On Shlomo Carlebach (Archives)

Shlomo: After Ten Years

(Written for the tenth yahrzeit of Shlomo Carlebach, who died on 16 Marheshvan 5754; Novemeber 2004)

I first met Shlomo Carlebach when I was 16, when he came to sing at the Jewish summer camp I went to as a teenager. At that time he was known by most simply as a young rabbi with beard and tzitzit who played the guitar and sang Jewish songs, performing in such unlikely places as coffee houses in Greenwich Village. Since he is best known to most people, even today, as “the singing rabbi,” as a composer of innumerable Jewish melodies and, increasingly, as the father of Nusah Shlomo, a certain set of niggunim for Kabbalat Shabbat, I will begin with a few words about his music. The following comments from The New Yorker (Nov 10 1997, p. 116), written about someeen else, seem strangely apt:

A gift for melody is so rare that, in revenge, critics call it a craft. Of all the great songwriters, few have had the gift so distinctly as Paul McCartney. Even fewer, perhaps, have seen it last so long. McCartney, like Irving Berlin, has managed to produce memorable tunes for a span of more than forty years. (It is probably no coincidence that the two are among the least trained of the great songwriters: neither could read or write music.) Through slumps and silliness, McCartney’s melodies have never stopped coming, and they all still have the self-sustaining “Whistle me” quality they had when the first appeared, so many years ago The above statement could be made, substituting the name Shlomo Carlebach for that of Paul McCartney, without changing a single word. Like McCartney and Berlin, Shlomo, notwithstanding his prolific creativity in music, was only minimally literate in standard musical notation and musical theory. On several occasions I was present at the birth of a new Shlomo niggun: suddenly, he would stop whatever he was doing and tentatively sing the new melody a few times; then he would go over to the piano, if there was one, feeling out the basic melodic lines, but he never wrote it down or asked for sheet music paper.

Conventional wisdom has it that Shlomo’s first “breakthrough” into recognition by the general public, the beginning of his musical career, was at a concert at the Village Gate, a coffee house in New York City’s Greenwich Village, in the late 1950s. His first LP consisted of songs he sang on that occasion. However, a friend of mine told the following story of his emergence as a singer in the yeshiva world. Some time in the mid-1950s there was a yeshiva wedding at which the hatan was from Lakewood—the “Harvard” of American yeshivot, the closest thing to a European yeshiva existing on American soil in those days, headed by Rabbi Aharon Kutler, “the Kletzker Rov.” Shlomo was asked to sing, but in the middle of his singing Rav Kutler interrupted and shouted into the microphone, “Dos niggen ist geganv’d” (“This melody is stolen!”)—seemingly, a shocking accusation. But after a pause, he continued “fon der Leviim in Beis hamigdosh!“—“from the Levites in the Holy Temple.” That is, Shlomo’s melodies were so sublime, so unique in his eyes, that they could only have had their source in the most sacred musical milieu known to Judaism: the Levites singing in the Temple.

Needless to say, neither Irving Berlin nor Paul McCartney created a new form or school of Hasidism or taught alienated young people a new spiritual path. In brief, as creative as Shlomo was in the entire area of music, it was only “the lesser light” within his personality and in his life’s work. That which was essential to him, and which moved him to create and use music, was the world of Torah and Hasidut, and his mission to reach out to Jews around the world and bring them back to their heritage.

There are two types of “hasidim” who mourn Shlomo’s passing, and for whom the date of his yahrzeit is significant. There are many people for whom he was “Rebbe” in every sense: he introduced them to traditional Yiddishkeit, and without him they would never have found their way back to a Jewish way of life, to Shabbat, to prayer, and so forth. And then there is a second type: those who came to him with a “background,” who had known many other teachers in the Torah world, but found something in him that was unique, not provided by any of their other mentors. Coming from the latter group, and having already known quite a few Torah teachers—thinkers, scholars, talmidei hakhamim, and even Hasidic rebbes—by the time I met Shlomo, I ask myself the question: What was unique about Shlomo? What made him different from other figures, including many others who, like himself, engaged intensely in kiruv work, in bringing alienated, assimilated young Jews back to knowledge of their tradition?

The answer at which I have arrived may seem strange and unexpected. Some teachers are successful in finding the point of contact between Judaism and the great movements of their day in the general culture, and somehow manage to create a meeting between them, a synthesis, even a kind of a fusion of the two, without it seeming artificial or forced. Such was the case of Rambam and medieval neo-Aristotelianism; of R. Samson Raphael Hirsch and 19th century German culture and philosophy; of Rav Soloveitchik and a certain nexus in Western thought. Shlomo somehow found the light, the spark of holiness, in the 1960s youth or “counter-culture,” and succeeded in drawing a line between it and a certain way of looking at Judaism. (For those unfamiliar with this chapter: Shlomo, during most of the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, made San Francisco the center of his activity, where he created the House of Love and Prayer, which was a combination synagogue/hippie commune/crash-pad, whose doors were always open.)

The essence of that culture was, first of all, a protest against bourgeois values; against a certain self-satisfied world-view, a culture largely oriented towards money and material goods. It called for a return to basics, to a type of authenticity and honesty, to more direct, unsullied human relations. Maverick social critic and philosopher Robert M. Pirsig, in his book Lila, interprets the Hippie revolution as a reaction against both Victorianism, with its (hypocritical) moralism and social conformity, and a certain kind of intellectuality that reached its peak in the 1920s (with the excitement engendered in the space of less than a generation by such diverse thinkers as Freud, Marx, Darwin, and Einstein), with its iconoclasm vis-à-vis religion and social convention, and the belief that science and rationality would bring about human happiness.

