Renewing Judaism:
An abridged history connecting Jewish Renewal, ALEPH, and The Shalom Center

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In the long shadow of the twentieth century—after the camps, after the bomb, amidst war and wonder—an ancient Jewish innovation sprouted forth. Not a return, but a rupture. Not a restoration, but possibility.

Renewal is not a movement, but movement itself. The way Life lives.

The way the tradition shakes itself loose and remembers how to dance. The way forgotten threads—textual, spiritual, ancestral—begin to braid again.

Arthur Waskow was one of those threads.

He was a Jewish radical before he was a radical Jew—rooted in justice movements, marching through the streets, imagining new systems. But the stories of his people kept returning to him, like echoes that hadn’t finished speaking.

In 1969, the Freedom Seder refracted Exodus through American Civil Rights , and retooled liturgy as liberation technology. The Sea split anew and suddenly Pharaoh wore new faces.

Revealed to Waskow was the insight that ritual is not escape, but instruction. Holiday, a technology of resistance, calling ancestors into the present tense. Politics not as policy, but prophecy.

Meanwhile, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was listening through different and distant but familiar frequencies.

A refugee of the old world, he began to hear God in forms that had no name yet. He tuned to the cosmic frequencies of the Age of Aquarius. A master of Hasidic soul-tech and interfaith experimentalism, he helped midwife a new Jewish spiritual consciousness. 

Chanting with Sufis, dialoguing with monks, ingesting mystery in chemical and cosmic form, he didn’t abandon tradition—he stretched it.

At a time when prayer shawls came in black and white, Zalman dreamed in spectrum, embodied by the rainbow tallit he wore—a garment of light and prism, spanning past and possible. The rainbow became a symbol not just of pride or inclusivity, but of the spiritual prism Renewal sought to be: refracting ancient light into unfolding spectra.

Like Arthur, Zalman didn’t abandon tradition—he stretched it, until it could once again hold the soul of the world.

And in the midst of that fertilized soil—that super-saturated solution—in basements and living rooms, forests and kitchens, the Chavurah movement bloomed. A turning inward more than a breaking away. A reconfiguration more than a rejection.

In makeshift sanctuaries, Torah was read in circle, prayer moved from recitation to revelation, God’s pronouns multiplied, and communities braided leadership, song, silence, and presence into something befitting of—and actively shaping—its era.

Then came the Jewish Catalog—part spellbook, part blueprint. It didn’t tell you what to believe. It handed you the thread. It gave seekers a do-it-yourself roadmap: not just how to tie tzitzit, but how to reweave a tradition frayed by modernity.

Bake the challah. Rewrite the blessing. Find God in the compost. In the broken heart. In the rising breath. Seed Moshiach.

It wasn’t about what Judaism was. It was an invitation to co-create what it might yet become. 

In Philadelphia, Jewish Renewal grew into and beyond itself. Reb Zalman’s B’nai Or became a hub of Renewal: drum circles, davvening, deep Torah. Then P’nai Or: a face that turned outward. Meanwhile, Reb Arthur’s The Shalom Center fused Jewish wisdom with prophetic action and imagination.

By the 1990s, the spiral turned again and Zalman and Arthur, now neighbors, dear friends, spiritual comrades, and organizational directors merged P’nai Or and The Shalom Center into ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Decades of shared breath made manifest into a convergence of devotion, ALEPH braided Zalman’s spiritual community and Arthur’s spiritual justice into a place for training spiritual leaders, gathering seekers, and midwifing new forms of communal life. Mystic creativity and sacred activism joined in a container that was part invocation, part unfolding.

And then, as organisms do, ALEPH spawned. Like cells divide to grow, ALEPH and the Shalom Center separated—a mitosis with each carrying forward part of the ancient Aquarius DNA.

The Shalom Center resumed its prophetic path as an independent beacon while ALEPH deepened its role as a container for spiritual leadership, community, and learning.

And now the spiral curls again. In this new era—post-pandemic, mid-collapse, amid new awakenings—we feel the mycelial threads reconnecting in refracted relationship. Now, again, as always, as movement.

A planting in the present. A winking hint to the future.

YH inhales.

VH exhales.

Judaism renews itself with each breath. The Name completes itself in every act of justice, every midrash uncovered, every circle that remembers how to sing. And then starts over again.

This is not the end of the story, but a space where something might begin again.

Each of us, HaShem, and every blade of grass, renewing Judaism and life itself, again and again.