1.
25 years since the passing of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. What a time. There is so much to say about the last 25 years, and Carlebach's presence in them, here in this world. And yet, when I was recently approached from several platforms asking me to write something on the occasion of this round Yahrzeit, I shied away.
When you're part of an entire project, you don't know what will be published in front of you, behind you, and on your side. Who else will write, and especially how they'll write. And when it comes to Karlibach, it's a bit sensitive for me.
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It's important to me to be precise. I'm not a foolish Hasid. He wasn't my teacher and rabbi, and he certainly wasn't my posek. But how much gratitude I owe him, how much we all owe him. Can you imagine our lives without him? Our prayers? The Sabbaths? The holidays? The joys? The sad days? When he died, he commanded us to live.
Carlebach was essentially a commentator. Greater men than him published commentaries on the verses of the Bible, from the first to the last of the last, but his commentaries settled on the hearts of all of Israel, opened their hearts.
When we say in Selichot, "The soul is yours and the body is your work, and you are protected by your labor," we understand this verse according to Carlebach’s interpretation. Even if we don’t sing these words, they will play in our heads in his melody and, in fact, in his interpretation. When we pray on the High Holy Days, "Joy to your land and joy to your city" and "Reign over the whole world in your glory," or when we ask on the holidays, "And return the priests to their service and the Levites to their song and their hymn," or in the Rosh Chodesh supplement, "Love for the world will bring them, and remember the covenant of the fathers to the sons" – this is in his melody.
When we mourn for Jerusalem, "For these I weep," or when we find comfort in "Comfort, comfort my people" or in "And the Lord will wipe away tears from all faces," this is in his wording. When we ask on Shabbat, "From your place our king will appear," this is according to his interpretation.
I'm not saying there aren't other wonderful melodies to these words, there are a thousand more, but I do say that Carlebach's melody, with its feeling in the words, is the most common and the most influential. And verses like "If only your law had been my delight, then I would have been lost in my poverty," "I will lift up my eyes to the mountains," "For the sake of my brothers and my friends," and "I have poured out your heart like water" don't even need to be mentioned. There he has a monopoly.
2.
It's the half-year anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and I'm not in the Holy Land. In recent years I've had the privilege of leading his annual musical memorial at the Nation Buildings, and this time I'm so far away.
On the other hand, this year I had the opportunity to take part in the large memorial service organized last Saturday night by the Carlebach Synagogue in Manhattan (Carlebach means Carlebach the Father. This synagogue was founded by Rabbi Dr. Naftali Hartwig Carlebach in 1939, when he fled to the United States from Europe. His son, Shlomo, was 14 years old at the time). Taking part not as a host or a speaker, but as an audience member. That has many advantages. When you host, you are not really connected to the event, but mainly to its behind-the-scenes aspects. That is, to the problems, the tensions, the pressures, the soundman's cigarettes, the mishaps. And when it comes to a show in memory of Carlebach, there are, without a doubt, many of those.
At the beginning of the evening, you get a neat line-up with a list of artists and songs, but then it turns out that each singer decided on his own to give some kind of introduction or short or long or very long story, and then he sings the song instead of four minutes as planned, seven minutes, or even more, because the audience is excited and dancing.
At the last memorial service at the Nation Buildings, around midnight, after the hall had already begun to empty, Aharon Razel told me that in addition to singing "Vashev" he wanted to include another unplanned song. A song that he had written just these days about a story by Rabbi Shloima. I told him to forget about it. It was really late, and besides, this evening was not intended for new songs.
On the contrary, the older the song, the more it touches people here. Why are you suddenly bringing me tunes from this week? I even enlisted the lore I once heard from Carlebach about how performing on stage is something that requires study. "Tractate Ya'ala and I'u'va," he called it, and said humorously that there are artists who only know the first half of the tractate, the "Ya'ala" (to go up) but they don't know the "I'u'va" (to come down), when to get off the stage.
Fortunately, Razal did not listen to me and my line of argument, and thus those who remained in the hall were privileged to hear for the first time in the world the wonderful song about "the holy hunchback.".
3.
