvd, was administrated by a family
that eventually joined the Breslav community and has consistently requested
anonymity.20 Later, Dovid Din21 administrated the house. Carlebach was present in the San Francisco House on events such as Chanukah, Sukkot, much
of the summer and for weddings.22
The make-up of the House of Love and Prayer is important because it begs
a number of questions: Who booked Shlomo Carlebach to “The Holy Man
Jam” and “The Meeting of the Ways?” The general references say it was members of the House. Who was instrumental in that process? These same figures,
who reached out to the cross-cultural communities of non-Western spirituality, which way did they go subsequent to the House, into Jewish renewal,
Orthodoxy or some other path? Murray Gerstel was Carlebach’s erstwhile manager at the outset; is he the dubious “Moishele” referred to by Coopersmith?23
Hence, the question of how Carlebach moved from music events to proto-New
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
At which this writer, hagiographically, was in attendance.
Goldberg, American Veda p. 179. As early as 1966, Carlebach took part in the “International
Guitar Festival” in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission
and Legacy p. 174.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 123–173.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 120–122.
Coopersmith, Holy Brother p. 231, 235; Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and
Legacy p. 125.
On the circumstances leading to the second House of Love and prayer, see Ophir, Rabbi
Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 129–134.
Coopersmith, Holy Brother p. 63.
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Giller
Age events remains cloudy and I confess that midway through the research for
this paper, my informants dried up. I wonder if the academic premises of my
research bothered them, or if they had been burned by prior studies.
4
The Meeting of the Ways
Two events followed the Berkeley Folk festival, the Holy Man Jam festival, the
first of which took place in 1969 and the second in Boulder in 1971. The Meeting
of the Ways festivals were another venue for this crossover. The first of these
took place in Live Oak Park, in Berkeley, in the summer of 1971. On the cover of
Aryae Coopersmith’s Holy Brother, Carlebach is depicted at the first “Holy Man
Jam,” playing in front of Yogi Bhajan. This festival, October 3–9, 1969, included
Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Steven Gaskin, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and Swami
Satchidananda.24 The festival was organized by the Family Dog collective
and took place on the Great Highway, near the Sutro baths, in San Francisco.25
At the 1969 Holy Man Jam, the Grateful Dead played on Sunday, October 6.
The first Holy Man jam was attended by Yogi Bhajan, the founder of the
“Sikh Dharma” sect, Swami Satchidinanada, leader of the “Integral Hatha Yoga”
movement, as well as independent figures such as the colorful Baba Ram Dass,
and a prominent group of American Sufis of the period including the San
Francisco bohemian Murshid Sam Lewis and Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. There is
an assumption, among Carlebach’s hagiographers, that he maintained warm
relations with such spiritual entrepreneurs and others through the early 1970’s.
It may be necessary to query these assumptions.
The 1969 Holy Man Jam was eclipsed by the 1970 Holy Man Jam in Boulder,
CO, which was documented by Robert Altman, at which Carlebach was also in
attendance.26 There he appeared with Alan Watts, Yogi Bhajan, Stephen Gaskin,
24
25
26
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 187, 188 note 48.
The Family Dog was a renowned music production collective familiar to anyone with a
passing interest in the Grateful Dead. Founded by Chet Helms in 1966, it produced music
shows initially at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, and, in this case, on
the Great Highway (aka the former Edgewater Ballroom, near the Sutro Baths and Cliff
House, if you know San Francisco). This collective competed with Bill Graham’s more
well-known and businesslike production company. It is not immediately relevant but I
would be remiss in not mentioning that the Family Dog developed a cadre of artists working in the “psychedelic” form, including the former surfing cartoonist Rick Griffin, Alton
Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson. Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach:
Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 187, 165.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 188.
