Philip Berg: A Counter-Obit

Philip Berg: A Counter-Obit

In the weekend newspapers one can find obituaries for “Rabbi Philip Berg”, dead at 86. The New York Times headline credits Berg as follows: “Updated Jewish Mysticism.”

“Updated”, huh? Well, that’s one way to describe the shenanigans of the shameless huckster who “ministered” to the likes of Madonna, Demi Moore, Roseanne Barr and Monica Lewinsky at the Los Angeles Kabbalah Center, with his red wrist strings and “holy kabbalah” water.

Of course, we don’t want our newspaper of record to wax judgmental in obituaries, do we? Where might that lead, after all? So we give the lately late the benefit of most doubts. And to be fair, the NYT obit, written by a master of obit writing, Margalit Fox, (who, by the way, doesn’t get to choose the headlines that adorn her writing), does spread the description of Berg, his wife and sons, and his multimillion-dollar scams to include at least some of his many shady dealings. But, unfortunately, it also invokes the excruciating even-handedness of Rabbi Arthur Green, of the Reconstructionist movement, to set the obit’s abiding tone:

It’s a mixed legacy. On the one hand, both Orthodox and liberal Jews accused him of charlatanism and hucksterism. . . . On the other, there were people who derived great benefit from his teachings, who found their way back to Judaism through him. . . . He tapped into the fact that modern educated people can still be superstitious and still have insecurities and still have needs that were once filled by people who wrote amulets and gave blessings. And he was willing to do that for people in the modern world.

Yes, Berg was willing to do that for fees that made him and his family hundreds of millions of dollar, and all he had to do was indulge the credulous and untutored by bowdlerizing Jewish traditions to the point of unrecognizability. Yes, afterlife/immortality themes and astrology had a place in medieval Jewish thought, mystical and otherwise; but Berg brought them front and center and disregarded most of the rest. He didn’t just gently humor the superstitions of confused people; he actively encouraged, embellished, bolstered and profited wildly from them.

It may not be all that surprising that a leader of the Reconstructionist movement would give Berg the benefit the doubt on this score, because that movement, in my view, also at times plays a little fast and loose with tradition in the name of helping Jews find their way to (or back to) Judaism—or at least a version of it. But it is distressing, of which (much) more below.

Fox, meanwhile, doesn’t help the overall impression of factual solemnity the obit wants to make by offering a translation of “kabbalah” as “tradition.” This is wrong. Kabbalah is a noun derived from the Hebrew verb meaning to receive, so it means “the received”, or “what has been received”, really meaning in context the received gnostic wisdom. The Hebrew word for “tradition” transliterates as “masorah”—not even close.

Now, it happens that I wrote about Berg in Jewcentricity, my 2009 book of which mention has been made in this space. After introducing the subject via Madonna and the other celebrities Berg snookered, I noted toward the end of chapter 7 that I had been putting the word “kabbalah” in scare quotes for a reason: There is such a thing as kabbalah, I explained: It’s the generic name for Jewish mysticism, based in large part around the Zohar, the Book of Splendor. I noted that for Orthodox or traditional Jews, kabbalah is difficult, esoteric and even potentially dangerous knowledge reserved only for the most serious, emotionally mature and well-educated. There were no shortcuts to it either. It was hard and exhausting study, and most important, it was not about or for the student; it was about God and creation. Its purpose was to attain enlightenment; the point was intellectual and spiritual, as in any serious form of mysticism. If dime-store therapy has an opposite, genuine kabbalah is it.

I wrote then that Philip Berg’s “kabbalah” is to real Judaism what Thunderbird is to real wine. It’s McMysticism—an outsized, distorted knock-off, a fake and worse, as any educated Jew who reads the web page of Philip Berg’s Kabbalah Center can readily see.

