The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Huss also seemed unperturbed by the huckster spirit that attaches itself to everything the center touches, from flash cards to candles to baby bumpers. “They give spiritual guidance,” he asserted, “and they take money for it. Embedded in their philosophy is that giving as much as you can is important. They believe that they have the keys to redeeming themselves and humanity. People go freely, and most of the consumers are happy with what they get.” (It doesn’t hurt the center’s gimme-gimme approach that kabbalah places great credence on the role of “giving,” although it’s dubious that the sort of “giving” the center encourages bears any resemblance to what the kabbalists originally had in mind.)

  My own, more religiously informed background might have militated against my falling in with a bunch of lost, lemming-like souls who mumbled about chakras, cosmic karmas, and energy flows. All around me were people whose eyes lit up when they talked about the “rav” and Karen as though they had just glimpsed the Messiah and his missus hurrying through the corridors, carrying bottles of kabbalah water and wearing the red bracelet said to be directly connected to Rachel’s tomb. But my self-imposed exile from the orbit of Friday night dinners and Shabbos services I had once known and abiding nostalgia for the encircling warmth of the Jewish community made me more open-minded than I otherwise might have been. The fact that the chevra’s immersion in the classic minutiae of Orthodox Judaism was kept under wraps lest it scare off followers was precisely the aspect—the strategic missing piece in the puzzle—that forged the bridge from the center to the lost milieu of my childhood. It was what led me, in the initial throes of my exposure to this hitherto unsuspected enclave of closeted Jewishness, to call up an ex-Orthodox friend and tell her that she should take the first plane out of New York to attend the celebrity-studded celebration that was being planned for the rav’s birthday, with Donna Karan in attendance, the better to acquaint herself.

  I was given fairly generous but carefully monitored access to the center and its doings. I attended Friday night services at the New York branch, where the prayer books include “directions for scanning” and a transliterated English text for non-Hebrew-speaking members. I noticed a sprinkling of Filipinos and other Asians as well as several diamond-bedecked Upper East Side women, all of whom looked as if they were just warming up to the strange brew on tap, clapping their hands and tentatively singing along with the Shabbos prayers. The women, cordoned off in a makeshift women’s section, seemed merry and carefree, while their children ran amok, playing with Rubik’s Cubes and prancing around the bimah. Although there was no evidence of a formal dress code, as there usually is in an Orthodox synagogue, where pants and tank tops are frowned upon, there was a casually imposed but strict gender divide, which put me in mind of all the Orthodox synagogues I had ever attended and reminded me uneasily of the compensatory ethos of liberation in confinement that is the Orthodox woman’s lot.

  In Los Angeles, I attended a Friday night dinner where the emphasis on kabbalah not being a “religion” (always referred to in quotation marks, as though it were another of those tossed-out, old-hat ideas, like fidelity) was heightened—undoubtedly to offset the lure of other local pastimes, like shopping at Fred Segal—and a microphone and slides accompanied the singing of prayers. The men circled Philip Berg, hands clasped around one another’s shoulders, singing and dancing in the ecstatic, overheated manner of a Lubavitcher gathering. I also went to Saturday mincha and maariv services, leading up to the Havdalah ceremony, in which a braided candle is lit, a symbolic sip of wine is drunk, and a box of scented cloves is inhaled, marking the demarcation of Shabbos from the workweek. Again, the women were observers from the sidelines while the main action went on among the men, who wore white track suits and baseball caps in tried-and-true Guy Ritchie fashion. (The men wear white, one of the chevra told me, because “they are the ones reaching the light through prayer, while women are only vessels.”) The proceedings grew weirder as they went along, with a lot of football-huddle sort of male bonding interspersed with hora dances, guttural noises, and a talk by one of the chevra that ramblingly connected the weekly Torah portion with some aspect of goodness or spirituality I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  Both Friday night dinners I attended followed the same pattern: tickets had been purchased ahead of time, and the prearranged seating at round tables appeared to correspond to some intricate hierarchy of important and less important guests. (Madonna and Guy Ritchie are said to eat behind a screen.) The meals were served Chinese-style and consisted of a mixture of Middle Eastern food—hummus and baba ghanouj—and the more ordinary Friday night roast chicken or overcooked brisket. For all the press hubbub that surrounds the center’s doings and the 150,000 hits it gets every month on its website, these occasions draw a relatively small number of people—several hundred in Los Angeles and less than half that in New York. (Although the center’s website alludes to a worldwide following in the millions, it is impossible to get an accurate number as to its actual devotees; one disenchanted observer puts it as low as three thousand to four thousand people.)