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Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
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Sri Gurudev, Swami Satchidananda and Chogyam Trungpa.27 Carlebach then
participated in the June 27, 1971 “A Yoga of Joy” event with Yogi Bhajan and Allen
Ginsberg. This program took place in February 1972 at the Nob Hill Masonic
Center. Yogi Bhajan also sponsored a “World Symposium for Humanity” conference in Vancouver in 1976, where Carlebach was present.28
It is significant that, whatever the programming decisions of the Holy Man
Jam, it was members of the House of Love and Prayer who reached out to
the other spiritual organizations organizing the Meeting of the Ways, so that
when Carlebach found himself at the point of the greatest possible crossover
influence, it had been engineered by his San Francisco disciples specifically.29
I suspect that, with regards to “The Holy Man Jam,” Ram Dass and Timothy
Leary had much to do with the marketing deal that, I would argue, was the
beginning of “New Agism,” in its marketing of spirituality as a commodity,
skimmed and lifted from the source traditions attached.
These events were documented in the film Sunseed, by Amertat Cohn,
which has been withdrawn from circulation and is presently being re-edited.
This important film centered on a number of the spiritual leaders with whom
Carlebach is juxtaposed. Murshid Samuel Lewis (“Sufi Sam”), Yogi Bhajan, and
Swami Satchidinanada,30 as well as theosophist Gavin Arthur and the Bay
Area habitué Joe Miller are also documented in the film. The latter was also
eulogized by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in his charming memoir My Life in
Jewish Renewal.31 Otherwise, while Carlebach’s participation at these events
is remembered fondly by many, empirical documentation is hard to come by.
In some instances, such as the panning shot of the Holy Man Jam, he seems
to have been a bit camera-shy and probably unwilling to pose for pictures on
the Jewish Sabbath. At other times, Natan Ophir, his official biographer, strains
for documentation that Carlebach actually was at the places that his followers remember him being. With regards to Steven Gaskin, the founder of the
legendary commune “The Farm,” there are many testimonies that Carlebach
played at the Farm in the early 1970 but nobody can recall formally exactly
when, either 1974 or 1975.32
27
28
29
30
31
32
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 188, note 48.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 189, 200, 290; Coopersmith,
Holy Beggars pp. 254–259.
Coopersmith, Holy Beggars pp. 253–254, 256.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 198–203; Coopersmith, Holy
Beggars p. 236.
My Life in Jewish Renewal pp. 177–178.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 188.
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Sufism
As the 70’s wore on, Carlebach continued to work the emerging New Age circuit. The Sufi encampments of Murshid Samuel Lewis and Pir Vilayat Khan
occupied a special place among the Vedic practitioners of the early New
Age and documentation of these communities is significant for the history
of their evolution and complex relationship of these groups to contemporary New Age discourse and ecumenicism. This was the Sufi order in which
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was ordained, yet it was syncretistic and hardly an
orthodox form of Islam. As late at 1974 and 1975, Carlebach created recorded
messages for Pir Valayat Khan and his Sufi center.33
The Sufi encampments of Murshid Samuel Lewis and Pir Valayat Khan occupied a special place among the Vedic practitioners of the early New Age, and
documentation of these communities is significant for the history of their evolution and the complex relationship of these groups to contemporary New Age
discourse and ecumenicism. “Sufi Sam,” or Murshid Sam Lewis requires special
attention.34 Sam, like Gavin Arthur, was a Bay area Bohemian whose development paralleled many movements afoot in the twentieth century. Ordained in
Zen, Sufism and Christianity, he hosted a commune in Novato, and was instrumental in founding the Holy Order of Mans, an esoteric Christian order.35 In
1960–62, while visiting Pakistan, he reported that he was publicly recognized
as a Murshid by Pir Barkat Ali, founder of Dar ul Ehsan. In 1966, after further
Zen study with, among others, Sokei-An Sasaki and Sagaku Shaku, Lewis was
ordained a “Zen-Shi” (Zen Master) by Korean Zen master Dr. Kyung-Bo Seo. His
institute in Novato, practicing his “Dances of Universal Peace,” was active in
the same period as the San Francisco House of Love and Prayer.
