19/3/00

The Carlebach spark in Safed

    All week long he shuffles paperwork, answers the phone, processes computer data. The meek, mild-mannered clerk in the credit department of Bank Hapoalim gets to the end of the week, slips unnoticed into a phone booth and ...
    It's not a Superman outfit he puts on, but a tallit.
    Faster than a speeding bullet, Meir Glaser is out of the office and in shul. The work week is just humdrum time that separates one Shabbat from the next.
    Meir leads the prayers at the Berav shul in Safed's old city. Berav is easy to find: keep walking past the mumble coming from other shuls, and follow the swell of song wafting from a distance. If you come to a shul so packed you can't get in, that's the one you want to get in.
    Sometimes there are more people outside on the street, a sort of "Berav Bahutz" minyan. "In the summer we've had 70 people who couldn't get in," Meir relates with due pride. "Their davening wasn't synchronized with ours, and inside we could hear them singing outside."
    This had been a shul that occasionally could not assemble even 10 men. "We were a small community minyan until a couple of years ago, when someone came from Petah Tikva who was a big Carlebach fan. He gave us the idea, and we started adding Carlebach tunes to the service. We put posters in hotels, and word got out there was a Carlebach minyan in Safed."
    Surprisingly for such a spiritual city, Berav is the first and only Carlebach-style congregation.
    Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach fathered modern-day spiritual Judaism, a revivalist revolution that has only mushroomed since his death, becoming a worldwide phenomenon. "This Carlebach stuff, something's happening, and people are really getting into it. There are concerts and they get 5,000 people singing and dancing.
    "One of the important things we can do is to get Am Yisrael together, and Reb Shlomo is now doing it. Society is so fragmented, but really, we're all part of the same thing, we all have a piece of the truth."
    Meir, who is 49 and originally from Baltimore, fell under Carlebach's sway like so many others: "I was at Boston University, and he gave a concert on campus. I wasn't really religious, but he got me going, you can't help it. He knew how to pull people. He lit the spark in me.
    "There's an amazing thirst" for Carlebach Judaism, Meir says. "His music pulls people together."
    And how.
    For one thing, it got me into a synagogue -- dancing around the little shteibl together with the most incongruous hodgepodge of yidn: haredim, hippies and modern Orthodox; the yeshiva crowd, and the most secularly estranged; drunks and crazies, tourists and beggars. Beards, ponytails, and beards with ponytails.
    And women. "Berav is not like some of the hassidic shuls where the women are way up top and they can't see. This is more appealing to them, they feel a part of it." Indeed, even those who can't get in.
    The most surprising incongruity is, ironically, the haredim. In their circles, Carlebach is treif, because of his unorthodox Orthodoxy and his sometimes less-than-rabbinic lifestyle. (Sure, he wasn't exactly monkish, but this was a rabbi who would go to a swami conference in California, because he knew there would be Jews there, and he wanted those Jews back. He might even have won over a few swamis too.)
    "One week we had four guys from Bnei Brak, yeshiva guys. They came Friday night, you could see in their eyes they were really into the singing and dancing. They came to me after davening and said they want to come to my house and continue the singing, which they did. These are guys who are not allowed to sing Carlebach, yet they knew all the tunes.
    "Reb Shlomo has infiltrated even the haredim. He's getting through to them."
    Meir, like Carlebach a guitarist himself, has performed in the last five klezmer festivals, and has produced a tape of his songs, but his music is not Carlebach style. "I was brought up on Peter, Paul and Mary, and the folk scene in America, and that's my influence." 
    Comes Sunday morning. Meir Glaser is a clerk again at the credit department. He falls back into the rhythm of his prosaic job. He answers the phone. He shuffles the papers. He scans lines of words on the computer screen not unlike the lines of words in a sefer Torah, except that he doesn't use a silver pointer. The clock on the wall slo-o-o-o-owly ticks off the seconds toward Friday night.
    Ah, but there's a tune in his heart, and almost imperceptibly, this meek, mild-mannered bank clerk starts humming...

    Lecha dodi likrat kala, p'nei shabbat n'kabla....