Over 100 people gathered at Drisha on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to explore the legacy of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. The event was the first in a series of evenings exploring the legacies of Torah teachers who offered unique ways to find and make religious meaning in the modern/post-modern age. Future sessions in June 2015 (all at Drisha) will explore the influence of other figures, including Rav Yehudah Amital. (Stay tuned at www.drisha.org for scheduling.)
This session, “Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Legacy of Reb Zalman,” co-sponsored by Romemu, opened with a song and a brief video of Schachter-Shalomi himself, setting the stage for an evening that gave those present a tantalizing taste of what Schachter-Shalomi was about. In attendance were both those who had met R. Zalman on their own spiritual journeys as well as those encountering his approach for the first time. Attendees walked away from the evening with much food for thought as to what it would mean to be a student of Reb Zalman, to a greater or lesser extent.
A panel of three speakers addressed the idiosyncratic thinker’s legacy from an assortment of perspectives. Rabbi Dr. Tsvi Blanchard stressed that Schachter-Shalomi was ahead of his time in recognizing the importance of “religious experience” beyond intellectual argument, that he saw faith as a dynamic process by which humans can discover a “covenant with the cosmos,” and that he emphasized the transformative and expressive power of embodied ritual.
Rabbi David Ingber, Spiritual Leader of Romemu, began by bluntly asserting “Reb Zalman saved my life” when the two met ten years ago, and described some highlights from what went on to become a close teacher-student relationship. Ingber described Reb Zalman as a master pedagogue who knew how to open the heart of the person with him. He discussed Schachter-Shalomi’s fundamental claims that the “technologies” of tradition could be applied to spiritual living in a post-modern age, and that halakhah needed to be applied in a “psychospiritual” or “integral” way that remained connected to its underlying purposes. Ingber also referenced Schachter-Shalomi’s interest in world religions and eschewal of religious triumphalism.
Reb Mimi Feigelson, Mashpiah Ruchanit and lecturer at American Jewish University in Los Angeles and a student of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (Carlebach, like Schachter-Shalomi, began his religious career in the Chabad Lubavitch movement), focused on her personal relationship with Schachter-Shalomi. Feigelson explained that after the first time she heard him speak she “sat shiva” out of profound disappointment, and only reconciled with him many years later, at his daughter’s wedding, where he “showered her with blessing” and offered her his smichah, ordination. She stressed that Reb Zalman was at home in multiple worlds—what she called the “white spaces” as well as the “black letters” of the Torah, and as a result was both comfortable and uncomfortable for everyone. The three panelists shared a friendly rapport.
Panelists then responded to a range of questions from the audience. Regarding Schachter-Shalomi’s relationship to halakhah, Ingber stressed that he focussed on underlying purpose, which could lead to flexibility about even the basic rules of, for example, shabbat but could also generate additional requirements such as “eco kashrut.” On Schachter-Shalomi’s vision for Jewish education, panelists answered that he would shy away from grand pronouncements and look for how to bring experiential Jewish learning to a particular community, would stress talking with children about a personal relationship with God, and would not be afraid to push institutions out of their comfort zones. As to what Schachter-Shalomi “really believed” theologically, Ingber argued that Schachter-Shalomi presented a vision of a “nondual divine” that could be contained in various human-constructed “faces” and explained Schachter-Shalomi’s Jewish Renewal approach as “hassidic reconstructionism.” Blanchard said that he had been unable to wring much from Schachter-Shalomi regarding the latter’s personal theology, beyond a heavy influence of Wittgenstein’s idea of language as a form of life. As to the relevance of the Holocaust in Schachter-Shalomi’s thought (the teenage Zalman Schachter fled Europe in 1941), Ingber related that Schachter-Shalomi, who gave very specific instructions for every aspect of his care after death, was buried with a bag of bones from Auschwitz, but refused to enter into post-holocaust discussions of theodicy. Regarding the place of Jewish Renewal in the panoply of Jewish denominations, panelists noted that Schachter-Shalomi himself resisted becoming a “movement,” but that Renewal now has its own institutions. Nevertheless, Schachter-Shalomi’s influence, from using contemporary popular music for liturgical singing to explicitly promoting religious experience, extend far beyond those institutions and have, Schachter-Shalomi would proudly claim, infected the rest of the Jewish world like a “virus.”
The speakers did not dwell on Schachter-Shalomi’s personal history or journey, for which curious attendees would have to look elsewhere, but did stress that Schachter-Shalomi, very conscious of his own mortality in recent years, left a large body of writings and videos accessible on the internet through the University of Colorado at Boulder (http://www.rzlp.org/Yesod-RZLP/Reb_Zalman_Legacy_Project.html) and on YouTube, for those who wish to learn more about his approach.
The entire evening was recorded; to view, visit http://www.drisha.org/rebzalman.php.
By Miriam Gedwiser
