• The grandson of the sage Baba Sali and a rabbi considered a Kabbalah expert in his own right was murdered, stabbed, at his yeshiva in Israel. He was 70. A suspect is in custody. [Haaretz]

• Ahmad Tibi, the Knesset’s deputy speaker and likely the most prominent Israeli Arab politician, calls for a boycott of all companies aiding the settlement enterprise and decries the anti-boycott law. [IHT]

• A judge removed the circumcision initiative from the San Francisco ballot, and appeal may be prohibitive. [Ynet]

• Of course, in the Bay Area, many including Jews are rethinking the practice nonetheless. (Hint: that’s how it’s supposed to happen, not with coercive laws imposing norms.) [NYT]

• The latest Facebook revolution? It’s in Israel. [Haaretz]

Calendars are always complicated and sometimes baffling. Layered with history and ritual, they bind communities together by preserving traditions and erasing the passage of time. My father taught me to observe Passover as if I had been a slave in Egypt: to imagine that I had dragged stones up pyramids and then followed Moses to freedom. Hearing his powerful voice and evocative words, I could see the Exodus, once a year, in my mind’s eye. Yet time does pass, and as it passes traditional calendars develop fissures and contradictions. The long Seder my family celebrated, reclining at table, did not much resemble the Passover prescribed in Exodus 12:11: “And thus shall ye eat it, your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste.” The Jewish calendar as a whole, with its year count and months that did not match the standard ones, was a mystery to me. It was even more confusing to realize, as a child, that it must have changed in multiple ways since ancient times.

If you’ve ever wondered about the Jewish year and its history, Elisheva Carlebach’s marvelous new book, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, has much to offer you. A preeminent specialist on the Jews of early modern Germany, Carlebach concentrates on what became of the calendar in the early modern period. In the 16th century and after, technical literature about time, which had once been treated as an esoteric knowledge reserved for an elite, became widely available to Jews for the first time, and Carlebach traces this process in detail. But as she reaches back to explain the distant origins of early modern debates and practices and sets the calendars into their larger contexts, Palaces of Time provides even more than it promises: a fascinating and provocative introduction, full of surprises, to the Jewish experience of time.

Richly documented and sumptuously illustrated, the book tells a sinuous and sometimes wild story, one in which books of many kinds, in all their grubby materiality, play central roles. Carlebach has long been known as a supremely skillful reader of texts—an approach long central to Jewish scholarship, and one sometimes combined with a reluctance to admit that readers actually encounter texts in the material form of books, where they often leave rich evidence about these encounters. From the 1970s on, historians of the book—Robert Darnton, Lisa Jardine, William Sherman—have shown how to enrich intellectual history by combining textual analysis with the study of books as material objects. Malachi Beit-Arie, Adam Shear, and others have successfully applied this method to Jewish texts. Carlebach too now attends, with great skill and sensitivity, to the material forms of the books she studies, to their sometimes-cheap paper and poor print, their complex and powerful illustrations, and their annotations. Reading in this new way, she can tell us not only what the calendar texts say, but what mattered most in them to the Jewish readers and thinkers who printed them, and copied them, and annotated them, and wore them out.

In the 15th century and after, Jews produced calendars of every kind, from simple wall charts listing feasts for the year to come to ibburim and sifre evronot, technical treatises on the structure and meaning of the year and longer cycles. Like the rabbinic Bible and the Talmud, Hebrew works on the calendar were printed and reprinted, not only by Jews but also by Christians. Johann Froben, the great Basel printer who was Erasmus’ chief publisher for much of his life, brought out the first printed ibbur in 1527.

Yet calendars also continued to circulate in manuscript form for centuries. Printed calendars and treatises often swarmed with typographical and technical errors, as press correctors noted when they produced what they claimed were better editions. Mistakes piled on mistakes could make these technical works too inaccurate to use. A careful reader—like the two portrayed on a page from a Berlin manuscript reproduced by Carlebach, studying their sifre evronot on opposite sides of a table—might well prefer to make his own copy, especially if he could use a sefer yashan noshan (very old book) as his model. In the wake of ritual murder trials, efforts to ban the Talmud, and expulsions of ancient Jewish communities, scholarly Jews in the German world feared that their traditions might disappear. They transcribed ancient treatises on the calendar as zealously as ancient works of Kabbalah. The literature of time spanned a spectrum from smudgy single sheets, mechanically reproduced and swarming with errors, meant to be nailed to the walls of shops and hovels, to quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, treasured by the learned bibliophiles who had copied them.

Carlebach emphasizes the learning of the Jews in Frankfurt and other centers. But no one, not even the most erudite scholar, could master all the mysteries of the Jewish calendar and its development in this period. The Jewish calendar tries—like other calendars—to square the circle. It follows both the motion of the sun, which passes through the zodiac, determining the seasons, in 365 and one quarter days, and that of the moon, which does the same in 29 and a half days, defining the months. The solar year isn’t evenly divisible into lunar months: how then to know when each Jewish month should begin? In the early centuries of the Common Era, Jews relied on direct observation. Once two independent, sober witnesses had given formal notice that they had observed the new moon, the Sanhedrin would declare that the month had begun and send out messengers with the news. But this system had obvious disadvantages, especially for Jews who lived in the Diaspora. Worse still, because the lunar year was only 354 days long, its months drifted forward in the seasons. Nisan, which is supposed to be the first month of spring, moved into winter. From time to time, accordingly, the Sanhedrin had to intercalate another month, to ensure that Passover took place, as it should, in the spring.

From the 4th century onward, the Jews of Babylon—where astronomy had been practiced in a sophisticated way for many centuries—reconfigured their calendar. An astronomical cycle, 19 years long, at the end of which the lunar and solar years coincided, determined when to add intercalary months. This fixed calendar, traditionally associated with Hillel II, found widespread acceptance. But it was challenged by the Qaraites, who insisted that the calendar, like all other Jewish practices, must rest on the Bible alone. And it provoked fierce debates in the 10th century, when Palestinian and Babylonian communities celebrated Passover on different days.

Two Jews, four calendars. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Jews mastered the new astronomy of the Muslim world. But if Maimonides and Ibn Ezra agreed that these shiny new tools should be put to work perfecting the Jewish calendar, bar Hiyya denounced them and insisted that the astronomy of the patriarchs and ancient rabbis had been more accurate. Only inklings of these fierce arguments—and of the issues they had turned on—found their way into the calendrical texts that were actually printed or copied in Renaissance Europe, and that “winnowed, diluted and mediated the mass of material for the common reader,” Carlebach writes. The great Christian student of calendars Joseph Scaliger may well have been right to proclaim that most 16th-century Jews believed that their fixed calendar went back to Moses himself.

For all their lack of concrete historical information about the Jewish year, the calendrical texts were richly stocked with other materials. Under Carlebach’s skillful hands they yield a flood of new information about Jewish life and thought. Manuscript sifre evronot were often richly and imaginatively executed. Carlebach reproduces many pages, which she explicates with great skill. Like astronomical writers in the Islamic and Christian worlds, Jewish calendar experts equipped texts with volvelles: dials made of layered paper rings, precisely marked off, which could be used to speed up computations. The calendrical works that included these were little analog computers made of paper.

Like Christian illuminators, Jewish ones introduced a rich vein of visual fantasy into many technical books. At the chart for checking one’s calculations, known as a panim ahor (face-back), manuscripts show a man standing on his head or displaying his bare backside to the reader. Puns and plays on words are common. To illustrate the new moon, for example, the illuminator might show a mother rocking her baby in the crib (molad, the technical term for new moon, literally means birth).

