The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  MARKETING MYSTICISM

  2008

  What brought me to the small, neat office in the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles—at the tacky southern edge of Beverly Hills where the upscale ambience of Doheny Drive turns into a decrepit stretch that includes two gas stations and multiple Korean nail salons—was Madonna, who, I had learned while interviewing her, doesn’t believe in death. And then there was my mother, who had recently died. Somehow, in an effort to reconcile divergent realities, I must have been looking for a resolution of the irresolvable, a way of navigating a path between the absoluteness of mortality and the lingering hope of something beyond it, between the immutable reality of personal loss and the promise of spiritual consolation.

  In a world where everyone is angling for a piece of the kabbalah mystique, an esoteric occult offshoot of Judaism dating at least to the thirteenth century, the Los Angeles center has been attracting Hollywood glitterati since it first opened its doors in 1993. And who can blame the neighboring institutions for trying to cut in on a share of the booty—the bevy of run-down ultra-Orthodox yeshivas and religious girls’ high schools with names like Torat Hayim and Ohr Haemet Institute, many of which have their own makeshift signs attesting to introductory kabbalah classes? It all looks so easy, not to mention remunerative, thanks to the pricey little doodads offered in the center’s store (ranging from red kabbalah bracelets at twenty-six dollars a pop to bottles of kabbalah water at nearly four dollars apiece) and to the hefty donations solicited from members old and new.

  Housed in a two-story cream stucco building with a red-tile roof that fits in with the 1920s- and ’30s-style Spanish Moorish architecture characterizing the neighborhood, the Kabbalah Centre is set in the midst of a surrounding shabbiness hard to reconcile with any kind of drawing power. All the same, in its Los Angeles incarnation, the center is spiritual home to Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Roseanne Barr, Donna Karan, and any number of other celebrities who dip in and out as the spirit moves them. Most important, as anyone who has heard anything about the center knows (and often it is the only thing they know), its public face is none other than that of the stridently non-Jewish and notoriously profane human meteor named Madonna.

  Despite having based an unparalleled career on her in-your-face assault on her native Catholicism and its iconic imagery, this über-celebrity appears to seek life guidance from the center’s precepts: she avails herself of its teachers (her spiritual guide is Eitan Yardeni, who proffers kabbalistic wisdom to handpicked and mostly famous disciples); shows up for High Holy Days services in either Israel or Los Angeles; and attends the occasional Friday night Shabbos dinner. Madonna brings the Kabbalah Centre’s message of egoless dedication to tikkun olam (repairing the world) home to her fans both in her music and in her personal appearances. Not incidentally, she has been lavish in her financing of the center’s larger ambitions and philanthropic enterprises, ranging from buying it property in London to providing millions for its outreach programs worldwide, including her pet project, Spirituality for Kids. Of course it is useful to the center’s relationship with its most generous benefactor—who is given pride of place as a member, with care being taken not to expose her to the curiosity of the center’s more plebeian devotees—that a primary kabbalistic tenet places great emphasis on the role of giving, the better to receive. “Embedded in their ideology,” explained Boaz Huss, a professor of Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, whom I talked to in an effort to understand the center better, “is that giving—and giving to the center—is important. They believe that they have the keys to redeeming themselves and humanity. They’re bringing in the light.”

  Although the center has been mocked and derided since the day Philip and Karen Berg founded it in 1993 (an embryonic version existed during the 1980s in Israel and New York), no small part of that mockery is envy—and resounding disbelief. How could so many people, especially jaded celebrities who have seen it all and then some, fall for an ordinary middle-class Orthodox couple from Queens who hawk their intangible wares—a kind of “Spirituality for Dummies” or “McMysticism,” as it has been described—with so little guile and so much fanfare? And what is it precisely that the center is offering its adherents? On some level, you might argue that it doesn’t matter what the center is ultimately providing—whether it is religious self-help, theological kitsch, non-Jewishness for non-Jews and disaffected Jews, a sense of community akin to that offered at AA meetings, or a way of ensuring your immortality by paying God in the form of contributions to the center—so much as the fact that it has brought a rarefied branch of Judaism out of the shadows and onto the red carpet.

