HASIDIC JUDAISM
June 11, 2023
This presentation is billed as “Hasidic Judaism,” but it’s really about my intersection with Hasidic Judaism, and the influence that some members of that faith had on me. It is not an essay, or even a lecture; I prefer to think of it as a story, one that just happens to be true.
In 1963, at the age of twenty, I fell away from the Catholic faith in which I had been raised. This does not mean that I fell away from spirituality—I certainly didn’t, but I wanted to explore other religious and spiritual traditions.
I chose Judaism as my first stop on this voyage of exploration, since it was closer to what I was used to (being the source of Christianity), and therefore more accessible. I think, though, that I had always been attracted to it. While still in high school, I had taught myself to read Biblical Hebrew. At that time I didn’t know it, but I actually had some Jewish ancestry, on my father’s side. I didn’t know it because my father had never told me, and in fact didn’t tell me until I was thirty.
Anyway, being of a mystical bent, I started with Jewish mysticism—not knowing yet in what it consisted. I learned about the thirteenth-century work known as the Zohar, and about the Etz Chayim, the “Tree of Life,” the Sefiroth, or Spheres, and the Shekinah, or Holy Spirit, always characterized as feminine.
With this small background, I allowed myself to graduate to the works of Martin Buber, and there I struck gold. It was there that I learned about the hasidim (“the pious”), and their charismatic leaders, the tzaddikim (“the righteous”). I learned, in short, about a popular movement that, as it has been said, “brought God down to earth,” was based on joy in prayer, and made it possible for humans to see their fellow humans as sacred. Sound good? I thought so. In fact, I quickly fell in love with Hasidism in its early form.
The founder of Hasidism was the legendary Israel Ben Eliezer (1700-1760), the Baal Shem Tov or “Master of the Good Name.” The part of his teaching that I especially identified with was the part about the “qeliphot,” or material shells, in which sparks of Spirit were entrapped in this world. According to the BESHT (the acronym by which the Baal Shem is called), we could liberate these sparks of Spirit by the way in which we approached the mundane, the things of everyday life. In other words, everyday acts could be made sacred by the manner in which they were performed.
There are many stories about the Baal Shem Tov in the books of Martin Buber, but the one, above all, that has stayed with me is one called “The Hose-Maker.” It tells how a man, whose job it was to make stockings, did his job so religiously as to liberate the sparks of Spirit, as described above. At the end of the story, the BESHT tells his disciples, “Today you have seen the cornerstone which will uphold the Temple until the Messiah comes.”
In 1964 I read all of the Tales of the Hasidim: the “Early Masters” as well as the “Later Masters,” including Dov Baer of Mezritch, called “The Great Maggid (Preacher),” Pinhas of Koretz, Zev Wolf, Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, Shneur Zalman of Ladi, and many others, and their descendants and schools. Later we will come back to the name of Shneur Zalman, which has special significance in this story. I read all of them though, and everything about them that I could find.
But in 1965 I met a real, live Hasid.
I was 22 years old, sharing an apartment with a friend, right across the street from the downtown campus of San Diego City College. where I had been a student for a couple of years. Every now and then I would wander over there, hoping to meet some of my old friends, which I often did. One day I was in the campus patio, when I saw a guy, about my own age, bearded, wearing a dark, 3/4-length topcoat (unusual enough in San Diego) and a flat-brimmed, black hat. This could mean only one thing: he was a Hasid. I struck up a conversation with him and eventually invited him over to our apartment to continue our talk. So it was that I met John, the bearded Hasid.
I had always had a lot of books, and in those days I had built a bookcase for them out of cinder blocks and shelf planks, as college students often do. As we talked, John’s eyes roamed over the spines of the books. Suddenly he said, “Whose ‘Tales of the Hasidim’ is that?” I told him that the two-volume set was mine. He said, “Have you read it?” I told him that, yes, I had read it—all of it. As we talked, John told me that he had attended a yeshiva (think of it as a seminary or divinity school) in NYC. I told him that I had been in a Jesuit novitiate for a few months, right after high school. So, although I had been raised Catholic and he had been raised Jewish, we both had something in common: we had each considered a religious vocation, but later decided against it.
We became good friends. John thought it was cool that I knew Latin, just like he knew Hebrew. I think he was one of the first, if not the first guy that I smoked weed with. One day I came home from work to find two LP records that had been slipped under the apartment door. They were both by Shlomo Carlebach, a Hasidic “Rebbe” in New York. I loved the music, which was both spiritual and full of Spirit. Thus began another huge Hasidic influence.
Both my friend John and Rabbi Carlebach were associated with Chabad, arguably the most influential organization not only in Hasidism, but also in Orthodox Judaism. They are a worldwide organization, headed by the “Lubavitcher Rebbe,” whose lineage goes back to Shneur Zalman, whom I mentioned earlier. The name “Chabad” is another acronym: it stands for Chokmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), and Daat (Knowledge), three of the sefirot, or spheres, at the top of the Etz Chayim, the Tree of Life. The preeminence of Chabad is due directly to Shneur Zalman, who was a writer and the auther of a kind of “Hasidic Bible” called the Tanya. [show book]
Hasidism is very much about Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, whose main source is the thirteenth-century book called the Zohar. It’s a difficult work to learn from. What Shneur Zalman did was make it understandable. He wrote, as he said, “for the average person.” So, if you want to learn Kabbalah but don’t have a teacher—read the Tanya, which brings it down to Earth, down to the people.