Sometimes the symbols are more than idle fantasies. Christian books of hours, designed to help laymen perform their daily devotions, often contained elaborate illustrations of hunts. So did sifre evronot. Mounted and on foot, armed with spears and guns, well-dressed hunters pursued tags and hares, boars and birds across the pages of these technical, largely quantitative books. Sometimes the hunted animal escaped. Pinhas of Halberstadt, in the 18th century, copied hunting scenes directly from Christian models. As their captions he inscribed verses from Isaiah that evoked the eventual triumph of the Jews. For Christians riffling the pages of their prayer books, a hunted hare was just a hare. For Jews reading their calendars, the hare became an emblem of their hope for survival among hostile nations. The calendar really could be a palace of time—or at least a pleasure garden, where Jews found a real if limited refuge from the humiliations and terrors of everyday life in a persecuting society.

Continue reading: saints’ days, chronographs, and “moshi’a.” Or view as a single page.

King James Goes Old Testament, LeBron Hires Rabbi [TMZ]
Related: Charismatic Moroccan Kabbalish Draws Crowds and Questions [Forward]
Earlier: Celebrity Rabbi Maybe Related to Death

• The dozen or so Senate Jews are backing a letter Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is sending to Ambassador Michael Oren expressing grave concern over the conversion bill. [JPost]

• The latest Kabbalah red-string wearer? Gov. David Paterson of New York. [Daily News]

• The IDF has established the Nahshol, “the world’s first female-only unit dedicated to combat intelligence missions, combin[ing] the fighting capabilities of combat forces with advanced intelligence-gathering skills.” That is so insanely hot. [Ynet]

• Israeli political scientist Asher Arian died at 72. [JTA]

• Contributing editor Gary Shteyngart on how technology alienates us from each other. [NYT Book Review]

They say, ‘Sing while you slave,’ I just get bored.

• Toward a definition of JCall, which is (somewhat misleadingly) fashioned as the European J Street. [Foreign Policy]

• A former Israeli diplomat and consul general makes the case for a U.S.-imposed peace plan instead of proximity talks. [Politico]

• In Britain, Leeds University’s student paper was pulled from racks after publishing an interview in which a Palestinian journalist said of news outlets, “They are certainly pro-Israeli. I think you have to ask yourself who controls the media.” [Leeds Student]

• Model Naomi Campbell is having secret meetings (except apparently not-so-secret) with Madonna’s Kaballah mentor. [Page Six]

• “Unfortunately, we receive so many Holocaust teenage diaries composed in European attics that it is impossible to accept each one.” [McSweeney’s]

Mazel tov to Tablet Magazine columnist Josh Lambert, newly the father of Asher:

Definitely seems like a good way to introduce a middle-schooler to the book. If you’re reading this and over the age of 20 or 25 or so, and still haven’t read it, though, you may just want to go pick the thing up and get it over with. It’s required reading in every sense.

Final question: 60secondrecap’s brief written summary argues, “the pinprick of light in all the darkness is that Eliezer does survive to tell his story—and to testify to the remarkable strength of the human spirit.” While the dominant fact of Night is simply its existence—the fact that someone lived through this and then told us about it will never cease to be remarkable—I don’t recall the book as arguing for the triumph of the human spirit, at least in the normal way. One of the book’s more poignant (if ultimately lesser) tragedies is that young Eliezer grows up enamored with Judaism and God—and particularly Kabbalah—yet by the end of the book finds it essentially impossible to be a believer. Even more than depicting the triumph of the human spirit, Night chronicles how a relatively ordinary person can manage simply to stay alive, to maintain the very basics of physical and mental health, in the face of absolute hardship—and, of course, absolute evil.

If you have a different opinion, though, please leave a comment. Or you can also record your own video response and leave it on the 60secondrecap site (a very cool touch!).

Oh, and if you’re a fan of Wiesel’s, may I recommend his brief Nextbook Press book on his own ancestor, the Talmudic scholar Rashi?

Night [60secondrecap]
Related: Rashi [Nextbook Press]

Indeed, it seems like the majority of Jewish liturgy not taken directly from the Torah is made of devotions arranged by permutations of letters, and interpolations of sums: for centuries, rabbis have composed acrostic prayers that spell their own names; and any visit to any synagogue on any day of the week at any of the three daily services will tell you that the number of times a text is repeated is just as important as what that repeated text actually means.

The occasion for these thoughts is no religious epiphany, but rather a rereading of French writer Georges Perec, whose 1978 masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual was just republished in a definitive translation by David Bellos. Perec was a member of Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “the workshop for potential literature”), a French organization founded in 1960 dedicated to the practice, and publicizing, of new writing techniques. Oulipans, whose ranks included Italo Calvino and movement cofounders Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, turned research itself into a literary art as they sought to identify novel constraints by which novels and stories could be produced.

Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters. Perhaps literature’s most famous Lipogram is La disparition, a detective story of sorts written by Perec in 1969, translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void; its 300 pages omit the letter ‘e,’ as if that vowel—and the book’s antihero, Anton Vowl—was representative of European Jewry, forever disappeared. Further, as the very name George Perec contains more than its share of the letter ‘e,’ the author has effectually self-effaced, having written himself out of his own book. Adair’s translation (which also is without the letter ‘e’) is a virtuosic reenactment of virtuosity: “With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.”

round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

Perec was born in Paris in 1936, the son of Polish Jews recently emigrated west; he was related, albeit distantly, to I.L. Peretz, the preeminent Yiddish writer of the 19th century. Perec’s father was killed fighting for his adopted country in World War II; Perec’s mother was murdered, most probably at Auschwitz; Perec himself survived by hiding with relatives and then died too young of cancer in 1982. I invoke Perec’s Judaism only in the way that he did—by scorning religious ritual, and investigating the esoteric aspects, especially the parallels between Oulipian restrictions and the disciplines of kabbalah. It is kabbalah that is responsible for assigning mystical meaning, and numerical worth, to elements of language, and the majority of Jewish prayers utilizing word and letter permutation were composed coevally with the emergence of kabbalah.

Life: A User’s Manual (originally entitled La Vie mode d’emploi) is Creationdom in microcosm, a depiction of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment block at 8 p.m. on June 23, 1975. A curious Jewish character is Cinoc, whose name was originally Kleinhof, then Khinoss or Kheinhoss, changed to Kinoch, Chinoc, Tsinoc, and finally Cinoc. A cynic? Maybe, but also a Jew with a mezuzah affixed to his doorjamb. Perec’s characters from Cinoc to Rorschach to Madame Moreau to the Altamonts are creations entirely of words, and though the author’s prose manipulations might seem to be the most kabbalistic of his accomplishments, they are not. Forget that each chapter’s length is predetermined, that each chapter’s people are predetermined; forget each list of activities, of physical positions, and reading material; what’s most kabbalistic about Perec, and about the best of Oulipo, is not this technical aspect but the transmutation: the magical turning of one thing, a dead word, into another, a living person.

Kabbalistic practice—which, our sages hold, created angels and golems, animals for food and labor in the fields and even, once, in an experiment the Talmud attributes to Rabba, a walking talking human being—became, by the time fiction and poetry came to be written, a cultural act in which letters and words didn’t create life, but merely simulated it. Perec understood this virtuality, and exploited it to present the Oulipian writer—a writer of orders and systems, of cosmogonies and laws given only to be miraculously broken—as a sort of fallen god. Though in his time the new religion was art, or a religion of art, the mysticism underlying all making remained.