  What sets the center apart from other postmodern belief systems like Scientology, which have subverted the traditional relationship between spirituality and authenticity by insisting that authenticity itself is fungible or even beside the point, is that it has wrapped its ardent ecumenical message around the kernel of a centuries-old, highly ritualized religious tradition. Much as the center denies its association with Judaism or any other existing religion (indeed, one of its leading members referred to the “stigma” of Judaism in conversation with me), its tiny insider circle of members (numbering a bit more than two hundred in all), referred to as the chevra, or circle of friends, abide by the laws and customs that are the underpinning of observant Judaism. These include observing the Sabbath and a multitude of holy days; keeping kosher; maintaining a separation of sexes in synagogue; the wearing by men of crocheted yarmulkes of the modern Orthodox style that prevails both here and in Israel; and the wearing of skirts and sheitels by married women. (Sheitels are the wigs, usually made of real hair, that cover women’s natural hair to signify that they are no longer objects of allure and are off the marriage market, although the kabbalistic rationale is more exotic and quasi-scientific, having to do with negative filaments and positive circuitry.) The chevra are the chosen among the chosen, provided with housing, clothes, schooling for their kids, even plane tickets.

  Still, given the proselytizing ambitions and will to visibility (there are a total of ten centers in the United States and sixteen internationally), it is difficult to get anyone close to the center to admit to this underlying belief system for fear of appearing too insular and exclusive. Even thirty-four-year-old Michael Berg, the younger of the Bergs’ two sons, a graduate of rigorous Orthodox yeshivas in America and Israel just like his thirty-five-year-old brother, Yehuda, and one of several spiritual directors of all the centers, insists that the center is without conventional religious affiliation. “We honestly do not believe we are spreading Judaism in the world,” he told me during a lengthy phone conversation. “The Creator gave the Jews these tools that were meant to be used and to show the way we should connect to the world.” When I asked him why the center insists on using “tools” instead of the word mitzvot, he answered without missing a beat, “If we used Jewish terms, we would alienate people.”

  * * *

  The history of kabbalah is long and thorny, filled with shifts in attitude toward the dissemination of its wisdom. It has been looked on with suspicion and even hostility by most Jewish authorities since it first emerged, its lore codified in an ur-text known as the Zohar, the authorship of which some attribute to Moses de León in the thirteenth century and others to the sage Simeon ben Yohai in the second century. Some principal ideas include a very specific and radical notion of cosmology, one that involves an initial cataclysmic “rupture,” or literal “shattering of the vessels” (shevirat hakelim), which occurred during the creation, leaving in its wake a fragmented and disordered state of affairs that can be made whole only through selfless devotion to tikkun olam.

  A second major theme focuses on a conception of God’s powers as being dynamic—God is evoked as a receptive female presence called the Shechinah—and on the idea that human beings can unite with the divine spirit through meditation and by following the panoply of religious commandments, thereby restoring the universe to its original integri
ty. Although kabbalah was studied from early on by elite circles of Spanish Jews and from the fifteenth century through the eighteenth century by scattered communities in the European and Islamic worlds, the prevailing attitude within the normative Jewish community was restrictive. Fear of its antinomic implications being ever present, kabbalah was generally considered to verge on the dangerously heretic in its speculative and personalized approach to a text-based and communal religious tradition. It was tenuously approved for study only for devout married men over the age of forty who were well versed in the Talmud and Jewish law or for exceptionally gifted and sturdy-hearted yeshiva students.

  Fast-forward to the last decade and a half. Enter Philip Berg and his second wife, Karen (he and his first wife had eight children before they divorced), who set up shop out of their Queens house with an original following that numbered no more than their two sons and a clutch of Israeli disciples. (Philip Berg, born Shraga Feivel Gruberger, who changed his name in the 1960s, was a former insurance salesman; Karen was his onetime secretary.) When it comes to spreading the gospel of the theosophical system of kabbalah, lineage is all; if you can establish a proven generational link to a master kabbalist, you are immediately vaulted into a privileged position to transmit its enigmatic philosophy. Intent on validating his title to the dynasty of kabbalism, Berg linked his own genealogy through his teacher Rabbi Yehuda Brandwein (an uncle of Berg’s first wife), who in turn was the disciple of Rav Yehuda Ashlag.

