Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi:
Tradition and Innovation
Spiritual Director of the Yesod Foundation
“I do not believe that anyone has the exclusive franchise on the truth. What we Jews have is a good approximation, for Jews, of how to get there. Ultimately, each person creates a way that fits his own situation. While there are differences between Jewish and non-Jewish approaches to mysticism in specific methods, observances, and rituals, there are no differences in the impact of the experiences themselves. When it comes to what I call the ‘heart stuff,’ all approaches overlap.”
Ask Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi about the path he has taken through almost nine decades of a complex, active life, and he will stop you and change the verb: “No, the path I was led on.”
At one level, the phrase expresses the deep piety of a rabbi who seeks God within a great mystical stream, a rabbi trained in the exacting traditions of the HaBaD Hasidim. It also expresses the courage and broad-mindedness of a religious leader who has opened himself again and again to other classical spiritual traditions from Catholicism to Buddhism, and to transpersonal psychology, body-mind work, feminism, environmentalism, and much else in the great mix of social, personal, and planetary change that came out of the 1960s.
Schachter-Shalomi has become the great sage of a worldwide movement of Jewish renewal by virtue of his keen understanding of where his own tradition can connect with the psycho-eco-spiritual revolutions of our millennial age. As the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement and ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Schachter-Shalomi has inspired and guided a movement for an observant, deeply traditional Judaism that is at the same time warm, experientially based, gender-equal, environmentally aware (thanks to the Schachter-Shalomi-coined concept of “eco-kosher”), nonhierarchical, and grounded in renewed liturgy.
But what “the path I was led on” means to Reb Zalman himself is more personal. It begins with getting out of Europe just before the Holocaust. Born Zalman Schachter in 1924 in Poland, the rabbi-to-be soon moved with his family to Vienna, where he attended both a traditional yeshiva and a socialist-Zionist high school. When the Nazis threatened, the Schachters began their own odyssey, going from Antwerp, Belgium to an internment camp in Vichy France, before finally escaping to Africa, the West Indies, and finally to New York in 1941.
“Having been saved from the Holocaust. . . I felt something was needed from me to give back,” he recalled. “I saw what was happening to our tradition, that it was being diminished. That the best and most advanced of our people had been decimated. So I was moved to think about creating a Noah’s Ark for our tradition.” In other words, he was looking for forces within Judaism that would re-energize it and make it self-confident again. Having been excited by the intense mystical piety of the HaBaD-Lubavitch movement, Schachter (he would add Shalomi to his name in the early 1980s) attended the central Lubavitcher yeshiva in Brooklyn, where he took rabbinic ordination in 1947; stints of teaching and serving as a congregational rabbi at Lubavitch synagogues in Connecticut and Massachusetts followed.
Already Schachter was showing signs of an iconoclastic temperament. In his congregations, he allowed women to take part more fully in worship and introduced guitars into the liturgy. He also entered a graduate program in the psychology of religion at Boston University, where he enrolled in a class in spiritual disciplines and resources taught by the great African American theologian and social activist Howard Thurman. Uncertain how he would fit into a Methodist-run university and a class taught by a Protestant pastor, the rabbi expressed his anxieties to Thurman.
“He put his coffee mug on his desk and began to look at his hands,” Schachter-Shalomi recalls. “Suddenly he spoke. ‘Don’t you trust the Ruach-ha-Kodesh?” Not only did Thurman invoke the Spirit of Holiness in good biblical Hebrew, but he went to his phonograph and put on a recording of Max Bruch’s setting of the ancient Kol Nidre prayer, sung on Yom Kippur. “Soon I began saying to myself; Zalman, relax!”
Thurman’s course was another revelation. The students experimented with various kinds of spiritual exercises, which “frequently took the form of guided meditations,” Schachter-Shalomi recalls. “In one kind of exercise, we were instructed to translate an experience from one sense to another—we would read a psalm several times, then listen to a piece by Bach, to ‘hear’ the meaning of the psalm in the sounds of the music. . . . In this way our senses were released from their usual narrow constraints and freed to tune in to the cosmos, to touch God.”
