“The Darkest Light”: Shlomo Carlebach, Between Reckoning and Legacy A Film by Simon Mendes

The Darkest Light will premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, July 19th. https://jfi.org/sfjff-2026/film-guide/the-darkest-light

[This film review is free for all. For those who want to become paid subscribers to support this work, your modest contribution is much appreciated - Shaul]

If you are interested in showing in your area, please contact Simon Mendes

Shlomo Carlebach: Redux?

Almost anyone who lived in the Jewish world from the 1960s until 1994 likely encountered Shlomo Carlebach in one way or another. He was a ubiquitous figure whose music served for many as a soundtrack of almost a half century of Jewish life. His songs became part of the canon of contemporary Jewish liturgy and helped inspire the movement for Soviet Jewry. Some knew him from afar and some more personally. And some, tragically, more intimately.

Shlomo Carlebach died in 1994, in a plane on a NY runway waiting to take off for Toronto. His legacy grew precipitously afterward, with “Carlebach minyanim” springing up all over the US and Israel. Bands such as Moshav and others recorded and interpreted his music for another generation. He left the world. But his trace remained.

This ascending legacy took a sharp turn is 1998 when Sarah Blustain published an expose article in the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, “Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s Shadow Side” (Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s Shadow Side – Lilith Magazine). The article featured first-hand accounts by women, many who had never spoken out publicly, that Shlomo had sexually molested them, some when they were teenagers, over the course of three decades. Since Shlomo died in 1994 there was no way for him to respond, even as he did famously respond to more private allegations during his life with the words, “Oy, this needs such a fixing.” How one understands that oblique turn of phrase depends on where one stands in the trajectory of Shlomo’s influence.

Reactions to Blustain was swift and vicious. Some of the women quoted were verbally attacked, some called liars, some were maligned. Blustain was the recipient of angry responses in print. “A liar.” “A traitor.” Or worse. Others felt vindicated, and more women came forward to tell their stories. For those of us who knew Shlomo well, few of us were surprised, although all of us were deeply disturbed, both by the accounts and by the vicious responses. Many of us had heard stories over the years. I lived on Moshav Modiim (the Carlebach moshav) for three years between 1986-1989 and rumors of misconduct were not uncommon. But there was always deniability. Until Blustain’s article.

While the Carlebach controversy may seem tame given present realities, it was in its time devastating, certainly to the women who were abused but also to those who were deeply influenced by Shlomo, his music, his teachings, and his optimism enveloped in an ominous past. The Holocaust almost literal brushed by him. The story is told that he and his family left on a ship in Belgium for New York the day before the Nazis invaded. It was that close. He felt that his entire life. A.J. Heschel described being saved from the Holocaust as being “like an ember plucked from the fire.” For Carlebach it was more like a specter. One can imagine those on the ship watching the shoreline as the Nazi troops marched into Belgium. One more day and their fate would have likely been sealed.

Shlomo carried this with him his entire life - a special kind of survivor guilt - but instead of turning inward from the world, he turned outward to the world. His musical talent brought him to the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s (I wrote about this here) and then to the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco in 1967. He saw the counterculture through the lens of early Hasidim he imagined traveling the backroads of Eastern Europe. He saw the optimism of the “Free Speech” movement in Berkeley as a salve for despotism. But all this freedom was too much. The swift transition from the world of the yeshiva to “free love” could not contain this young romantic soul. His desire to please was confounded and upended by his desire to be pleased.

Love unbound can become pain. Light unblocked can become darkness. Charisma unchecked can become abusive. We all know that. There are many examples. But he was our own, he brought an old world destroyed into our purview, not as a sign that we must be afraid, but as an opportunity by which we should be inspired. In his book Wrapped in a Holy Flame, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi called Schlomo’s world a “virtuous reality.”

Shlomo wove stories creating a world through his imagination that transported you to a kloyz in Lubin, the town of the Baal Shem Tov, the great cities of Warsaw, Bialystok, and Budapest. Were the stories true? It didn’t matter, they were a kind of “virtuous reality,” that made us feel as if they were, as if we were part of them. One Shabbat morning in Moshav Modiim in the mid-1980s Rabbi Chaim Brovinder was visiting. Shlomo told a story after which Brovinder said, “Shlomo that is the worst story I have ever heard,” to which Shlomo responded with a smile without missing a step, “Yes, I know, but how did you like the way I told it!”

His career in Israel was different but no less impactful. He recorded a two-album set “I Heard the Wall Singing” right after the Six-Day War in memory of his recently deceased father. He travelled to hospitals during the Yom Kippur War to play for wounded soldiers. He became part of the new Hasidic music festival movement in the early 1970s. He founded a moshav where his disciples, his “holy hippies” introduced granola and tofu to Israeli society.

Synagogue, Mosha Modiim

Throughout, the darkness was there, always there, but rarely spoken about and when mentioned, almost always denied. He was too significant a figure, “too big to fail,” as it were. Until 1998. The Lilith article initiated a crack in the dam, but there were enough people to prevent its collapse. Victims abound but were told not to malign a great man and his legacy. The waters calmed, and the Jews mostly moved on.

Until the “Me Too” movement in 2006 (and later in the 2010s) brought it back from the vault. There were too many stories, too many women, to keep this dark secret locked away in a vault only for “those who knew.” And then his daughter Neshama Carlebach decided to speak truth to power. For the first time, she acknowledged some of what had been alleged. She decided it was time to face deception with honesty. She paid dearly for her choice. Her musical career went off the rails, the Jewish community could not bear to hear those words from the daughter of the legacy. She suffered. And yet she persevered. It was a profile in courage.

