I’m that 14-year-old

In 1998, LILITH ran the article about Shlomo Carlebach. Reading it was both shocking and enlightening. You see, I was one of those girls. At 14, I had a much-too-close encounter with him where, in an empty staging area, he came up from behind me, hugged me, touched my breasts, and ground himself into my backside, all the while telling me how beautiful I was, how I was a schoene maidel. Me, a gawky, awkward, not-pretty girl, was flattered beyond belief. He told me I was beautiful! That I was special. I excitedly told my mother about it. Turned out, I wasn’t so special. I was one of hundreds he touched inappropriately.

That was 60 years ago.

I talk about those events in the new documentary, The Darkest Light. How my mom had to explain what he did was wrong, that I had actually been molested, and, ultimately, that his handlers knew he did this sort of thing routinely. Honestly, I never thought much of it until the LILITH article came out, and in the years since, I have written about what happened in a few places, including my own blog, The Wifely Person Speaks.

But he was oh-so-popular, and his music was oh-so-ubiquitous.

Knowing Carlebach’s music was not an if; it was everywhere. There was something unsettling about the rhapsodic joy in his niggunim or the soulfulness of his slower tunes. Psalms, sacred words to be sung at sacred moments, set to his music left me with an unsettled sense I could not fully articulate. A space at the center of me recognized what happened but did not dwell on it. I became viscerally angered every time I heard him regaled as a saint, a tzaddik, or a sage. He was none of those things; he was a pedophile and serial molester of women.

Instead, he was revered, celebrated, and idolized.

A musical about him, Soul Doctor, originally produced in 2008, was on Broadway in 2013, right before the #MeToo explosion of 2017. What should have been common knowledge by then was still swept under the rug. How could anyone prance around a stage ignoring what this guy was really like? I suspect the writers and producers chose to ignore the ugly part of the truth.

The #MeToo movement was already in full swing when the filmmaker Simon Mendes found me through some of my writing. I had long hoped Carlebach would be included in the famous offenders hall of shame. He was not. Finally, a chance to tell the whole story. I was hesitant at first, but oh, so relieved someone was gonna shine a light into that dark, elusive hole.

I am constantly asked if I want the music to go completely away? Not really. It’s really too late for that.  It’s catchy, it’s well-known, even my grandson sings Carlebach songs not knowing they set my teeth on edge…and I’m not mentioning that to an 8-year-old. Let him sing AM YISROEL CHAI to his heart’s content. Yeah, there’s a dichotomy there, but that’s a me problem.

When all of us who were molested are gone, I’m pretty sure the tunes will still be heard in shuls everywhere.

Funny thing happened on the way to the documentary. Despite an ignoble beginning, I got to know Neshama Carlebach, and in doing so, I have come to feel very protective of her. She has sacrificed a lot to be a part of this film and addresses her dad’s horrific behavior. Neshama may be his daughter, but she is not him. My anger and distrust are directed solely at the guy who molested me. I could not have written that sentence three years ago.

In her own piece on The Times of Israel Blogs, Less alone than I thought, Neshama wrote:

We grow when we learn to live in the uncomfortable space between truths, resisting the urge to turn people into saints or sinners.

Both can be true.

And yet complexity must never become an excuse for moral confusion. Holding two truths does not mean that they carry equal moral weight. Love does not excuse harm. Admiration does not erase accountability. And acknowledging what was beautiful does not require us to minimize what was wrong.

I think she is spot on. And I think The Darkest Light does justice to the whole story.