When he joined the Near Eastern and Judaic studies department of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1956, Schachter was still looking for ways to restore Jewish traditions, not change or “renew” them. He felt that the Jewish Essene monastic tradition revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the vigorous spirituality of the Hasidim, and the treasures of Kabbalistic mysticism were pre-Holocaust resources that could give Jews hope and energy after the great European disaster.
But he was also pushing the frontiers of his experience. In 1959, under the guidance of Timothy Leary, he took LSD; a break with the Lubavitcher authorities followed. The break may have been inevitable; while grateful to the Lubavitcher movement for initiating him into the mystical tradition of Judaism, Schachter was becoming discontented with the movement’s parochialism and insistence that it alone possessed spiritual truth. Through the 1960s, Schachter and a small group of like-minded colleagues began experimenting with liturgical changes, meditation, and new modes of prayer.
“In 1968, I had my sabbatical from Manitoba,” he said, “and I came to Brandeis University to do some study for myself—I studied Arabic, Syriac, Akkadian, Ugaritic—all those ancient Near Eastern languages, because I was interested in what had happened to our people prior to the patriarchs. That was when a lot of stuff about the goddess religion was coming up; there was so much happening around rediscovering the ways of nature and wicca and so on. I wanted to see what pre-patriarchal Judaism was like, what our roots were in these areas.”
During his sabbatical, he took part in the founding of a havurah—a small Jewish study group—in Boston. “We did remarkable things with liturgy;” he says. “Having seen how people sat and meditated on cushions, we did it too. We used a lot of body movements and dance in what we were doing, and that was part of the delight. And gradually I was moved from restoration to a whole other idea that had to do with renewal.”
These were among the first stirrings of the Jewish Renewal movement, an effort to re-energize Jewish piety by making it more emotionally satisfying, inclusive, experimental, experiential, and compelling. For Jews who were alienated from the sometimes tepid rationalism of the Reform movement and the stern ritualism of the more traditional denominations, the brilliant neo-Hasidic writings of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel were a call to embrace the living fire of a slightly different traditionalism—the great tradition of ecstatic union with God carried by the Hasidic mystics. At the same time it was a call to link themselves to the world of the moment, its pains, possibilities, and lessons, its psycho-spiritual breakthroughs and political changes.
Schachter, with his superb traditional training, omnivorous mind, and personal warmth, was a natural leader of the movement. Back at Manitoba, he began an intense inquiry into what to keep and what to alter in a vital Judaism. He corresponded with the Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton and visited the Trappists at the St. Norbert Abbey outside of Winnipeg, observing the process of aggiornamiento (bringing up-to-date), the modernization of liturgy, language, doctrine, and the role of lay people that had been mandated by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. He talked to Sufi mystics, Indian gurus, and Native medicine keepers. In two books, The First Step (1983) and Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hassidism for the Aquarian Age (1975), he laid out his dynamic conceptions of Jewish prayer, meditation, and observance.
When he moved to Temple University in Philadelphia in 1975, Schachter-Shalomi put his Jewish-renewal activities into high gear. With the P’nai Or Religious Fellowship (later called P’nai Or, and finally ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal) as a base, and lectured, taught, ordained rabbis, visited Jewish renewal groups as they sprang up, translated psalms and prayers into vigorous new English. He even altered his name, adding Shalomi (“peace”) to Schachter (“slaughterer”) as an act of peacemaking and balance. From 1995 to 2004, he held the World Wisdom Chair at the Buddhist-oriented Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, moving to Boulder in 1996.
Schachter-Shalomi’s teaching begins with an emphasis on experience over doctrine, the felt yearning for God over abstract ideas about the Deity. There’s also a powerful orientation toward the future in his idea of faith. “Faith is tossing out into the future an anticipation for which I don’t have proof,” he says. “But I feel attracted in a direction and when I follow this direction it is faith that pulls me there.” He sees God not as a stern old man living “up there,” but as a force both outside and inside us that draws us to Himself (or Herself).
