Reuven Goldfarb

[Aryae Coopersmith]

Recorded at the Reb Shlomo Shloshim and reunion at Aryae's home in El Granada, California, October 30, 1994

I first came out to California in ’67. I was riding the dream of the mythical Summer of Love. My girlfriend and I, at first we didn’t want to go to San Francisco because that was the media center for what was happening. So we tried San Diego, and after about a week there, we felt there wasn’t enough happening for us, so we went to Los Angeles. My brother put us up in an apartment for a week. It was interesting, but it wasn’t our place. And finally we said, well, I guess there’s no other place to go; we’ll have to go to San Francisco. So we did.

I stayed in San Francisco exactly a year from the day I arrived, which was July 4th. And left on July 4th in ’68. I went back east. A lot had happened to me in the meantime. I’m not going to tell you about that, because that’s not the point of the story.

But one of the things I had to do was alternative service for the draft. I was a CO, and I got a job on Long Island, in the winter of ’69, a 10-week job in which I lasted nine and a half weeks. And then I was ready to come out again, but it took me a long time. And it wasn’t until maybe August, right before Yom Tov actually, that I made it all the way out west.

I was really in a broken condition in ’69. In ’67 I had come out with a head of steam. In ’69, I had basically nowhere else to go. And I needed to put myself together. But I didn’t know how to do it by myself. I was fortunate to meet a lot of strong spiritual teachers in those days. The area was flooded with them. A lot of them kept people’s neshamas (souls) intact while they organized the physical plane around themselves.

One of them was Stephen Gaskin. I know a lot of people from the House used to go in convoys to the Monday Night Class. I first connected with Stephen on September 29, 1969, and then two weeks later, on October 13, at which time he announced that he was a true teacher and disbanded the class for an indefinite period, leaving a lot of us, you know, sort of adrift. A few weeks later he got the word that his people couldn’t survive without regular Monday night meetings, so he reconvened the class and added to the Monday night class a Sunday morning service. At Sunday morning services, he told a Hasidic story. And then, after he finished the story, he looked around and said, “Where does that come from?”

His eyes happened to light on mine. I said, “It sounds like a Ba’al Shem Tov story.” I had recognized it from my reading of Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, which was one of my first reentries into authentic Judaism. So he nodded, gestured affirmatively, and said, “Right,” thusacknowledging the source.

Immediately someone walked up to me and said, “Have you heard of the House of Love and Prayer?”

And I said, “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been there.” So this person told me where it was; he gave me the address on Arguello.

So next Shabbos I walked over to the House. I was living on Spruce St. at that time, near the Avenues, so it was convenient. And someone named Richard, it must have been Friday evening -- I don’t know if anyone knows who this Richard is, ‘cause I haven’t seen him since -- but he kind of glided down the stairs and put his arm around me and said, “Welcome brother!” And I felt a real heart connection. I had felt spiritual connections with teachers and groups before that, but I hadn’t felt a heart connection, that feeling of homecoming that I felt from this greeting. So I felt good. I thought, though not in words, this is a place I can stick around for awhile.

I started coming regularly on Friday nights. As I said before, that was the last Shabbos that Alex and Miriam were in San Francisco. And after that I learned with Aryae, and with everyone else who was singing Shlomo’s tune.

But I hadn’t met Shlomo yet. That came about a couple of months later, in the East Bay. Again I heard from somebody, probably at the House, Shlomo is doing a concert in Berkeley. So I got the address, and I hitchhiked over. I walked in late, later than he did, and there was a lot of music and dancing in big circles. So I joined one of the circles, and I saw people were kind of very friendly, and didn’t have a lot of barriers, and it felt nice and sweet, but I hadn’t checked out the main man yet. So I walked over to Shlomo, who was standing in the middle playing his guitar, and he looked at me coming over toward him, and he strummed some more chords, and in the middle of the song he said, “Street people are building bridges for all of us to walk on.”

Wow! (laughs) I didn’t even have to ask him anything, you know. He just gave me an appropriate teaching for that moment. So that was enough for me. I went back and I continued dancing.

[reuven sabel aka golden gater rebbe aka proshevitzer rebbe aka proszowicer rebbe]

reb shlomo zatzal knew what to teach us at those times