Hassidism at Boombamela

March 30, 2009 - 4:05 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Profiles, Religion 

Michael GolombA long-time disciple of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and a seasoned grassroots organizer, Michael Golomb used to spend his efforts marching against the Vietnam War. But since moving to Israel along with many of Carlebach’s Hassidim as part of that community’s mid-Seventies exodus from Haight-Ashbury, Golomb has busied himself with spreading a message of love at gatherings, encounter events and festivals – even mainstream, teenybopper-y ones like Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet.

Golomb and his crew have helped to organize Tents of Love and Prayer at several of these festivals, with the sub-camp serving as a festival within a festival for many party-goers. According to a statement released this week by director Guy Peleg, Boombalema’s planners love Carlebach-style Judaism because of its emphasis on happiness and love of mankind, making Golomb’s contributions key elements to the eye-opening, pan-spiritualist experience Peleg is trying to forge.

At the festivals, the Tent of Love and Prayer offers kosher food (which is even harder to come by during Passover), prayer services, meditation sessions, low-impact lectures and the like.

But it’s not always easy to keep one’s mind on lofty ideas when corporate sponsorship banners are flying high and scantily clad perky young ones are doing the same. And the mainstream festival circuit has received plenty of criticism in recent years about these trends from the hippie hardcore populace that first provided their critical mass about a decade ago. But Carlebach-style outreach was never afraid of “elevating the sparks” (as the Hassidic masters might have put it) out from the ditches. As The Chicago Tribune did put it back in 2007:

…Carlebach was one of the first emissaries of the Lubavitcher movement, a Hasidic group that pioneered outreach to disaffected Jews in the 1950s. Carlebach found himself particularly drawn to lost souls: drug addicts, runaway young people, the homeless.

Golomb carries this torch proudly, dancing while carrying a Torah scroll into the throngs of drum circle, sunset-hailing revelers at the opening evening of each festival. And it’s nice to see Boombalema’s leadership, which essentially represents the ultimate in the crossroads between mainstream pop culture and new-age (which usually means post-Jewish) spiritualism, appreciating his efforts.

This year’s three-day Boombamela Festival on Nitzanim Beach is set to kick off on April 9, with plans for this year including utilization of solar energy to cut down on electricity waste by half.

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Beresheet bumped up

June 19, 2008 - 7:15 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Music, Pop Culture, Travel 

BoombamellaIsraelis love festivals. The Israel Festival is a five-week affair this year, currently in progress. Hardly a week goes by without some kind of event being dubbed as the next big festival, from the Cinema South Film Festival in Sderot, which wrapped up two weeks ago, to this past week’s kosher food extravaganza in Petach Tikva.

The most lively mainstream events on the annual festival calendar in recent years have been the big three hippie festivals, Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet, each taking place during a major Jewish holiday, times when the nation more or less goes on vacation. Intoxicating blends of new-age spirituality, corporate sponsorships, Eastern ethnic jams, family camping, teenybopper-friendly pop, nudism, all-night trance parties, beach living and even Carlebach-style Jewish outreach, the big three have drawn crowds in the tens of thousands since before the millennium.

But stretch marks have begun to show. Shantipi, the first one in the game, tried to reposition itself as less tween-oriented and more family-friendly in 2004, and when efforts were met with lower attendance, planners attempted and failed to backtrack on the move. Shantipi didn’t even take place this past Shavuot, earlier this month.

Even the most robust draw in recent years, Passover’s Boombamela, has seen a drop in attendance. “I reckon we’ll have twenty-five thousand or even thirty thousand people this year,” the festival’s artistic director Mathaus Waldorf told The Jerusalem Post’s Barry Davis a few months ago. It didn’t pan out. While something like 15,000 tickets were sold, a solid turnout by any means, it was a mere half of the load that planners had invested in infrastructure to accommodate. Plus, many of the revelers didn’t stay for the entire four-day shindig – the schoolteachers’ strike of the autumn had made for a shortened vacation from classes, and Hamas missiles falling in nearby Ashkelon surely inspired many parents to ask their children to come home early – lending the proceedings a feeling of emptiness.

The Beresheet festival, which started out ten years ago as a Rosh Hashanah production, has also attempted to rebrand itself as something bigger and longer in recent years, opting instead to take place during the longer holiday of Sukkot since 2004. Brought to you by the same production crew that organizes Boombamela, this year’s Beresheet is set to take place over three days starting on July 14 on the sores of the Sea of Galilee, a far safer bet in terms of minimizing school schedule conflicts and a somewhat safer bet in terms of minimizing the chances of a missile attack. The move might just mark a return to the millennial days of booming attendance, but the pre-commercialized purity of the early days will probably remain elusive.

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