Some critics aren’t sold. “The biggest hurdle for white, Western reggae singers to overcome is phoniness: How to make reggae without faking patois (which sounds silly and condescending), and how to embrace its themes without reducing a racially and politically charged genre to mere schtick?” notes a reviewer in Paste. “Matisyahu spectacularly fails to solve these predicaments, but the biggest problem with his reggae is simpler: He’s unequivocally terrible at it. Not only do we get fake patois, but also raging electric guitars and cluttered hip-hop production.”

Hasidic Star Matisyahu Mixes It Up on New Album [AP]
Lyin’ From Zion [Paste]
Previously: Melody Maker

Matisyahu + Umphrey’s McGee at SummerStage [TONY]
Matisyahu Expands Sound, Vision on Light [Boston Music Spotlight]
One Day [Matisyahu’s MySpace]
Previously: Melody Maker [Tablet]

And like all pop music, contemporary Jewish pop must struggle to negotiate a delicate balance between originality and a perceptible thread of its influences. It has to maintain youthfulness while grappling with songs we associate with our parents—for many, traditional Jewish music feels so inherently tied to family that it can be a challenge for those in between childhood and parenthood to relate to it.

Two new bands are innovating in these directions—albeit from different ends of young adulthood: 32-year-old David Griffin’s indie-rock outfit Hebrew School, and Zeda’s Beat Box, a band consisting of an adult and four teenagers.

Hebrew School

Hebrew School, which is funded by a Six Points Fellowship, was founded in New York City in 2007. Its first album is set to be released this March or April. According to its Web site, the band is going for “an innovative use of the genres of Indie rock and experimental music to mitigate, through recording and performance, the disaffection of Jewish life in a large urban center.” In case the language didn’t tip you off, Griffin identifies with the eye-rollers in the back of the Sunday school classroom, the kids who were bored by what they saw as a burdensome and irrelevant tacking-on of superficial Jewishness to otherwise secular lives, or considered themselves “too cool” for religious and cultural engagement, but, in adulthood, find themselves craving some sort of reconciliation. “I joke that this is a therapy process for me, working the songs through my head,” says Griffin.

While some of Griffin’s lo-fi, multi-instrumental songs are covers of traditional favorites, others are originals. In the former category, his “Adon Olam” is completely deconstructed, full of hoots and warbles, drum rolls and noise. It’s still somehow pretty, and performing live, the band seems to enjoy it with the particular abandon that accompanies the destruction of childhood sacred cows; in this case, the target is particularly apt, as “Adon Olam” is known to be musically mutable. “At my bar mitzvah I sang it to the tune of ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,’” says Griffin. Hebrew School’s rendition is an attempt to subvert the general wisdom that the song can be sung to a variety of tunes, he says, “a way to prove the point that it couldn’t work with any melody.” In fact, though, by going so far out in its rendition, the band almost comes back around to something that might be described as a “classic” experimental piece, and as such, just another way to perform “Adon Olam” in any genre.

David Griffin

Among Griffin’s original compositions, there are gestures, overt and hidden, toward a kind of inescapable Jewishness. One song, “The Gravlax,” puts lyrics like, “I’m not in it for the JCC…I’m not in it for being a Jew, just in it for the gravlax” to an indie pop beat. “People commented that it sounds just like a rock song you might hear in some jukebox in Brooklyn,” Griffin says, “but then if you step in, there’s this strange other element.” But it’s hard to tell where intriguing uncanniness ends and novelty for its own sake begins. Honestly, any mention of smoked fish by a band called Hebrew School seems pretty conspicuous.

“Ancillary Devices” drops a hint obscure enough that it feels like a secret treat to pick out—the first notes are from “Adir Hu,” a tune from the Passover seder. The song’s lyrics are a bit literal, but their subject—deliberate methods Griffin uses to spark his creativity (“like the current tack of only writing on two-thirds/ to 75% of a page”)—provides a double meaning. Jewishness itself functions as one of these devices for Griffin: “The Jewish content holds the music in a container and gives me room within certain boundaries to be creative,” he says. Griffin, who also performs with the band Golem, came of age musically during the early 1990s, and he absorbed that era’s proclivity toward art that is also a comment on itself. “I like to ride that fine line,” says Griffin.

