The Turbulent Marriage of Ethnicity and Spirituality: Rabbi Theodore Falcon, Makom Ohr Shalom 1 and Jewish Mysticism in the Western United States, 1969-1993

Abstract

American Jewish culture entered a prolonged crisis in the 1970s and 1980s as intermarriage and spiritual rigidity appeared to threaten the viability of the Jewish community. Many American Jews turned to alternative forms of spirituality. A small coterie of these Jewish spiritual explorers returned to their ethnic heritage to rediscover the long-neglected interior dimensions of Judaism. This paper examines the distinctive Kabbalistic community that coalesced around Rabbi Ted Falcon in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s and grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. Trained as a Reform rabbi and a psycho-therapist, Falcon became a pioneering advocate of meditative and self-reflective techniques that were firmly rooted in Jewish scripture and Kabbalistic texts. The synagogues that Falcon led in Los Angeles and Seattle became magnets for disaffected Jews who had abandoned their tradition in favor of Eastern religions and New Age spirituality.