  It is Ashlag who is the linchpin of the outwardly egalitarian but intensely hierarchical operation that is the Kabbalah Centre—or, as many would argue, the justification behind an illegitimate group of squatters who lay claim to its ancient, sacral territory. A crucial and highly controversial figure who was born in Poland and immigrated to Palestine in the early 1920s, Ashlag began to revolutionize traditional attitudes toward the promulgation of kabbalah, prying open its historically hallowed, coded concepts. Among other innovations, he attempted to integrate kabbalistic ideas with communism and to modernize a system steeped in untouchable exclusivity by emphasizing the non-elitist nature of kabbalah and its ostensible link to scientifically ordained truths. His writings, which might be said to be the beginning of the “de-authenticization” process that many have accused the center of setting in motion, are the foundation of the Bergs’ movement, just as Ashlag himself is its sanctified figurehead. Thus the importance of Berg’s constantly reiterated link to his predecessors Brandwein and Ashlag, whose photographs share an honored place surrounded by flickering candles on the bimah, the raised platform in the center’s synagogue from which the Torah portion is recited every Shabbos.

  For the vast majority of their followers, however, the minutiae of lineage means very little. The Bergs have succeeded in selling kabbalistic wisdom as a source of inspiration to an audience that has nothing to do with academics and their careful distinctions between where one line of kabbalistic wisdom (the theosophical Lurianic strain) ends and another (the ecstatic Abulafian strain) begins. They have effectively boiled down an attenuated, arcane, and often tedious system sprinkled with numerological symbolism and elaborate, loop-the-loop interlinkings of God, the world, and the evil eye, into an accessible lifestyle philosophy offering succor to the unaffiliated and the disheartened of whatever racial or ethnic origin. Theirs is a canny reading of the infectious malaise of secular life and the widespread yearning for a transcendent context as well as an up-to-the-microsecond sense of branding.

  * * *

  In spite of my wide-ranging Jewish circle, I knew no one who had ever attended a class or service at the Kabbalah Centre at either its New York or its Los Angeles locations. Still, the fact that the movement seemed to speak to a hodgepodge of impulses and to represent a less than pristine—indeed, a somewhat tabloid—version of the religion I had been brought up in piqued my curiosity. My interest crystallized after a meeting with Madonna in the winter of 2006, months before my own first visit to the center. I met with her for nearly two hours in a hotel room on Central Park West in the process of writing a profile of her for a women’s magazine. She was dressed in her usual idiosyncratic mix of naughty and nice, wearing a formfitting top tucked into a corduroy skirt that stopped modestly at the knees—all of it set off by a gold lamé belt, opaque brown kneesocks, and a pair of gold pumps. She was in New York to publicize the release of her album Confessions on a Dance Floor. In tribute to the nebulous spiritual guidance the center has offered her, which includes renaming her Esther, the CD features a track called “Isaac,” with a mantra-like phrase in Hebrew, suggesting that Madonna is planning on ascending heavenward to join the sisterhood of biblical foremothers—Sarah, Rivka, Leah, and Rachel—at the right transmigratory, soul-evolving moment. (A core kabbalistic concept, gilgul neshamot, refers to the recycling of departed souls.)

  It became clear to me during our conversation that Madonna had been schooled in basic center tenets: she let drop the exalted name of Brandwein, Philip Berg’s mentor; referred to the “light,” a term that would be much bandied about the center in my hearing, signifying a supremely opaque notion having to do with positive and negative cathodes (don’t ask) as well as the transmission of spiritual energy; and discussed reading the introduction to the Zohar, which she said was full of “potent information.” She went on to explain, in her prim, faintly British-accented voice, that kabbalah offered her “a reconciliation of science and spirituality”—of “the Garden of Eden and superstring theory.” After informing me that her children and husband were taking Hebrew lessons, she evinced curiosity about my observant Jewish background, wanting to know whether my mother covered her hair. (She didn’t, in a break from her own family tradition.)

