I have the privilege of knowing Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach for some 20 years before he passed on. During that time, I had been going to his concerts for about 5 years on a steady basis and I played his recordings even when I wasn’t an active part of his movement. He also hooked me up with a rabbi who lived near me on LI, NY and I went to the rabbi’s shul after I came back to the US in late ’79.
Actually, I was on the periphery of the movement. I’m really not Chasidic or frumkeit material. But for a while Shlomo was directly influential in my life.
I found him to be sympathetic to my problems and when I needed to leave the Ben Yishai cult, Shlomo intervened and invited me to come to Moshav Me’or Modi’in his home in Israel. I have ambivalent feeling towards all of this at the current point in time even though as I pen this missive I’m listening to Shlomo Sings 1962.
One problem I had was what to call him. Shlomo never rammed his smicha (“ordination”) down anyone’s throat least of all mine, but my relatives and people in his Shul did. My side of the family is not orthodox but my first Uncle Irving Green (author of “Judaism on the Web”) was and they kept trying to impress it upon me that there was a “Jewish pecking order.” My Aunt Dagmar constantly told me that Shlomo was a “big important person and he’s busy so [stop bothering him]” I just ignored her.
After all the abuse I put up with in public school for my Jewish upbringing I needed to find a rabbi who cared at all and I found that in Shlomo. Nevertheless I have some comments to make about my experiences and the direction the movement has been taking. I also have some comments about how Neila Carlebach handled the article in Tikkun magazine called, “The Paradoxical Legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.”
I got slandered in Yeshivat D’var Yerushalayim and was called a drug addict by someone. It simply wasn’t true.
During the time period between May of ’78 and either October or November ’79 I lived in Israel and was at Modi’in twice. I spent about 8 months there. I made a lot of friends there and I was lucky enough to tour Israel in concert with Shlomo. Friends of my parents saw me on TV during this time period.
My uncle Irving came to Israel during this point in time and he kvetched about how lucky I was having the time of my life, “running around Israel” with Shlomo. What he didn’t know was how much pain I was in due to all the mosquito bites I got at Modi’in and also the skin sores on my body where, thin, clear ooze use to seep out. Israel was no picnic for me.
In between my 2 stays at Modi’n, I was at Kibbutz Shluchot in the Beit Shean valley on a kibbutz run ulpan (crash course in Hebrew) and I used to throw parties called kumsitz gatherings playing my guitar and singing to the people on the kibbutz. I was very well received and I believe that it was a high point in my life. My food was taken care of, so was my laundry, and my father and mother gave me some cash and sent CARE packages to me, so to speak.
Personally, money was never a driving factor in my early adulthood. I needed to get training and I eventually went to college and I now possess a Master of Science in Management degree from Boston U at a program they did in conjunction with Ben Gurion U of the Negev, in Beer Sheba Israel so Israel and I have ties stronger than I thought early on. And I wound up back with the Carlebach movement after I finished my MSM and also after I lost my last contract as a computer programmer analyst.
The essential problem I had with the Carlebach movement was that it is essentially a “one man movement” as my father told me numerous times. While Shlomo was “kind of like” the messiah for some people as an orthodox Jew told me while I was at Con Ed in NYC, I never found a career because of him although;I did get computer training through COPE Institute, run by Agudat Israel, and became a programmer for some 6 plus years after that. Also, there were no infrastructures for helping me out like there were in Chabad because Shlomo had no State-side haven as it was moved from the House of Love and Prayer in the Bay Area in CA to the Moshav in ’76.
I told people in my church that just there were Jesus Freaks, there were also “Shlomo Freaks.” And testimonials about his impact on people, especially some in the Holy Beggars Gazette, read just like the literature that born again Christians write about Jesus.
One more thing I’d like to comment on is Neila’s handling the article in Tikkun magazine. I read on the web that she didn’t want to deal with these people who complained because she felt that they just wanted to besmirch her late husband’s legacy.
I believe that Tikkun handled it responsibly they had a hot line set up to receive phone calls and talk to these people.
Personally, I never saw Shlomo molest a youngster although his yetzer hara (“evil inclination”) got the best of him several times that I saw when he hugged and did more than that to women. The people in Mea Shearim, Israel used to print up handbills condemning him for this when he came to Israel.
Personally, I don’t believe that it’s per se wrong for a man to hug a woman or anything like that. That’s orthodox law and it’s questionable in my sight. But in orthodox Judaism it’s forbidden and Shlomo had his problems dealing with the orthodoxy over it.
