It's hard to attribute the center's success to one factor -- though getting Madonna to shill for you on national TV doesn't hurt. Take Wendy Gimenez, a 26-year-old New Yorker, an office manager for a commercial real estate firm (and for that matter a non-Jewish Puerto Rican), who has been attending classes for the past three months. "I first came because I was watching an interview with Madonna," she says. "It made me curious so I went to an orientation class."
But the celebrity factor isn't the reason she stayed. "During the class they talked about using the power of Kabbalah to find a better life," says Gimenez, "that while I might be fine in my present life, I could use Kabbalah to get more fulfillment." This better life is further augmented by the fact that Kabbalah comes with a 4,000-year-old religious endorsement. But the strangest part is that while other L.A.-style fix-your-life, find-your-God spiritualities come complete with a charismatic guru of the "respect the cock" tradition -- Sri Chinmoy, Sun Myung Moon or Anthony Robbins himself -- Yehuda Berg is a schlub.
In person, at lunch, he has all the charisma of an eggplant. He's disheveled, uninterested, uninteresting. In "Ulysses," James Joyce writes, "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body," and Berg seems no different. His beard is patchy, trimmed with blunt scissors. He spends the entire meal with a ring of tomato sauce wrapping clown lips around his mouth. He speaks in a mumble and not quite badly, but absently, as if he can't be bothered to fire up his brain to find the right word, but instead simply uses whatever comes to mind.
"There's a tall, moody feeble about a gay wizard."
"A what?"
"A Talmudic fable about a guy without."
"Huh?"
Making things even more complicated is that even if you write off Berg's lack of magnetism as profound humility (an important point since Berg teaches that ego is the main thing that stands between man and God) his book doesn't exactly underpromise. The subhead on the cover of "The Power of Kabbalah" reads: "This book contains the secrets of the universe and the meaning of our lives." Not bad for $17.95.
Or, take Page 6 of "The 72 Names of God: Technology for the Soul" (Kabbalah Publishing), which has already sold over 45,000 copies. "Science, physics, biology, religion, spirituality, and philosophy all have their roots in Kabbalah ... Kabbalah profoundly influenced the greatest thinkers of history, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, Leibniz, Shakespeare and Jung."
I know that many of the names on the list did actually peruse Kabbalah -- Jesus' participation is recorded in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Newton wrote more about Kabbalah than he did about science, though those writings didn't surface until earlier this century. The certainty of Plato's participation, however, is not established. When I asked Berg about this he told me that "Plato's world of forms mirrors Kabbalistic teachings," which is apparently proof enough for him. Either way, in his books, Berg rarely points out these facts, he simply name-drops and leaves it alone.
"The thing about the center," says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, bestselling author of "Honey From the Rock: An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism" (Jewish Lights Publishing) and rabbi-in-residence at the Hebrew Union College in New York, "is that it's highly stylized and very far from traditional teaching." Kushner scoffs at the red thread bracelets -- said to ward off the evil eye -- that grace the slim wrists of Winona Ryder and Demi Moore and sell for $5 in center gift shops, and Kabbalah water, blessed and "empowered" with magic, which sells for $2.50. Those items "should raise some serious yellow caution flags for the serious seeker," he says.
Perhaps the center is not built for the serious seeker, but for someone like Gimenez -- someone who doesn't want to abandon her New York lifestyle for a world of God, but someone who simply wants a better life in New York. "It's only been a short time that I've been coming to classes and practicing Kabbalah, but I've seen small changes in my life. Being a New Yorker, there's so much hustle and bustle. I felt like I was living in a panic. Now that I've started using their meditations, I'm more relaxed. I'm much more in control."
Which is the thing: The center prides itself on results. If you go there looking for a better life, you better find that better life. "Don't believe a word we say," says Phillips, the L.A. producer. "Look at the results. Kabbalah should work for everything, for every problem in life, and it should work 100 percent of the time."
And for Phillips, it has worked. "Before I started studying Kabbalah, I was rich in business, but I was poor in life. I was completely unappreciative of my family, I was under the delusion that many entrepreneurs have that I was providing for my family. I wasn't providing for my family, I was gratifying my ego. My kids didn't want an extra million dollars, they wanted an extra hour with their father. My wife didn't want a bigger house -- she wanted a husband with a heart."
Berg echoes this 100 percent results sentiment. Both of his books begin by imploring the reader to be skeptical. "If your life doesn't get better by using these tools then stop using them," he says. "Throw away my book, don't come to class. Don't waste your time."
And while merely showing up is not enough, the meditations and spiritual exercises the center teaches are remarkably simple. Most are aimed at getting the practitioner to be "proactive" rather than "reactive" -- i.e., making decisions that are not driven by ego but instead are driven by a desire to be one with God.
To make this happen requires working with "The 72 Names of God." Berg's instructions call for a little positive affirmation that takes the form of studying short explanations of the various names. For example: "Moses became a liberator of the very slaves he helped rule. Because of this tremendous transformation, the letters that compose his name hold great spiritual power. This particular configuration transmits the forces of healing."
Study is followed by a little visualization (picture the Hebrew letters that make up this name of God) and a little meditation (focus on the letters, focus on your breath). The whole practice is done for about ... as long as you feel like doing it. Like most other religions, Kabbalah emphasizes good works, and each of the centers has a variety of charity causes where students volunteer, but this merely greases the wheels of change. The real deal is the names-of-God meditations. When I asked Berg how long I would have to do this kind of meditation before my life got better, he said, "A month. You should notice a difference in a month."
A month. Impressive. And not just to me: Even in superfaddish L.A., people keep coming back. Madonna herself has logged seven years of study.
Lunch is over. Berg pushes back from the table. He still hasn't wiped the tomato sauce from his face. Does Kabbalah teach people about napkins? Who knows? I ask him why Madonna, why everyone else has stuck with Kabbalah so long -- what's their secret? "We live in the information age -- people want real information about how to live better lives. Kabbalah is the world's oldest self-help book. It had been hidden from people for too long. Our secret is that it's finally not a secret."
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
About the writer
Steven Kotler is a writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of the novel "The Angle Quickest for Flight."
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