God's hip language

The Kabbalah Centre has turned centuries' worth of impenetrable Jewish mysticism into a self-help fad for Madonna, Winona and 200,000 others.

By Steven Kotler

July 29, 2003 | LOS ANGELES -- I'm eating the world's worst tuna-on-rye in a kosher Italian restaurant. Soggy bread, prefab cheese, some kind of special sauce that tastes like talcum powder. The good rabbi over there, on the other side of the table from me, chose the place, and while this guy may know a thing or two about the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, he doesn't know squat about lunch.

But no matter. This lunch is like getting to play backgammon with the Buddha, patty-cake with the pope. I'm sitting across from the Man, Rabbi Yehuda Berg, son of Rav and Karen Berg, brother of Michael Berg, who collectively are the ruling family of the Kabbalah Centre -- the world's largest Kabbalah educational center and by extension the direct metaphysical descendants of everything top-secret and superholy in Jewish mysticism. Yehuda Berg is one of the people who busted the gates of secret magic wide open and, in the process, weaned Madonna off the yoga teat and sold her on bottled Kabbalah water and that nifty Hebrew tattoo she sported in her last video.

Berg busted the gates open by publishing a book in 2000 titled "The Power of Kabbalah" (Kabbalah Publishing), one of several on the topic written by members of the Berg family. On the strength of these writings and word of mouth, they've attracted a group of roughly 200,000 students worldwide, including not only Madonna, but her main squeeze Guy Ritchie and a host of other soul-searching notables, like Roseanne and Courtney Love. Alongside everyone else they show up at any of the 50 Kabbalah Centres spread across the globe and shell out about $24 per class for a 10-class self-help-styled workshop.

In Los Angeles and New York and Miami, where some of the largest centers are located, there are about 20 such classes a week, on topics ranging from parenting to relationships to reincarnation to healing, each drawing as many as a hundred students. A short lecture is followed by a discussion that takes place in smaller groups and is heavy on the caring and sharing. That's about it, that's how it works. No backwoods stream dunking or snake handling or conversion to Judaism required. In fact, 50 percent of Kabbalah Centre students aren't Jewish. And this egalitarian approach has made the center the world's hippest spiritual stop 'n' shop.

If you aren't up on your arcane philosophies, or haven't picked up People magazine for a while, or if you missed Madonna on "Dateline" a few months back, Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. It's been around for centuries, a sacred oral tradition passed from master to student, dating back (at least according to Kabbalists) to Abraham the Patriarch. The fundamental Kabbalistic text is called the Zohar and is attributed to Rabbi Bar Yochai in the second century. This text was augmented by a number of secondary commentaries, the majority of which were written down in Spain during the 13th century. Much of the actual nature of the mystical practice remained shrouded in mystery (these texts were kept hidden from non-Jews and Jews alike, becoming the purview of only a select few) until historian Gershom Scholem published his seminal "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism" in 1946 and a dozen other books on the subject.

Explaining the underlying principles of Kabbalah is about as easy as trying to explain what red looks like to a blind man. Scholem writes in "Kabbalah" (Keter Publishing), "The Kabbalah is not a single system with basic principles which can be explained in a simple and straightforward fashion, but consists rather of a multiplicity of different approaches, widely separated from one another and sometimes completely contradictory." The basic theory is that the Torah, meaning the five books of The Old Testament, is a giant linguistic puzzle. This puzzle starts with the phrase: "In the beginning was the word." Kabbalists take this to mean that God spoke the universe into creation (the language of the Torah is actually, literally, the language of God) and that the goal of mankind is to figure out how He did this. Life thus becomes one big quest to learn how to speak the language of God.

This is no simple thing. As spiritual paths go, traditional Kabbalah is an especially tough one. It is both heavily symbolic and heavily philosophical, and a great number of Kabbalistic teachings seem to relish further confusing the issue (either to weed out the unholy or to toughen the holy or both). The meditations involve everything from complicated visualizations to understanding arcane numbers theory to proper ways to eat lunch. Such rigor is felt necessary because, if you succeed, Kabbalists claim you get the ultimate Cracker Jack prize: having the same powers as God.

For centuries, Jews, even those who don't actually practice Kabbalah, have been keeping this prize a secret. It was the strength behind the religion's power structure. Because of this there were all kinds of rules about who gets to learn it. According to tradition, you've got to be male and over 40 and a Torah and Talmud scholar -- and really, they mean it. Ten years back I tried to do some research about Kabbalah for a novel I was writing and quickly found that not only would no one tell me squat about Kabbalah, but everyone seemed seriously pissed off that I had the chutzpah to even ask.

Now, thanks to the Kabbalah Centre, all that has changed. Since the founding of the center the mysteries have become available to all seekers, not just a select group of Jews. "Back in 1922," Berg tells me, "an Israeli rabbi named Yehuda Ashlag started the first center in Jerusalem because he felt that Judaism had become spiritually voided. More wars have been fought in the name of religion than anything else -- Judaism included. Religion's supposed to be a way for people to get closer to God, but instead it's become another reason for separation." Ashlag's remedy was to start teaching Kabbalah to everyone -- not just Jews -- but anyone at all who wanted to be down with Yahweh.

"Kabbalah's supposed to be for everybody," says Berg. "It teaches us that a relationship with God is an individual thing -- no priests, no rabbis, no organized religion." Without these things, there's no reign of the righteous. Basically, to guard against this loss of power, Kabbalah was turned into one of history's best-kept secrets. And it was Rabbi Ashlag who decided, much to the chagrin of many of the orthodox, that enough was enough.

Ashlag followed a centuries-old tradition and passed his torch to his prize student Rabbi Brandwein who, upon his death in 1969, passed it to his prize student named Rav Berg who, alongside his sons, is currently the lineage's acting patriarch. It was the Bergs who decided to make Kabbalah more practical and user-friendly by adding a few smiley faces. One of the first things they figured out is that no one really cares about forbidden fruit if they can't use it to bake a pie. So instead of having classes about God, the center has classes about the much more practical task of finding your soul mate. Along the way, what they teach might show you a thing or two about God, but their version offers some serious personal change without putting in all that time on the hard cold floors of the monastery. No fasting, no thorny path. According to Berg, all you need for change is a bit of prayer and a bit of meditation.

If this sounds a little ethereal, well, it is. This is mysticism after all -- served quick and easy: You sign up, take a few classes, and suddenly, shazam: happiness, true love, career fulfillment -- whatever you want on the menu is yours courtesy of a beneficent creator. Welcome one and all to the McDonald's of Jewish mysticism.

Billy Phillips, a 45-year-old multimedia producer in L.A., who has been studying Kabbalah for the past 15 years, defends that very simplicity. "Why shouldn't it be this simple? Everyone should be able to understand real divine truth and apply it. It becomes very elitist if truth is reserved for the most holy. If a mother has a sick child does she have to be holy to request a miracle?"

Next page: The celeb factor is what gets people in the door of the Kabbalah Centre