I never heard Shlomo call himself a rebbe. To the extent he accepted the role, it was the rebbe as a good friend. When he said you should phone him, he meant it. He was in your corner. He bailed friends out of prison, emptied his pockets to strangers, played his guitar by the docks for the down-and-out. “I’ve had people give me things,” said a homeless man who came to Carlebach’s funeral in Manhattan. “But I never had anybody make me feel like a man before.” Once, when I hitched a ride to New York to be with him, Shlomo asked, “Are you making friends in the hevre?” Without really understanding the question, I told him I had recently moved to Ann Arbor, where I did not know many people. “Ann Arbor!” he cried energetically. “I’ve got my Top Guy there!” Friendship quickened Shlomo’s spiritualism. “If you’re my greatest friend in the world,” Coopersmith quotes Carlebach, “do you think I’m worrying about how kosher you are? The only thing that matters is that we’re friends. Being friends, loving another person, is the deepest thing there is.” The last time I saw Shlomo was two months before his death, a hot night on the porch in Israel. There was a crowd of maybe 10 or 15 people milling about in a loose circle. I was 20. He held my hand, and asked about my plans. I was leaving for two months to study ecology in Nepal. “You know there is Chabad in Kathmandu,” he quipped, grinning. He started to laugh. “Do you know that when Columbus discovered America, he found that Chabad was already there?” Shlomo turned his attention to the circle, gesturing to me. “Do you know I have known him since he was a baby?” he asked, as if I were the most important person in his world. It was true: My parents knew him when they were in their 20s; by the time I was a year old they were bringing him to where my father was a rabbi in the Pacific Northwest and later in New Hampshire. But in 20 years, I could not have been near Shlomo for more than 10 days; the notion of these 10 days being as meaningful to him as any his life was intoxicating. Shlomo placed his hand gently on the back of my head, putting his lips to my cheek. “Don’t give up,” he whispered. “Don’t ever give up.” -Holy Beggar
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 01:42:42 +0000
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