AMONG THE HOLY SCHLEPPERS
Jennifer Bleyer

“My journey to find a place where I belong as a Jew has been a long adventure with rather unlikely origins: I was sixteen and tripping on acid at a Grateful Dead show in Ohio. This was when I first heard of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.

Breaking through thick clouds of patchouli and pot smoke at the Richfield Coliseum, my brain was thoroughly blown into another dimension when a bearded face swirled in front of me—a man who wore tzitzit under his tie-dye and a colorful knitted yarmulke. His smile was gentle and his eyes intent. “Hey sister,” he said, “are you Jewish?”

Given the psychedelic circumstances, the question took a minute or two for me to fully process, and even then I wasn’t sure what to say. Well sure, I was Jewish. But I didn’t feel all that connected to it. I wasn’t a stereotypical Jewish American Princess, like many of the girls at my high school. I wasn’t religious or a Zionist, as my parents had raised me to be. I didn’t feel any particular attraction to klezmer or Yiddish, and as a vegetarian, the very thought of pastrami made me want to puke. But still, I did have the feeling that there might be something there, something worth tinkering with and exploring in a quiet, personal way.

The bearded man continued: “Sister, if you ever go to New York City, you have to go see Shlomo Carlebach. You won’t regret it.” He pressed a business card into my hand that said “Shlomo Carlebach, Rabbi” with an address on West Seventy-Ninth Street in Manhattan. Delirious and hallucinating, I stuffed it in my pocket along with other concert detritus and wandered off…”

Jennifer Bleyer founded Heeb Magazine in 2000, and was its editor and publisher until 2003. A journalist who lives in Brooklyn, she has written for The New York Times, Spin, Salon, The Progressive, Adbusters, Yentl's Revenge (Seal Press, 2000) and The Fire This Time (Viking Anchor, 2004).