  During the course of my visits, I also sat in on a session of a class called Kabbalah 101 at the Los Angeles branch, taught by a patronizing and seemingly bored former therapist named Jamie Greene. After quickly summing up the “universal wisdom” he had dispensed in the first two classes, Greene went on to talk in generic terms about taking responsibility for your behavior, pausing to draw simplistic chalk diagrams with a white marker on a big blackboard. Listening to him coolly dispatch such enlightening concepts as “a credit card is a dangerous little thing” and “fear of intimacy guarantees that we’ll never experience intimacy,” I wondered if all of human behavior could be twisted into an emanation of kabbalistic principle, from gambling to dating.

  The class was a multiethnic assortment of mainly blue-color workers of different ages. Most of the students were wearing the red string bracelet (notwithstanding the fact that the color red, according to Moshe Idel, has negative connotations in kabbalah), and all of them had copies of The Power of Kabbalah, written by Yehuda Berg, the more populist of the two brothers, with a cover blurb courtesy of Madonna: “No hocus-pocus here. Nothing to do with religious dogma, the ideas in this book are earth-shattering and yet so simple.” Subtitled Technology for the Soul, Berg’s book includes brief chapters with titles such as “The DNA of God,” “The Light Bulb Metaphor Applied to the Endless World,” and “Nanotechnologists Confirm the Kabbalists.” There was much vague talk about flows of consciousness, forces of darkness, and blocking the light. “The light is always there,” Greene assured the class before they struggled out. “The light is endless.”

  I met separately with some of the center’s star teachers, including Eitan Yardeni (Madonna’s teacher), an intense forty-two-year-old Israeli who has been instrumental in opening Kabbalah Centres elsewhere in America and is currently the spiritual director of the London center. Yardeni grew up in a nonobservant family and started studying kabbalah as a teenager while in the Israeli Air Force, where he gave instruction in Hawk missiles. He explained the center’s grandiose mission to me: “We’re much bigger than Jewish; we’re here to touch souls all over the world, to give people universal tools to access the practical.” He added, “We’re talking about affecting change on a global level.” I had my horoscope read by Yael Yardeni, the center’s resident astrologer who also happens to be the sister-in-law of Eitan, keeping it all in the family, and discovered that in one of my three past lives I had been a rebbetzin with oodles of children. (Yael has a waiting list of three months and charges two hundred dollars a session.) Astrology is a big part of the center’s construction of meaning, though it plays a marginal role in kabbalistic thought. When I met Karen Berg, she immediately pointed out that Donna Karan was a Libra, as though this were a profound insight into her character. And at a Friday night dinner in New York, Miriam, one of the hipper and more elegantly dressed among the chevra, confidently assessed me as a Scorpio. (For the reco
rd, I am a Gemini.)

  Back in New York, during an earnest phone conversation with Michael Berg, I found myself growing teary-eyed when we became involved in a discussion of why, despite my late mother’s fervent wish, I had never put up those small, totemic objects known as mezuzot (which enclose a klaf, a handwritten rolled scroll of parchment inscribed with a section of Deuteronomy) on my doorways. I was truly touched when Michael promised to send someone that very Sunday to put them up, only to discover that that was the last I would hear of it.