At the same time, his immense erudition in the Hebrew sources of his tradition has allowed him to reveal some powerful spiritual truths hidden in familiar Judeo—Christian words—the fact, for example, that the Hebrew for commandment (as in the Ten Commandments) also means “connection, Secret communication.” The commandments, then, are expressions of God’s intimacy with us as well as God's expectations of us. “It’s like two people who care for each other across the room from each other,” he says. “My wife can be over there and I can be over here talking to someone, and a glance, or the way I hold my cup, will communicate that we are not cut off from each other; we are connected.”
And, of course, Schachter-Shalomi’s psychological training, his experience of several modes of bodywork, and his profound knowledge of other faiths allow him to situate his expanded, welcoming version of Jewish truth in so many different contexts—personal, intellectual, experiential, physical—that learning from him is like taking six courses in six different disciplines, all at once.
Reb Zalman’s most recent area of exploration—aging—is of particular poignance for a man of 85. His 1995 book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older, is a spiritual blueprint for a new image of elderhood, not as a period of slow, sad decline culminating in a warehouse called a nursing home, but, as he writes, “a time of unparalleled inner growth having evolutionary significance . . . [a] pioneering journey into our unmapped potential.” This manifesto calls on elders and those who love them to realize age as a golden time of personal development, in which spiritual tools that have, so far, been associated with the quests of the young and the spiritual crises of midlife— meditation, zazen, yoga, shamanic wisdom, the Kabbalah, Sufism—help transform the physical diminishments of old age into powerful spiritual assets: “Spiritual elders use tools from these disciplines to awaken the intuitive capacities of mind associated with inner knowledge, wisdom, and expanded perception. By activating their dormant powers of intuition, they become seers who feed wisdom back into society.”
If the plan seems utopian, Schachter-Shalomi can point to his first teachers, the Hasidic masters, who lived to ripe old age with their spiritual fires growing brighter with every passing year. And, for a shining example of a seer who has fed wisdom into society for half a century we have only to look at Reb Zalman himself.
* Based upon material from From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older, Paradigm Shift: From the Jewish Renewal Teachings of Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Sparks of Light: Counseling in the Hasidic Tradition, The First Step: A Guide for the New Jewish Spirit, and Visionaries: People & Ideas to Change Your Life.
Ask Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi about the path he has taken through almost nine decades of a complex, active life, and he will stop you and change the verb: “No, the path I was led on.”At one level, the phrase expresses the deep piety of a rabbi who seeks God within a great mystical stream, a rabbi trained in the exacting traditions of the HaBaD Hasidim. It also expresses the courage and broad-mindedness of a religious leader who has opened himself again and again to other classical spiritual traditions from Catholicism to Buddhism, and to transpersonal psychology, body-mind work, feminism, environmentalism, and much else in the great mix of social, personal, and planetary change that came out of the 1960s.
Schachter-Shalomi has become the great sage of a worldwide movement of Jewish renewal by virtue of his keen understanding of where his own tradition can connect with the psycho-eco-spiritual revolutions of our millennial age. As the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement and ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Schachter-Shalomi has inspired and guided a movement for an observant, deeply traditional Judaism that is at the same time warm, experientially based, gender-equal, environmentally aware (thanks to the Schachter-Shalomi-coined concept of “eco-kosher”), nonhierarchical, and grounded in renewed liturgy.
But what “the path I was led on” means to Reb Zalman himself is more personal. It begins with getting out of Europe just before the Holocaust. Born Zalman Schachter in 1924 in Poland, the rabbi-to-be soon moved with his family to Vienna, where he attended both a traditional yeshiva and a socialist-Zionist high school. When the Nazis threatened, the Schachters began their own odyssey, going from Antwerp, Belgium to an internment camp in Vichy France, before finally escaping to Africa, the West Indies, and finally to New York in 1941.