There was a mythos attached to Lewis’s relationship with Carlebach, a myth
of Divine retribution. It seems that Sam, at the time of Carlebach’s sudden
death, was remorseful over having borrowed teachings from Carlebach without attribution. Among his followers, his death was some sort of retribution for
this offense.36 As late as 1977, a disciple of Sam’s, Benefsha Gest, would be coordinating joint Jewish/Sufi events at Moshav Modiʾin, with the participation of
Sheikh Murshid Hassan who, at the time, was resident in the Balata refugee
camp near Bethlehem but later went to America.37
33
34
35
36
37
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 204.
Coopersmith, Holy Brother p. 167, 236.
Coopersmith, Holy Brother p. 146.
Coopersmith, Holy Brother p. 167; Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy
pp. 201–202.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 242–243.
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Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
207
It bears remarking that the activities of a number of Carlebach’s contemporaries in the emerging New Age scene in the Bay Area were also tinged with
scandal, particularly Swamis Muktanada38 and Satchidananda and, clearly,
the Sufi encampments of Pir Vilayat Khan were centers for the relative sexual
license of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. The time and place is also a valid context for considering Carlebach’s own inconsistencies in this regard.
6
Conclusions
Carlebach was the only Jewish presenter in 1976 at the “World Symposium
for Humanity” in Vancouver, B.C.39 Carlebach’s visit to Pir Valayat Khan’s
“Abode of the Spirit” in 1982 was not his last documented cross-cultural activity. That same year, Carlebach and Zalman Schachter, accompanied by David
Zeller, appeared at the “International Transpersonal Association” conference
in Mumbai. He performed at the “Moving Forward” conference on Nuclear
Disarmament in San Francisco in 1983. In 1984, he appeared at “The Rainbow
Family Peace Gathering” in the Modoc Forest, following Richie Havens. In 1989
he had visited “The Sivananda Ashram Yoga Camp,” with his disciple Sonny
Garner. He returned to the Abode of the Spirit a number of times until 1992,
particular in its later “Ruach of Judaism” incarnation. In January of 1994 he
participated in a Jewish-Muslim conference, “The Lessons of Maimonides for
the Modern Age.” And what are we to make of his appearance at the R.D. Laing
Institute in London in 1992?40 These were the high points of Carlebach’s activity in the New Age circuit.
After that, the euphoric Zionist project of the late 20th century clearly overtook him, and he turned his activities towards his Israeli projects, particularly
the Moshav in Modiʾin and the demands of his peripatetic life. At the point
when his contemporaries at the “Meeting of the Ways” were entrenching, buying land, setting up commercial ventures, preparing for the development of
the “New Age Movement” and the explosion of commercial and marketing
possibilities that went along with it, Carlebach turned inward and stayed on
the road.
38
39
40
Cf. Rodarmor, William (1983), “The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda” (Reprint).
CoEvolution Quarterly (winter); Lis Harris, The New Yorker, “O Guru, Guru, Guru” The New
Yorker 14 November 1994; Goldberg, Philip, American Veda p. 211.
Dec. 4, 1976; Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 290.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 332, 338, 340, 355, 362, 389.
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Giller
Finally, the solution to the riddle of why Carlebach walked away from the
New Age is evident in the insistence, from many informants, that Carlebach
was not an ecumenicist, that he cared not a whit for Eastern religions, that he
considered them worthless, and that his only reason for involvement was outreach to “lost” Jewish souls in those milieus. This was not subterfuge; according
to one informant:
they (the gurus) were all trying to attract as many of one another’s disciples as possible. Whereas Shlomo, although friendly with everyone, was
only looking to attract the Jewish ones to what he was offering—so he
was less in competition than the others …41
In one recorded instance, Satchidinanada remonstrated with Carlebach for
trying to abscond with the former’s followers, while Carlebach insisted that,
“I was just borrowing some of mine back.”42 On the other hand, according to
one informant, a Shinto priest at “The Meeting of the Ways” was asked why
the physical can’t be lifted up to the spiritual. He answered “that, my friend,
is the work of the Jews.”
