Given a choice, Eve Ilsen would focus exclusively on her late husband Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, unrivaled leader of the Jewish Renewal movement until his death in 2014.
Ilsen, 70 and white haired, downplays her current role in Jewish Renewal, which she championed well before meeting Schachter-Shalomi in the mid-1970s.
“No, I’m not a leader in the movement,” she says from the Boulder home she and Schachter-Shalomi shared since 2000 — but their relationship spanned nearly 30 years.
“I’m a psychotherapist and an ordained rabbinic pastor,” Ilsen obliges. “Occasionally I teach. I counsel individuals. I often refer people to other people who know what they’re doing. I do baby naming ceremonies and weddings.”
Also a storyteller, meditation guide, blogger, photographer, creative artist and singer, she resolutely disdains the self-congratulatory.
Ilsen would rather talk about the annual Jewish Renewal Ohalah conference, set for Jan. 13-16 in Boulder. This year’s theme is “Ayeka: How We Show Up in These Times.”
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, director of social justice at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, is the keynoter.
It begins with a Shabbaton, followed by study sessions and an abundance of music. The ordination of six Jewish Renewal rabbis, one rabbinic pastor and three cantors is the centerpiece.
“There’s so much affection and respect at these gatherings,” Ilsen enthuses. “People drop their luggage in the hotel lobby and hug each other. It’s like no group I’ve ever known, and probably like no other group this hotel has ever seen.”
But another task has assumed reflective priority.
Ilsen is currently finishing a book “that was never intended to be a book,” she says. Sadness and humor alternate in her low voice.
In the late spring of 2014, Schachter-Shalomi fell ill after leading a Shavuot retreat at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut.
He was rushed to the ICU in Hartford but later developed pneumonia.
“While Zalman was sedated, his secretary came up to me and said, ‘the phone is ringing off the hook, so I’ve opened a site on Caring Bridge where you can report on his condition and readers can respond.’”
Ilsen started filling the anxious void with her words every day.
On June 19, friends arranged to Medivac the couple to their Boulder home, where she continued chronicling the ordeal on a daily basis.
He died in his sleep two weeks later, at age 89.
“People wrote me and said, ‘Please don’t stop writing now. This your story.’”
Schachter-Shalomi readied the Jewish Renewal world for his passing to ensure the movement’s continuity. But no amount of preparation could mitigate Ilsen’s personal loss.
“I went through a long period of grief that felt like physical pain,” she says. “I never knew what I might run into in the house that would remind me of something. And the tears . . .”
Mourners filled the home day and night during shiva, standing with her in grief. “Well, that’s not always an advantage,” she notes. “But there was a lot of love.”
Ilsen is unable to remember how or when she finally emerged from the darkness. “My husband was such a known figure that hiding wasn’t possible,” she says.
“People were coming by the home all the time.”
A friend whose much older husband, a scholarly Viennese Jew, had died several years before, always reassured Ilsen that she “knew the territory” and would be there when the time came.
“Sometimes I called her five times a day just to hold on to someone who knew what I was going through and could help stabilize me,” Ilsen says.
Once the house emptied of people, she would go upstairs to the bedroom where she kept beautiful blank journals and a fountain pen.
“I wrote for myself,” she says. “I think that helped me survive too.”
Schachter-Shalomi’s ecumenicalism, Ilsen says, transcended religious divisions.
“Zalman davened at Chabad and Bonai Shalom; he was available to any part of the Jewish community,” Ilsen says. “He had a listening ear and an open heart for any who came to him.”
Rabbi Deborah Bronstein, rabbi emerita at Boulder’s Reform Har HaShem, fondly recalls the couple’s kindnesses to her. “Both Eve and Reb Zalman have been very gracious to me,” she says.
“Eve conveys much strength and compassion and spirit whenever I see her. I always feel glad to have spent a little time with her.”
During Ilsen’s down time, which seems to expand with the seasons, she enjoys inviting friends and family to the home, where private memory surrounds the tangible.
“Zalman’s davvenen room and library are untouched, as is his chair — although the cats like to sleep there,” she says.
Eve Ilsen’s mother, a spiritual person who was “rather suspicious of any rigid model,” encouraged her child to look for G-d within and outside Judaism’s frame.
“When I wanted to keep kosher as a kid, my mother did this for me,” she says. “Later in life, after marrying a Conservative rabbi, my mother kept a kosher home — but in the middle, she did not!
“I was fortunate to be raised by a woman whose real heart and interest was spiritual reality. And that transcends any one religion.”
Ilsen was in graduate school when she first met Schachter-Shalomi, who was leading High Holiday services in the 1970s at the Aquarian Minyan in the Bay area. Their second meeting occurred in the 1980s at the home of her teacher, Mme. Colette Aboulker-Muskat in Jerusalem.
The third time — the perennial charm — occurred when her adoptive father died in the mid-1980s in California. Ilsen says the shiva “was a catastrophe, so my mother and I decided to finish sitting shiva in Philadelphia.
“It was right before the High Holidays, and all I could think of was finding B’nai Or (founded by Schachter-Shalomi in 1978) to see whether services were being held there.”
That was the turning point.
“It was an odd story all around,” Ilsen says.
They moved to Boulder in 1986, when Schachter-Shalomi accepted the World Wisdom Chair at Naropa.
