A Review of The Torah Commentary of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach

From Jewish Media Review:

The Torah Commentary of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach provides a glimpse into the unusual way in which the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach received and transmitted Torah. It also aids the reader in bridging ‘œRabbi Shlomo Carlebach the great composer/singer’ and ‘œRabbi Shlomo Carlebach the great scholar/teacher.’ Those who sing his songs, but do not learn his Torah, only sing half a song. When Reb Shlomo speaks of Abraham and Sara, you are sure he is speaking about his own grandparents. When delving into the lives of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah, it is as if he is speaking of his own parents.

The teachings in this book of commentary are not just meant to be read – they are intended to be enjoyed and experienced as œholy music. Ultimately, they are intended as a lesson in living a holy life. Wherever Reb Shlomo traveled in the world, he brought several suitcases of holy books with him. This book makes Reb Shlomo’s teachings accessible to help us carry on our journey through life.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (Reb Shlomo) was born in Berlin, Germany in 1925. He grew up with his twin brother, Eli Chaim and his sister, Shulamith, near Vienna where his father, Rabbi Naftali, was Chief Rabbi. In 1939, as the war began to escalate and the Nazis’ grip tightened, Shlomo and his family miraculously escaped to New York where he spent time learning by some of the greatest Torah scholars of the last century, such as Rabbi Ahron Kotler, Rabbi Shlomo Heiman and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Even as a young boy, Shlomo’s vision and clarity of thought set him apart from his peers as being amongst the most brilliant of the scholars. Through that vision, courage, and a deep love of all people, Shlomo took on a mission and set off on a path that many didn’t believe in.

Reb Shlomo believed that to uplift, inspire, and bring joy to every human being was truly his reason for existing. Through his words of Torah, his music and his stories, Reb Shlomo touched the hearts and souls of all who were blessed to hear him. He sought to remind people that they are never alone, that there is one God who loves them, and that every person has a unique and important mission to discover for themselves. He was able to mend the spirits and lives of the most broken, distraught people worldwide, people of all faiths and cultures. Much of Reb Shlomo’s life was spent traveling the world, where he would sing with the poor, the lost and the lonely, and always swear he learned from them.

Even since his passing in 1994, many lives have been influenced and touched by Reb Shlomo’s teachings, messages and melodies.

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The Carlebach Bootlegs

by Jonathan Mark

Thousands of hours of audiotapes yield mystical insights from the scholarly side of Reb Shlomo, as well as 300 lost songs.

After Reb Shlomo Carlebach’s passing in 1994, “Carlebach minyans” have blossomed around the world, driven by the fact that anyone can sing (and daven) along with the music famously recorded by him. But if the music lives on, Reb Shlomo’s Torah teachings have suffered a more elusive afterlife. Singing along is one thing, but how can one study along with, or even find, his unrecorded, unpublished teachings that were often casually spoken in situations as ephemeral as they were enchanted?

“The good news is that Reb Shlomo was, by far, the most bootlegged Jewish artist of all,” says Shlomo Katz, director and editor of the recently created Shlomo Carlebach Legacy Trust. “He was recorded everywhere, constantly — concerts, classes, conversations. It became clear,” says Katz, a musician and teacher in his own right, “that we had to form a central place to house everything, not just for archival purposes but for disseminating and publishing, and for the kovod [honor] of Reb Shlomo.” It’s something that Katz, who at 31 never met Reb Shlomo, has been working on informally and now professionally for several years.

Reb Shlomo’s teachings were mostly unstructured, jazz-like expositions ranging from the Zohar to stories of Moishele the Water Carrier, to the Holy Thieves, improvised without notes, and differing — depending on his evolving scholarship and consciousness — from one session to the next. In his endless travels, he would often take at least two suitcases, one for clothes, one for a portable library — volumes of Ishbitz, Rav Kook, Reb Nachman — a moveable feast that fueled his teachings at the next port of call.

The trust, a project administered by the Carlebach family, has collected some 21,000 hours of Reb Shlomo bootlegs — mostly audiotapes, with about 1,000 hours of video — according to the trust’s website. More than 95 percent of these tapes have yet to be transcribed and processed, says Katz, who is editing the tapes from his home in Neve Daniel, Israel.

The gathering and transcribing of tapes began, in fits and starts, even before Reb Shlomo’s death in 1994. However, the coordination of the project under the trust, based in Jerusalem, began in 2009, says Katz, who is being assisted by about a half-dozen people working on the tapes in various locations.

The tapes have already yielded nearly