“Having been saved from the Holocaust. . . I felt something was needed from me to give back,” he recalled. “I saw what was happening to our tradition, that it was being diminished. That the best and most advanced of our people had been decimated. So I was moved to think about creating a Noah’s Ark for our tradition.” In other words, he was looking for forces within Judaism that would re-energize it and make it self-confident again. Having been excited by the intense mystical piety of the HaBaD-Lubavitch movement, Schachter (he would add Shalomi to his name in the early 1980s) attended the central Lubavitcher yeshiva in Brooklyn, where he took rabbinic ordination in 1947; stints of teaching and serving as a congregational rabbi at Lubavitch synagogues in Connecticut and Massachusetts followed.Already Schachter was showing signs of an iconoclastic temperament. In his congregations, he allowed women to take part more fully in worship and introduced guitars into the liturgy. He also entered a graduate program in the psychology of religion at Boston University, where he enrolled in a class in spiritual disciplines and resources taught by the great African American theologian and social activist Howard Thurman. Uncertain how he would fit into a Methodist-run university and a class taught by a Protestant pastor, the rabbi expressed his anxieties to Thurman.
“He put his coffee mug on his desk and began to look at his hands,” Schachter-Shalomi recalls. “Suddenly he spoke. ‘Don’t you trust the Ruach-ha-Kodesh?” Not only did Thurman invoke the Spirit of Holiness in good biblical Hebrew, but he went to his phonograph and put on a recording of Max Bruch’s setting of the ancient Kol Nidre prayer, sung on Yom Kippur. “Soon I began saying to myself; Zalman, relax!”
Thurman’s course was another revelation. The students experimented with various kinds of spiritual exercises, which “frequently took the form of guided meditations,” Schachter-Shalomi recalls. “In one kind of exercise, we were instructed to translate an experience from one sense to another—we would read a psalm several times, then listen to a piece by Bach, to ‘hear’ the meaning of the psalm in the sounds of the music. . . . In this way our senses were released from their usual narrow constraints and freed to tune in to the cosmos, to touch God.”
When he joined the Near Eastern and Judaic studies department of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1956, Schachter was still looking for ways to restore Jewish traditions, not change or “renew” them. He felt that the Jewish Essene monastic tradition revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the vigorous spirituality of the Hasidim, and the treasures of Kabbalistic mysticism were pre-Holocaust resources that could give Jews hope and energy after the great European disaster.But he was also pushing the frontiers of his experience. In 1959, under the guidance of Timothy Leary, he took LSD; a break with the Lubavitcher authorities followed. The break may have been inevitable; while grateful to the Lubavitcher movement for initiating him into the mystical tradition of Judaism, Schachter was becoming discontented with the movement’s parochialism and insistence that it alone possessed spiritual truth. Through the 1960s, Schachter and a small group of like-minded colleagues began experimenting with liturgical changes, meditation, and new modes of prayer.
“In 1968, I had my sabbatical from Manitoba,” he said, “and I came to Brandeis University to do some study for myself—I studied Arabic, Syriac, Akkadian, Ugaritic—all those ancient Near Eastern languages, because I was interested in what had happened to our people prior to the patriarchs. That was when a lot of stuff about the goddess religion was coming up; there was so much happening around rediscovering the ways of nature and wicca and so on. I wanted to see what pre-patriarchal Judaism was like, what our roots were in these areas.”
During his sabbatical, he took part in the founding of a havurah—a small Jewish study group—in Boston. “We did remarkable things with liturgy;” he says. “Having seen how people sat and meditated on cushions, we did it too. We used a lot of body movements and dance in what we were doing, and that was part of the delight. And gradually I was moved from restoration to a whole other idea that had to do with renewal.”