“Ironically, one of the things that has informed the project is the kind of Jewish education I had: three days a week, very rote learning, ‘here’s how you sing this,’” says Griffin. “The curriculum was such that we may not know what the words mean, but we can sing them back to our parents and they’ll be happy. But there’s got to be more to it than that.”

Listen to “Adon Olam” by Hebrew School

Listen to “The Gravlax” by Hebrew School

For 16-year-old Elliot Liebman, guitarist and vocalist for Zeda’s Beat Box, there is, in some relatively uncomplicated sense, “more to” those peppy summer camp singalong songs. Liebman—who, when it comes to music, insists he means it when he says he listens to everything, but lists his favorites as genre-defining classics Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, and the Grateful Dead—finds a pure satisfaction in personalizing the songs of his (ongoing) youth.

Zeda’s Beat Box

Zeda’s Beat Box was formed in St. Louis by 41-year-old Dave Simon, founder of Dave Simon’s Rock School. Simon came up with the idea—a band that would play retooled, reggae-inflected versions of traditional Jewish songs, as well as a few related originals that he pens—and then handpicked four star pupils to join (besides Liebman, there’s Chris Lowery, Claire Holohan, and Ely Thayer). Liebman jumped at the chance. “I really got a kick out of it when Dave told me about the whole thing,” he says in a laid-back drawl.

The band performs primarily for synagogues and youth groups, although it has also played some successful shows in rock clubs. Its first album, Seven (listen to it here), with a sound reminiscent of Sublime and familiar to anyone who’s even heard a Bob Marley track, features lyrics that are sometimes also overly literal, but in this case they are in service of explicating grand ideas behind traditional Jewish songs, as opposed to personal explorations. In “Am Yisrael Chai,” a ska beat belies a straight take on a classic Jewish idea: “Wandering without a home, without a place to call our own/The desert sands are full of hope, plant a seed a garden grows.” And in “Adonai Malach,” a more hard-rock-tinged intro leads into the words of the prayer, and lyrics like “When they hear your judgments, all of Zion will rejoice.”

Zeda’s Beat Box also risks falling into the traps of the novelty act—in this case because the youth and unabashed enthusiasm of the performers can make their songs seem quirky-cute. Liebman proudly enjoys membership in the youth group BBYO, where hanging out with friends sometimes means observing the Sabbath, and, he says, “the deepest, most emotional connection I get to Judaism is through the music.” He says he’s never even considered the possibility that someone might make fun of him for making Jewish music, or that he might find it remotely embarrassing. In place of Hebrew School’s complicated blend of disaffection and semi-ironic reclamation, Liebman and his bandmates seemingly just want to rock out, Jew-style.

Hebrew School, then, has a greater task; while both bands have a theoretical built-in niche audience, Griffin’s is a group often characterized by a sarcastic sensibility that relegates anything easily accessible to the realm of a guilty, kitschy pleasure—and then hordes those, leaving little room for much in the way of supposedly serious pursuits. So, despite their aesthetic affinity with the musical tropes he employs, some of Griffin’s peers may find themselves in the ironic situation of preferring the music of a group of teenagers to the more intellectual, tongue-in-cheek output of a fellow traveler.

Perhaps the bands would benefit from access to each other’s venues. Zeda’s Beat Box may be able to sell out a rec room at the local shul, but Hebrew School can fill a rock club. “Personally I think our audience is in that 20 to 30 age crowd, kind of like hippie people, says Liebman. “But it’s hard to get to that crowd because they don’t have synagogues that you can just give a call, and do a show at.

The community is featured sporadically in Jewish newspapers, mostly as a wacky story about unconventional Israeli immigrants. The thing most reporters don’t usually write about, however, is the town of Dimona’s unlikely profusion of pop and soul singles in the 1970s.

