Q: Hippie Rabbis Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schacter-Shalomi were the First Two Lubavitch Emissaries Sent To College Campuses. Why Doesn’t Anyone Know It?
A: In the early 1960s, Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi was a close associate of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Then he started dropping acid. And offering it to the Rebbe.
Reb Zalman, as he came to be known, was not just any wayward Hasid. As one of the two first Lubavitch emissaries ever tasked with kiruv, or Jewish outreach, he had been a major player in the founding of a movement which came to define the Lubavitch during Schneerson’s tenure.
Today, Chabad’s emissaries can be found on hundreds of college campuses across America, working to bring unaffiliated Jews into the fold. Before 1949, such outreach was essentially unheard of in the Jewish world. That changed in December of that year, when two young yeshiva bochers, under the direct orders of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, walked into a Chanukah party at a Brandeis University cafeteria bearing eleven sets of tefillin. These first two emissaries grew up to be two of the most iconoclastic Jewish figures of the twentieth century: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the Rock Star Rabbi, countercultural icon and founder of the San Francisco commune known as the House of Love and Prayer (“I could have called it Temple Israel, but no one would have come,” Carlebach famously quipped), and Reb Zalman, acolyte of the Eastern religions and founder of Renewal Judaism. Neither was born into Hasidic Judaism, but both were drawn to the Lubavitch sect during their formative years, and both soon chafed with the movement. Their role in the history of Chabad outreach exists only as a footnote in the official histories, and the circumstances of their departures are mostly untold.
A recent book on Chabad, M. Avrum Ehrlich’s comprehensive The Messiah of Brooklyn (Ktav Publishing House, 2005), only mentions Carlebach and Zalman in a subchapter entitled “The Habad Periphery: Heretics, the Disenchanted, and Neo-Habadnikim,” leaving them out of “The Outreach Concept” and “Campus Outreach.” Sue Fishkoff’s The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch (Schocken, 2003) is similarly typical in its treatment of Carlebach and Schacter-Shalomi, demurely noting that the rabbis “fell out of grace with the Chabad leadership in the 1950s after blending in too well with the young people they sought to bring back in to Judaism.”
Carlebach’s divorce from the Lubavitch hinged on his desire to create a Judaism that was more inclusive than that which was offered by the traditional orthodoxies. “From 1951 to 1955 I was, mamash [really], the Rebbe’s right-hand man,” Carlebach remembered in an interview with Tikkun magazine, published after his death in 1997. “But I had some problems and I told the Rebbe about it. ‘Last night,’ I told the Rebbe one day, ‘I had one hundred people come to learn with me and sing with me.’ But in those days the Rebbe had the position that women couldn’t sing with men. So I told the Rebbe, ‘When I told them that we had to sit separately men from women, I lost 90 people, and when I told them that women couldn’t sing, I lost nine more, and the one person who remained was the biggest idiot.’…So the Rebbe said to me, ‘I cannot tell you to do it your way. But I can’t tell you not to do it your way. So if you want to do it on your own, God be with you.’ So I split.”
Reb Zalman maintained his relationship with the Lubavitch through the late 1960s. In 1966, after being introduced to LSD by Timothy Leary, Zalman wrote an essay in Commentary magazine which read, in part, “…[W]hen I can undergo the deepest cosmic experience via some miniscule quantity of organic alkaloids or LSD, then the whole validity of my ontological assertions is in doubt.” In his book Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today’s Jewish Mystical Masters (HarperOne, 1998), Rodger Kamenetz maintains that it was this essay which led Zalman to be “kicked out” of the Lubavitch world. A 2005 article in Ha’aretz blamed that banishment on a 1968 speech on kabbala and LSD. Either way, the relationship was probably hastened to its end by an encounter in which Zalman asked if the Rebbe would be interested in dropping acid. According to the Ha’aretz story, “Rabbi Schneerson politely declined.”