Berg (not his given name) presents “kaballah” as esoteric knowledge separate from Judaism, rather than as an outgrowth or expression of it. In the website’s question-and-answer section, the viewer learns that it is not necessary to be Jewish to study and follow kabbalah. Berg’s son Yehuda told Daphne Merkin of the New York Times, apparently in a moment of unsafeguarded candor, that the Center downplays the Jewish aspect of the Center’s version of kaballah, because it might alienate the clientele.

It is indeed a strange mix that Berg and his family came up with: Seating in the Center for prayer services is segregated by sexes; adepts are enjoined to keep kosher; the weekly Torah portion is read from a bima on the Sabbath, yet no claim is made that any of this is Jewish! Mitzvoth are not called mitzvoth, but “tools.” What goes on in the Center is never referred to as “religion”, and in all discussions of the matter religion is always put in quotation marks to separate “kaballah” from it—as if, as Merkin put it, religion “were another of those tossed-out, old-hat ideas, like fidelity.”

This is why we can be told on the website with an apparent straight electronic face that Sir Isaac Newton was an adept of Bergian kaballah, for example. So was Pico de Mirandolla, the remarkable man who wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man that helped kick off the Italian Renaissance. This is a bizarre half-truth, like much of what the Kaballah Center proffers. Pico believed the Zohar predicted Christianity, and so had the remarkable Jewish scholar Abba Hillel Delmedigo teach him Hebrew so that he could read the original. This, however, did not make Pico de Mirandolla a master of kaballah, for he came at it with a preconceived purpose at odds with its teachings.

So did Philip Berg. Rabbi Berg claimed inspiration from genuine kabbalists like Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, and this claim is partly true. But to see how, we must know a little something about Yehuda Ashlag—something you are unlikely to find out about in a NYT obit. 

Rabbi Ashlag was a rather unorthodox Orthodox Jew. Born in Poland in 1885, he founded the Kaballah Center in Israel in 1922. While others, like Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, were busy fusing Orthodoxy with modern Jewish nationalism, Ashlag tried to fuse his understanding of Orthodoxy with communism. There are stories of Ashlag’s audiences with David Ben-Gurion that left Ben-Gurion complaining: “I wanted to talk about kabbalah, but the rabbi wanted to talk about socialism.” One of Ashlag’s students was Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein, and Berg claims to have been a student of Brandwein. (He was, but Brandwein repudiated Berg and all he stands for.)

But while Ashlag was influenced—or addled, depending on how one sees it—by the incandescent idealist currents of his day, Berg was moved instead by elements of New Age and standard hippie culture. His version of kaballah bears little resemblance to Ashlag’s, only two generations removed from that original, which was itself a departure from tradition. Berg claimed that there is greatness inside everyone, but that only by subduing one’s ego can one find this greatness. Berg’s kaballah is dime-store personal therapy, and an illogical kind at that: One seeks greatness by extirpating the ego? Sounds interesting, er….., but doesn’t the very act of seeking greatness make that difficult?

In any event, the advertised motivation for Berg’s “kabbalah” is not primarily to seek knowledge about God, it’s about helping the student. What does “losing” one’s ego and aura of negativity mean to someone like Madonna? One can only speculate, but if I’d done more to popularize vulgarity than any other woman in the 20^th century, I might want to slim down my ego and expel my negativity, too. And if all I have to do to accomplish this is tie a red ribbon around my wrist—a negative color, by the way, in real kaballah—learn about the 82 names of God, drink expensive designer water and buy costly books I don’t understand, well, that’s a super deal if one happens to have millions of uncommitted dollars on hand.

It seems that Madonna has another interest in “kaballah”, however: immortality. Merkin learned this when she interviewed Madonna for a woman’s magazine. Madonna knew that Merkin has been raised as an Orthodox Jew, so she asked her if she believed in death. Wrote Merkin: “I answered somewhat bleakly that I did. When I turned the question back on her, she announced that she didn’t because she believed in the concept of reincarnation as taught by the Kaballah Center.” Madonna was referring to the authentic, if exotic, kabbalistic concept of gilgul neshamoth, or the recirculation of souls. So Merkin asked Madonna why she didn’t stick with Catholicism, since life after death is far more prominent in Catholicism than in Judaism. Madonna’s answer: “There’s nothing consoling about being Catholic. There’re all just laws and prohibitions.” Merkin, who went to yeshiva as a child and understands full well what “laws and prohibitions” are really about, doesn’t record her response to this astonishing remark because, doubtless, she was completely nonplussed.