But a leading kabbalah-related rabbi, Yitzchak Batzri, is not pleased that Israelis “put out the red carpet” (and the red bracelets) for the star; as he reminds us, she is a non-Jewish, non-converting, sexual innuendo-making woman who therefore shouldn’t even be studying kabbalah, and on top of it all sings live in front of men—a major no-no. Presumably he doesn’t agree with Sarah Silverman, who says that kabbalah is only “the tiniest slice Jewish, but without big noses.”

Madonna to Meet with PM and Livni [JPost]
‘Madonna Forbidden to Sing in Israel’ says Top Kabbalah Rabbi [Arutz 7]
Jewish Without the Big-Noseness [Killing the Buddha]

Rabbis Fly Over Israel in Hopes of Eliminating Swine Flu [Ynet]

So, yeah. Kinda wacky, mostly harmless. Pretty much what you’d expect.

I Found An Answer [ynet]

GIVEN NAME
Kabbalah Berg: Feivel Gruberger
Birther Berg: Philip J. Berg (assuming his birth certificate is not a forgery)

JEWISH?
Kabbalah Berg: Yes, although not all of his co-religionists would say so at this point.
Birther Berg: Yes, according to one interview (he’s also a “life-long member of the NAACP”).

PREVIOUS JOB
Kabbalah Berg: Insurance salesman.
Birther Berg: Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania.

QUESTIONED CREDENTIALS
Kabbalah Berg: He claims to have a Ph.D, but it is not clear in what or from where.
Birther Berg: Was successfully sued for legal malpractice by former clients.

WRITTEN WORKS
Kabbalah Berg: Has published several books, including Kabbalistic Astrology: And The Meaning of Our Lives; Astrology, the Star Connection: The Science of Judaic Astrology; and the presumably more mainstream Kabbalistic Astrology Made Easy.
Birther Berg: Authored a 237-page lawsuit accusing President Bush (actually, both Presidents Bush), Vice President Cheney, and 153 other defendants for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks, in violation of RICO. The case has been dismissed.

FAVORITE ACCESSORY
Kabbalah Berg: A red-string bracelet.
Birther Berg: A copy of Barry Soetoro’s fake birth certificate.

ODD BELIEF
Kabbalah Berg: Believes in reincarnation.
Birther Berg: Believes that thousands of hungry journalists, millions of opposing Republicans, and 300 million Americans have been fooled by an unusually savvy Kenyan man.

The bracelet is but one totem of a relationship with Jews that was, like most everything in the star’s life, rocky. In 1995 he was publicly castigated for lyrics (“Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me”) from the song “They Don’t Care About Us.” Jackson rejected the critique that he espoused anti-Semitism, saying “the song in fact is about the pain of prejudice and hate and is a way to draw attention to social and political problems. I am the voice of the accused and the attacked. I am the voice of everyone. I am the skinhead, I am the Jew, I am the black man, I am the white man,” according to the New York Times. Despite the rebuttal, he changed the lyrics. A second flare-up ten years later renewed speculation about Jackson’s feelings about the Jews when a phone recording of the pop wonder calling two Jewish former business associates “leeches” was leaked.

A reputed loner, Jackson did, apparently, have occasional spiritual advisors—or so Shmuely Boteach suggests in a homage in which the rabbi subtly congratulates himself for accompanying Jackson to Shabbat dinners and services and for introducing him to Elie Wiesel. And David Suissa, the editor of Olam magazine recalls Jackson’s joy at Suissa’s rendition of a Sephardic melody during a meeting in which Jackson agreed to write an article about his childhood for the magazine. The legendary entertainer wrote that his youth “was not an idyllic landscape of memories. My relationship with my father was strained, and my childhood was an emotionally difficult time for me.” For Jackson, difficult times never abated completely.

King Michael [Slate]
Michael Jackson, Islam, and the Middle East [Agoravox]
In New Lyrics, Jackson Uses Slur [NYT]
Michael Jackson Calls Jews ‘Leeches’ [JPost]
The Tragic End of Michael Jackson [JPost]
Memories of My Childhood [Olam]

The film, which opens today, was written and directed by David S. Goyer, who wrote Batman Begins and the Blade trilogy. It follows Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman), a morose college student who still grieves for her long-dead mother and has a penchant for tight athletic wear. When Casey starts noticing a creepy-looking boy with neon-blue eyes who’s invisible to everyone else—on the street, on a nightclub dance floor, behind her bathroom mirror—she knows something isn’t quite right. What she doesn’t know is that she had a twin brother who died before he was born, and that her mother’s mother was—well, let’s just say that by the time an old woman with a Hungarian accent (Jane Alexander) appears, you know Auschwitz can’t be far behind. And it isn’t!

Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) hopes her Hand of Miriam necklace—or maybe her boyfriend, Mark (Cam Gigandet)—can protect her from an unspeakable evil.

In a season with far too many concentration camp movies, out of nowhere comes what amounts to Exorcist V: Shoah. The Unborn is not terribly scary, and it’s humorless (unless you count the scenes with the homicidal six-year-old, which had the audience guffawing at the screening I attended). Aside from its Jewish angle it’s as predictable as all the other horror films that studios dump into theaters every January. The old Hungarian, Sofi Kozma, is Casey’s grandmother. She survived Auschwitz as a child, but her twin brother didn’t. The siblings were subjected to one of Josef Mengele’s perverse experiments, in which the brother had something toxic injected into his eyes to make them blue. (Since, you know, blue eyes were important to the Nazis.) The brother died, and then he came back to life. But he wasn’t the same anymore—he was a dybbuk! Yes, here’s a mainstream horror movie aimed at teenagers—complete with video IM’ing and babysitting and vodka-and-Red-Bulls—that has a dybbuk as its villain, and goes to awkward lengths to explain what a dybbuk is.

In her skillful accent, Jane Alexander says that she and her fellow kiddie Auschwitz prisoners could tell that her brother was no longer her brother. He had neon-blue eyes and a ghostly pallor. “So I killed it,” she says. Yep, she killed her own brother at Auschwitz. (And you thought The Reader was the most deplorable Holocaust-exploiting film now in theaters.) Sofi reveals that this brother who died at Auschwitz is now the dybbuk that’s haunting Casey. He—it, whatever—wants to be reborn in her, his great-niece. There’s only one way out: an exorcism.

Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) and Casey attempt to drive away the dybbuk with a joint reading from the Book of Mirrors.

For some reason the exorcism can be performed by only one person: Rabbi Sendak, played by esteemed non-Jew Gary Oldman. He’s a tweedy, progressive rabbi, and he tells Casey when she comes to him that he doesn’t believe in any kabbalah nonsense. That is, until a few scenes later, when a mysterious wind in his synagogue tears the Torah to pieces, and he gets menaced by a dog with an upside-down head. When the exorcism finally begins, Rabbi Sendak is assisted by a basketball-playing Episcopal priest (Idris Elba—Stringer Bell from The Wire!). But the exorcism doesn’t go as planned, even though Casey does some impressive writhing on the gurney she’s strapped to. (“My main source of research was watching real exorcisms on YouTube,” Yustman says in the press notes.)

In many horror movies dealing with religion and the occult, the lead—often a skinny hottie—suffers as punishment for her loss of faith. As Goyer, the writer-director, says in an interview on Rottentomatoes.com, The Unborn can be seen as one of them:

Rottentomatoes: There’s also the idea in the movie that younger generations are detached from their heritage, that Casey not only doesn’t practice the Jewish faith but also is unaware of the dybbuk that has cursed her family for generations.