Ye’allelulah! Soul Messages from Dimona, a sort of posthumous greatest-hits compilation for the colony released by Numero Group, chronicles this near-forgotten and altogether brilliant history. When the Dimonans imported their Chicago lifestyle to the New Old World, they brought their aesthetic along, too. The CD art features a number of wild shots of people in vivid ’70s clothes, all sequins and spangles and red jumpsuits”with tallit and ceremonial head-coverings as well. Just over half of the tracks feature a group called The Soul Messengers; the other songs spotlight later incarnations of the group, including a group of female vocalists known as The Spirit of Israel, who played with the same backing band, and The Sons of the Kingdom, a group of later immigrants from the same Garvey community.

Dimona

Musically and thematically, the groups mesh together seamlessly on this album, so you’re essentially listening to one long record by the same band with a cast of revolving vocalists. But, hey, that’s exactly what early Motown singers did, too.

Much of the album is inspired by American soul music of that era. There are fat, tightly-arranged horns playing high fanfares and low, ass-beating funk; the guitars have a wah-wah wobble. The singing on “Go to Proclaim is straight out of the Curtis Mayfield songbook. “A Place to Be sounds like an outtake from a Martha and the Vandellas album”well, except for the chorus that declares “I just want to live in Israel—well, except for the chorus that declares “I just want to live in Israel . . . It’s a place of love and freedom / It’s a world of love and peace.” Meanwhile, “Holding On,” both musically and lyrically, could be a Jackson Five song, with its traded-off vocals and chorus that’s hopeful almost to the point of naïveté—“Sisters and brothers, walk hand in hand / Cause this whole world, right here / is standing on our jams”—but in the context of religious music, these pleas feel somehow purposeful. The lyrics—in fact, the very dynamic—of the album straddles the foggy border between Biblical hyperbole and Motown cheesiness: that is to say, it’s not how people talk today, and it’s probably not how anyone ever spoke. But, just as there’s poetry in Psalms and in songs like “My Girl” and “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” there’s poetry on Soul Messages.

Shem’s Disciples

I first encountered Shem’s Disciples in the middle of a giant festival concert. Until their set, the stage had been a revolving door, one performer after another. Suddenly a band was packing themselves onto the tiny stage—a guitarist, bassist, and keyboardist, and . . . four vocalists.

Right away, I knew something was up. The men who front Shem’s Disciples paint an unusual picture: Two young, awkward white brothers—one a Hasidic Jew in a bushy beard and baggy hip-hop clothes—took the left-hand mics. Two older-looking black men, both bald and dressed to the nines, stood to the right. The band looked like they were going to start a high-voltage, pumped-up rock and roll chord—but, as soon as the guitarist’s fingers came down on his instrument, the band dropped into a laid-back reggae groove. All four voices came in at once, a kind of vocal wall of sound that assaulted every part of the listener’s ear at once: the white guys with their staccato lines of hip-hop, and the black guys belting out a powerful, soulful chorus.

In the short year since their formation, Shem’s Disciples have recorded and self-released an album, Sow Melodic (an allusion to the melodica that group leader Marlon Sobol, the kid with the big beard, sometimes plays). Its first half is a mix of solid background music and meandering reggae/hip-hop/jam-band hybrids that end just in time to leave listeners still in the groove and not yet bored.

Marlon Sobol

The second track, “Far from Home,” samples the song “Where the Heart Is” from Fiddler on the Roof. Weirdly, this is the second time in three weeks that I’ve heard it sampled in a hip-hop song. If anyone was worried that Fiddler had been getting neglected since Two Live Jews’ 1991 hip-hop adaptation Fiddling with Tradition, they can rest easy now.

