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arthur green  Renewal and H . avurah American Movements, European Roots T he H . avurah and Jewish Renewal movements, beginning in the late 1960s, are rightly looked upon as quintessentially American Jewish phenomena.Indeed,from the inception of Havurat Shalom in 1968, this writer and others spoke of the h .avurah as an aspect of the American counterculture, setting our efforts in the context of the communitarian impulses that flourished in the broader youth culture of that era. There is no question that the banal quality of American Jewish life,including a perceived shallowness of the American synagogue, was a major motivating factor in attracting Jews to the self-proclaimed radical alternatives offered within these movements. This was part of a broad reaction against the perceived smugness and self-satisfaction of American postwar bourgeois culture as the babyboomer generation emerged into postadolescence in the late 1960s. The document that best expressed the ethos of H . avurah Judaism, The Jewish Catalogue, was as American 1970s a product as one could imagine. At the same time,however,there was much that was distinctively Jewish,textual ,and traditional in the Judaism set forth by these claimants to the countercultural mantle.Havurat Shalom opened its doors with serious text study,including courses taught by Green, Michael Fishbane, and Zalman Schachter, among others. Serious theological conversation, intense singing of Hasidic niggunim, and even halakhic debates have been part of the milieu in many of the settings created by both H . avurah and Renewal circles in the ensuing decades. The rejected American Jewish style that characterized the postwar era in the community and its institutions was juxtaposed to a more “serious” or “authentic ” Judaism learned by these young leaders mostly from European émigr é intellectuals, building on developments that had taken place in a now lost and idealized interwar European Jewish community. From German Jewry came the inspiration of Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Juedisches Lehrhaus, the adult study institute that he founded in Frankfurt 146 / Arthur Green in 1920. Appreciation of Rosenzweig had spread significantly in American Jewish intellectual circles following the publication of Nahum N. Glatzer’s Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought in 1953 and the embrace of his thought by Will Herberg and others. The German term Lehrhaus was being used on college campuses by the mid-1960s to refer to a program of Jewish learning that, while not offering college credit, was to be fully as serious as any university instruction.It was,however,to be infused with the Rosenzweigian spirit, which is to say that its aim was personal Jewish quest and not acquisition of academic knowledge. The Lehrhaus model of learning may be accurately depicted as the first efflorescence of a postmodern spirit in the American Jewish mind.The link between the founders of the H . avurah movement and the Rosenzweig legacy was quite direct; several of the movement’s founders had been Glatzer’s students at Brandeis University in the years preceding their involvement in creating the movement. But the legacy of Eastern European Jewry was even stronger. It was clear from the outset that these groups saw themselves as neo-Hasidic, that is to say, carrying certain values of early Hasidism and limited aspects of Hasidic devotional praxis, lifted out of their original context, to Jews who lived far different lives from those of the traditional Hasidic community. While many of these young Jews may indeed be construed as h .ozrim bi-teshuvah (“returnees ”), Jews more committed to tradition than was their upbringing, they were not on their way toward Orthodox Hasidism, and it would be quite inaccurate to depict them that way. They were Hasidic largely as channeled through the writings and personal influence of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, certainly the most widely read theologians within their circles . To an even greater extent they were inductees into the world of Hasidism as conveyed through the singular personality and teaching of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.1 The neo-Hasidism put forth by Schachter and his close friend and colleague Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach was much influenced by their own experiences in Lubavitch in its early Brooklyn years. Though neither Schachter nor Carlebach hadbeenraisedasaLubavitcher,2 bothfoundtheirwaythereduringadolescence and had been deeply shaped by the experience. Both had also broken with their mentor,Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneersohn,a break that was essential to the emergence of the new North American Hasidism they were to create by the mid-1960s. But neo-Hasidism did not begin in America. The...

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