obituaries
Obituaries from page 69
Father Of Jewish Renewal
Ben Harris
JTA
R
abbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
was one of the world's most
innovative and influential Jewish
spiritual leaders.
To his followers, he was their Chasidic
rebbe. But what other rebbe had dropped
acid with Timothy Leary and dialogued
with the Dalai Lama?
Schachter-Shalomi, who died July 3,
2014, at 89, wasn't the only rabbi who tin-
kered radically with Jewish tradition. No
one else, however, did so with the sense of
gravitas and authenticity that came with
carrying a living memory of the richness of
prewar Jewish Europe.
Though Jewish Renewal, the movement
he helped midwife, remains marginal by
the standards of the major Jewish denomi-
nations, many of the ritual innovations he
fostered have long since gone mainstream
— from the use of musical instrumenta-
tion during services to the incorporation of
Eastern meditative practices.
Few Jewish spiritual leaders could match
the scope of his erudition, steeped as he
was
not only in sacred texts and Jewish
mysticism but contemporary psychology
and Eastern spirituality. He was a Yiddish
speaker, proficient in the vernacular of
modern science and computer technology,
an academic capable of creating transfor-
mative religious experiences for his follow-
ers.
"He was a whole world," said Rabbi David
Ingber, spiritual leader of the Manhattan
congregation Romemu and a leading figure
among the younger generation of Renewal
rabbis. "There was no one like him when he
was alive; and now that he's gone, there will
never be anyone like him:'
Born in Poland in 1924 into an Orthodox
family with Belzer Chasidic roots,
Schachter-Shalomi was raised in Vienna
and arrived in the United States in 1941. He
was ordained as a Chabad rabbi but strayed
far from his Orthodox roots, eventually
helping to found a movement that fused
the ancient and postmodern into a kind of
liberal Chasidism.
Like the Chasidic masters of Europe,
Schachter-Shalomi encouraged his follow-
ers to seek a direct experience of the divine
through practices inspired by the Jewish
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Obituaries
mystical tradition. He embraced a decidedly
liberal ethos, championing equal roles for
men and women in religious life, welcom-
ing gays and lesbians, and promoting doc-
trines like eco-kashrut that integrated con-
temporary concerns into Jewish practice.
Schachter-Shalomi pioneered ritual inno-
vations that were groundbreaking at the
time, including meditation, ecstatic dance
and drums and other musical instruments
in religious services. He led prayers in the
vernacular, reading Torah from a scroll but
translating it into English on the fly while
maintaining the traditional cantillation — a
feat he could carry off with seeming aplomb
well into his ninth decade.
Though he lost family members to the
Nazis, Schachter-Shalomi believed it was
a mistake to attempt a restoration of the
Jewish world destroyed by the Holocaust.
Instead, he felt that Jewish traditions need-
ed to be renewed, harmonized with new
ways of viewing reality that emerged in the
20th century.
Along with the legendary composer
Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Schachter-
Shalomi was among the earliest emissaries
dispatched by the Lubavitcher rebbe to do
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
outreach on college campuses. But he drift-
ed from the strictures of Orthodoxy, explor-
ing other mystical traditions and immersing
himself deeply in the counterculture.
He was a leading figure in the growth
of the Havurah movement, the small
prayer groups that emerged in the 1960s
and rejected institutionalized synagogue
Judaism in favor of home-based worship,
presaging the rise of today's independent
minyans.
An inveterate boundary crosser, he
declined to choose between the social jus-
tice imperatives and progressive politics
of Reform Judaism, the spiritual rigor and
devotion of traditional Orthodoxy and the
mystical impulses of Chasidism. He wanted
all of them.
In the 1990s, Schachter-Shalomi left
Philadelphia, where he had held a teaching
post at Temple University, to assume the
World Wisdom chair at Naropa University,
a Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college in
Boulder, Colo.
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