Online Zoom Forum: Meshullam Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: The Spiritual, Social, Ecological, and Interreligious Vision in His Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 14 January 2026.
Time:: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman:
Bio: Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman was ordained in 2004 by ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and now serves as a Spiritual Director. She has served as Torah teacher and meditation guide in many retreats led by Rabbi David Cooper z'l and Shoshana Cooper, as assistant to Rabbi Shefa Gold in many Kol Zimra retreats, and as a teacher in retreats of Awakened Heart led by Rabbi Jeff Roth.
From 1993 to 2003, Berman was the director of the Summer Program of Elat Chayyim, a Jewish retreat center for healing and renewal near Woodstock, New York.
She is the co-author of three books of Jewish teaching: A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life-Spiral as a Spiritual Path (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002)' Tales of Tikkun: New Jewish Stories to Heal the Wounded World (Jason Aronson, 1996; Rowman & Littlefield, 2004; Ben Yehuda Press, 2021); and Freedom Journeys: Tales of Exodus and Wilderness across Millennia (Jewish Lights, 2001), and co-editor / co-author of Liberating Your Passover Seder (Ben Yehuda Press, 2021.
She has written on new liturgy (especially for or about women) and the relationship of liturgy to personal growth and transformation — for the journals Good Housekeeping, Tikkun, Moment, and Menorah, for the volume WorldsofJewishPrayer (Jason Aronson, 1993) and for several anthologies.
Berman chaired the board of P'nai Or Religious Fellowship for many years, and then was secretary of the board of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. In 1991, she was ordained an Eshet Hazon (Woman of Vision) by the Jewish-renewal women's community.
She was a member of the editorial committee that created OrChadash (NewLight), an innovative guide to Shabbat-morning prayer and celebration. She often leads services, teaches Torah, and tells stories for synagogues, havurot, institutes, and retreat centers in North America, Europe, and Israel.
Berman also led a concurrent career: In 1979, she founded and in 2016 she retired as Co-Director of the Riverside Language Program, a renowned intensive English-language school for adult immigrants and refugees from all around the world. It was housed in Riverside Church in New York City. Out of that work she co-authored a book of stories of the lives of immigrants, Getting into It.
Speakers:
Rabbi Or N. Rose:
Title: Interreligious Hospitality: Reverend Howard Thurman and Rabbi Zalman Schachter (Shalomi).
Description: Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014), founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement, was a pioneering interreligious practitioner in post-World War II North American life. By the time of his death at age 89, he was widely regarded as a leading interpreter of Judaism, particularly its mystical currents, and a wise religious bridge-builder. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi participated in public and private gatherings with such renowned figures as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Father Thomas Keating. From 1995–2002, he held the World Wisdom Chair at the Buddhist Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. However, long before he grew into the role of international Jewish sage and spiritual elder, Schachter-Shalomi began an idiosyncratic journey that took him from the world of HaBaD-Lubavitch Hasidism into dialogue with an array of practitioners, practices, and texts from the world’s religions. In this brief presentation, I examine Schachter-Shalomi’s written reflections on his first encounters with the renowned African American spiritual polymath, the Reverend Howard Thurman (1899–1981) at Boston University (BU) in 1955. At the time, Rev. Thurman served as Dean of Marsh Chapel and Professor of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources at BU’s School of Theology, and Schachter (not yet Schachter-Shalomi) was a new student in the MA program in the Psychology and Religion (with a focus on pastoral care), while also working as a pulpit rabbi in a small Orthodox congregation in New Bedford, MA. The rabbi repeatedly described this relationship as pivotal to his development as a (inter)religious leader and educator, referring to Thurman as a rebbe (spiritual master, usually reserved by Hasidim for their Jewish mystical masters).
Bio: Rabbi Or Rose is the founding Director of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership of Hebrew College and a senior consultant to Interfaith America. He previously served as the Associate Dean for Informal Education at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and as co-founder and director of CIRCLE, a center for interreligious education co-sponsored by Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College. Rabbi Rose is Publisher Emeritus of The Journal of Interreligious Studies and the co-editor of the award-winning anthologies, My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation (Orbis, 2012) and With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps & Mistakes (Orbis, 2023). His most recent publication was a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (d. 1972) for teen readers (ages 12-15, Monkfish, 2025). Rabbi Rose is currently completing a contemporary multifaith commentary on the Book of Psalms (Paraclete Press, 2026), and a children’s book on Reb Zalman’s creation of the iconic "rainbow tallis” (prayer shawl).
Prof Sam S.B. Shonkoff:
Title: ‘You Are Out of This Thing, but You Are with Me’: Schachter-Shalomi’s LSD Trip with Timothy Leary as Interreligious Encounter.
Description: On a summer night in 1963, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi tripped on LSD for the first time with Timothy Leary at a Massachusetts ashram. This was part of Leary’s psychedelic research in those years, through which he arranged “transcendent experiences” for over 1000 people, including 69 religious leaders from various traditions. Schachter-Shalomi was still a Chabad Hasid at the time, and he integrated various practices and aesthetics from that culture into his LSD experience. Leary was a recently fired Harvard psychologist who embraced a sort of perennialist mysticism, hardly attuned to the cultural specificity of his own orientation. It is illuminating to examine their night together through a lens of interreligious encounter. Schachter-Shalomi’s published trip report (1968) emphasizes elements of spiritual unity he found with Leary. The unpublished transcript of his oral trip report (1963), however, offers a far more textured account, shedding light on tensions between self-transcendent experiences and situated selfhood.