  Finally, in what seemed to me a startling detour, she asked whether or not I believed in death. I answered somewhat bleakly that I did. When I turned the question back on her, she announced that she believed in the concept of reincarnation as taught by the Kabbalah Centre. “The thought of eternal life appeals to me,” she told me, as though she were trying on a new outfit in front of a mirror. “I don’t think people’s energy just disappears.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by this—whether Madonna believed in a concrete form of reincarnation whereby she would return to earth as herself, all blond ambition and strenuously toned body, or in the more abstract concept of gilgul neshamot. But it made eminent sense that her link to the center would be based on something more than an altruistic vision of egoless self-betterment and earthly bliss, which is the message she conveys in her statements and songs. When I asked her why she hadn’t stuck with Catholicism, which incorporates belief in an afterlife, she snapped in reply: “There’s nothing consoling about being Catholic. They’re all just laws and prohibitions. They don’t help me negotiate the world.”

  * * *

  Seven months later, in the immediate wake of my mother’s death from lung cancer, I took a trip to Los Angeles to begin my own year-and-a-half-long journey of exploration into the Kabbalah Centre. I thought of it as an investigative-cum-personal search, the goal of which was to find out what its appeal was to Madonna and others and whether it might have anything to offer me, despite its mumbo-jumbo aspect and suspect “vulgarization” of a preexisting religion (as Moshe Idel, the foremost scholar of kabbalah, described it to me). Although my curiosity was initially intellectual, the unfortunate—or, as some might have it, propitious—timing and my own sense of grief undoubtedly made me less skeptical of the form of solace the center had to offer.

  I visited the Los Angeles center on two occasions, separated by a period of some months. So it was that one winter afternoon, on my second visit, I found myself in Michael Berg’s airy wood-paneled second-floor office, filled with photographs of bearded kabbalists and shelves of seforim, solemn-looking books of Jewish learning of the kind that filled my father’s study when I was growing up. Under Michael’s guidance, we delved into several passages of the Zohar. (According to the bio on one of his book jackets, he “achieved a momentous feat when he
was only 28” by doing the first translation of the complete Zohar from ancient Aramaic to English.) I became immediately absorbed by the abstract, centrifugal line of reasoning that ran through the text. It reminded me of the Talmudic commentators I had studied in high school—forever engaged in exegetical flourishes—in the way it somehow managed to remain clear of sticky human emotions while at the same time dilating on the mechanics of human behavior at its most paradigmatic. Michael and I got on to the topic of my mother’s recent death, and I listened spellbound as he gently conjured the logistics of reincarnation—which has no place in the doctrine of normative Judaism but which is embraced in all its hazy and exploitable reality by the Kabbalah Centre. True disbeliever that I am, I nonetheless figured it might well be possible that I would meet up with my difficult yet vivid mother in some coffee shop in the world to come, where we would no doubt commence to have a heated argument but would at least be in the presence once again of each other.

  I was ripe, in other words, for seduction. Or was I? Because I come from an Orthodox background—I am the product of a yeshiva day-school education, and although I am no longer observant, my siblings all are—my own interest in taking a closer look at the Kabbalah Centre had been percolating for a long time. I had heard it referred to both in conversation and in the media in only the most dismissive terms, ranging from derision at its unsubstantial and misleading synthesis of Jewish, New Age, and Sufi elements to rantings about its being “dangerous.” Still, disenchanted as I was with the patriarchal foundation and constricting prohibitions of observant Judaism, I wondered whether there might be something worthy in a more ecumenical approach.

  The center seemed to answer an intractable longing among its followers for an old-style sense of order in the midst of the chaotic jumble of contemporary choices and for something that elevated the disappointing limitations of human existence. Could it be that the very obsession with “authenticity,” which is where the center clearly came up short, was itself an outdated obsession? Perhaps the Kabbalah Centre was a celebration of an ad hoc mix-and-match approach, a renunciation of “the bottled product” of ritually driven Judaism—as Gershom Scholem, the founder of kabbalah as an academic discipline, once described it—in favor of something more nondenominational and contemporary? Or, as Boaz Huss put it, “Why does kabbalah have to be clean? The center annoys people so much because they subvert the basic perceptions of modern society, which puts religion here and pop culture there, in opposition to each other.” Alluding to the many A-list types who come and go, Huss insisted that the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality of their involvement with the center is precisely the point: “Being in there for two minutes is a significant part of what the center is about. In a spiritual marketplace, most of the consumers don’t stay long.”