The Hippies have been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the period following their departure as a “return to values,” whatever that means… The Hippie revolution of the sixties was a moral revolution against both society and intellectuality. It was a whole new social phenomenon no intellectual had predicted [or could] explain… children of well-to-do, college-educated, “modern” people… who suddenly turned upon their parents and their schools and their society with a hatred no one could have believed existed…. In the sixties it was thought that both society and intellect together were the cause of all the unhappiness and that transcendence of both society and intellect would cure it… Contempt for rules, for material possessions, for war, for police, for science…. Drugs that destroyed one’s ability to reason were almost a sacrament. Oriental religions such as Zen and Vedanta that promised release from the prison of intellect were taken us as gospel…. (pp. 346-347)

But in the end, the moral power of the Hippie revolution, with all its quest for authenticity and inter-personal honesty and its passionate hatred for the hypocrisy of the established society, failed. It made a fatal mistake in stressing what Pirsig calls “biological quality”—i.e., rejection of conventional morality, sexual and otherwise, an anarchic approach to marriage and the family—rather than Dynamic Quality (by which Pirsig, in his somewhat idiosyncratic terminology, means something like spirituality, creativity, “freedom from domination by any static quality”), ending as one more moral revolution that failed or, even worse, sliding into degeneracy and violence.

Where Shlomo came into this picture was that, for those who encountered him and who took up his message in a serious way, he provided an alternative in his uniquely personal style of Hasidic Judaism. Historically, Hasidism, too, had had its elements of bohemianism—a certain anarchism and contempt for conventional mores and behavior (e.g., in Bratslav, Kotzk, Iszbich), an emphasis on emotional intensity and fire, etc.

All these things Shlomo understood, of course, intuitively. He was not a man of ideologies, nor one given to abstract intellectual formulations. Though extraordinarily intelligent and quick-witted, and profoundly erudite in all aspects of the Jewish tradition, it is not clear to me how much he knew of Western philosophy, nor of Wissenschaft des Judentums (the modern critical-historical approach to Judaism). His connection to the world, which enabled him to speak so directly to the hearts of the “Hippie kids” of the ‘60s, was grounded in a kind of intuitive grasp of how they saw the world and what troubled them, almost a kind of “street smarts.” For all his openness, and for all of the anomalies and apparent contradictions some may have seen in his personal life, he as at heart very much an old–fashioned Jew. As such, he defies characterization in terms of ideology. Was he Haredi ? Modern-Orthodox? Religious Zionist? Right wing? Anyone who knew Shlomo will know how much such questions are not to the point.

His manner of speaking was extremely down-to-earth; his language was utterly simple (deceptively so). In his relationship to his disciples, there was none of the distance or awe usually felt towards a Rebbe. He was never addressed as anything other than “Shlomo.” It was almost as though he was a religious Hippie, one of their one, who happened to belong to another generation, and who “happened” to be an awesome scholar and teacher— but, essentially, a friend, a kind of loving father. In addition to being a latter-day Jewish minstrel, he was also a bard, a master story teller. Besides his profound knowledge of both Talmuds and of classical Rabbinic literature, and of the theoretical works of Hasidim, he also had an encyclopedic knowledge of Hasidic stories and of Hasidic music.

Shlomo himself was an outsider. Whoever will some day write his biography will need to examine his ambivalent relationship with the Haredi “Torah world” from which he came, and which in some sense rejected him after a certain turn in his life. His respect and even love for such men as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Bobover Rebbe, Rav Aharon Kutler, Rav Moshe Mordecai Skopf, and others, coupled with his estrangement from them in actual life, was a basic part of who he was.

A striking aspect of all of Shlomo’s teaching was the centrality of love, the need for loving, unconditional acceptance of the other as the basis for all human relations, and of the love of God as the basis for the mitzvot. In this, he was strikingly different from the main-stream of the “frum,” or Orthodox community. In standard Orthodox teaching, the emphasis is on duty, on obligation, on a person discharging his halakhic obligations. The motif of fear tends to be upmost, yirat hashem preceding ahavah. (Of course, there are those who see in the lack of these elements a problematic aspect of Shlomo’s message. Some in the mainstream religious world have accused him of a certain “softness” and leniency in his approach: of leaving too much to the emotions, rather than to the reason and the will; of the absence of the sense of all-powerful obligation, of the heteronomy of the Law; of what the Kabbalists call an “overflow of hesed,” of Love, without the counter-balance of din.)

Among Shlomo’s disciples, by contrast, and among those who were influenced by him, one often feels that the mitzvot—especially those of prayer and Shabbat—are first and foremost to be accepted, experienced, celebrated with love and joy. Prayer is an act of joy and passion. Shabbat is a day of celebration, a kind of (if one may say such a thing) Jewish agape feast; a day of joy, when God’s presence is felt as tangible and concrete; and a day of love of God and of one’s fellow. And, however trite and banal it may sometimes become, one feels this even today among his close disciples—albeit not with the same force and intensity as when Shlomo was among us. In this respect, at least, he seems to have been on a very different modality from most of Jewry.

All these are, of course, basic Hasidic messages—but they somehow seem to have been lost in the shuffle, over the decades and generations and centuries. Yet with Shlomo, I often felt, notwithstanding all the cultural and other differences between 18th century small town Eastern Europe and 20th century urban America, that the original message of the Baal Shem Tov was still alive and pulsing. May his memory be as a blessing.

(For more teachings on Shlomo, see below, archives for October 200)