So, my friend John was a Lubavitcher Hasid. As it happened, I moved back to San Francisco, and a few months later John showed up at my apartment. He told me that the Draft Board was trying to draft him, and he was on his way to NYC to talk to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He hoped the Rebbe would give him a writing saying that he was a conscientious objector, thus saving him from the draft. This the Rebbe refused to do: after all, there were other Hasidim serving in the military.
Now, my mystical friend John was the most unfit person for military service that I have ever known. He would do his best to help the military to understand this. He refused to carry a rifle, but he could play some musical instrument, so they put him in the band. He told them that he had to have time to say his prayers every day; the chaplain told him he could say them in the latrine, which for reasons of ritual cleanliness made John furious. He told them he had to not only eat kosher, but “glatt kosher” (smooth kosher, which you can’t get just anywhere). Nothing worked. He was still in the army.
In the middle of all this, John showed up at my apartment in SF. He carried a duffel bag which contained, among other things, a bottle of vodka (which he pronounced like “vodkee”), which is an important Hasidic "accoutrement." He had gone AWOL from Fort Ord. He wanted me to take him to the Fillmore Auditorium. So we got on the number 16 bus and went to the Fillmore. And every now and then, John took a nip of “vodkee.”
In the morning, John took the Greyhound Bus back to Fort Ord. He hoped they would finally kick him out. Instead, they just ignored the whole thing. John was now desperate. Do you remember that part of the Alice’s Restaurant record where Arlo goes in to the military psych and says, “Doc, I wanta kill, I mean, I wanna KILL?” Well it was something like that, except John went in to the shrink and started jumping up and down and screaming that he wanted to kill someone. They must have believed him, because he got a general discharge.
In April of 1967, with the Summer of Love upon us in SF, I got a call from John, who was in Seattle, in the middle of the night. He wanted to come to SF and crash on my floor. I told him I couldn’t do anything for him, because I already had two guys crashing on the floor of my small, studio apartment. Unfotunately, in the crazy vortex of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, I lost track of John. I have always regretted it.
An important part of this story is still missing: the part about Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. He was the most charismatic man I ever met, and I did meet him. Here’s how it happened:
In late 1966 or early 1967, I heard that Rabbi Carlebach would be giving a concert at the Berkeley Community Theater. Of course, I had to be there. I invited my friend Elsa to go with me, and she readily agreed. Elsa was half-Jewish, originally from Vienna. She was four years older than I was, and had only survived the Holocaust because her mother was Catholic. Like me, she was exploring her Jewish roots.
The Berkeley Community Theater holds 3,491 people. I would estimate that there were between 2,000 and 3,000 people in the audience that night. Rabbi Carlebach performed and interacted with the audience for two hours. The performance contract only allowed the show to go until 10 p.m., but the audience did not want it to stop. The theater management momentarily dimmed the lights, several times. Rabbi Carlebach offered those of us who wanted to to come up and get “The Rebbe’s Kiss,” a Hasidic tradition. Elsa and I, and about a hundred other people came up and got a kiss on the cheek from Rabbi Carlebach. Then he said to the remaining audience: “We have to leave the theater, but follow me down to the shul (the synagogue), and we’ll sing and dance there until the sun comes up.”
Outside the theater, the scene was crazy. Rabbi Carlebach was jumping up and down with his guitar and singing “Od Avinu Chai” (Our Father is Always Living), which was one of his newest songs. Singing and dancing, we started off toward the shul. Some people came to their windows and wanted to know what was going on. Someone would shout up to them: “We’re going to the shul—join us!” Some did. At one point, Rabbi Carlebach stopped and said, I want to sing you a song called “Sam’hem.” “It means ‘Make Them Happy.’ not this silly thing we’re doing tonight, but make them really happy, by giving them a better life.”
Inside the shul, I grabbed a kippah. Rabbi Carlebach sang and played, and we danced the hora. The Rabbi’s energetic playing, though, eventually caused a string on his guitar to break. During the ensuing lull, he asked me if I knew where he could get a guitar string. I told him I didn’t. Even in Berkeley, it wasn’t possible in the middle of the night, with all the stores closed.
I took Elsa home, knowing that we had experienced something special, and unforgettable.
Quite a few years later, I read an interview with Rabbi Carlebach. His wife had left him and he was living alone in a New York hotel room. He said, “the only good thing is that my daughter hasn’t abandoned me.” I assumed that his wife had left him because of infidelity. Many more years later, a friend told me that it was worse. It was inappropriate sexual behavior, with several of his female students. I was devastated to learn of it.
The women in question had come forward four years after Shlomo’s passing. Many congregations stopped singing Carlebach’s songs. He had caused a lot of pain and done terrible damage to his legacy. In January of 2018, his daughter, Neshama, wrote an open letter to the women who had been harmed by her father. It was published by the Times of Israel, and it’s a very moving letter. I’ll quote just a little bit of it:
“I accept the fullness of who my father was, flaws and all. I am angry with him. And I refuse to see his faults as the totality of who he was.” The rest of her letter is well worth reading, and I can provide it to anyone who would like to.
Shlomo’s songs are again being sung. He has had a Broadway musical about him, "Soul Doctor," which has now been made into a movie, also called “Soul Doctor.” The subject of the play/movie is an affair that Shlomo had with Nina Simone, long before he was married. It is a sweet story, sensitively told. Shlomo's books are again being published, and I can tell you that they are sources of great joy and spiritual strength.
Thank you.
