Zalman Schachter-Shalomi - Career and Work

Career and Work

While pursuing a course of study at Boston University (including a class taught by Howard Thurman), he experienced an intellectual and spiritual shift. In 1968, on sabbatical from the Near Eastern and Judaic studies department of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, he joined a group of other Jews in founding a havurah (small cooperative congregation) in Somerville, Massachusetts, called Havurat Shalom. He eventually left the Lubavitch movement altogether, and founded his own organization known as B'nai Or, meaning the "Children of Light" in Hebrew, a title he took from the Dead Sea Scrolls writings. During this period he was known to his followers as the "B'nai Or Rebbe", and the rainbow prayer shawl he designed for his group was known as the "B'nai Or tallit". Both the havurah experiment and B'nai Or came to be seen as the early stirrings of the Jewish Renewal movement.

In later years, Shachter-Shalomi held the World Wisdom Chair at The Naropa Institute; he is Professor Emeritus at both Naropa and Temple University. He has also served on the faculty of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Omega, the NICABM and many other major institutions. He is founder of the ALEPH Ordination Programs and ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. The seminary he founded has ordained over 80 rabbis and cantors.

Schachter-Shalomi was among the group of rabbis, from a wide range of Jewish denominations, who traveled together to India to meet with the Dalai Lama and discuss diaspora survival with him. (The Tibetans, being exiled from their homeland for three generations now, are facing some of the same assimilation challenges faced by the Jews. The Dalai Lama was interested in knowing how the Jews had survived with their culture intact.) That journey was chronicled in Rodger Kamenetz' book The Jew in the Lotus, now also a documentary film.