The second half of the album really finds Shem’s Disciples raising the stakes. The rustic jam “Banks to the River” is a soul song set to reggae backing music that vividly recalls old gospel spirituals. The brilliant piano jam “Sapphire” threatens to break out into a late-era Elton John number, but retains its sparse instrumentation and layers on the vocal harmonies instead. It’s an honest, schmaltzy, and unexpectedly touching ballad—“Not living in a fantasy,” the singer croons, “just here to extend my family tree”—that, once you listen to it a few dozen times, plays really well as a self-questioning devotional for the recently religious. The Disciples’ soul-and-hip-hop vocal team-up is most effectively used on “Not for Myself,” where the hairless half of the vocalists recite the words of the Talmud tractate Pirkei Avot (“If I’m not for myself / who’s going to be for me / if I’m only for myself / who am I?”) with devotion befitting a Baptist choir while the brothers drop rhymes over a solid reggae riff.

Matisyahu’s new four-song E.P., Shattered, is less a stand-alone project than a preview of his upcoming full-length album, Light. “This album came about by me looking at music for the first time again, but it’s also about me looking at the world anew,” he told me in an interview last week. “First, everything’s darkness. Then you see a lightning bolt—that’s the ‘Shattered’ part. Then, there’s light, and it lights up the world and you see the realness of all the shadows around you.”

K’naan

“Smash Lies,” the first song on the mini-album, seems to be the single, but I’m more sold on “Two Child One Drop,” which clocks in at six minutes, flowing from pop song into full-blown odyssey in a torrent of different instruments, with wildly chanted Hebrew vocals (by Moshav’s Yehuda Solomon) and instrumentation that’s one part reggae and three parts Postal Service—echoey, otherworldy, and instantly nostalgic.

Matisyahu’s new tour features opening act K’naan, a survivor of the Somalian wars whose remarkable debut album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher switches from a chilled-out world music groove to a manic, breathless spoken-word stream of consciousness, launching a dazzling array of percussion out of his words alone.

I know, I know—Matisyahu may be a lot more familiar than black Jewish soul music unearthed after thirty years, but, in its own way, his new music is as surprising as the recordings from Dimona. Like K’naan and Shem’s Disciples, their songs do what great music is supposed to; I could put a name on it, but we’d all probably just roll our eyes and sigh.

Instead, just press play.

Matthue Roth is a performance poet and author of the novel Losers. He is an associate editor at MyJewishLearning.com.

And then, in 2003, Godspeed went on a more-or-less permanent, unexplained hiatus. But during the band’s last throes, a core group of three Godspeed members—Efrim Menuck, Sophie Trudeau, and Thierry Amar—had begun recording and performing as Silver Mt. Zion (the name would go under a number of permutations: Thee Silver Mt Zion,

Thee Silver Mountain Elegies, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band). A five-to-seven-piece group (depending on the album or tour), with Menuck as lyricist and vocalist, SMZ recently issued their sixth release, 13 Blues for 13 Moons (Constellation). SMZ’s music is generally of a quieter strain than Godspeed’s (although 13 Moons finds them enthralled with the potentials of their amplifiers), with singing on almost every track. Their songs are idiosyncratic, structured to fit the mood of the music rather than on regular chord changes and melodies. The tempos are often slow, and the intricacy of the instruments speaks to a range of avant-garde influences, with occasional eastern European and Klezmer accents.

If Godspeed flirted with Jewish material, SMZ addresses it head-on, in both tone and subject. Fronted by Menuck, who is Jewish (and like the other members of both bands, cagey about his biography), the band draws themes and lyrics from Genesis and the Psalms, employs Hebrew, and frequently references angels and Babylon.

In “There’s a River In the Valley Made of Melting Snow,” for instance, from their fourth release, Pretty Little Lightning Paw (Constellation), the narrator looks out on a scene of devastation with shock and wonder, while seeking solace in another. Menuck sings,

Mystery and wonder did light up the valley
To be beat back by dark clouds…
Your hands like birds in the trees
If the trees themselves were all on fire
Your hips on mine make a choir
Singing “baruch atta adonaï.”

The song is typical of SMZ—the declarative language, long phrasing, and the apocalyptic (yet strangely pastoral) imagery—but it’s also pretty typical of the Psalms, in this case, Psalm 18:7, 11:

Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken . . . He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of sky

There’s a correspondence in spirit and tone—if not entirely in content—to SMZ’s dazed, awestruck visions.