Goyer: Well, it’s a subtext. They’re detached from their lineage, they’re detached from their heritage, they’re detached from their families, and that makes them more vulnerable, because there’s not as much of a sense of community. It’s all subtext, but it’s in there, yeah. Absolutely.

Goyer goes on to say that survivor’s guilt, passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, is an equally strong factor in Casey’s torment. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. What a relief, after the film’s unsurprising surprise ending, to see The Unborn’s final credit: “NO ACTUAL TORAH SCROLLS WERE DESTROYED OR DAMAGED IN THE MAKING OF THIS MOTION PICTURE.”

I had a brief introduction to the subject in high school, when a chain-smoking Israeli expat who dabbled in amateur theater attempted to explain the Sefirot to my ninth grade class, but all I got out of it was a deep and abiding sense of puzzlement. (Divine emanations? Broken vessels spilling forth holy light? From this you build a universe?)

A little reading later in life didn’t help much. I’ve always identified with the rational, logical side of Judaism; give me a good, old-fashioned, obsessive-compulsive Talmudic argument any day. Ideas like the transmigration of souls and the magical manipulation of words and numbers—those, I just can’t wrap my head around.

I’m not proud of this. Kabbalah has deep roots in Judaism, and it is said to inform even non-mystical, mainstream aspects of the tradition in ways that I am certain never to appreciate. I have had to reconcile myself to this secret shame, this inability to penetrate the deeper mysteries of my heritage. Madonna, I’m not.

Jonathan Keren

But having recently heard the Israeli composer and violinist Jonathan Keren introduce a new, Kabbalah-inspired work, On the Bridge of Words: A Triple Concerto for Narrator, Clarinet, Piano and Chamber Orchestra, I no longer feel quite so bad about my failure to pierce the veil of Jewish mysticism.

Keren is not the first contemporary Jewish composer to address arcane spiritual concepts in his work; the recently deceased Moshe Cotel, for example, incorporated both Torah study and Kabbalah in his compositions. Unlike Cotel, however, Keren is not a rabbi, and the task he set himself might have been daunting even for a scholar: On the Bridge of Words sets to music six different snippets of text by writers and philosophers who were involved with or inspired by Kabbalah, from the 13th century Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia to Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and Franz Kafka. During a pre-concert talk, Keren”a young, bespectacled figure with the kind of unruly hair you’d expect from a professional artist or a serious pothead”explained why he avoided using phrases plucked from actual Kabbalistic texts like the Zohar: they were incomprehensible. So instead of going to primary sources “that, honestly, I tried to read but couldn’t understand,” he decided to crib from people who ostensibly did. Hey, graduate students in the humanities do it; why not composers?

The excerpts Keren chose all related to language or music, and he tried to evoke their content in his compositions. Those intended connections were lost on me—do dissonant, stabbing piano chords and sustained string notes really conjure the “steel bridges over still waters” of Bialik’s The Explicit and the Allusive In Language?—but I enjoyed the music for its own sake. Keren is a modernist with a gift for dramatic gestures, and On the Bridge of Words commanded attention, even if it didn’t quite seem to fulfill its programmatic agenda.

Daniel David Feinsmith

In a different musical take on Kabbalah, California-based composer Daniel David Feinsmith doesn’t wade around the edges of Jewish mysticism; he dives right in and rolls around in it. A former Zen monk who has cobbled together his own brand of “meditative Judaism” from both Jewish and Buddhist sources, Feinsmith sees music as a “magical tool” that can be used to affect, and to improve, the world around us. He achieves this musical tikkun olam using techniques that are straight out of the Kabbalistic playbook; his works are intended, through a careful balance between contrast and repetition, to foster a trance-like state among listeners.

Drawing on the Sefer Yezira (“Book of Creation”), a 1000-year-old work of speculative philosophy that ascribes the creation of the world to the divine manipulation of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Feinsmith generates his tones and rhythms using the numerological values of the names of God and of select biblical passages. The piece “Yahweh,” for string quartet and handbell choir, was created using the numerical sequence 10, 5, 6, 5, which corresponds to the letters in the Tetragrammaton. A medieval Kabbalist would recognize this as a form of gematria, which reveals the hidden meanings of words through their numerical equivalents, while a modern composer would see in it a compositional algorithm that turns numbers into music. (Come to think of it, mystics and “serious” composers have a lot in common: both tend to attract small groups of fanatical devotees, and no one really understands what they do.)

Abulafia in particular might have admired Feinsmith’s method: According to Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah, Abulafia advocated a particular brand of textual manipulation, or hochmat ha-zeruf (“the science of combination”), that used the letters making up the names of God for meditative purposes. He even compared this technique to music, “which too could conduct the soul to a state of the highest rapture by the combination of sounds.” That seems like something the Hasidim, who have done more than any other group to popularize Kabbalah, would appreciate: their wordless chants, or niggunim, are intended to induce a state of spiritual ecstasy.

Feinsmith’s music might not have quite the same effect, but it is powerful stuff nonetheless, and his hypnotic melodies and driving rhythms can be appreciated without understanding the arcane processes through which they are derived. That in itself seems rather Kabbalistic: After all, the goal of all this mind-bending mysticism is not to win the gold medal for the most complex intellectual gymnastics, but to achieve a closer union with the divine. For a rational secularist like me, a transcendental musical experience is about as close as I’ll ever come.

According to Judaic scholar Edna Nahshon, though, the symbolic value of shoes is a year-round affair. Her new book, a collection of essays aptly titled Jews and Shoes, aims to trace the role of footwear in the evolution of Jewish identity. Nahshon follows shoes across the sartorial map. Examining the Bible’s treatment of Moses’ sandals, Ora Horn Prouser, a scholar at the Academy for Jewish Religion, discovers a window into her relationship with God. Fashion historian Ayala Raz finds Zionist ideology inscribed upon popular Israeli footwear. The Jewish Museum’s Andrew Ingall puts a Jewish spin on Primo Levi’s fetishistic preference for women in heels, and artist Mayer Kirshenblatt offers a glimpse into life in pre-war Poland as he recalls his years as a shoemaker. If the essays in Nahshon’s collection figure the shoe as an extension of the Jewish body, Jews and Shoes offers a “cultural anatomy” of footwear.

Roll your mouse over the illustration to learn more about Jews and shoes . . .

Illustration by Vanessa Davis.

As happens in walk-ups, one day I passed the woman—petite, beautiful, black-haired—on the stairs four times. We finally introduced ourselves; Carole warmly welcomed me to the building. I met her husband shortly after that. Yitzhak Buxbaum is a small, wiry 63-year-old with a close-cropped beard. He usually wears a beret and jogging shoes, and has an odd air about him—at once intense and distracted. In our hallway chats, I learned that he had written several books about Judaism and spirituality (among them The Life and Teachings of Hillel, A Person Is Like a Tree, and The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov), and that he has a commercial website—jewishspirit.com—that bills itself as a “gateway to spirituality, mysticism, and kabbalah.” Most interesting to me was the fact that he was a maggid, an ordained storyteller. I’d never met one before, and I was curious about how and why he came to be one. Luckily, Yitzhak loves to talk.

We met in the second-floor apartment, which is full of books and decorated with exquisite religious paintings—Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian as well as Jewish. This is where Yitzhak does his teaching and writing, and Carole gives yoga lessons.