  * * *

  A year and a half after I began my explorations, the cynic in me wrote the Kabbalah Centre off as hokum, a brilliantly shrewd commercial enterprise, playing on the existentially orphaned state that is the general condition of many people today, in or out of Los Angeles, offering spiritual cachet for cash. Still, the ever-hopeful, lapsed Orthodox Jew in me wonders whether I might have found my own personal, mystically tinged form of antireligious religion had I been willing to overlook the crass reductionism and imbibe the New Age atmosphere of nonjudgmental compassion. Gershom Scholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, observes on the last page, “The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me. Under what aspects this invisible stream of Jewish mysticism will again come to the surface we cannot tell.”

  Are the Bergs onto something genuine, some “secret life” of Jewish mysticism that they alone have managed to fathom? Or are they gifted con artists milking the invisible stream of human gullibility for all they can get? That there are glaring holes in the center’s façade—philosophical discrepancies and yawning gaps in scrutability—cannot be denied. Not to mention the impenetrable finances. Why, for instance, as many observers have wondered, is the center so reluctant to discuss how the many millions it raises every year as a nonprofit organization are actually spent? In answer, Michael Berg insists that the center is a flawed “work in progress” that has made mistakes it must rectify.

  Here’s what I do know: My mother has shown no signs thus far of resurfacing, and I would guess that Madonna continues to hold fast to a belief in her own immortality as guaranteed by the center. Meanwhile, the couple from Queens and their chevra have pulled a rabbit out of a hat, made believers out of ex–car mechanics and former real estate brokers. That’s them in the spotlight, flashing their red bracelets, embracing their nouveau, pseudo, po-mo religion.

  V

  WOMEN IN THE SINGULAR

  AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN

  (LIV ULLMANN)

  2001

  I first see Liv Ullmann standing in the door of her New York apartment, and for a moment I am struck by a quality of almost tangible luminescence, an aura that transcends her iconic status as the muse of a great and melancholy director—“the village genius from Sweden,” as Ingmar Bergman once described himself. Days later, I find myself trying to figure out her singular physical effect, the way it caught me off guard, as though flesh-and-blood reality had, just this once, outdone the mythologized screen image. Perhaps it had something to do with simple atmospherics, the stage setting of a gray December afternoon against which Ullmann stood out with a particular vividness. Or perhaps it was that she was taller and slimmer than I had expected, more regal—still recognizably the figure of mesmerizing allure who graced The Passion of Anna and Cries and Whispers.

  At sixty-two, she has a soft, doleful beauty that is in some essential way undiminished by time, despite faint signs of age around her eyes and mouth and a slight slackness around her neck. Unlike many women renowned for their looks, she hasn’t had plastic surgery—because, she tells me, she always liked her grandmother’s face: “I thought if I could grow into that kind of face … I wanted to see what God wanted from mine, more out of curiosity.” She is honest enough to admit to having thought about it, especially when she has to be photographed, or when a woman stops her in the airport and says, “Didn’t you used to be Liv Ullmann?” All the same, the face that stirred Bergman’s romantic and artistic imagination still captivates: the rounded forehead, the flushed complexion with a faint smattering of freckles, the lush mouth, and the open cornflower-blue gaze that is capable of conveying immense delight but more often hints at some unfathomable sadness.

  Bergman first caught a glimpse of the twenty-five-year-old Ullmann—then a promising stage actress from Norway who had achieved notice as a member of Oslo’s National Theater—in a casual snapshot in which she stood against a red wall next to her friend, the actress Bibi Andersson, who had already appeared in several Bergman films. This photograph gave him the idea for the psychological usurpation of identity that is the theme of Persona, starring Andersson and Ullmann, which he shot in less than three months over the summer of 1965. “Film work is a powerfully erotic business,” Bergman remarks in his memoir The Magic Lantern.

