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.
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