On your website, you mention in passing that you used to be an atheist. That surprised me.

When I went away to college, that was the first time I was required to put religion on a form, and I put “none,” because like many people of my generation—maybe yours, too—after the bar mitzvah that was the end of it. I happily call myself at that period a fastidious atheist: philosophically hardcore and strict. My mother was an atheist. My father believed in God, but not in a very active way.

I was studying biology and zoology—that was my field of science. There is an inclination in science, of course, to be materialistic: not in a greedy sense, but in terms of spirituality, needing proof. I didn’t have any belief in a big person in the sky. That was my scientific attitude, coming through my rationalism.

But as far as I can tell, your life now is devoted to the religious and mystical. Something clearly changed. What happened, and when?

Because of the crisis of the Vietnam War I was depressed, like many people, and I had to decide what the meaning of life was. So I started to explore, just a little bit, religion, which was very strange for me. I was influenced by Tolstoy, who at the age of fifty became totally religious. His Confession is amazing. It’s a seventy-page book that explains how he came to believe in God. And I read Kierkegaard; his idea of the leap of faith was also influential for me. I had to figure out how one departs from rationalism.

I had been going to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Then, because of the war, and the turmoil connected to it, science seemed irrelevant. And my interest in animals seemed irrelevant. I learned about rich and poor, and the suffering in the world, and oppression. I dropped out. I was in my early twenties. I was this wild radical, with what I called a Hebro, the Hebrew version of the Afro.

If you weren’t a student, it was a matter of going to the Army, going to jail, going to Canada, or teaching. I followed a friend, a Harvard guy, back to Cambridge and I started teaching high school, but it meant nothing to me. I had to discover the meaning of life, or else I was going to lose myself. I spent weeks and months thinking. I’d sit in the Pamplona Café for hours. People thought I was doing nothing, but I was the most intensely focused I had ever been in my life.

Then one night I was walking down the street, and I realized that the deepest thing I knew was that I had to do good. If I felt obligated to do good, what was obligating me? It was not from my parents, it was not from the culture; it was something very, very deep. Half a year later I realized it was God.

Was your search for the meaning of life always tied up with Judaism?

At about the same time that I had that realization, I was also thinking about being Jewish, which had previously seemed of no interest or relevance. I reflected on my Jewishness along the lines of the “black is beautiful” and women’s movements, and recognized that I was ashamed of who I was due to an internalized anti-Semitism. I opened up to investigate Judaism. I read Martin Buber, and then went to see Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, my great rabbi.

The first time, I went with a friend to Brandeis, where Shlomo was appearing in the student union building. He spoke and sang so beautifully. Forty-five minutes into the event he jumped up, and all the people around us jumped up—and started to jump up and down to the music. I said to my friend, “Let’s get out of here. This is a worship service!” I wasn’t ready for worship. I was dipping my toe in, and someone shoved me in the pool—but I didn’t know how to swim. But after some months I was so attracted by the perfume of Shlomo’s holy presence that I just had to see more of him.

I started going to the Hillel at Boston University regularly. Shlomo was teaching there. After some time of attending, I came up with the correct question for him. I realized that God is not an object, so we can’t ask, “Does God exist?” the way we ask, “Does a table exist? Does the building exist?” A person from a rationalist perspective thinks they can just cogitate, “Is there a big person in the sky?” God is something different. So at a question-and-answer session, I said, “Shlomo, I’ve never met God.” And Shlomo said, “Brother, I would like to introduce you.”

What happened next?

Well, I left Cambridge, came to Brooklyn, and went to Lubavitch yeshiva. I studied with them for half a year. I grew payes and a beard. I always have to be a radical.

What did your mother and father think of all of this?

My mother was a very tolerant, nonjudgmental person. She wondered why I did this, but she was okay with anything that I did. My father was thrilled, because he had been trying to tell me for years and years and years how Judaism is the meaning of life. He was a businessman, and he hadn’t been very articulate, but he was sincere. But he couldn’t bear the fact that I had long payes, these sidelocks. I learned in Lubavitch that you can make a deal—a business deal—about religious things, which, from a secular point of view, seems totally bizarre. I said, “Dad, if you’ll put on tefillin, I’ll cut the payes.” So he put on tefillin every morning and I cut the payes. And it had an amazing effect, because he came back to religion.

Well, from the beginning, it was the center of my life. Once I decided what the meaning of life is, I didn’t go back to a relaxed attitude. In fact, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous rabbi, said, “If God is not the most important thing, He is nothing.”

When you decided to make God the center of your life, did you go through any emotional or psychological changes?

In one sense your personality changes. In another sense, it doesn’t; I am the very same person I was when I was an atheist. One thing that happened was I ceased being interested in music other than religious music. I am not proud of it, or think this is the correct way to be. I just lost an interest in secular music, because music speaks emotionally—and emotionally I am tuning into God all the time.

How did you figure out how to combine your religious life with a way to exist in the material world? You didn’t want to be in academia anymore, you weren’t a businessman like your father.

Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidism showed me the kind of lifestyle that I admired: people who were tremendously devout and religious, but had friends and family. So as I started to read more and more the Jewish stories, I started a little group. I would read a story and we would discuss it. And that evolved into my becoming a maggid, meaning an inspirational speaker and storyteller. I received s’micha, the ordination to be a maggid, from Shlomo.

And then I started writing books. I was constantly reading all these texts that presented high ideals, religiously and spiritually, in Judaism. I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” But I didn’t know how. So when I encountered nitty-gritty, practical ways to attain something spiritually I would note them down. And then I realized, “Gee, this stuff is not available.” And that’s when I produced my first book, my gigantic book, Jewish Spiritual Practices.

What happened after you published this gigantic book?

I became a teacher of Judaism. I taught for many years at the New School. I taught Jewish mysticism, and also ecumenical courses, like “Spiritual Stories from Around the World.” I taught at Makor for a number of years. I have taught at, like, five hundred synagogues.

After I had been doing this for about twenty-five years I decided it was time to train other people. I started a program to train people to be maggids. Twice a year people come for an intensive. I have ordained ten people already over the last two years.

How do you decide whether they are ready to be ordained?

I am not trying to put impediments in people’s way if someone wants to spread God’s light. If they go through it with some attention I generally give s’micha. My wife, Carole, went through the program, and she had no aspirations to become a maggid. But I gave her ordination as a baal misapair ruchani, a master spiritual storyteller.

If God is the center of your life at every moment, how do you also have a marriage?

One of the things about Judaism is that it is nothing crazy, you know? Camus said that he didn’t want to be more godly, he wanted to be more human. And I think that’s the Jewish attitude. Carole is religious, but not as “fanatical” as me. I think it has become more central to her, but my secular interests are limited. It sounds bad, but it isn’t, I hope. She’s a big outdoors person. She has more interest in the world and seeing things. I go along and have a great time, but I am less motivated. It’s like Rabi’a, this great Muslim mystic in the early days. Her assistant told her to come outside and see the wonders of God, and Rabi’a told her to come in and see God Himself.

Why do you feel it’s your job to teach people about God and Judaism and mysticism?

You know that Muslim group called Tablighi Jamaat? They are worldwide, but they are more based in Pakistan. They are proselytizers, and the Western intelligence services feel they are providing a pool for the Jihadists. But ten or twenty men go out to another country or a remote area of their own country, and proselytize for a month. The Mormons do something similar. And Lubavitch has it built in, too. But I feel that the other branches of Judaism have to come up with some radical way to institutionalize proselytizing among the Jews. Nobody is ashamed to stand out on Court Street and pass out literature about environmentalism or politics. So why should people be ashamed to pass out spiritual literature?

