He is the founder of the Spiritual Eldering Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which sponsors nondenominational workshops to help people grow into elderhood. He is also co-founder of the havurah movement and the founder of B'nai Or Religious Fellowship, Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Aleph Rabbinic Seminary, and The Yesod Foundation.
Reb Zalman was ordained by Lubavitch Yeshivah Brooklyn in 1947 and received his M.A. from Boston University in Pastoral Psychology and his D.H.L. (Doctor of Hebrew Letters) in 1968 from Hebrew Union College. He has served as teacher and school principal, congregational rabbi, campus chaplain, Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Temple University, and former World Wisdom Chair and Professor of Religion at Naropa University.

Born Zalman Schachter in 1924 in Poland, the rabbi-to-be soon moved with his family to Vienna, where he attended both a traditional yeshiva and a socialist-Zionist high school. When the Nazis threatened, the Schachters went to Antwerp; when Belgium came under German attack, the family began an odyssey. Detained in a camp in Vichy France, they escaped to Africa, then to the West Indies, and finally to New York in 1941.

He completed his rabbinical studies in the Yeshiva of the Chabad/Lubavitch movement and received ordination from the late Lubavitcher Rabbi.  After serving the Lubavitch community for a number of years he came to the conclusion that rather than recreating the destroyed world of Eastern European Jewry, the true need of our time was to bring together the best of that world with the humanist insights of contemporary society.  He also understood the need to create a Judaism which could speak to the thousands of young Jews who were discovering spirituality outside of Judaism.  A result of his work was the Jewish Renewal movement.  Reb Zalman’s teachings incorporate wide-ranging knowledge of the spiritual technology developed by peoples all over the planet.