Bio: Sam Shonkoff is a scholar of modern Jewish thought and the Taube Family Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union.
Seth Fishman:
Title: Reb Zalman’s Life and Work: How he came to Jewish Renewal and what it means for the Future.
Description: Jewish Renewal came about because of Zalman’s desire to bring greater loyalty to Judaism for the people in the present time. Through it, he brought souls closer to God, he updated theology so that the story of a universe after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz, Birkenau, moon walk, fifth-generation computer, string theory, and quantum could be a part of it, he cleaned up the interface with God through reaching to the teachings of Jewish mysticism making them applicable to our day, he brought holistic body awareness to spirit, and also in the realm of physical, he acknowledged the “body” of our planet, whose air/lungs have emphysema, whose blood circulation, meaning the water table, is poisoned, whose fever is global warming. He helped us move from a masculine, patriarchal, left-brainish understanding of Judaism to something more of the imagining heart and intuition. His Jewish Renewal brought all these things together and they have implications beyond just Jewish and beyond just his own lifetime.
Bio: Seth Fishman served Reb Zalman for twenty-three years as an editor and translator of his writings. In 2005, He received Semicha / ordination from Zalman as "Gabbai Um-shamesh BaKodesh” / “an enabler and attendant in holiness” at which time, Reb Zalman stated: "Seth has studied God’s perfect Torah to become one who helps establish the indwelling of God’s strength through attending to matters of the needs of the faith community. I can put my trust in him as a scribe who sets my lectures in writing such that everyone who reads can learn in accord with the desire of his/her heart." From 2007 to 2014, Seth was the webmaster for Reb Zalman’s BLOG: https://jewishrenewalhasidus.org. He holds a BA degree in Music History from Yale College, and an MBA graduate degree from the Wharton School of Business.
Prof Hava Tirosh-Samuelson:
Title: The Ecological Spirituality of Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi.
Bio: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D. 1978, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is Regents Professor of History and Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism at Arizona State University. In addition to 75 peer-reviewed articles, she is the author Between Worlds: The Life and Thought of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991); Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue Knowledge and Well-Being (2003); and Religion and Environment: The Case of Judaism (2020). She is also the editor of 8 collections of essays and the editor-in-chief of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers (2012-2018), a set of 21 volumes.
Prof Shaul Magid:
Title: Renewal and/as Heresy: Reflections on Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Bryn Mawr Seminar “Why We are Different than the Sabbatians?” (early 1990s)
Description: Questions of heresy and religious schism have long been a topic of Jewish scholarly attention. In 1981, Rafael Jospe published a collection of essays entitled Schisms in Jewish History surveying this history. For many, those questions have not survived in the modern era when pluralism and the lack of religious authority made schism, and heresy, all but impossible to maintain. Perhaps the last great heretical schism was the Sabbatian heresy in the 17th century. Gershom Scholem’s attention to this episode and its aftermath in Jewish modernity kept alive this question even as we moved further into a pluralistic orbit. But it remained mostly in the realm of theory and not practice.
Accusations of “heresy” and even religious schism were floated in the early period of Hasidism as well, for example, with the writ of excommunication of the Hasidic “sect” supported by the Vilna Gaon in 1772. But Hasidism soon folded back into normative Orthodoxy and its radical beginnings were soon erased. This changed somewhat with Martin Buber’s radical rendering of Hasidism in the early 20th century reviving questions of (neo) Hasidic heresy but by that time the structures of normative Judaism had become malleable enough to absorb deviance and thus avoid any kind of schism.
In the early 1990s Zalman Schachter-Shalomi gave a series of lectures with the title, “Why We Are Different than the Sabbatians?” The transcript of those lectures were never published. A much-truncated version was published by Daniel Siegel (and Schachter-Shalomi) as Renewal NOW but this version removed much of the more radical comments made in the public talks. I was able to obtain a copy of the original transcript from Zalman before his passing and my talk will briefly explore some of the themes therein, especially regarding heresy and Sabbateanism where Zalman draws a distinction, but perhaps not a categorical one, between his vision of Renewal and the Sabbatian heresy. I will conclude with a few brief comments about a potential schism that exists in the Jewish world in the wake of the destruction of Gaza.
Bio: Shaul Magid is Professor of Modern Judaism in Residence at Harvard Divinity School, co-editor of Harvard Theological Review, a contributing editor to ARC Journal and the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in New York. He studied for his M.A. in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1994. He is the author of many books including American Post-Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2016), Hasidism Incarnate (Stanford University Press, 2018); Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism (Academic Studies Press, 2019), The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Commentary to the New Testament (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021); The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press, 2023), Jewish Anti-Zionism as Political Theology: The Major Writings of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (University of California Press, 2026); and Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2026)
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
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