At times, Menuck seems to be addressing Biblical material more directly, as in “God Bless Our Dead Marines,” from 2005’s Horses in the Sky (Constellation). Menuck recasts a passage from Genesis, in which Jacob dreams of angels moving up and down a ladder to heaven.

They put angels in the electric chair
Straight-up angels in the electric chair
And no-one knew or no-one cared
But burning stars lit up their hair
And burning stars lit up their hair
And crawled to heaven on golden stairs

In interviews, Menuck has talked about the universality and timelessness of this sort of material. In an April 2008 interview with Belgian radio, he was asked about the religious significance of SMZ’s name.

He responded: “Mt. Zion is a holy site for Jews, it’s a holy site for Christians, it’s in every other really good reggae song you ever hear. It’s like the mythical place you aspire to reach and you know you never will but you tell yourself stories about it when you’re feeling low. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Mt. Zion. I like that humans have that quality, that they need to believe in this thing that’s not real, you know? But that it’s a good thing, it’s a pure thing, and a good thing and maybe some day we’ll make it there. I love that. That moves me to tears, that idea.”

He’s not alone. There’s a long tradition of musicians—religious or otherwise—charging their imagination with materials from the Scriptures. It’s present in the apocalyptic reveries of blues musicians like Gary Davis and Son House (both preachers), in the ascendant squall of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, and in the entirety of Bob Dylan’s career. Godspeed and SMZ are another notch along that continuum, creating their lyrical and aural (and visual) lexicon from the same sources. And like their predecessors they—despite their Canadian origin—are operating within a particularly American folk vernacular, in terms of their compositions, a fact of which they’re well aware. The difference, perhaps, is the addition of what they see as a Jewish vernacular. “From the folk aspect,” one of the members said, in a 2004 group interview with the Web site Manchester Music, “it’s a real blend fusing Jewish sensibilities with American sensibilities.”

Silver Mt. Zion play the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 19th and the Bowery Ballroom on May 20th.

Jonathan Dixon is a writer in Brooklyn.

Next to the ad hung a poster for a newish CD titled Live at Stubb’s by Matisyahu, featuring a silhouette of the same young man clutching a mic. The poster led me to a website trumpeting the artist as “the Hasidic Reggae superstar.” Whether that means he’s a superstar who plays “Hasidic reggae” or a reggae superstar who happens to be Hasidic is moot. Right now, both statements are true: Live at Stubb’s spent most of the last year near the top of the Billboard reggae charts, peaking at No. 1, and if Hasidic reggae is a movement then Matisyahu is a genre unto himself.

2005 was a banner year for Matisyahu, and he’s braced for even greater success in 2006. He recorded two songs with born-again headbangers P.O.D. for their recent CD, and is set to release Youth, his first major-label album, on Epic this March. In addition to Carifest, his recent gigs range from sold-out shows at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom and Webster Hall to the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee, where he performed Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” alongside Phish veteran Trey Anastasio in front of 90,000 people. It’s been a remarkable journey for a high school dropout, now 26, who followed that same jam band across the country a decade ago.

Hasidic reggae: The very phrase sounds like fodder for a Saturday Night Live skit, and a predictably unfunny one at that. By dressing in the anachronistic manner of Lubavitch forebears”call it “Old Shul”"and shunning the temptations of the secular world, an adherent of Orthodox Judaism would seem an extremely unlikely candidate to entertain the masses. It’s certainly an attention-grabbing combination, a surprising marriage of secular and sacred, black and white, made richer by the memory of the 1991 race riots in Matisyahu’s adopted neighborhood of Crown Heights.

Despite their aversion to pop culture, Hasidim have become a familiar visual presence in it. Like Canadians, secular Jews have blandly assimilated, so while the fervently observant make up only a small percentage of the overall Jewish population, the Hasidic “uniform” has become the most obvious signifier of Jewishness, easy shorthand to depict an identity that’s notoriously difficult”birth mother’s religion? no foreskin? High Holy Days ticket-holding?”to define.

