Can we hold the gray space of human failure and creativity? It’s not only a question about the music of my father Shlomo Carlebach.
It was February 2018. I had not been to shul in a few months. I hadn’t even davened alone. I was immersed in my raw and recent acceptance of what women were saying my father had done to them. I was mourning anew. It broke me that I couldn’t ask him about any of this. I was angry with my father, spiritually separate from him for the first time in my life. And it made me feel very lonely, though he’d been dead for nearly twenty-four years. I felt deeply alone in the universe. The world I knew had turned on me.
