We still need Shlomo Carlebach so much: The Darkest Light appreciated

This is always hard to write about. But this time of year, amidst both elections and Shlomo Carlebach’s Yahrzeit– the discourse either returns, or is disappeared and sublimated. Is Shlomo a saint, maybe the best we’ve ever had as far as reconciling joy as well as social engagement and activity– or is he a creep, an abuser like any other male charismatic figure?

Despite everything; because everything– it’s important for us, Jewish people everywhere, to consider: Without ecstatic Hassidic theology, what can Judaism become except a frustrating nerdy legalism or a vicious brutal ethno-nationalism? Without an erotically charged or otherwise completely inspiring core– what become of everything religious?

“Judaism”, like all religion, depends on feeling good about the thing. We, the Jewish People, have lost that feeling, communally, many times, from either defeat or enlightenment– the “defiling of the oil” that Hanukkah associates with Hellenism.

Or rather: came close to losing it. Until some underlying priority was lionized in ways that allowed, and invited, the best of the newly or perennially realized to be identified with the Jewish– the ostensible older, untouched and still pure oil, or the newly freshly pressed. This is one of the core assumptions, challenges, and convictions of all Religious Zionisms, as well as progressive Judaisms of all stripes– the new things will help us understand, love, embrace and understand the old. But will they make us stop an ancient abuse cycle within that old?

Shlomo Carlebach’s derech is one of the best examples of the capacity of Orthodox Jewish Religion to be repurposed towards genuinely humanistic goals and practices WHILE STILL BEING FUN–  BUT: is this very theology and tradition of prioritizing expressed love and joy as the core of the public facing self a trojan horse for selfish, creepy affection-as-license to invade the Holy of Torah itself, in the neglected and abandoned post-Holocaust, post Jerusalem triumphal of Jewish religious identity crisis?

This is much of the great accomplishment of Simon Mendes documentary epic about Shlomo, “The Darkest Light”: communicating what is great, helpful, transformative and even redemptive about Shlomo and his Torah in the context of Judaism everywhere– and noticing how loud what we seem to insist on ignoring about him has been. Modernity, technology and public knowledge make hearing the voice of people impacted by him personally viable. Especially those closest to him, who loved him the most: his own daughters, and their mom. But also: women who experienced degrees of sexual abuse by him, and activists heartbroken and enraged by the sense of betrayal from learning of it, and the suppression of any conversation or mechanism for accountability that would have welcomed a discourse and more public referrendum about it at all.

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No one who knew Shlomo at all imagine or suspect a sadism or willing insensitivity to human suffering, especially not that imposed by him himself, through his affection. On the contrary: most of the people who took Shlomo Carlebach the most seriously couldn’t but notice through his noticing so much more about the capacity and opportunity for impact in another person’s life, and the will was not to do so through terror-of-piety or religious entitlement, but to help anyone else be happier.

This is the great work that builds lasting cultures: only love, concern and investment through joy. This is why his music and Torah are so eponymous: it fully digests a range of Hasidic ecstatic priorities, boiled down into a very modern social radical-warmth. His strongest legacy, as far as influential ethos, is hugs as devotion, as kosher, even across gender lines. The metaphor he would use is that of a doctor in an ambulance, not pausing to be offended by someone’s fingernail length. G-d wants us all to be “Holy Doctors,” prioritizing healing through love’s expression, verbal and otherwise in this theology and it makes the rest of the religion a sort of wonderful game, including all the higher (accessible) pieties and longer, deeper practices.

Alas, it really sounds like it was a bit much sometimes. Grace becomes justification for too much of Judaism’s self-confidence as inherently good and beautiful, amidst the most selfish and creepy of our chauvinists, whether driven by violent fantasy or erotic-affection. This is so tragic, because of how novel and profoundly helpful the humanism in his Torah fundamentally was, and is, in ways that no other development in Judaism has been able to source, provoke, or parallel:   Embrace of affection as sacred duty, bound up in noticing and taking care, even to the point of radical vulnerability. It was all a little much sometimes, and that’s why there have been the complaints: About him, and about the Israel he represented, that we are after all.

Mendes’s film acknowledges the extremes expressed in the use and presence of Shlomo songs in every kind of prayer circle in Israel, and any Jewish event in Europe or America, from the most egalitarian and decentralized to the most unyieldingly repressive. Anthems at Occupy Wall Street and anti-Bibi protests as well as sung by the most Right-Wing Settlers amidst any number of activities of varying degrees of menace and violence are the face of the Big Horseshoe: Truth in alienation from the normal; assimilation into modernity. The quieting of the soul in the embrace of that which civilization tries to lull us into, from Left or Right, is the fundamental problem that all Judaism stands in the face of, arguably defining it’s perennial appeal in ways Freud couldn’t quite digest, despite a lifetime of puzzlement. Why NOT just become normal?

But in America, ethnic identity WAS part of normalization, and this was the degree to which Jews and Judaism could flourish there… but like Zionism, this threatened traditional Jewish identity and values. As another form of modernity, both secular Zionism and 20th century American liberalism ultimately offered to sacrifice ALL ethics, all responsibility and all pride into the martial and commercial. Could be worse! But “the soul cries out for more”, and so all kinds of Jews and Judaisms pursued spirituality and/or activism as ways to ground themselves in virtue, purpose, and meaning, the kind that had been the monopoly of the Torah until the enlightenment, itself a rebellion against the external trips of conventional global religion and empire.

