What is a holy beggar?

Answer 1

In Judaism, the term "holy beggar" was first used in the summer of 1967 by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994) to describe the deep spiritual quest of the hippies in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. Ostensibly, a beggar is impoverished and begs for sustenance. But the "holy beggar" is wandering the streets of the world, "begging not to take, but to give." He is begging "to turn over the whole world" and is offering a utopian gift of hope and redemption. In Reb Shlomo's kabbalistic-Hasidic vision, these are the "holy hippies" who despite the external disguise they are neither impoverished nor bewildered; they are on a truly momentous spiritual quest.

Reb Shlomo's mission was to reach out to "holy beggars" who are "hungry like no generation before" because they are thirsting to "bring the great day of love and peace". The attractiveness of this idea is that it unveiled a cosmic purpose in the hippie quest. It was interlaced with Shlomo's midrashic interpretation that even non-Jews, "hungry for God's presence," found their way to Mount Sinai, to join in receiving "the deepest secrets of the world."

Reb Shlomo's innovative creation of the term "holy beggars" may have been influenced by the Hasidic dramatizations of the image of the beggar as a disguise behind which hides a righteous saint or a miraculous miracle worker. A further development of the literary image of the beggar can be found in the tale by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1872-1910), The Seven Beggars (See translation by Aryeh Kaplan, Woodstock, Vermont, 2005. There the parable is how the beggars bring ultimate redemption.