The idea of proselytizing rubs many people the wrong way.

I feel that the Jews have to get over this. So many of our people are unconnected religiously.

Have you had any doubts since all this started? Any dark or confused days?

I don’t have any doubts. For my intellectual integrity, I have to allow that there is, like, a one percent chance there is no God. But I don’t operate that way. And if there wasn’t a God, it would be some kind of glorious mistake, just about the noblest mistake possible. I am not a seeker; I am a finder. People too much glorify this questioning in Judaism.

I was glad to find a notary within walking distance of my new home. At the rear of a vast, old-fashioned stationery store on Court Street in Brooklyn, past ledger books and hole-punches, two portly Orthodox men work behind a glass counter. The younger one, clean-shaven with bright red payes, answers the phone and does Xeroxing. The older one has short hair and a gray beard; he wears a yarmulke and a handsome, rumpled suit. That is Yitz Ring. He takes the authenticating-who-you-are thing to a new, unfamiliar level: on my first visit, he examined my signature—a series of concentric loops—and pronounced, “Nelly, your head is too much in the spiritual realm.” Then he looked at the phone numbers and addresses on my documents and muttered something about “so many 8s” and “chaos.”

The next time I went in he told me that in a past life I had helped a lot of Jews during the Holocaust and that I was a reincarnation of Eve. With most people, I would not have found such unsolicited psychic pronouncements charming—I would have found them intrusive and possibly creepy. But Yitz is charismatic and funny; he radiates good will and I got curious: Where did his pronouncements come from? Were they religious? Was he totally nuts or a savant?

I’m not sure I got an answer during the conversations that followed, but I did learn that Yitz truly embraces his own cosmology. Most of the people I talk to acknowledge, maybe without even being conscious of it, that there is an element of subjectivity in their theologies. Yitz believes that his beliefs are truth for all of us.

What role do religion and faith play in your everyday life?

Yitz Ring

I’m not religious in the slightest. Faith, on the other hand, I have used. And I use it, I must admit, for selfish reasons. In Hasidic philosophy there’s a Hebrew expression which means “In the first place, you do above.” If you have an opportunity to do something, you should always try for the best. You jump over the fence first, you don’t try to go under. So how does a person get the energy, the chutzpah to do that in life? To always be able to jump? Faith, Nelly, faith. When you feel faith that you can do it, and someone is helping you, and success is on your side, it’s a transcendent dimension that gives strength.

When you say faith, you mean faith in God?

Of course. There can be a transcendent aspect to everything you do. Faith is a pair of wings that raises you higher so you can see solutions. People can accomplish things without the holy—well, the Godly—aspect. But if you connect the things you do to a good source, you wind up feeling more satisfied. The bottom line is to have faith in the soul, which is part of God.

And what would you say your religion is?

I try to be an observant Jew. But observance, when you understand why we fulfill certain commandments, is more scientific. And that’s really sad. Because when you understand why, it loses its sparkle.

Keeping kosher, wearing a yarmulke, not working on the Sabbath—there are explanations for these things, and explanations that are very satisfying. So it’s terribly important for people to connect to the higher level, because the religion itself is too satisfying intellectually. You have to imbue these deeds with emotion. You have to realize that it’s not just science, there’s spiritual aspects to it—the mitzvahs, the deeds that a person does.

By “science,” do you mean, for instance, the health reasons for keeping kosher?

Well, there’s that, but I’m talking scientific on the spiritual level. Let’s analyze being kosher. In Hebrew there are two words, one is assur (prohibited) the other is mutar (permitted). Foods are one or the other. Assur also means imprisoned, so kosher laws are somehow connected to imprisonment or liberation. The scientific-spiritual explanation is as follows: the job of all people is to elevate the world. God took the spiritual and turned it into a physical world; our job is to take the physical and turn it spiritual. Something that’s not kosher is imprisoned by physicality; no matter how hard we try, we cannot unlock its holiness. That’s a scientific explanation that satisfies the religious intellect. But we’re not just intellectual beings; we need to transcend the intellect. We need to feel good. Dig it, mama.

Wow, for me that is a totally new kind of science. A minute ago you were talking about jumps that we all must take, and that we need faith for success. Can you give me an example of such a jump from your own life?

Waking up in the morning. For most people it’s nothing: “Eh, I wake up, no big deal.” But somehow, for me, when I’m sleepy…so sleepy…I just gotta push myself. I use faith. Each morning, a person is considered a new creature, totally new. You know, the soul goes up at night, gets recharged, and comes down—and literally, every morning you’re a new person. Sometimes your soul doesn’t want to come back to Earth. It’s been so nice and comfortable up in the spiritual realm. But we have to be here on Earth and hustle; we can’t have constant enlightenment.

Is this a Kabbalistic idea?

Everything I speak about has its basis in the Kabbalah. But this is also in aspects of, the Bible, too—the Psalms. The leap of faith is not something for the big things, to be able to lift up a car when the car is, God forbid, covering the tail of a kitten. No, no no. A leap of faith is for little things. That’s what people don’t realize. You need power, those extra abilities for everyday life, because when a person can deal with everyday, then the big things come naturally.

Were you raised with this understanding?

I have an interesting family. They are survivors from Poland and Lithuania. I am half-and-half. In Poland Galicianers are the Southerners, and they’re more coarse, more earthy; the Northerners are from Vilna, the intellectuals. And my parents come from those two places—one from each. My mother’s family was rich, and she completed a high level of education at gymansium; my father was a hustler and an actor. They met doing theater in a DP camp and I was born in Austria in 1949. They both came from a Jewish tradition, and even though they weren’t practicing religion, they sent their kids to yeshiva. We moved here when I was six, and I grew up in Deep Brooklyn: Coney Island in the early days, and later Sheepshead Bay. My sister, Marlene Ring, didn’t go continuously to yeshiva; she went to college and became a modern dancer.

So where did I discover this stuff? Even though I went to Jewish-oriented schools all my life, I wasn’t really into it. That wasn’t the source. They say the soul extends to all points in the universe, spiritually and physically. The soul is continuously aware of what goes on. We’re not aware of our essence that much, and at times the soul gives us a kiss of awareness. And then it comes down to us on a conscious level—whether it’s an emotional conscious level or even an intellectual conscious level, so we become more desirous of spiritual things.

How old were you when you first had that kiss of awareness?

Around four. I never had a childhood; I was always too aware. When you’re too aware, you can’t play. You don’t feel that playing has any real purpose. I wanted to, but I understood too much. I was always a little psychic, meaning I saw things other people didn’t see, could predict certain aspects of the future, see certain things in people’s pasts. I went to Yeshiva University High School, but in my senior year I started to try to find out more about the mystical realm. I ended up in a Hasidic cult.

Really?

Well, not really. Lubavitch. After high school, I went to rabbinical college in Crown Heights. That’s where the action was. I moved out from my parents’ house and lived with a bunch of guys who were also studying there.

Are you still connected to the Lubavitchers?

I can get you anything you want wholesale.

Look, I don’t want to talk about my failures, but I was never really connected. I didn’t want to bother anyone, if you really want to know. I felt everyone has enough problems without someone asking them for lessons. I’ll just plod along, and try to understand it myself without bothering people—which was a stupid, dumb mistake of youth, because you have to ask. That’s the only way you can learn! And the only way the deeper mystical tradition is passed on is through a teacher. You can’t get it from books.