Shlomo changed all that by being cooler and more pious, more radical and more conservative, than anyone else at all. R Zalman Schechter, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Mordechai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Abbie Hoffman,  R Soloveitchik, R Kook, Moshe Feinstein, etc. could only represent so much, could only cross over so much. Shlomo justified worlds but also challenged the repressive racist, fascistic, misogynistic and misanthropic tendencies within modern Judaisms, and now that his legacy functionally threatens to collapse into the exclusive privilege of the Zionist right, it’s important to know how much examples like Shlomo of beloved masters pleading for Jews (((settlers))) to love every Arab and care for them like themselves, of traveling into

https://www.crescas.nl/columns/webcolumnlopescardozo/tdgoz/What-Rav-Shlomo-Carlebach-said-to-the-Women-of-the-Wall/

All of this is acknowledged by Simon Mendes’s epic documentary effort The Darkest Light. This itself is an amazing accomplishment of communicating, not a danger or absurd delusion like in the format of Cult-Expose documentaries like Wild Wild Country or You Can See Everything. Instead, using a subtle background of some of the best and most meaningful Shlomo recordings, Mendes successfully communicates the scale and purity of purpose in Shlomo’s Torah, as well as the context that birthed it, from escaping Germany to managing NYC to being in Israel circa/post 1967 to Hippy San Fransisco post 1968 and all the subsequent formations and reformations of unmediated ecstatic Jewish practice, in the wilds of the festivals and the Moshav– giving way to precisely the chaos we associate with the end and evolution of those years: a love that gives way to “broken hearts” and maybe even lasting trauma.

For many years, we in the extended Shlomo Carlebach “chevra” have viewed efforts to “out” Shlomo by attesting disturbing actions as either contextual misunderstanding, hostile lie, or worst of all– acceptable temporary lapse, “not a big deal”. This is precisely the problem that parallels all the problematic unwillingness of communities dependent on something; an economy or a vibe; it’s hard to even begin to want to understand or acknowledge anything that feels like it might threaten the legitimacy and viability of something we love and appreciate.

But, much like anti-zionism, criticism of Shlomo is a sad thing to fear: this fear itself is a betrayal of the potential limit of our faith in his derech. But the truth is, similar to something R Nachman used to say: A Tzaddik can be wrong, and it doesn’t mean he’s not a Tzaddik, and it doesn’t mean he’s not wrong.  The kind of wrong the best of us are is how we learn the limits of virtue and expectation itself– and this is one of the most precious “updates” available in an ecstatic culture: knowledge of a problem lets us enjoy and appreciate what we love more, not less, because it gives us the tools to manage the very thing we are confronted by our vulnerability around

Nationalisms and/or Socialisms, Radicalisms and or Conservatisms… they are all just the ways we find our wholeness with, and through, our identities and traditions. It’s why all extremes away from basic, classical/normative “centrist” Liberalism tend to be so confoundingly race obsessed: in a world that feels frustratingly wrong, we try to orient ourselves in our most fundamental identities, the things we can feel good about calling ourselves. Knowing about ourselves.

Shlomo Carlebach gave us all that, for at least a generation or so, until the issues with his path and personal presence began to emerge more coherently.  In his initial presence, and in the presence of his grounded-yet-ecstatic, G-d driven yet humanistic Torah, every sense of lack in dry, ritualistic, ethnocentric and chauvinistic Judaism that we all may have emerged from or passed through just completely dissolved.  Authentic, grounded, informed Judaism then offers to have and be everything we need, it turns out!

This, we may not have been able to know, if not for Shlomo holding a space that offered understanding of a range of Judaisms made of the extremes of all the dissidents, frustrated and betrayed by the lameness of modern orthodoxies, reforms, secularisms and just the shallowness of conventionality itself at a time when the dissonance of Western civilization’s promises began to ring especially and insultingly hollow, in light of the embedded biases, economic ambivalences, and increasing access to information about the history and nature of the way things worked.

This is no excuse for the excesses and the abuses, not his and not ours, all Israel. Not for bombings, not for gropings. Everything that is a problem and hurts anyone, is a problem, and hurts someone.  We need to notice, we need to acknowledge and even feel all that “we” are doing and have done, that is hurting anyone, or ever hurt anyone. Acknowledgement is the first step in transformation of a poison into a medicine, and our pride and confidence in the rightness of our way is always the poison that can and tends to become damage or abuse. But sometimes, inevitably, we find positions and values that we lean into to find our core priorities, and these become the main push of the rest of our lives. This is so much of what The Darkest Light lets us see, with so much love and appreciation for family, community, impact, and love itself– but this love begs us to listen to our daughters, sisters, and mothers when they tell us what they’ve been through.  It hasn’t been aired or released in Israel yet, so I can only look forwards to the distribution of this movie, and it’s range of clarities, widely; speedily in our days. Because the more we can understand both the love and the dark thing that creeps up behind, under, and through the love when we are insisting it on others, as something like the only way to be expressed, either religiously or otherwise, the less our love will make space for abuse. We still need Shlomo so much, to help us understand how much more we can do, and how much safer we can, in service to and protection of, all that love that makes life and frumkeit “real”.