And something else made my Yahrzeit this year. The new edition of the book 'Even Shlomo' (Divrei Shir Publishing), with 343 pages of talks that Carlebach gave on the week's parashats. "I always felt so connected to his wonderful character, due to the enormous closeness that existed between him and every word that came out of his mouth," writes editor Shlomo Katz in the introduction. "When Shlomo zt"l talks about Abraham and Sarah, he sounds as if he is talking about his grandparents. When he delves into the lives of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, you are sure that he is talking about his parents and his own siblings.".
Here is a little taste of this week's torah portion from the book: "Many commentators discuss the question of why God made a covenant with Abraham and not with Noah. I want to say one more Torah verse on the matter. When Abraham our father brought in his three guests who seemed to be worshippers of idols, he was not stingy. He slaughtered three calves to give each guest a piece of beef tongue. But for some reason when he came to the water, he said, 'Please take a little water.' Did Abraham our father suddenly become stingy? Maybe it was important to him to save water?
""There are many teachings on this from all the righteous, but I will tell you my own Torah, according to my humble opinion. The deepest question in the world is which is stronger: Is the world and its temptations the stronger, or are the Torah and Judaism stronger than them? Which is stronger: the six days of work or the holy Sabbath? All the countries of the world or the Land of Israel? When you think about this question from a scientific perspective, a Greek perspective, the question seems ridiculous. Are Jews and their small country stronger than the whole world? And also with regard to the Torah – yes, it is important and sweet, and there are beautiful things in it. A week ago I read in a newspaper a well-known professor who published a Hasidic story that proves that the Torah is good, but beyond that?...
""In fact, that's why Noah didn't try to bring his contemporaries together. He thought that the desires of the world were stronger than all of Judaism. He didn't believe that there was a possibility of returning to God. The only way not to drown in the flood is to simply not do anything wrong. And if, God forbid, you get involved in the world, there's no way back.".
""And so God gave a son like Isaac to our father Abraham and not to Noah. When the angels came to Abraham, they told him about Sodom and the birth of Isaac. What is the connection between these two pieces of news? The answer is simple: In order to be worthy of raising children, I need to know what to teach them. Do I teach them, 'Try to be Jews, but know that the world is much stronger than Judaism, so you must stay away from the world,' or do I teach that the world is so beautiful. The trees and flowers are wonderful, the Torah, the Sabbath, Jerusalem, they are incomparably stronger than anything in the world.
""Abraham our father said to God: Sodom is a great and powerful city, it is the most corrupt city in the world. But give me fifty Rebbes, I will go there, and turn every person in Sodom into a Baal Shem Tov. I am not afraid of Sodom. I know that the Torah is much stronger than Sodom. Noah, on the other hand, believed that the world was much stronger than the Torah. Even though he was righteous, he thought that when a person is corrupt and immersed in the world, there is no way for him to get out of there.".
4.
""And here comes the profound Torah," concludes Carlebach. In my opinion, this is the essence of his message to this world, this is what he tried to convey in his hundreds of poems and stories and journeys to bring distant lands closer together – that the Torah is the main thing, that Judaism is what is exciting, it is the focus of our identity. 25 years after his passing, and this point is still the main point: "It is written, 'There is no water but Torah.' Our forefather Abraham said to the three idolaters: The thing you need to become good is, 'Take a little water.' A little, one word of Torah, can transform a person a thousand times. Not only is the Torah as a whole more powerful than the whole world, but even one word of Torah is more powerful. 'Take a little,' you only need one drop of water, no more.
""There are people who think they know nothing. But do you know a single word? Do you know Alef or Bi't? That's a lot, you are already stronger than the whole world. We need to worry and pray about the situation in the Land of Israel. God wants us to pray. But deep down there is really nothing to fear, because the Land of Israel is much stronger. The little sheep is much stronger than seventy wolves. Wow, how strong we are! When the spies returned from the Land of Israel and said, 'We cannot go up to the people, because they are stronger than us,' it caused terrible destruction. Chazal say that this happened on Tisha B'Av. Because such a way of speaking is the end of Judaism. What kind of Torah are you studying if you don't believe that the Torah is stronger than the whole world?
""I greet you, friends, and I beg you, please, that we may know clearly that God has given us the most powerful explosive in the world, the greatest nuclear energy. Because one word in the Torah, or one Sabbath... is the most powerful force.".
• The column is published in the newspaper 'Bisheva''