The biggest problem I had was the Carlebach-Chabad connection in my life. After I left Israel in ’87 when I was living with Yeshua Witt and his family, I went to Crown Heights and got married through Chabad. As noted on my recent piece called “More about Chabad” on this forum, I got called “a dog” and received death threats from my Aunt Dagmar who threatened to get Lubavitch to kill me, and my first cousin, Michael, threatened to get a black belt friend of his to beat me up. No one sympathized with me over the problem I had through my marriage and I stopped going to my family. I did not go to my Uncle’s funeral when he died.
My uncle also tried to marry me off to both of his daughters and my father was furious about it. He didn’t want any further aggravation and I wouldn’t touch them even though both of my first cousins were very good looking girls. My younger female first cousin looks like my paternal grandmother and that also gave me the biggest reasons to not marry her. My grandfather divorced my grandmother and I wouldn’t touch another frum girl after what happened with my ex.
I also have issues with how Rabbi Witt’s family treated me in ’95 especially Yeshua Witt’s eldest son, Yachad, attempting to turn me into a clay android called a golem. The whole religious scene for me it nuts.
If you take a look on [www.amazon.com] and pull up the reviews I have (about 18 of them) you’ll see what I’m driving at. Shlomo said that Judaism is a religion of love, but I haven’t seen it in many years.
Some people in the Carlebach movement, notably Rabbi Sammy Intrator, who was Shlomo’s understudy and who took over from Shlomo after his decease for some 4 years at the Carlebach Shul, once commented to me that he hoped that the movement wasn’t a cult. But I have some reservations about all of this.
If anyone takes those wild stories on Shlomo’s recording literally I have some comments about it all especially about the story of the miser who never gave tzedakah (“charity”) and the Chevra kadisha (“burial society”) refused to bury him so he buried himself after he passed on. Similarly with the “Story of the Holy Mamzer” (“Holy Bastard”). It seems like the wilder the story the more Shlomo liked them.
Shlomo was a staunch Zionist and a good friend of Ariel Sharon’s. Shlomo was against the “land for peace deals” with the Arabs. I also have issues with that.
I found Shlomo’s doctrines to be ethnocentric and fundamentalist and I never believed that the world was literally created in 6 days and nights like he did. So I have some questions about his theology too.
One of the problems I’ve had in my life was that it seemed that I couldn’t get away from being involved with Judaism. Even when I left Crown Heights in ’88 and was employed by AT&T, people kept bugging me about my Jewish background. Some of my co-workers tried to educate me when it came to the Torah and its commentaries and I had to convince them that I knew more about Judaism that they did. I also had problems with anti-Semitism at the company for some reason.
One of Shlomo’s teachings was on the messiah the son of Joseph who would lose his life fighting the Amalekites and breaking the power of the gentiles in the current “exile of Edom”. As usually happens to people who are undergoing struggles in life, I got delusions of grandeur and thought it applied to me and I went to Crown Heights with the master plan of ganging up with Menachem Schneerson and fighting the non-Jews.
While I was at Chabad I got a job in a company on LI and one of the bosses kept telling me, “I’m a Yeshiva graduate”, in a threatening way. He also fought me over my education at BGU. I have had many problems in my life over religion and I’m fed up over it.
Even at my church, people have told me that martyrdom may happen and I’m trying my damndest to stay alive. People have also told me “God has a plan for your life and I told one person, “It probably involves a hammer and nails”.
At Shlomo’s funeral, some of the yeshiva students commented how everyone talks about how all the European born Rabbis were on a much higher spiritual level than the American born and bred rabbis. Shlomo was born in Europe, I think in Berlin.
I’m trying to refocus my energies, find a new career in writing and move on with my life. Chabad doesn’t like me and I don’t find myself in Hillel or the Carlebach Shul, I simply will move on.
I do not find myself at his shul even though I talked to his grand nephew, Rabbi Citron, who took it over after Brother Sammy left it. One of the rabbis there threw a dig at Conservative and Reform Jews who, “interpret Judaism to make it convenient to them.” He looked at me, and stuck his tongue in his cheek trying to get a rise out of me. I simply ignored him. Almost 30 years ago, I went completely out of my way to go to Israel and I have had very bad results.
Also, that same rabbi, who I think is now deceased, blamed the war in the Mid East on me personally over an email that was published in Haaretz daily paper in Israel. I was trying to get people to overthrow the stranglehold the orthodoxy has on Israeli society especially by pushing through the Haredi Draft bill which would end army exemptions for the yeshiva students and orthodox. I called them, “A bunch of parasites who have been sucking the blood of people like myself since time immemorial.” The rabbi Yehoshua Saffran said that after my email was published it “destroyed Israel’s spiritual armor”
Currently, I’m focusing on my job search and my musical education. Chabad and Hillel blew me off, I don’t care any more I have alternative outlets for my creativity and it looks like I’ll be performing some pieces in my church, Carlebach music strangely enough.