But your lack of connection didn’t prompt you to leave the community.

Well, I finished school, I did become a rabbi. But I didn’t have certain abilities that being a successful rabbi requires. I really had trouble with authority. I didn’t like discussing my career plans with my elders. I had opportunities and I didn’t take them. Imagine, right now I might have been at some synagogue on the Upper East Side, and when you approached me, I could have said, “talk to my secretary.”

What did you do after rabbinical school?

I studied liberal arts at Kingsborough Community College. And then I did various things. I was the mashgiach at The Cauldron, a macrobiotic restaurant in the East Village.

I remember that place!

The owner was hanging around the Lubavitchers in Crown Heights. They didn’t have enough money to have a full-time mashgiach, so I also did everything else: waited tables, some cooking, dishwashing. I wound up in retail.

Another great Jewish tradition. My family sold lighting fixtures—it was a big jump from being bagel bakers. How’d you get into the business?

I was always in retail part time, starting at age seven in my father’s grocery store in Coney Island, then his supermarket. I worked through rabbinical school, selling children’s clothes, and then I got into women’s designer clothes (selling, not wearing them!). Then onto The Cauldron. After that I got into office supplies and parachuted back to the capitol of the world, Brooklyn.

Do you go to synagogue now?

When I said I wasn’t religious, doesn’t say I’m not practicing. I do as much as I can. I used to live in Borough Park, where there’s a synagogue every block. Now I live in Flatbush, and there’s a synagogue every five blocks. It’s necessary to join a group to pray, rather than praying alone, for the simple reason that everyone helps each other to “bring down” the blessings—that’s Hasidic street talk for manifesting, revealing and internalizing spiritual force. No matter how much we think we have the ability, man is not alone, man is not an island…neither is woman, by the way. You know what I’m going to tell you? A mystery. Ready?

Shoot.

Have you seen studies that show there’s so many singles, whether in divorce or never got married? It’s not by accident. Think about a bunch of mystics hanging out, drinking beer and eating pretzels and talking, this is what they talk about: We’re supposed to be in the messianic age already, a time when there will be total peace, wealth, and people will see, within the physical, the spiritual. They’ll see the goodness of everything, and since everything is good, they’ll act better. Diseases will be as if nonexistent; people will live longer because of the increase in spirituality. It’s the prime goal and duty of our generation to manifest a utopian world idea. The messianic age is supposed to be the age of Aquarius—This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

In mystical terminology, there are two concepts of the Almighty that we can talk about: the imminent and the transcendent. The imminent is the life force that we all have inside of us, that the earth has, that gives us life. The feminine. Mother Earth. We call it Shekhina, the divine presence. The transcendent aspect of godliness is the masculine, and it surrounds us in all aspects of the physical universe. The messianic age is the marriage between the transcendent and the immanent aspects of godliness. But the forces, whatever they may be, are preventing it. Everything that happens in the physical is reflected in the spiritual, and the spiritual is reflected in the physical. So male and female can’t get together here on Earth either.

Yitz, how much of what you are telling me has to do with your being from the hippie era?

Everything! Everything. I’m a mystical hippie.

How does the way you see the world relate to the fact of mortality?

I’ll explain to you how I understand it from the Torah. There’s no such thing as death. The person’s soul is forever, with different aspects of awareness. There’s an expression in Hebrew that’s used in Midrashic literature: histalkut, which means removal. The soul removes itself from the physical body. It doesn’t mean it’s a good or bad thing. It’s just a different place. While we’re in a physical realm—according to our tradition—one can accomplish more than the spiritual realm.

It’s all here, heaven is on earth, but we just can’t experience it.

Does knowing this make you less afraid of dying?

Nope. I’m chicken. I understand it, but I’m not interested in experiencing death. Of course, no one should experience it. It only occurred because of the tree of knowledge. You girls gave us the apple. Adam and Eve tried to elevate evil to holiness by eating from the tree—but they weren’t successful, and the entire universe became intermingled with Good and Evil. Prior to that act, Good and Evil were separate. Mortality is a product of man’s exit from Eden. Knowledge is difficult because if you are aware that God’s all over then how do you even go to the bathroom? I know—not polite.

You feel that God is all over the place?

Oh, sure. The thing is, you need a sense of self. If you think about God being everywhere, it can feel like having your parents sitting in the backseat whenever you’re on a date. But you can’t be robots. And worse—you know what we can turn into worse than a robot? An angel. An angel’s a perfect creature. Total perfection. And that’s not a good place to be. (Don’t tell an angel that; they’re very powerful creatures.)

One time there was an analogy given as to why we are the way we are. Rebbe Schneerson wrote a letter to someone who asked a question about why life is so hard, and why doesn’t God make us perfect. So he says: This is the difference between a photograph and a painting. You take a picture of Niagara Falls and you can sell it for a dollar. But if you make a painting and it’s beautiful you can sell it for $20,000, $100,000, there’s almost no price for a painting. Why? A photograph is a perfect reflection of reality. But a painting is in the image of its creator. It’s not perfect at all, it’s how the person envisions something. Somehow, with all of our foibles and darknesses, we do what we do, and we create a painting.

Alana Newhouse grew up in a Modern Orthodox community in Lawrence, Long Island. She studied Torah and Talmud in high school, but in her free time supplemented that with whatever she could get her hands on—Shakespeare, General Hospital, and Top 40.

Back then, it never occurred to her that these two worlds—the Jewish world and the world of popular culture—would someday collide. But collide they did, and she traces that meeting to a single afternoon in high school when she was home alone, and ventured to open the door to a bearded man who came knocking. Later that day, she was faced with a choice—Madonna or Kabbalah. It’s a choice that’s become more complicated with the passage of time.

In 1997, before Madonna and Monica Lewinsky started flaunting red string bracelets, Daniel Matt began work on the first complete English translation of the Zohar, an esoteric biblical commentary central to the kabbalah. Matt can hardly be accused of dabbling in Jewish mysticism; thanks to the patronage of philanthropist Margot Pritzker, he was able to resign his post at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and devote his full attention to a text that scholars believe was composed by Moses de Leon in 13th-century Spain. Stanford University Press just published the first two volumes of Matt’s labors, with the remaining ten to be completed over the next 20 years—so he’ll finish just in time for Uggs to come back into style.

The term kabbalah comes up everywhere from People magazine to Larry King, but that wasn’t the case when you started this project.

In a sense it’s even a sharper contrast than when I first started studying Zohar in 1970. Then it was the most esoteric, unknown aspect of Judaism perhaps. Now, you find it all over. The Hollywood connection has certainly made it widely known. In some ways, it has made me more committed to doing translation in a very accurate, scholarly way to balance the superficiality you find in some dimensions of kabbalah today. I want to give readers what the Zohar really is—a commentary on the Bible.

The Zohar constantly wrestles with the text and shows new possibilities of meaning in an imaginative and fantastic way. For example, God says to Abraham, “Go forth.” The Hebrew is “Lech Lecha,” which literally means, “Go to yourself,” and that’s how the Zohar takes it. It’s not a geographical journey. It’s saying, “Go deep within and you’ll discover the Divine.”

The Zohar is written in Aramaic. I always thought that was an ancient language that was dead by the 13th century.

When the Zohar appears, hardly anyone in the Jewish world spoke Aramaic. They studied it because the Talmud was written in Aramaic, but in part the Zohar was written in Aramaic to make it look ancient. Moses de Leon never admitted he was the author. He said, “I’m just a scribe, and I’m copying it out from an original second-century text.” He claimed it went back over a millennium, and the original had been composed in the land of Israel in the second century by a famous Talmudic teacher.

