Not so very long ago (about forty-six years) in a place not so very far away (Bay City, Michigan), there was a little girl who was baptized into a nice Roman Catholic family and named Louise Veronica Ciccone. When this little girl got older she discovered she could sing and dance. She also discovered that the more blatantly sexual she was the more people wanted to listen to her singing and watch her dancing. With a wonderful sense of the ironic, she took for her name the title of the woman most venerated by the Catholic church as the opposite of sexuality: the virgin Mary, the Madonna.

The church has apparently faded into the background for Madonna, who now studies at a place called the Kabbalah Center. As a result of what she learned there, she puts straps on her arms reminiscent of tefillin and has God’s name tattooed on her right shoulder. Madonna serves ice cubes made of “holy Kabbalah water” in the drinks at her “Kaballah parties” and has taken the name Esther, which inspired this thread of messages on the Kabbalah Center’s own discussion board:

“I am amazed of [sic] Madonna’s change,” writes spiritualme.. “She seems so peaceful and secure . It seems to be because of Kabbalah. Is that also the reason why she is changing her name to Esther? 

I bought the book 72 Names of God, but I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to go passed [sic] the first chapter. For [sic] the little that I read I kind of don’t understand much. Is there anything I can do or read so I can understand better? 

I have a paper copy of the Zohar, is that good enough?”

“Madonna changed her name because of the energy associated with her name Madonna, which was her mothers name who died when she was 5. I believe Esther was a Hebrew queen who freed many Jews. But anyways the change was because of the energy in the name,” answers JoanneH.

Laurent disagrees: “First of all she’s NOT changing her name to Esther. She’s just adding this name, as she put it to feel the energy of another name. The fact remains that I’m still convinced she’s the modern reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.”

She is involved in this cultic nonsense along with other intellectual giants of our age such as Brittney Spears, Roseanne Barr, Demi Moore and Elizabeth Taylor. Like so many others, Madonna turned to a cult at a time of personal crisis – in her case, “when she was pregnant, exhausted from [her role in the Broadway musical] Evita, and looking for an anchor.” [The Rick A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, December, 1997] 

The Kabbalah Center boasts 24 locations in 12 countries and has turned its leaders, Phillip Berg and his wife Karen, into multi-millionaires. “The net assets of his New York branch alone in 1990, according to IRS returns, were close to 10 million dollars.” [Ibid.] 

Who is Philip Berg? His name was originally “Feivel Gruberger”, a former insurance agent. He married a niece of [a] kabbalist Rabbi… and [claims to be part of the Jewish mystical tradition]

Berg left… his first wife and their eight children to marry his second and current spouse Karen… he is universally condemned by both the orthodox rabbinate and contemporary schools of Jewish mysticism in Israel, the USA and elsewhere, as a charlatan. In one interview Berg admitted that in fact he has no academic degree at all.

Former members [of the Kaballah Center] speak of abject obedience and servitude. They say the Bergs decide “everything connected to the lives of the crew, who marries who, who separates, who leaves the country… [Berg] is asked whether it is permissible to become pregnant, and Karen [Berg] is asked how to have sexual relations.” One former follower admits, “I felt it was a great mitzvah for me to clean Karen’s washrooms. I used to clean her slippers with a toothbrush.” Another says “If the Rav [Philip Berg] would have told me to jump off the roof, I would have done it and with great pleasure.” [Ibid.] 

If this isn’t a cult, I don’t know what is. It is as dangerous as the Moonies, the Scientologists, or the Hari Krishna. I urge you to avoid it like the plague it is. 

Yet how is it that these famous people, these actors and actresses who have such incredible wealth and fame, who seem to have everything, are drawn down these strange paths? How come Tom Cruise and John Travolta are avid members of the Scientology cult? And Mel Gibson? Words fail me.

Because even so, even with everything they have, something is missing, for them and for most of us. Kabbalah – the real stuff, not this other nonsense – would say that it is God that is missing from our lives, and all of this is a yearning for personal experience of the Divine.. Says one of our teachers,

Sometimes our yearning begins with an underlying sense of emptiness or shallowness. We may feel that we are lost or that something is missing. There sometimes grows in us a desire for a greater fullness and vitality in our lives. We seek to fill an emptiness… with alcohol, drugs, or distractions of one kind or another... Often, we are unaware that our deeper desire is for a relationship with God: a relationship in which we might discover profound beauty, worth, and meaning.

We seek the assurance that our lives make sense and that, on some ultimate level, everything will be all right. [Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook, p. 228] 

The most important guide along the path of doing so, the most important work of Jewish mysticism and probably the longest, is called the Zohar. Written in the 1300’s, it comprises 5 large volumes containing some 2,400 pages of small print. It is essentially a kabbalistic commentary on parts of the Torah. I’m sure Brittney Spears knows it intimately. For the rest of us, we have to cope with the language, philosophical Hebrew, which even for people fluent in Hebrew is extremely difficult to translate, let alone understand. When I was in Rabbinical school we studied one sentence from such writings for an entire semester. ONE SENTENCE! – and we still weren’t done plumbing the depths of its meaning.