Perhaps the Kabbalah Center has actually helped Madonna and others. Fine: Lots of people think that mixing and matching aspects of different religions is amusing and harmless. But Rabbi Berg’s Kabbalah Center has got nothing to do with genuine kabbalah, and the organization is anything but harmless. There are now fifty “kabbalah centers” worldwide, five in Israel, and there are far too many stories about the rip-off cults some of these centers have become for none of them to be true. In one Israeli center a so-called rabbi stole thousands of dollars from a couple, one of them dying of cancer. Giving this “rabbi” their life savings would supposedly cure the wife—of course, it didn’t. This is the lowest of the low, the scummiest of the scummiest kind of thing to do in the name of any religion. Some of these centers look to be a combination of kooky Scientology-like nonsense—teaching courses in “anti-matter” and palm reading—and the social cohesion of the Moonies in the way they combine rank superstition with ego escapism. This is not Judaism, and it is not harmless.

It could get worse, too. It would be unfortunate if large numbers of innocent but uneducated people around the world come to think that this cynical rogue operation as an authentic expression of Judaism. And that, unfortunately, is not so far-fetched. Imagine some impressionable 17-year old in Detroit, or Malawi, where Madonna has spent millions to teach young people “kaballah”, hearing a rabbi say that the Berg Kabbalah Center is a manipulative, money-making cult that has nothing to do with Judaism, and Madonna contradicting that claim and saying otherwise. Indeed, she already has, as has her (former) husband Guy Ritchie, who explains that the only difference between “kabbalah” and Catholicism “is the amount of people. You don’t call Catholicism a cult.” To this Rabbi Berg added: “Eventually, when there’s enough people doing kaballah, it won’t even be an issue.”

So who is that 17-year old going to believe? An international rock star who has cultivated an aura of social consciousness and given millions of dollars to charity, or some bearded schnook she’s never heard of? When Brittany Spears gets a Hebrew tattoo on her neck and claims that’s cool and part of kabbalah, but some unknown educated Jew points out on a talk show that tattoos are forbidden by Jewish law, who’s she going to believe? The “kabbalah” phenomenon exists separate from Hollywood, to be sure, but it is Hollywood and American celebrity culture generally that has vaulted it into the limelight, and given it the potential to do such harm. That is why it is probably not such a great idea for people like Shimon Peres to appear in public with Madonna (her Jewish name is Esther, she says, but she’s not actually a convert) when she comes to Israel, as she did in 2004 and again in 2007. Peres may not realize how wacky Madonna’s version of kabbalah is, but neither he nor any other Israeli official has any business stamping a heksher—a seal of kosher approval—on it, and this making more plausible Madonna’s claim that she is “an ambassador for Judaism.”

Thanks to the internet, we live at a time when demagogy, bigotry, fads and foolishness of all kinds can careen around the planet at near the speed of light. There are no filters and few controls, enabling Jewcentricity to be expressed, magnified and mixed within and across national borders as never before. Philip Berg never quite qualified as a madman leading multitudes to perdition, as did the false messiah Shabbtai Tzvi of the 17^th century. But stranger things have happened. Berg may be a precursor of who-knows-how-many charlatans in the future who may try to take Judaism for a talisman-like ride on a Jewcentric merry-go-round for fun and profit. In the fullness of time, forms of fake Judaism may take hold in the United States, and perhaps Israel too, that respond to a growing need for spiritual guidance in a psychically unstuck time, but that bear no resemblance to actual Judaism. With the sharp decline in Jewish education and with it historical memory and understanding, Judaism could face the challenge of mindless heresies like never before. Just imagine what Shabbtai Tzvi could have done with the internet. 