Why would he do that?

So that it would be accepted as authoritative. He presents very radical ideas: that God is feminine, equally feminine and masculine; that the ultimate name for God is simply infinity, Ein Sof; and that God needs the human being, is in some sense incomplete without our active participation. Those are among the three most important innovations of kabbalah. If he had said, “I have an idea that God is a woman,” he might have been thrown out of town. But he presents ideas as ancient wisdom. People were naïve enough that the Zohar was accepted as ancient, which paved the way for the acceptance of kabbalah.

If you compare it to what happens in Christian mysticism—one of the great Christian mystics at the same time, Meister Eckhart, he was denounced by the Church. And some of the great Sufi teachers in Islam were condemned. It’s remarkable how easy a way kabbalah had.

Why were there traditionally restrictions on studying the Zohar—mastery of the Bible and the Talmud, reaching a certain age, being married?

Those have to do partly with the material—there’s a very strong erotic element to the Zohar. The goal of the whole system is to unite these two halves of God, the masculine and the feminine, and although the Kabbalists insist that’s just a symbolic mode of thought and shouldn’t be taken literally, the text reads very erotically. God’s inner romantic life is being described graphically. That may have been part of the hesitation. The other is the fear that people would be so attracted to the material—to the beautiful poetry and imagery, and to its intense spiritual nature—that it might lead them away from responsibilities of the family, of making a living.

When did it become acceptable to approach it without a certain level of erudition?

It’s been gradual. Kabbalists would say kabbalah goes back to Adam and Eve, or Abraham, but kabbalah as a movement within Judaism goes back about a century before the Zohar, in Provence. It spills over the Pyrenees into Spain and crystallizes. But in the first couple of centuries, it’s very small groups of kabbalists, studying together, meditating, sharing secrets. Over the next several centuries, it starts to spread to larger groups. Hasidism is really the popularization of kabbalah. Hasidism spread it to the masses. Some of the fiercest opposition to Hasidism came on the part of Kabbalists who agree with the ideas but don’t think they should be spread so widely.

Because they’ll be abused?

Yeah, they’ll be diluted or abused or misunderstood or taken too literally. That’s in the 18th century.

What about contemporary interest with kabbalah?

In the last 20 years or so, in America and in Israel, there has been this fascination with kabbalah, first in the Jewish community and then in broader circles. Certainly it’s part of the general interest in spirituality since the sixties, but I ask myself, why specifically kabbalah, why do some of these Hollywood folks get drawn to this rather than to Zen or Hare Krishna? There are a couple of things that I have been able to identify.

Kabbalah is fairly unique: It’s a spirituality that doesn’t flee from the material world. It doesn’t demand that you go off to a cave and meditate for 20 years. On the contrary, it demands that you engage the world, that you try to discover the divine spark in the material world, and thereby transform it. So it may appeal to people like Madonna, who have made it to the heights of materialism. She even defined herself in those terms. Somebody who does that will very naturally feel that there must be something else—and yet they’re not willing to give up everything they’ve received. It’s spirituality that doesn’t demand you jettison all of the material, and yet it does demand that you look more deeply and search for some spiritual core.

The other factor is that kabbalah is simultaneously strange and familiar. It’s supernatural and exotic in some ways, but based on the most familiar text there is in the entire Western library: the Bible. The Zohar will say, well, Abraham stands for this quality of God, and Sarah stands for this. It enables you to engage in a spiritual search but still be anchored in something familiar. In some ways it’s almost not what the Zohar says but how it says it that’s especially relevant for a contemporary reader. It’s a celebration of the imagination.

Have there been earlier periods when the kabbalah was in fashion?

Yes. In the Renaissance there was a fascination with kabbalah in the Christian world. Key figures in the late 15th and 16th centuries—people like Johannes Reuchlin in Germany, and a little before him, in Italy, Pico della Mirandola—were attracted to kabbalah because they also thought it conveyed ancient wisdom and saw parallels with Christian theology. They created what became known as Christian kabbalah. In the feminine half of God they saw some parallel with Mary. And in the symbol system of kabbalah, the ten sefirot—aspects of God’s personality, you could say—are also grouped in triads they thought were similar to some Trinitarian structure.

Are talismans like the red string bracelet, or the Kabbalah Mountain Spring Water sold by the Kabbalah Centre, bona fide parts of the tradition?

Things like that are part of folk tradition, which some people who are drawn to kabbalah may have also been drawn to. I don’t know in detail that particular custom of the string, but I doubt it has a specifically kabbalistic origin. It may even be non-Jewish, like the hamsa. That’s really an Islamic tradition which then was adopted by Jews in Islamic countries, and then people think it’s authentically Jewish.

As a scholar, do you feel the work you’re doing is trivialized by endeavors that reduce it to a piece of red string?

Certainly. I’m bothered by the commercialization, the hard sell. I know someone who was going for an operation, and she was told, “Buy this set of Zohar and it will go well.” That seems worlds away from my interests.

On the other hand, kabbalah is a broad term, and many things are included under it. There certainly are superstitious elements. You can find discussions of amulets and things referred to as magic or numerology that I’m not particularly interested in, but I can’t deny that they’re part of a kabbalistic universe.

Most names you hear—Madonna, Stella McCartney, Britney Spears—are women. Why do you think women in particular appear to be drawn to kabbalah?

It may be partly because the feminine has such a large role in the kabbalah. It’s not that Kabbalists gave equal rights to women or encouraged women to participate in Jewish life. But they did make the feminine prominent within the divine world, and that probably resonates today. A lot of Jewish feminists have made use of that to promote a social transformation of Judaism. You know, seeing God as father in heaven definitely makes you feel excluded as a woman. And seeing God as equally male and female is empowering.

What makes your translation unique?

There are standard Aramaic editions of the Zohar, and usually that’s the basis of translation. But I had access to the original 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts of the Zohar, which are scattered around various European libraries.

Over the centuries, every scribe or editor that handled the Zohar doctored the text; he would put in a word of exclamation or he would correct what seemed to him to be mistakes in the original. I decided to try to recover those original readings. I have a research assistant who goes through all the manuscripts and lists the differences, the variant readings, between the manuscripts and the printed edition. As I’m going, I can see what manuscripts have what I feel is a better reading, and I translate from that superior reading, rather than from the printed text.

So what we’ve done is to create what you might call a new ancient version of the Zohar that’s closer to the original, and that’s what I’m translating from. That we are making available on Stanford’s website.

How did you get involved with kabbalah?

It goes back in part to my father. He was a rabbi, genuinely spiritual, and I felt drawn toward that dimension of Judaism. I was really searching for that dimension within Judaism, the spiritual dimension, and felt attracted to Martin Buber and Hasidism, and explored kabbalah to discover the roots of Hasidism. That’s the simple answer.

Does your interest in kabbalah go beyond the scholarly?

I’m trying to balance the two approaches: the spiritual and the academic. I think they each have something to offer. If you subscribe to it totally as ultimate truth, you miss some of the historical perspectives which enrich it, and if you look at it just academically, then you stay at such a distance that you don’t allow the power to have an effect on you. I try to navigate between those two.

What form does your spiritual interest take?

Well, certain techniques of meditation, and then the regular mitzvot, the observances of Judaism. In kabbalah those become in a sense mystical techniques, because you’re doing them with certain intention in order to gain intimacy with the Divine.