So Carlebach had no interest on patterning himself after the various gurus
and, contrary to Ophir’s protestations of warm, ongoing relationships between
the sages, when in that milieu, he probably wasn’t even listening. He remained
a Habad-style harvester of souls. In one instance, Pir Vilayat Khan’s “Abode
of the Message” in New Lebanon, N.Y. was also the site of a retreat entitled
“Ruach: Spirit of Judaism” that took place July 1–5, 1982, attended by Zalman
Schachter, Shlomo Carlebach, David Deen and Meir Fund. The Jewish Sufi
Gedalya Persky organized 15 more such retreats, which evolved into purely
Jewish enterprises under the leadership of Rabbi Meir Fund from 1983–1993,43
initially based in Khan’s “Abode of the Spirit” but later moving to more conventional Jewish retreat centers. So Carlebach and his cohorts made use of the Sufi
hospitality and then moved on.
Also, by the early 1970’s the House had fractured, in a division between
people who eventually pulled up stakes and moved to conventional Orthodox
communities and those who, generally, remained on the West Coast and,
under the influence of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, pursued what would come
41
42
43
Yaqub Ibn Yusuf, Olam Qatan bookstore, Jerusalem, Israel, private communication.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy p. 203, also note 106, see
Mandelabum, Holy Brother, pp. 72–73 cf. Neilah Carlebach, “Remembering Shlomo,”
Canadian Jewish News Nov. 16, 1995.
Ophir, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach: Life, Mission and Legacy pp. 290, 341, 334–335, 349, 385.
For use by the Author only | © 2020 Koninklijke Brill NV
Shlomo Carlebach on the West Coast
209
to be called Jewish Renewal. According to some reports, plans for a House of
Love and Prayer Yeshivah foundered when Zalman suggested having lectures
by representatives of other faith traditions, which Carlebach flatly vetoed. This
would follow the pattern pointed out by the scholar of American religions
Wade Clark Roof,44 which posited that spiritual seekers of the baby-boomer
generation tended to skew in two directions, towards orthodoxy and eclecticism. So it could be said, in the end, that Carlebach simply lost interest in that
venue; or perhaps, by the early 1980’s, the party was over, as far as he was concerned, and he did not foresee the next stage, the era of money and commerce
that would characterize the New Age in the 1980’s.
A constant in Carlebach’s activity was that he was spiritually prehensile
and intellectually promiscuous. Magid has pointed out that he could cite the
Satmar Rebbe, Rav Kook, or, in one edition of the Holy Beggar’s gazette, Rav
Arele Roth, without differentiation. His stories were wrapped in the mantle of
“virtuous reality,” as Zalman Schachter-Shalomi put it, while others might say
that they were contrived and inauthentic.45
While Carlebach is now decried for his sexual incontinence, it was perhaps
his emotional incontinence that has remained a salient element in the Jewish
community, as has been noted by Shaul Magid in his examination of the relationship between Carlebach’s activity and the evolution of his contemporary,
Meir Kahane. He was a wastrel, without institutions or boundaries to restrain
him, living as a traveling musician in the 1960’s. There were no more expectations of him than there would have been of Robert Plant or Jerry Garcia. A
fraction of the people for whom he played pursued an ongoing connection
with him. The vast majority of people who came to hear him moved on or
away from him, often from an aversion that they could not, at the time, name.
And yet, for those who moved on, there is an ambivalent recognition. His
immediate rehabilitation upon his death was followed by a number of harassment testimonies, and so his memory swings between these two poles. When
he was alive, he was actively marginalized by most of the Jewish community;
the instruction, “no Carlebach melodies” was characteristic of orthodox
Jews in the 1960’s and liberal Jews of today. This ambivalence, an oscillation
between two poles of thinking, remains the norm as received traditions about
Carlebach swirl through the rabbinic community, as Jews clasp at the vanishing memory, as R. Nachman said, of a time when people were once happy.
44
45
A Generation of Seekers p. 44.
Magid, “Shlomo Carlebach and Meir Kahane”: 465; Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Holy
Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters pp. 287–296.
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210
Giller
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