Shlomo and Neshama

“The Darkest Light”

This is where Simon Mendes’ film “The Darkest Light” begins. With Neshama telling a heartbreaking story of when she was molested as a child. She immediately told her father. And her father didn’t believe her. She told this story with love and sadness. She loved her father. He was the center of her life. But in that moment, when the bond between father and daughter is stretched to its limit, beyond its limit, that light turned to darkness. Retelling her story, you can see that the dam broke inside her. Again, and now with much more force. To not believe your young daughter when she tells you something like that, suddenly seemed to make all the stories possible. Light becomes darkness.

In many ways, Neshama’s story is the frame of Mendes’ painful and courageous film. I was part of an early group Simon assembled in NYC to view an earlier version of the film organized by the Jewish Film Institute. It was an interesting mix of people, all of whom had deep connections to Shlomo, all of us knew one another, some only causally. There was considerable, albeit respectful, disagreement and debate about the cuts we saw. Should the film tell this story? Should the film also tell the other side, those who deny the allegations? Why raise these issues now?

Some of the testimony of women interviewed was quite graphic. Simon heard all our concerns and asked many questions. He was serious, and he was generous. We ended our session. We all knew, the film would be made. Deniability would be made more difficult, if not impossible. Some of us were angry, some relieved, some resigned. All of us were saddened. Light becomes darkness.

I continued to be in conversation with Simon about the film. He was deeply aware of its precarity, and equally committed to tell this story. This was not just the story of a man. This was the story of a time. In some ways we all had the question of legacy on our minds. Some of us were more emotionally invested, even those who acknowledged the wrongdoing, some less so. For some, Shlomo had literally changed their lives, they would not be who they were without him. That is true about me. Maybe it was my gender, maybe my own decision to distance myself from him and the “hevra.” I supported the film. And I think the final product is more than important, I think it is necessary, even if it raises painful issues once again.

There are those who argued that Shlomo’s name should never be mentioned, nor his songs sung, that the pain he caused required “cancelling” him from our story. It is too easy, I think, to simply try to erase Shlomo from our story. But I think we have to confront the pain, nonetheless. And I think part of the power of this film is that it simultaneously exhibits stark honesty and deep appreciation. That is, to shine a light that is also dark, love that is also pain, joy that is also hurt. In some macabre way, I think that was precisely what Shlomo was trying to convey in his teaching. How do we rise from the ashes of the Holocaust and still be able to love the world? Trust the world? Embrace the world? If we can’t we forfeit our destiny.

Another filmmaker, Menachem Daum z”l was also making a film about a series of concerts Shlomo gave in Germany and Poland in the 1980s. Daum passed away before his film was finished. Shlomo was sharply criticized for performing these shows in Germany and Poland. He was told by rabbinic figures not to go. To Berlin? To Warsaw? How could he? How many of those faces in the audience were ex-Nazis? Had Nazi relatives? How many killed Jews, or watched as Nazis killed Jews? We will never know. How could a Jew perform for them?

Menachem Daum z”l

But Shlomo went, with a big kippah on his head and a Star of David necklace around his neck. And he spoke to them in impeccable German. And he sang Hasidic nigunim for them. And they sang along. And they applauded. The concerts were sold out. Shlomo was saying “Here I am, a Jew. And I am alive. Yes, still alive. And you have come to hear me tell my story. Our story.” Shlomo knew who he was talking to. And he knew what he wanted to say to them. “I am not afraid. Not of you, not of anyone. And I will not let you allow me to hate. I live in the shadow of the Creator of the universe.” Menachem wanted to capture this part of Shlomo’s legacy, the man who would not succumb to fear, who would not allow even the most horrific tragedy to make his disbelieve in humanity. Sadly, he ran out of time. Here, Shlomo’s light did not become darkness, it dispelled darkness. In those moments, the light was bright.

But as Simon’s film brilliantly shows, other times it was dark. The perplexing dilemma, that which many of us cannot, perhaps ever, fully comprehend, is that it is the same light. I respectfully submit that those who still maintain his innocence against all evidence, misunderstand him. His entire life was focused on the darkness in the light, and the light that can emerge from darkness. No one is innocent, we are all guilty.

I recall one Simhat Torah at the Jewish Institutional Synagogue in Manhattan, probably in the early 1990s, Shlomo would speak between each hakafah (dancing with the Torah). In one of his short talks, he spoke about the heroism of the settlers, how they were the vanguard of the new Jews (let us remember he gave a eulogy at Meir Kahane’s funeral in Jerusalem). It sounded close to something Kahane would say (I published an essay of Carlebach and Kahane here). Afterward, when the dancing continued, I went up to him and said, “Shlomo, that was way out of line.” He replied, “You think so?” and smiled. After the next dance he spoke again, this time extoling the Palestinians and telling a story when he was on a plane of mostly Arabs in Egypt and had them all singing his songs and dancing on the plane. The dancing began again. He looked over at me and smiled.

I realized that he meant both, and both were true, and both were not. Darkness. Light. Its not always easy to distinguish between them.

Mendes’ moving film tells a hard story; a story Neshama helped make possible, but a story he expertly curates and presents honestly, and with respect. It is courageous, it is painful, and it is necessary. Toward the end of the film, Simon graciously gave me the space to weigh in on all this. I said something like this: I understand the inclination to airbrush Shlomo out of the story of postwar Judaism. But some people are too significant to erase, whatever one might think of them. But that does not mean we erase the pain he caused. Not at all. That pain is real, and it is lasting. And maybe our job now is to first collectively confront that pain. And be there for the victims. Life is a complex web of darkness and light, joy and pain, hope and disappointment. If Shlomo taught us anything, he taught us that.

(as always thanks to Carla Sulzbach)