That’s what I said in the book, less than more, and so there you have it: The notion that Berg “updated” Jewish mysticism isn’t remotely accurate, anymore than “kabbalah” means “tradition.” What Berg did and what his Center will no doubt keep on doing, since it is so lucrative, is fraudulent and harmful.

But please, please understand that I am by no means equating Berg’s desecration of traditional Judaism with Reconstructionism just because Art Green strained himself to be so evenhanded about the man. I do have problems with Reconstructionism, but it’s more or less the same problem I have with Reform and, to a lesser extent, with Conservative Judaism, too. Let me explain.

I want all forms of Judaism to thrive according to their own lights. I want the more than occasionally yawning disrespect among the different forms to cease. I applaud any effort to bring Jews together in the service of God so long as the effort is mounted in good faith, and no one is trying to use keter torah—the crown of the Torah—for profit, as did Philip Berg. I especially applaud efforts to make Jews feel at home in a synagogue when circumstances may make that problematical, for, all else equal, it’s better for people to join in community than not. But I cannot prevent myself from ruing the means by which this is sometimes done.  Let me illustrate by way of a personal anecdote.

This past Rosh Hashanah, for reasons I needn’t detail here, I attended a Reconstructionist service for the first time ever. I soon saw that the prayer book was ruthlessly edited to make it absolutely gender-equal, and all reference to Jewish chosenness has been expunged. Sections of the Torah that refer to male homosexuality as an abomination are never read, as they are in traditional synagogues for the afternoon service on Yom Kippur. As it happens, the Reconstructionist movement, and its seminary (where I taught a course some many years ago, hired by none other than Arthur Green), is particularly attractive to what is now called “the LGBT community.”

The Reconstructionist air veritably pulses with contemporary political correctness in that and every other known respect. Indeed, at one point in the Rosh Hashanah service, the rabbi asked congregants to shout out of the silence one by one—Quaker style—what they wished for in the coming year, and many obliged with highly predictable “progressive” mantras. Heresy in a place like this is defined in political terms, not in theological ones. The rabbi’s sermon on the first day of the holiday was about the state cutting the education budget, and building more prisons. This is a matter about which any sensible person might be incensed, but to make this the sole topic of a High Holiday sermon shows clearly that politics takes pride of place over matters of the spirit, in at least this Reconstructionist service if not also others.

This is made right by defining “social activism” as an integral form of religious devotion—a Jewish “social gospel”—so that the distinction between the two has been rubbed away to near nothingness The activism has to be of a certain provenance, however, even when its content flatly contradicts the plain meaning of the Torah text, let alone the Talmud and rabbinical responsa over the years. The idea that Judaism affirms only one sort of social activism exemplifies the conceit of contemporaneity, the assumption that modern (and now postmodern) “progressive” beliefs are intrinsically superior to anything inherited from earlier eras. Current ideological idols are invested with authority; anything that contradicts these idols is dismissed out of hand, and is reviled as tactically and emotionally necessary. One can be of any disposition religiously—believe in God or not, keep the Sabbath and the dietary laws or not, engage in Jewish learning or not, and so on and so forth; but if an attendee happens to be a standard-issue political conservative, he or she better shut up or prepare to face no little hostility and intolerance.

Most traditional Jews have a bone to pick with Reconstructionism and Reform Judaism on the basis of Jewish law—halacha.  Orthodox Jews may disagree over interpretations, but they agree that the halacha, as it has developed for around two millennia, is the basis of the conversation. It is authoritative. For Reconstructionist and Reform Judaism, it is not. But that isn’t what I want to dwell on now. I want to focus instead on just one aspect of that disagreement: the liturgy itself.