Hasidism are often employed as a cheap source of humor, from the davening scholar in the mosh pit in the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” video to the photos that American Apparel uses in its ad campaigns as bearded non sequiturs. Read as a gimmick, then, it’s no wonder that Matisyahu created such a media stir, one that until very recently outstripped his actual record sales. In the last few months, however, those have soared; to date he’s sold 369,000 copies of Live at Stubb’s, while sales of his 2004 debut, Shake Off the Dust. . . Arise, approach 12,000″a 400 percent spike since the fall.

With write-ups in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, and appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Last Call With Carson Daly (whose host proclaimed him the “most exciting thing happening in music today” even as he mispronounced his name “Modest Yahoo”), Matisyahu has garnered more mainstream media attention than any new reggae artist in years and become the first artist from the ranks of the Haredim to crossover to the mainstream. Even my shrink, who hardly possesses Daly’s cultural antennae, has heard of him.

He may be the focus of attention thanks largely to his novelty, but Matisyahu’s not a joke act relying on sophomoric punchlines, like 2 Live Jews, M.O.T., and Yidcore. Nor is he like the performers who normally target the frum demographic, purveyors of what some call “shiny shoe music”, a kind of slick Yiddish pop. Startling in its earnestness, his music attempts to unite the redemptive vibes of Bob Marley and Shlomo Carlebach, who left Chabad to found a commune for troubled Jewish youth.

The journey from rebellious teen to devout Orthodox scholar makes for an irresistible story. Born Matthew Miller, Matisyahu was raised Reconstructionist in White Plains, began listening to Marley at age 14, grew dreads, and slid into hippiedom. At 16, a trip to Israel connected him to Judaism, but his religious awakening didn’t really begin until he moved to New York to attend the New School and stumbled upon the Carlebach Shul. In Washington Square Park, he met a young Lubavitch rabbi who was a former Deadhead, and Miller soon moved to Crown Heights to devote himself to Torah study. Passionate about music long before religion, his performances for fellow yeshiva students led to his reggae career, but only after he received the blessing of his rabbinic advisors.

Matisyahu isn’t the first Jew in reggae; that honor probably falls to Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. There are relatively few Jewish reggae artists”dancehall superstar Sean Paul, indie ska stalwart King Django, and Elan Atias, the American-born, Israeli-raised lead singer of the Legendary Wailers, who will release his debut on Interscope in 2006″but long before The Matrix reggae artists were invoking Zion. The first international reggae hit was Desmond Dekker‘s “The Israelites,” which topped the British charts in 1969 and climbed to No. 9 in the U.S”the first reggae act to reach No. 1 in the UK and the first to chart in America. The Star of David, a familiar icon on album covers, graces the logo of Tuff Gong, Bob Marley’s Jamaican label, and a sense of ersatz Yiddishkeit abounds, from Biblical imagery in Marley’s “Exodus” or the Congos’ “Ark of the Covenant” to the “Fiddler on the Roof” melodies that float through Augustus Pablo’s “Skanking Easy” and “Havendale Rock.” The Ivory Coast’s Alpha Blondy has even taken the philo-Semitism to the extreme, titling his albums Masada, Jerusalem, Elohim, and Yitzhak Rabin.

There are actually a number of similarities between Rastafarianism and the Lubavitch, including strict adherence to the Old Testament, dietary laws that shun pork and shellfish, a proscription that women keep their head covered, and a fervent Messianic belief”for the Rastas in Haile Selassie, who claimed to be a direct descendant of King David; for some Lubavitch, in Menachem Schneerson. One Rasta sect considers itself the Lost Tribe of Israel, and another early Rasta proselytizer wrote that “A Rastafarian is a Jew by nature, being a righteous one of principles, dignity and love for God.”