At that time, Boulder had a small Jewish Renewal contingent overseen by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, who was ordained by Schachter-Shalomi in 1982 and led Jewish Renewal chavurot (later the Jewish Renewal Community and Nevei Kodesh) from infancy to fruition.
“A few of us wanted to keep Reb Zalman in Boulder,” Firestone says. “He was so much happier here, and understood, than back in Philadelphia.”
The group found the couple a home, which they occupied in 2000.
Today there are two Jewish Renewal congregations, several chavurot and one synagogue in Boulder.
Initially, Ilsen and Schachter-Shalomi worked on joint projects and attended retreats together.
“We did a lot of work in partnership, as a duet,” she says, utilizing a balletic metaphor. “Later on I discovered that he was really better as a soloist. I loved working as a duet, an ensemble — but I had to learn how to do it myself, because that’s what he needed.”
Their 25-year age difference did create one fundamental issue.
“Zalman had 11 children, and he was very sure he didn’t want more,” Ilsen says. “And I was right at that age when I wanted children. I saw clearly that Zalman could not manage having more.
“So we invited his youngest son to live with us here, which was wonderful.”
While Ilsen’s support of Schachter-Shalomi’s mission and health took precedence, no one would ever categorize her as a shrinking violet.
“Eve was and is a powerhouse in her own right,” says Firestone. “She never stopped doing important work, but she made her husband a top priority.”
Ilsen was an eyewitness to the man and the movement. Jewish Renewal rose out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, as Jews sought new directions and the young, regardless of faith or its absence, explored the drug culture.
A Chabad emissary in the early 1950s, Schachter-Shalomi immersed himself in this brave new world of religious experimentation and continually pushed the envelope.
“Zalman was in a country that allowed dialogue with clergy from other religions, and he also was surrounded by the ‘60s,” Ilsen says. “The world opened.”
Schachter-Shalomi became “post-denominational,” a term that applies to the Jewish Renewal movement today.
Its broad arms mirror Schachter-Shalomi’s eclectic upbringing in Vienna, where he was trained in strict Orthodoxy and also encouraged by his father to attend the Bobover chasidic shul.
“Zalman always had this expansive mind that allowed things to co-exist that don’t always co-exist,” she says. “For some people, one thing would cancel out the other — but not him.”
Ilsen says that Schachter-Shalomi was interested in anything having to do with G-d, whether the source was Jewish, non-Jewish, Buddhist or Sufi.
“Before 9/11, when you could travel much more freely and with less of a paranoid dimension, Zalman would come into an airport and sort of scan the room,” she delights.
“And if he saw people with clothing or headgear that indentified them as clergy, he would leave me with the suitcases and go bombing right over and start talking to them.”
Ilsen recalls a startling image he once shared with her. The ensuing years have blurred the exact context, but not the symbolism.
“He said, ‘There were clergy from all religions and we were sitting together in a hot tub. You could see by their dress and headgear what religion they represented. When I dunked my head under the water, it was all one body with different heads.’”
Ilsen laughs to herself.
“‘What a fabulous, slightly stoned and excellent metaphor for how I see reality.”
She disagrees with the notion that Jewish Renewal is often a crossover for members of traditional denominations. “A lot of people in other denominations have gained from the Jewish Renewal movement, but it’s not a crossover.
“These people found vitamins in Jewish Renewal that they couldn’t obtain elsewhere. It’s like a benign virus, infusing G-d and joy into everything it touches.”
Spouses invariably teach each other lessons by experience and example, whether it’s an oil change or menchlikeit. What life lessons did Ilsen acquire from her husband?
“First of all, I learned how to love this particular person, and how to let myself be loved,” Ilsen says.
“And I loved watching how his mind made connections. He had an open, original, quirky, creative mind.”
Ilsen was also amazed by his kindness, which she envies. “I wish being kind were as easy for me as it was for him.”
Other descriptions flow: his intense ability to listen; knowing where to direct people on their spiritual paths; infusing any religious practice with joy and deeper meaning.
The last quality “sometimes meant observing the outer form in an unusual way,” she adds.
Asked about her hopes for Jewish Renewal, Judaism and humanity, Ilsen releases an audible gasp.
“Oy veys mir,” she reacts, as if someone had requested her to recite the Torah by heart.
Momentary silence.
“My hope for Jewish Renewal is that it doesn’t settle into a denomination and ossify there,” Ilsen says.
“I hope it stays alive — the questioning, the quirkiness, the creativity.
“The best thing any religious practice can do is catapult you beyond where you’ve been.”
Ilsen would like to see Judaism pay attention to the process, “which is something Arthur Waskow might say,” she laughs. “To live our lives so that there’s a personal experience of our existence, and use it to repair the world.”
Humanity requires a beat or two of extra consideration.
“I’d like to see an openness of mind and heart, and the capacity to be surprised: a willingness to entertain the unexpected, and give what we wish we would receive in the circumstance.”
The final fragment reflects her ruminations on the current immigrant crisis, and how her grandmother’s parents were immigrants.
Ilsen extends an invitation to Boulder: take a walk, sample homemade soup, talk, meet the cats, see the study.
It’s tempting, if only to spend a few hours catapulting in bliss.
Andrea Jacobs can be reached at andrea@ijn.com.
Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News