These were among the first stirrings of the Jewish Renewal movement, an effort to re-energize Jewish piety by making it more emotionally satisfying, inclusive, experimental, experiential, and compelling. For Jews who were alienated from the sometimes tepid rationalism of the Reform movement and the stern ritualism of the more traditional denominations, the brilliant neo-Hasidic writings of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel were a call to embrace the living fire of a slightly different traditionalism—the great tradition of ecstatic union with God carried by the Hasidic mystics. At the same time it was a call to link themselves to the world of the moment, its pains, possibilities, and lessons, its psycho-spiritual breakthroughs and political changes.Schachter, with his superb traditional training, omnivorous mind, and personal warmth, was a natural leader of the movement. Back at Manitoba, he began an intense inquiry into what to keep and what to alter in a vital Judaism. He corresponded with the Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton and visited the Trappists at the St. Norbert Abbey outside of Winnipeg, observing the process of aggiornamiento (bringing up-to-date), the modernization of liturgy, language, doctrine, and the role of lay people that had been mandated by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. He talked to Sufi mystics, Indian gurus, and Native medicine keepers. In two books, The First Step (1983) and Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hassidism for the Aquarian Age (1975), he laid out his dynamic conceptions of Jewish prayer, meditation, and observance.
When he moved to Temple University in Philadelphia in 1975, Schachter-Shalomi put his Jewish-renewal activities into high gear. With the P’nai Or Religious Fellowship (later called P’nai Or, and finally ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal) as a base, and lectured, taught, ordained rabbis, visited Jewish renewal groups as they sprang up, translated psalms and prayers into vigorous new English. He even altered his name, adding Shalomi (“peace”) to Schachter (“slaughterer”) as an act of peacemaking and balance. From 1995 to 2004, he held the World Wisdom Chair at the Buddhist-oriented Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, moving to Boulder in 1996.
Schachter-Shalomi’s teaching begins with an emphasis on experience over doctrine, the felt yearning for God over abstract ideas about the Deity. There’s also a powerful orientation toward the future in his idea of faith. “Faith is tossing out into the future an anticipation for which I don’t have proof,” he says. “But I feel attracted in a direction and when I follow this direction it is faith that pulls me there.” He sees God not as a stern old man living “up there,” but as a force both outside and inside us that draws us to Himself (or Herself).At the same time, his immense erudition in the Hebrew sources of his tradition has allowed him to reveal some powerful spiritual truths hidden in familiar Judeo—Christian words—the fact, for example, that the Hebrew for commandment (as in the Ten Commandments) also means “connection, Secret communication.” The commandments, then, are expressions of God’s intimacy with us as well as God's expectations of us. “It’s like two people who care for each other across the room from each other,” he says. “My wife can be over there and I can be over here talking to someone, and a glance, or the way I hold my cup, will communicate that we are not cut off from each other; we are connected.”
And, of course, Schachter-Shalomi’s psychological training, his experience of several modes of bodywork, and his profound knowledge of other faiths allow him to situate his expanded, welcoming version of Jewish truth in so many different contexts—personal, intellectual, experiential, physical—that learning from him is like taking six courses in six different disciplines, all at once.
Reb Zalman’s most recent area of exploration—aging—is of particular poignance for a man of 85. His 1995 book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older, is a spiritual blueprint for a new image of elderhood, not as a period of slow, sad decline culminating in a warehouse called a nursing home, but, as he writes, “a time of unparalleled inner growth having evolutionary significance . . . [a] pioneering journey into our unmapped potential.” This manifesto calls on elders and those who love them to realize age as a golden time of personal development, in which spiritual tools that have, so far, been associated with the quests of the young and the spiritual crises of midlife— meditation, zazen, yoga, shamanic wisdom, the Kabbalah, Sufism—help transform the physical diminishments of old age into powerful spiritual assets: “Spiritual elders use tools from these disciplines to awaken the intuitive capacities of mind associated with inner knowledge, wisdom, and expanded perception. By activating their dormant powers of intuition, they become seers who feed wisdom back into society.”If the plan seems utopian, Schachter-Shalomi can point to his first teachers, the Hasidic masters, who lived to ripe old age with their spiritual fires growing brighter with every passing year. And, for a shining example of a seer who has fed wisdom into society for half a century we have only to look at Reb Zalman himself.
* Based upon material from From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older, Paradigm Shift: From the Jewish Renewal Teachings of Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Sparks of Light: Counseling in the Hasidic Tradition, The First Step: A Guide for the New Jewish Spirit, and Visionaries: People & Ideas to Change Your Life.