In a traditional High Holy Day service, almost exclusively in Hebrew (with a little Aramaic tossed in for good measure), the structure of the services is fixed. There is an order of prayer based on the daily liturgy, but modified and expanded to suit the special occasion. In the case of the High Holy Day liturgy, the expansion has been vast thanks in part to the invention of the printing press. Locally produced poetry and hymns from hither and yon over the centuries got gathered together; the compilers of the modern Orthodox makhzor (High Holy Day prayer book) were reluctant to pick and choose lest they offend, so they included nearly everything. The service is therefore voluminous and takes a long time to get through. And if you’re not an expert in Hebrew literature, making sense of some rather esoteric poetry composed in different forms of Hebrew as it evolved through the centuries can be very difficult. Translations help, but only to a point. Of course, to follow even the less esoteric parts at the speed they move presumes a religious education up to the task; but Orthodox communities focus relentlessly on education, for this and other purposes intrinsic to the religious system as a whole.

Education or no, for many attendees High Holy Day services—especially on Yom Kippur—are tedious; getting through it feels like work. A fair number don’t bother with the harder material, although the traditional music that accompanies much of it can be attractive enough to keep most people in the room. There’s a fair bit of hearty communal singing at strategic intervals, even though silent devotion and listening to the cantor make his way though reams of text account for most of the time.

But that the prayer service feels like work makes a certain sense during the High Holy Days, because the entire experience in the synagogue during the Ten Days of Repentance is understood to be a kind of hard work: You are there for the purpose of merciless personal introspection as a means to repent one’s sins and thus become a better person. This is a goal, traditional Jews have always believed, that is worth the hard work it demands.

Closely related to the notion of prayer as a form of spiritual work all year long, not just during the High Holy Days, traditional services defend against distractions. For that reason, men and women sit in separate sections, because they do in fact distract each other—and if you deny that you’re either not being honest with yourself or you’re undersexed. On the High Holy Days men wear an outer white garment, a robe called a kittel.  Everyone, with kittel and standard black and white prayer shawl (tallit), looks more or less the same. Women generally dress modestly. So there are no fashion distractions either.

You do this work as an individual, but you say the words in the first-person plural; your work is made easier by the knowledge that everyone around you is doing the same thing. The balance between what is individual and what is communal is finely hewn. Those immersed in the service are all personally addressing God, their judge, but in their kittels and prayer shawls no egos get expressed publicly in communal prayer. That is an appropriate expression of humility: After all, each individual engaged in an I-Thou conversation focused on asking God’s forgiveness wants least of all to indulge in ego-prominent behavior. And when the service is over, one feels that something has been accomplished. The feeling of happy lightness, of a burden lifted, has been earned.

And there is something more going on that I have only come to appreciate over time. The potential tedium of the High Holy Day services declines for most people year by year, experience by experience. Forty years ago the High Holy Day services felt endless to me. I was antsy some of the time, bored much of the rest. But I plugged away at the great volume of words in the mahzor and, to my amazement, I found that little by little, year by year, I began to feel comfortable with it. I began to anticipate it. I began to understand the structure within and among the sections. I began to actually like it. As I grew the liturgy grew within me. Insights born from immersion in the texts eventually penetrated even my thick skull. And so I began to understand that the work involved transcended any one prayer service, and any one year’s worth of High Holy Day prayer services. I realized that I was engaged in a lifetime’s effort though which, again little by little, I have been earning a more mature understanding of prayer itself, and of myself through prayer.

At a Reconstructionist service for the High Holy Days, at least the one I experienced, things are different. There is, of course, no separate seating for men and women, and many people do not dress modestly. Plenty of female arms and shoulders and backs were exposed; one female gabbai (rector) walked around in shorts. At least 90 percent of the liturgy simply goes missing. In its place, for example, there was in this instance a lengthy wordless “walking meditation” to start one of the services. People just milled around the room looking a little like Shirley McClain zombies. There are not strategic intervals for communal singing; there is instead a lot of communal singing in the form of a “greatest hits” version of the traditional service. Instead of singing the ending lines of a hymn after having first read the rest, only the end is sung and is repeated over and over and over again, mantra-like. Some of the music sounds Jewish, but just as much sounds like reggae or vaguely African music—no doubt the bongo drums in near constant use help give that impression.