  Although Ullmann insists that the filmmaker did not set out to seduce her, she became involved with him during the making of Persona when he sat on a rock and told her about a dream in which he said to her, “You and I will be painfully connected.” According to Ullmann, it was this somewhat gnomic remark that won her heart. “That’s what I went for,” she says. “I fell for it. How was I to know better? I believed everything he said, and if he said it, it must be true.” Shortly thereafter, Ullmann left her doctor husband for Bergman, then forty-seven and already a veteran of four marriages (which produced six children) as well as any number of amorous relationships with various actresses, including Andersson.

  After Persona, Bergman chose to work almost exclusively with Ullmann—who displaced Andersson as his lead actress, just as Andersson had displaced Ingrid Thulin. (Despite this divisive situation, the two women have remained close, which Ullmann attributes largely to Andersson’s generous spirit. “Bibi never said, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I would have had your career.’”) Bergman and his latest protégée lived on the remote Swedish island of Fårö from 1966 to 1970; he built a house for her there, and they had a child together. After they ceased being lovers—“He probably left me,” she says, as though the matter has never been fully resolved—they remained friends and frequent collaborators. “The best thing about him was how wonderful he was when it was over,” Ullmann recalls. “I needed to talk to him every day, and he allowed me to do that. He never hung up on me. Most of them hang up. The terrible thing is when someone leaves you and you hear the door bang.” Bergman continued to cast Ullmann in his bleak, tormented dramas—going so far as to use her, rather than Max von Sydow, as his cinematic alter ego—until he announced his retirement from film directing in 1982. (His last feature, Fanny and Alexander, was written for her, but Ullmann stunned Bergman by passing up the opportunity in favor of another project.)

  * * *

  Ullmann is in New York for a few days to meet with members of the Women’s Refugee Commission, an organization she helped found that works on behalf of women, child, and adolescent refugees. She is also here to do some advance publicity for Faithless; the movie, which opens this week, was directed by Ullmann from a screenplay by Bergman. This is the fourth feature film she has directed—her debut was Sofie, in 1992—and the second written by Bergman. (The first was Private Confessions, in 1996.)

  Faithless runs two and a half brooding hours; it is vintage Bergman in its preoccupation with the interior life of its characters and the harrowing consequences of their often inscrutable actions. The film opens a bit creakily, taking time to establish itself as a narrative within a narrative. It is as much an old man’s musing on mortality—“a diversion before death”—as it is an examination of the high price of reckless passion. The movie’s carefully orchestrated story line unfolds in extended flashbacks, prompted by the recollections of “Bergman,” an aging and isolated film director (played by Erland Josephson) driven to confront the disastrous aftermath of a long-ago affair. We learn of the events that lead inexorably to tragedy from the beautiful and vulnerable Marianne, who upends her contented existence as a wife and mother
when she commits adultery with David, a close friend of Markus, her celebrated conductor husband. David is a clear stand-in for Bergman’s younger self, and it is a lacerating depiction of the artist as a shameless egotist who leaves wreckage in his wake. “I mess things up for myself and others,” he warns Marianne right before they fling themselves at each other.

  Faithless presents itself as a reconstruction of an incriminating autobiographical episode (the kernel of its plot can be found in a chapter of The Magic Lantern), an artistic farewell that is also an effort at self-absolution by a man whose films have always grappled with the condition of spiritual guilt. It strikes me as a deliberately mystifying artifact, intellectually detached and emotionally accessible at once. Looked at one way, the film is an act of homage from a woman who learned much of what she knows about the craft of filmmaking at Bergman’s knee. In another way, it is an ingeniously conceived piece of role reversal, in which the famed director has the tables turned on him by a former lover who was once a worshipful disciple but now sees him clearly for the monstre sacré he is. Of course, Bergman has wittingly colluded in this enterprise—and endorsed Ullmann as the premier interpreter of his work—by writing the screenplay in the first place and then giving it to her to direct.