Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who was considered the spiritual father of the Jewish Renewal movement — an influential camp of religious pioneers who reintroduced to synagogue services ancient Judaic traditions of mysticism and meditation, gender equality and ecstatic prayer — died Thursday at his home in Boulder, Colo. He was 89.
His death was announced by Aleph, an umbrella organization that represents about 40 Jewish Renewal congregations around the world, most of them in North America.
Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi’s strain of Judaism had its roots in Chabad-Lubavitch, a branch of Hasidism that itself began as a revival movement in 18th-century Russia, drawing ideas from mystical Judaic texts like the kabbalah. But he traced the spark for his renewal movement to the intellectual and spiritual ferment he encountered on American college campuses in the 1960s.
As an ordained rabbi of the Lubavitch movement, which sends emissaries around the world to keep the Jewish faith alive, he was dispatched to meet with secularized Jewish students throughout the Northeast. Along the way, he befriended fellow spiritual seekers like the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, the Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton and Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), an educator and proponent of hallucinogens and Hinduism.
His exposure to Eastern religion, medieval Christian mysticism and LSD — he had the first of a handful of hallucinogenic experiences in 1962, under Leary’s tutelage — helped him formulate some of the innovations he brought to contemporary Jewish practice.
From his LSD experience in particular he concluded that “what I’d experienced in prayer and meditation before — the oneness and connection with God — was true, but it wasn’t just Jewish,” he told the writer Sara Davidson, author of “The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery,” a book, published this year, about her conversations with Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi on aging and mortality.
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