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.
Read more about this topic: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Famous quotes containing the words career and, career and/or work:
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)