Saturday, December 25, 2010
Lord get me high
Shlomo was descended from one of the oldest rabbinical dynasties in pre-Holocaust Germany. He was born in Berlin, where his father, Rabbi Hartwig Naftali Carlebach (1889-1967), was a rov. He made aliyah from Brooklyn schul he was leading, and established a community of rather strange grass smoking American hippies near Modiin. I met some of his followers in the army (my unit was full of anti-militaristic American and Russian Jewish neurotics). Although he composed thousands of songs, he couldn’t read musical notes.
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Carlebach went in for the full '60s trio of sex and drugs and rock 'n roll. He apparently had a thing for young teenage Jewish girls. He would not have sex with them but he would would rub up against them. "Charismatic" is , I think, another word for psychopath. What is amazing to me is not that such psychopaths exist but that people (sheeple?) follow them.
K
It is rather worse than promiscuity -- more like molestation. http://www.rickross.com/reference/lubavitch/lubavitch12.html
K, you are lucky to be so resistant to charm, but most people are not so fortunate.
I also heard rumors of his free love grass smoking hippie musical commune, and he was "unwelcome" here by the official rabbinical establishment. He was like an Indian guru.
The fact is that he attracted to Orthodox Judaism many a confused youth who was on the way to full drop out drug addiction.
So you are saying the confused youth that he saved makes up for the confused youth that he molested? I say not. In the past, a lot of bad behavior was excused or tolerated on similar grounds and it was wrong, wrong, wrong. These were not sheep he was molesting but humans and each one must have suffered years of mental anguish following her molestation. Ask the Catholic Church if it was wrong - on purely financial grounds alone this kind of tolerance has cost them billions. I agree with De Gaulle that there are no indispensable men (De Gaulle said that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men - sure enough Reb Shlomo lies in the cemetery and the world goes on). Mamash a gevalt! it says on his grave. Somewhere there is a man with enough charisma to save the wayward youth and yet does not feel compelled (or empowered) to molest teenage girls. I never heard such stories about Schneerson, for example (though there were others regarding his frumkeit - at one point he had given up on the whole Rebbe business and was working as an electrician).
K
K
BTW, such predators are attracted to confused youth. Just like a wolf will pick out the sheep that seems the weakest, human wolves seek out those who seem most vulnerable and who are the least likely to go to (or be believed by) the authorities.
The entire "hippie" movement had a highly misogynistic view of women so Carlebach was not alone- liberation from conventional or "square" thinking was an awful lot like immature narcissism or wish fulfillment where you could do whatever you wanted without your parents or "the Man" telling you what to do. What many young men like to do if they are liberated from all societal restrictions is raping and pillaging, which is why societal restrictions were imposed in the 1st place. What looked to the hippies like arbitrary rules ("no free love") was mamash (Carlebach's favorite word) the carefully worked out wisdom of the ages.
K
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