But believe me, as difficult as the pursuit of Jewish mysticism can be, it is nonetheless possible. We begin when we first understand that there is indeed something there to look for. It’s a matter of perception. Kabbalah, real Kaballah, is for all of us, even Madonna. It teaches that a direct experience of God’s presence is in us and around us, not far at all, but very close. It is a way of seeing, not of clothing style or form of ritual practice:

One day Reb Nachman led Reb Shimon went on a walk in the forest. …. As the night fell they had reached a place where they might be able to find shelter… [They knocked, and] when the door opened they were greeted by an old man…. He… motioned for them to enter…

“It is remarkable that you arrived here today” he said, “for only this afternoon I captured a large and beautiful fish with silver scales. I was just preparing the fish and was about to cook it… Please join me.”

The old man cut the fish open, and as soon as he did a bright light shone forth from inside it… The old man reached inside and pulled out a key – a golden key…

[He]… handed the key to Reb Nachman, and said, “Take it, and may you discover the purpose for which it was intended.”

That night… Reb Nachman dreamed about that golden key. In his dreams he traveled to many lands and searched for many places in which to insert the key… In one dream he found himself ascending into the heavens, but even though he tried to open all of the Gates of Heaven, the key fit none of them. And in another dream he traveled through a vast desert until he reached a golden mountain, thinking the golden key might fit there, but it did not. Before waking he even dove to the bottom of the sea, since the key may have been found there by the fish and perhaps unlocked a place beneath the sea. But the key did not open anything he found there either, and when he awoke and recalled these dreams, Reb Nachman began to wonder if there were any lock in the world for which the key was intended.

Then Reb Nachman took out the key, which he had placed beneath his pillow. He held it up to his eyes and for the first time peered through the round opening in the head of the key. And he was astonished to find that he was looking into another world, which passed before him, slightly out of reach.

And all of a sudden Reb Nachman understood that he had discovered the purpose of the key — to open the way into that shimmering world, which appeared to be so near and so far away at the same time. [Howard Schwartz, Elijah’s Soul, pp. 146-9] 

Say the teachers of Kaballah, can you look beyond the obvious? Can you see that sometimes there is no lock, and what you have in your hand may not really be a key, even though you may think it is? The important part may be at the other end, a new perspective with which to see reality in a new way.

Where do we look for this new, this Kabbalistic way of seeing? Anywhere. Everywhere. Kabbalah is meant to be a model, a diagram of reality – all of it. In the same way that today the double helix of DNA is the model of our genetic make-up and the Copernican model of the planets orbiting around the sun is the model of our solar system, the Kabbalists created a model called the Sefirot. It is made up of ten interlocking circles, one at the top, one at the bottom, three arranged vertically on each side, and two more arranged vertically down the middle. They are an attempt to depict how God, who is infinite, can interact with the universe, which is finite. If you have several years to spare, maybe more, I’ll try and explain them to you.

Understand that what the Kabbalists were teaching was truly radical. For instance, the Zohar questions even the Torah, saying that the real meaning must be buried far beneath the surface of the text. The stories cannot possibly be about what they seem to be about, the Kabbalists said, or we could write better ones ourselves! [Handbook, p. 104].

They taught that there is also a feminine aspect to God, and called it the Shechinah, the Divine presence. Creation derived, they taught, from the sexual union of the male aspect of God with the female one, and continued to exist through that continued union! They taught that the universe was flawed because God, too, was flawed, and had made a mistake in the process of creating it! It was our task, almost like in the story of Humpty Dumpty, to help God put it back together again.

Now you can understand why our tradition cautions against teaching these radical ideas to anyone but a married man of good character and responsible age – usually thirty or so. The Kabbalists knew full well that their teachings would be deemed so heretical that they might be burnt at the stake. 

I assure you Kabbalah is not just for “them,” whoever “they” are. From my perspective, God speaks to us all equally, whether we are wearing black coats, black hats and have long payis, or are wearing Geoffrey Beene, Manolo Blahnik, and have a set of golf clubs in the trunk. Because, in spite of all the difficult, philosophical language, in spite of all the esoteric doctrines and the metaphysical models, ultimate reality, say the Kabbalists, is actually intimate and personal.

The passage we read from the Torah on Yom Kippur, though written long before the Kabbalists came on the scene, teaches this very idea:

For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, nor too remote. It is not in heaven, that you should say: “Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it down to us, that we may do it?” Nor is it beyond the sea that you should say: “Who will cross the sea for us and bring it over to us, that we may do it?” No, it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do it. [Deut. 30:11-14] 

Yes, you can do it, I can do it, all of us can do it: be part of a search for spiritual understanding that began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. So many generations later we are still trying to return from our estrangement from God. We need the teachings of Kabbalah because, as my teacher Norman Cohen says, they do “not merely mirror back at us who we are, [they] also show us who we can become.”

The mirror into which Madonna is looking was given to her by a fraud and a charlatan. With it, the Material Girl will never become a spiritual girl, however much she may think she already has. She needs, what we all need, is a deep humility before the profound wisdom of our real mystical teachings. If we would pursue them we need to have patience, courage, and yes, discipline.

We can become more than we are, says the Kabbalah. It is already there, if we can but learn to see it and act on it. This is not a fantasy. It is a Jewish reality stretching back hundreds and hundreds of years.

Tonight we haven’t even entered the forest. We’ve looked at the trees from afar, and we’ve been able to hear the winds rustling through the distant leaves. I pray that this will be enough to inspire us all to want to come closer. I hope to teach another course on Kabbalah, hopefully later this year. But before I can do that I have to learn more, a lot more. As I do, it will be my privilege to share it with it with you and with anyone else who wishes to join this never-ending journey. It is a journey with no destination and no end and that, says the Kabbalah, is as it should be.