The paper examines the friendship forged by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement, and Howard Thurman, Christian mystic and social reformer, beginning in the 1950s when Schachter-Shalomi was a graduate student at Boston University and Thurman was serving as the dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. The paper argues that interreligious friendships are central to the leadership styles and practices of both religious leaders and examines the legacies of friendships among other religious leaders trained in Thurman and Schachter-Shalomi’s intellectual lineages at Boston University and Hebrew College respectively and beyond. The paper also gives particular attention to the influences of Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman on two pairings of contemporary Jewish-Christian friends: a senior rabbi and mid-career United Methodist pastor/academic, each with deep ties to Hebrew College and Boston University respectively, and a pair of their students, each now emerging into prominent national religious leadership positions.
Schachter-Shalomi wrote about the beginnings of his relationship with Thurman in several published volumes. In both “What I Found in the Chapel” in My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation, edited by Jennifer Howe Peace, Or N. Rose, and Gregory Mobley (Orbis, 2012) and in a chapter of My Life in Jewish Renewal: A Memoir (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) Schachter-Shalomi recounts how he initially mistakes the kindness of a black man in the basement of Marsh Chapel in finding an appropriate place to daven as that of the building’s janitor, only to learn that it was Thurman himself who had removed the brass cross in the building’s lower chapel when he made an appointment with the revered dean to discuss taking a course with him in a future semester. Schachter-Shalomi goes on to recount later bringing his son to Thurman at the time of his son’s bar mitzvah to be blessed by the dean, and Thurman writes about the importance of that blessing and their friendship to him in an unpublished portion of Thurman’s own autobiography.
Schachter-Shalomi’s reflections on the beginnings of their friendship have become required reading in several rabbinical and Christian theological school contexts. At Hebrew College, students read Schachter-Shalomi’s recollection of his first encounters with Thurman in the lower-level chapel of Marsh Chapel while taking their required immersive introduction to Christianity course. All master of divinity students at Drew University Theological School produce written reflections on Thurman’s early advice to Schachter-Shalomi in their first very first term as part of the school’s mentored portfolio program and its commitment to meaningful interreligious engagement. Several scholars who teach with Schachter-Shalomi’s reflections on the emergence of his friendship with Thurman have also published about the use of Schachter-Shalomi’s material in a variety of classroom contexts, often in the context of cultivating interreligious leadership capacity. (See Or N. Rose, “Howard Thurman’s Mentorship of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi,” in Interreligious Dispatches from an Emerging Field, edited by Hans Gustafson [Baylor University Press, 2020] and Soren M. Hessler, “‘Nothing Off Limits’: Pedagogical Reflections by a Christian Teaching Christianity at Rabbinical School,” in Deep Understanding for Divisive Times: Essays Marking a Decade of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, edited by Lucinda Allen Mosher, Axel Marc Oaks Takács, Or N. Rose, and Mary Elizabeth Moore [Interreligious Studies Press, 2020].)
Drawing from Schachter-Shalomi’s concept of spiritual eldering (Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older [Updated Edition; Balance, 2014]) and Shively Smith’s approach to Thurman’s hermeneutics of interpretation of life and mind (first appearing in “Thurman-eutics: Howard Thurman’s ‘Clothesline’ for the Interpretation of the Life of the Mind and Journey of the Spirit, in Anchored in the Current: Discovering Howard Thurman as Educator, Activist, Guide, and Prophet, edited by Gregory C. Ellison, II [Westminster John Knox, 2020] and more fully developed in Smith’s forthcoming Reading Howard Thurman: His Practice of Interpretation through Womanist Eyes [Fortress, 2026], I discuss both sages’ ruminations on interreligious and intergenerational friendship and how those lived friendships grounded and enhanced their leadership styles and practices.
Finally, the paper concludes by examining two contemporary friendships between intellectual descendants of Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman. Engaging the relationships between a senior rabbi on the Hebrew College faculty and a mid-career United Methodist pastor/scholar and a pair of their students, one a United Methodist divinity student and emerging interreligious scholar who will join the staff of the United States National Holocaust Memorial Museum in May 2025 and the other a Hebrew College rabbinical school student who serves as a mikvah guide and educator (both of whom are also Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics Seminary Fellows), the paper proposes ways contemporary religious leaders seek to emulate Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman’s intergenerational interreligious friendship practices.
The paper aims to contribute to the growing body of Thurman scholarship and the emerging scholarly interest in Schachter-Shalomi while also bringing insights from interreligious studies scholars and their engagement with Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman to religious reflections on friendship. The paper also identifies significant discussions of friendship in recent interreligious studies literature and locates interreligious friendship as a central practice of contemporary understandings of interreligious leadership (See Eleazar S. Fernandez, editor, Teaching for a Multifaith World [Pickwick, 2017]; Eboo Patel, Jennifer Howe Peace, and Noah J. Silverman, editors, Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field [Beacon, 2018]; Najeeba Syeed and Heidi Hadsell, editors, Experiments in Empathy: Critical Reflections on Interreligious Education [Brill, 2020]; Alon Goshen-Gottstein, editor, Interreligious Heroes: Role Models and Spiritual Exemplars for Interfaith Practice [Wipf & Stock, 2021]; Eboo Patel, We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy [Beacon, 2022]; Hans Gustafson, Everyday Wisdom: Interreligious Studies in a Pluralistic World [Fortress, 2023]; Rachel S. Mikva, Interreligious Studies: An Introduction [Cambridge University Press, 2023]; Anne-Marie Ellithorpe, Laura Duhan-Kaplan, and Hussam S Timani, editors, Multireligious Reflections on Friendship: Becoming Ourselves in Community [Lexington, 2023]).
The paper examines the friendship forged by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement, and Howard Thurman, Christian mystic and social reformer, beginning in the 1950s when Schachter-Shalomi was a graduate student at Boston University and Thurman was serving as the dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. The paper argues that interreligious friendships are central to the leadership styles and practices of both religious leaders and examines the legacies of friendships among other religious leaders trained in Thurman and Schachter-Shalomi’s intellectual lineages at Boston University and Hebrew College respectively and beyond. The paper also gives particular attention to the influences of Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman on two pairings of contemporary Jewish-Christian friends: a senior rabbi and mid-career United Methodist pastor/academic, each with deep ties to Hebrew College and Boston University respectively, and a pair of their students, each now emerging into prominent national religious leadership positions.