The structure of the service is only vaguely recognizable, as favorite, popular elements of the “additional” (musaf) service, said after the reading of the Torah in traditional services, are dragged into the morning service instead. Musaf is dispensed with altogether because Reconstructionist (and Reform) Jews eliminate entirely any reference to the animal sacrifices done while the Temple stood—even though the whole point of the prayer service, as originally conceived and traditionally understood, is to substitute words of prayer for the sacrifices of old.

In the service I attended, too, there was a break four or five times for members of the congregation to come up and tell everyone their personal stories of landing in that particular synagogue. It was very ego-out-there-on-display, just the opposite tone of what a traditional service promotes.

The service is, in short, highly participatory but requires only a very low level of educational preparation. It is not work, and as best I can tell there is no chance for much of anything to accumulate year to year, at least nothing inherent in the liturgy. There is nothing difficult to master, so there is nothing apparent to earn over the arc of a lifetime. It is, in a word, a form not of spiritual work at all; it more resembles a form of entertainment.

How contemporary American can you get? Let me reach for one of my favorite Michael Crichton quotations, this one from his 1999 book Timeline, to make the point clear:

What is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment. . . .

Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.

            In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.

Crichton didn’t list it, but beyond business meetings, malls and stores, politicians and schools, clergy and religious services must be entertaining, too. Or people will switch, and they’ll go out of business.

Again, let me emphasize that I’m not trying to diss the Reconstructionist service I attended, let alone the entire movement. It may not be my cup of tea but it clearly serves a need. I wish it well. As I have already said, I want all forms of Judaism to thrive according to their own lights. Many, perhaps most, of the people in attendance with me this past Rosh Hashanah would not have gone to any High Holy Day service had this one not been inviting and available. Many would not have felt comfortable elsewhere, and most simply lack, through no fault of their own, the minimal educational preparation to follow a traditional service.

Moreover, there was and is a sense of community there, and a broad generosity of spirit is unmistakable—qualities not always in evidence elsewhere. The rabbi is no ignoramus, not by a very long shot. And just by the way, she happens to be relentlessly serious about the intellectual and spiritual qualifications for conversation to Judaism—more so, I would venture to say, than most Conservative, Reform and even many Orthodox rabbis. She sends her successful conversion candidates to a mikvah (a ritual bath), too. Whatever one’s own preferences, all this deserves our respect not least because for some, including some people I know and love, there is no other realistic way into the Jewish world and its traditions; and those who cannot enter cannot grow in that world.

I am just trying to point out that, thanks to the conceit of contemporaneity, a great deal of value gets lost in translation when one moves from a tradition hammered out of experience over the generations to the nearly omnivorous lax, easygoing, “I’m-OK-you’re-OK”, very “hip” standards of the Western cultural present. And obviously, Judaism isn’t the only religious tradition confronted with that dilemma in 21^st-century America.

In that regard, Philip Berg’s Kabbalah Center is way beyond the pale; he certainly was a charlatan and a huckster preying (not praying) on the cluelessness of those seeking easy and instant spiritual gratification. Reconstructionist and Reform Judaism, despite their casual attitude to rabbinical tradition and authority, are nothing of the kind. But for that very reason it’s probably not a good idea for Jewish clergymen of any variety to defend Philip Berg. Whatever the motive may be, it sends the wrong signal about their own activities and standards.

We should remember: Most of the time the alternative to high standards isn’t low standards, it’s ultimately no standards. The benefit of the doubt cannot be infinitely elastic, and even benign ends do not justify flexible means in all cases. Sometimes the best way to help spiritually thirsty people is to challenge by telling them, “No, you can’t do that and I won’t help you do it; there is no easy answer, and you’ll have to work hard, possibly for a long time, to find one. And your money is irrelevant.”  (What? That could happen in Hollywood?  Who am I kidding?…..)