In a world that embraces Christian rap-metal, perhaps Hasidic reggae is not really so absurd. Matisyahu’s smooth, retro groove has a traditional roots-reggae approach, and avoids the clanky, stuttering rhythms and abrasive barking of dancehall, with its impenetrable patois and inflammatory homophobia. Possessing a sweet falsetto, a soaring cantorial croon, and an impressively authentic delivery”it’s sometimes hard to tell what language he’s chanting in”Matisyahu’s songs tackle the Exodus (“Chop ‘Em Down”), the destruction of the First Temple (“Aish Tamid”), and spiritual salvation, both divine (“If you’re drowning in the waters and you can’t stay afloat/Ask Hashem for mercy and he’ll throw you a rope”) and earthly (“Bob Nesta said it best everything will be all right”). On “King Without a Crown,” he even subverts one of reggae’s most familiar associations, marijuana as a sacramental herb, singing “Me no want no sinsemilla/That would only bring me down/Burn away my brain no way my brain is to compound/Torah food for my brain let it rain til I drown.”

Aside from the obvious stylistic collision, Matisyahu’s real innovation is the connection he makes between Jamaican toasting and niggun, the improvisatory wordless melodies”sort of a Jewish scatting”that Hasidic writer Mordechai Staiman defines as “a stammering infant language G-d created for us when our feelings are too delicate or too intimate for others to hear.” There’s also a dash of hip-hop “flava”: His backing band’s easygoing rhythms are punctuated occasionally by Matisyahu’s beatboxing”one of the highlights of his concert repertoire”and at his show at Webster Hall last fall he was joined onstage by his White Plains white rapper homeboy Stanley. Yeshiva boys and frat brothers represented in equal numbers and the crowd’s rapturous response to him suggests he has potential for broad crossover appeal. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a dynamic live performer; bouncing up and down in exaltation, his tzitzit flailing, he stage-dived into outstretched arms, putting the “mosh” into Moshiach.

Though Matisyahu’s talents are evident in concert, his albums leave me wanting. He’s not without real skill, but on record his backing band is dull; the grooves are too tame and overly polite, and the basslines”perhaps reggae’s most crucial sonic component”are positively timid. Matisyahu is devout not only in his love of God and Torah but in his fealty to the reggae genre, and his albums are reverent to the point of blandness. While songs like “Warrior” and “King Without a Crown” have memorable melodies, elsewhere he falls prey to the same affliction that plagues much underground “backpack” hip-hop, especially by white rappers: overcompensating on their props-paying to the point of tedium. His records suffer not from a lack of talent but from a lack of excitement.

That hasn’t stopped Orthodox fans from engaging in online debates about purity and selling out similar to those among hip-hop and indie rock diehards”compounded in this case by the perennial question: But is it good for the Jews? Matisyahu’s inclusion last year at a benefit for the Hebrew Academy of Special Children at Madison Square Garden proved especially controversial. “Are we supposed to be impressed that he sings like a goy?” snarked one writer. Another complained that, after a 2004 Hanukkah concert, sheltered yeshiva teens ventured to Manhattan to see him perform at “treif nightclubs where drugs, alcohol, body surfing and other stuff goes on.” Matisyahu “may be attempting to maintain a distinction between his ‘kosher’ performances and his club gigs,” wrote yet another, “but the reality is that given his PR success, that distinction is impossible to sustain at this point.”

Will Matisyahu propel listeners toward tempation or keep them from it? This is, of course, the very battle between body and soul that pop music has engendered since its dawn, inspiring such establishment responses as anti-dancing laws, record burning, and the PMRC. Matisyahu may draw inspiration from a higher source, but despite his attempt to infuse that ol’ devil music with spirituality, at root it’s still only rock-and-roll (so to speak), and that’s precisely why crossover crowds flock to his shows. Whether he offers a walk on the wild side for the Haredi, an opportunity for the less observant to reconnect in some way with their roots, or simply a groovy night out for the curious, this pious piper is singing pop’s siren song”one intelligently designed to get feet, shiny-shoe shod or not, a-tapping.