‘Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hasidism for the Aquarian Age’
“The book no longer belongs to anyone; it is this that consecrates the book.” Maurice Blanchot.
In 1975 Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi published the first edition of “Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hasidism for the Aquarian Age,” which will be reissued in a lightly updated edition on the 24th of this month. It was this book that launched the Jewish Renewal movement and consolidated the Neo-Hasidic impulse that had been welling up in places like the Havurat Shalom in Somerville, MA. The new edition comes with introductory remarks by Eden Pearlstein, Tirzah Firestone and Shaul Magid as well as the preface by Schachter-Shalomi from the first edition and his introduction, an afterword by Jericho Vincent and a Postscript by Arthur Kurzweil.
Schachter-Shalomi’s introduction begins, “Books and I don’t generally get along.” “All that happens in the mind depends upon valences born of interests, needs, and concerns in the student or seeker. As an instrument in the hands of the Spirit who informs and guides I permit this life force to play on whichever key it wills.” Shaul Magid replies, “But of course, ‘Fragments’ is, unavoidably, a book.” It is, in part, an anthology of translations of traditional Jewish texts by Shachter-Shalomi. They are not organized with a main “point.” Rather they are a group of texts that Schacter-Shalomi felt would support the needs and impulses of ‘the student and seeker.’
“The student and the seeker,” were a class from sixties counter-culture that focused on the spiritual. The circle around Wallace Berman and the Beat movement more broadly can be seen as the precursors to the larger movement.
They were focused primarily on The Great Mystery, the generalized arcanum revealed through the many different mystical texts from the western and eastern traditions, Kabbalah being only one of them. There was no ordered sense of the priority of one tradition or even one teaching within a tradition for the most part. The normative frame of mind within that group was a syncretic blend of religious traditions and cultural analysis from figures like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.
Schacter-Shalomi immersed himself in this American cultural movement. He did interdenominational work and was personally familiar with leaders outside of the Jewish tradition, and he was easily conversant in that larger syncretic mindset. These students and seekers are the audience that “Fragments” meant to speak to. By this point Schachter-Shalomi had broken with the Chabad movement and the assumptions of fundamentalist Judaism, but he had lost none of his faith in the wisdom of the Hasidic rebbes and the power of the Jewish mystical tradition.
He recognized the crisis in American Judaism. The generation of students and seekers that he was speaking to were many of the absent bodies leaving empty seats in American synagogues. The value proposition for American Jewry in the post World War II era was creating a place in suburbia where formerly urban Jews could gather together with their own, a social space with events like “Boy Scout Shabbat.” (An event that Abraham Joshua Heschel had to endure at one synagogue where he was a guest speaker, to his extreme annoyance). This sort of synagogue was a vital part of the social life of American Jews, but it was not spiritually substantive. When they were called upon to provide strong spiritual experience they lost out quickly.
The Chabad movement was sending out shaliachs to set up Chabad houses on college campuses in the 1960s at places like the University of California, Berkeley. It was in this period that the seeds of the Baal Teshuvah movement started to germinate, but it was precisely the rigidity of Orthodox practice that Schachter-Shalomi felt was going to fail with the majority of the students and seekers. It could seem like a cult and Schachter-Shalomi was aware of the presence of cults seeking to peel off his students and seekers and take them down a path of brainwashing and exploitation. For him, renewal required some element of newness. In the era of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Jewish Catalog, the idea that one’s Jewish practice was best without the burden of hierarchy and with the empowering benefits of DIY practices, Schachter-Shalomi's “Fragments,” was an effort to propose a new value statement for Jewish practice and the Jewish tradition.
His innovation, in what became the Jewish Renewal movement, was to reframe Halakhah, Jewish Law. Shaul Magid points out that Schachter-Shalomi translated Mitzvah as “good karma.” “While it [kabbalah] assumes obligation, that is not its focus. Mitzvot, on that reading, are prescribed ways to create good ‘karma.’ Such translations are thus not simply tools of communication or terminology to entice the reader; they are experiments meant to convey syncretistic substance. Rooted within an Emersonian and Jamesian [William James] worldview, in which religious experience is sometimes called ‘pure consciousness’ experience, ‘Fragments’ intends not to bring its reader back to an existing movement within Judaism, but to bring a new vision of Judaism to its reader.”
The first of three sections of the book contains the bulk of Schachter-Shalomi’s own teachings. The second is made up of his translations of the teachings of various Hasidic rebbes, and the third section includes some of both of these groupings. The pieces in the first section are Hasidism: The Incarnation of the Baal Shem Tov, Life Here and Now, The Spiritual Guide, Two Walk in Paradise: An Introduction to Kabbalah, Remember the Sabbath, What is Religion For? and Prayer. The ordering of these sections illustrates the way that Schachter-Shalomi felt it best to speak to his intended audience. He begins by invoking the Great Mystery through the initiator of Hasidism. He explains the frame of mind of the deeply observant Hasid and explains the role of the Rebbe as a spiritual guide. Only then does he introduce Kabbalah as a body of teachings. While he frequently uses vocabulary that nods towards syncretism he is working his way towards the particularity of Judaism. When he comes to Shabbat and prayer he is introducing not the most exotic flowers of the Jewish traditions, but the ones that sustain the idea of the beauty of Jewish practice.
The second section of Hasidic sources in translation includes a variety of Hasidic approaches. I think that part of the motivation of presenting this material is to portray a gallery of mystical approaches that show similarities with a range of the mystical traditions that approach the Great Mystery. Schachter-Shalomi is trying to make the case that Jewish texts can be central to a mystical search even for those who are comfortable outside the Jewish tradition.
The third section includes a selection from Chaim Vital and the Tikkunei Zohar, as well as another pass at Shabbat observance and then an experimental text, “Finnegan’s Awakening,” which invokes James Joyce’s epic novel “Finnegan’s Wake,” as a mystical text that includes the answers to questions but in a way that finding those answers would be an invalidation of their truth. While “Finnegan’s Awakening,” leads to Schachter-Shalomi’s belief that for the seeker there should be no end to the search, the text on Shabbat digs into the way that one should observe Shabbat with a systematic intentionality.
Problematic within this system is that it is clearly a gendered one. It is for a man with a wife to resolve the practical details of this observance. She will anchor the physical realm so that her husband can ascend into the spiritual realm. Schachter-Shalomi and the Renewal movement as a whole were leaders in opening Jewish practice to women in meaningful ways. However, here, where he is clearly expressing the Hasidic mindset fully, he had yet to find a way to translate the experience to one that was open to everyone.It was early days. Setting that aside, this vision of an ideal observance of Shabbat is the place where Schachter-Shalomi's background and future intentions overlay each other most precisely.
Schachter-Shalomi was willing to accept the fact that these seekers were not going to be satisfied strictly within the Jewish tradition and were unlikely to come to the point where they recognized one tradition as exclusively authoritative. These seekers have had an outsized influence on the lives of those less intrepid Jewish souls that make up much of the rest of the Jewish people. Thus, his vision means to make traditional Judaism a useful tool for all Jews (and others) in a way that traditional practitioners would not have accepted. From within the tradition he was willing to release the tradition into the larger world, an accomplishment that began in earnest with this book.
The book will be out next week. It can be ordered from the publisher here or order it from an independent bookseller at bookshop.org.
