Hello, everybody. As promised, I’m continuing my story with Reb Shlomo, but rather than pick up where I left off, I want to skip ahead about three years. I did spend a few hours of that first Shavuos with Reb Shlomo, but I didn’t stay till the end. I also went back to the shul for one Shabbos shortly afterward. I turned up on Saturday, not Friday night, which means I violated the Shabbos to get there. I enjoyed both experiences, but I wasn’t ready to turn my life upside-down by becoming an Orthodox Jew. I headed off to college, as planned.
I’m going to gloss over what happened to me in college, but suffice it to say, the next few years remain the most regrettable period of my life. I had two bad relationships, smoked way too much weed, dabbled in foreign spiritual practices, and ended up failing out in my junior year.
When I landed back in my parents’ apartment in Queens, I thought I’d lost everything: my friends, my boyfriend, my chance at spirituality, and my education. My parents were sure I’d lost my mind. I suppose I can’t blame them. I was talking like a “self-appointed Lord’s anointed.” In college, I’d been exposed to some heady ideas to wash down the weed and psychedelics. Rock ‘n roll poetry. The theory of psychohistory. Gurdjieffian mysticism. It all came pouring out of me in an incoherent, solipsistic, spiritualistic jumble.
My parents did what any secular Jews would do: they schlepped me off to a shrink. As I was a second-generation patient, this could easily have cemented a lifelong career in mental illness. Hospitalization was recommended, but I’d read enough R. D. Laing to know I should put up a fight, and I won. So instead, I was prescribed that gateway drug of the psychotropics: lithium.
Without school or a job, I had lots of time on my hands. Mostly I stayed up late, watching black and white reruns on Nick at Nite. I’d catch up on lost sleep in the daylight hours. It was a terrible cycle I didn’t know how to break.
“What should I do?” I asked one of the older Gurdjieff disciples on the phone. The Teacher who ran the school/ashram I hoped to join had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I’d been given clear instructions to stay away. It was the immediate cause of my tailspin, the reason I believed I’d been left with nothing.
“The spirituality you want in your life is out there in the world,” he answered.
It was? That was news to me. I’d been given to understand that the Gurdjieff method was the only true path to spiritual development. Everything else was just a halfway measure. This was my first beacon of hope.
So one afternoon amid all that angst, I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood instead of sleeping. I passed all my old haunts - the public library, the movie theater. I didn’t have any destination in mind. I certainly didn’t think I was going to find any spiritual secrets on the streets of Queens, even though the neighborhood had a sizable Orthodox population, one that I always viewed with curiosity. But there, hanging in the window of a kosher store, was the poster directing me to my next step. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach was giving a pre-Purim concert.
“Should I try that again?” I wondered. I still remembered the address. 305 West 79th Street. The cure sent before the disease was about to fulfill its potential.
It took a few weeks before I gathered the will, but one Saturday morning, I took the train into the city. I knew from my previous visits that even though I was violating the Sabbath, I’d be welcome anyway.
What I hadn’t counted on was the possibility that Reb Shlomo might not be there. Leading the services was his twin brother, Rabbi Eliyahu Chaim zt’l. It turned out, the Rabbis Carlebach shared the leadership of the synagogue. Reb Shlomo would lead one Shabbos, and Reb Eli would take the next. I also met Reb Eli’s wife, Rebbetzin Hadasa Carlebach.
“What a classic Jewish face,” I thought when I first saw her. I suspect she was thinking exactly the same thing about me.
I was right about being welcomed in. More than welcome. After prayers, Reb Eli and Hadassa offered me a couch where I could spend the afternoon reading. I didn’t take them up on it. I went to McDonald’s (not kosher!) and journaled (forbidden!) about the experience I just had.
But I went back. I’ll tell the story of how I fully committed to Sabbath observance in a separate post. My main point now is to pay tribute to Reb Eli, my other soul doctor. Reb Shlomo’s famous name brought me in, but it was Reb Eli who got me to stay. He’s the forgotten twin. The "Soul Doctor" movie didn’t even include him as a “character.” But as far as impact on my life, he absolutely surpassed Reb Shlomo.
As I said, I was cosmically confused at that point. I asked Reb Eli to pray for the dying Gurdjieff Teacher, which probably horrified him. He would have seen her as a cult leader and beguiler of Jewish souls. He and Rebbetzin Hadasa assured me that I didn’t need the Gurdjieff school. All the spirituality I wanted was right in the Torah. It paralleled what the older Gurdjieff disciple told me. I had what I needed to finally move on.
Just as Reb Eli and Hadasa convinced me that I didn’t need the Gurdjieff school, they didn’t believe I needed shrinks or lithium, either. They thought that whatever was wrong with me would be fixed as long as I kept living on the straight and narrow.
“Forget your old friends,” Reb Eli would say. “I’ll be your friend. Come here for three Shabbosim in a row, and I promise you, you’ll never have another bad thought.”
So I did. I quit weed. I quit lithium (though not therapy.) And I learned to keep Torah and mitzvos. I had to develop discipline, but I didn’t have to abandon belief in something mystical and unseen.
I could never have healed in any other way. The atheistic worldview of psychiatric medicine offers no answers that could every satisfy me, only prescriptions to shut me down. Emily Dickinson had it right. Just as “much madness is divinest sense,” “much sense [is] the starkest madness.”
So if you’re a seeking soul having a crisis, or you’re the parent of a kid with “religious ideation,” I beg of you: listen to your inner urge. Don’t dismiss it as “crazy.” Find a soul doctor - a patient, giving, practitioner of a spiritual tradition. I thank G-d every day that I was sent two.
Wow Kressel, thank you for sharing this vulnerable and inspiring part of your journey.
I enjoyed this article. I’m glad you found your spiritual grounding. I have friends who still follow gurus like Gurudeff, however you spell it, I know what this practice is. They happen to be Jewish and I find them hopelessly lost. Steiner is the other one I hear of all the time before the conversation spins off into how fiercely authentic astrology is. I have nothing to say but only pray for them. Thanks Kressel.