Yossi Abramowitz: Madonna is Jewish

We've been posting for nearly seven years that one of our favorite pop singers, Madonna, is not Jewish even though some of her music makes allusion to the Kabbalah and she has been involved in Kabbalah studies.

Now Yossi Abramowitz in the Jerusalem Report, strongly insinuates that Madonna is Jewish in actual fact ("YOSEF I. ABRAMOWITZ hails the arrival of Madonna to Israel – and to Judaism").

Yossi writes a nice column, but we just don't buy the premise of this story, especially because he has not interviewed Madonna to ask her if she has converted to Judaism. Nice try though.

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Is Madonna Jewish?

No, superstar singer and dancer Madonna is not a Jew. She was born and brought up Catholic. However in recent years she has been linked to the Jewish mystical practice called Kabbalah.

On Madonna's 2005 album, "Confessions on a Dance Floor" the tenth track is controversial because it is called Isaac and contains allusions to the Kabbalah. Rabbis in Israel (mistakenly) thought Madonna was trying to cash in on the good name of Isaac Luria, the Ari, the great founder of Lurianic Kabbalah. So those good men condemned the singer and the album.

It turns out that the singer named this song in homage to her quite living London spiritual guide, a Mr. Yitzhak Sinwani - Isaac is his English name. So what do we think? Is Madonna misappropriating the Kabbalah in this song, distorting it in her now-expected sacrilegious manner? (See below for the lyrics.)

There are elements of Jewish chant in this song with strings and guitars and guts and emotion - yes, a spiritual vibe. Yitzhak Sinwani of the London Kabbalah Centre, does sing several stanzas on the song in Aramaic and provides the soft-spoken English coda at its end.

Madonna has said to the press that the Aramaic chant by Yitzhak in the song made her cry. "I had tears in my eyes and did not even know what he was singing about," she told AOL. "Then he told me and I cried even more."

Is this Kabbalah? It's Madonna stringing together poetically some lines about heaven and angels and light and doors that are locked. Everyone that sings of light in heaven is not a Kabbalist. Locked doors of the heart are a classic Madonna theme. In fact, Open Your Heart is a Madonna standard from her True Blue album of 1986 (yes, twenty + years ago).

I'm more intrigued by the songs both before and after this cut on the album. In the one before she asks superstar mid-life crisis questions.

"How high are the stakes? How much fortune can you make? Should I carry on? Will it matter when I'm gone?" To me this sounds more like Kohelet (the philosophical biblical book of Ecclesiastes) than Kabbalah. How much is enough? How many Rolls Royces, villas, private jets?

"Was it all worth it? How did I earn it?" And Ms. Madonna forces herself to admit, "Nobody's perfect/I guess I deserve it." Now this is hardly a spiritual reflection. It sounds like the material girl is poking her head through here.

Okay, perhaps, I ruminated, the song Push that follows Isaac on the album moves in a mystical direction. But first you have to make one big rabbinic assumption that most critics and fans have not made. They all assume that this song is an homage to Madonna's (former) husband and lover, Guy Ritchie. "You push me to go the extra mile. You push me when it's difficult to smile. You push me, a better version of myself. You push me, only you and no one else. You push me, see the other point of view. You push me when there's nothing else to do. You push me when I think I know it all. You push me when I stumble and I fall."

However, one might presume - a la the midrash - that this song is a metaphor for the singer's reliance on a higher spiritual being, much as the rabbis interpret that the beloved in the Song of Songs is a metaphor for God.

Only then does Madonna tilt toward the spiritual and maybe - it is still a stretch - in the direction of the authentically kabbalistic content of Judaism. Here are the lyrics:

Im-ninalu (if they are locked)
Daltey Nedivim (the doors of the generous)
Daltey Nedivim
Daltey Marom (the doors of heaven)

Im-ninalu x8

Staring up into the heavens
In this hell that binds your hands
Will you sacrifice your comfort?
Make your way in a foreign land?

Wrestle with your darkness
Angels call your name
Can you hear what they are saying?
Will you ever be the same?

Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu

Remember, remember and never forget
All of your life has all been a test
You will find the gate that's open
Even though your spirit's broken

Open up my heart
And cause my lips to speak
Bring the heaven and the stars
Down to earth for me

Im-ninalu
Daltey Nedivim

Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu

Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu

El-Hay (Living God)
El-Hay Merumam Al Keruvim (Living God, aloft above the Cherubs)
Kulam Be-Ruho Ya'alu (All of them will rise up through his spirit)

Wrestle with your darkness
Angels call your name
Can you hear what they are saying?
Will you ever be the same?

Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu

Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im-ninalu Im-ninalu

El-Hay
El-Hay Merumam Al Keruvim

[Spoken by Yitzhak Sinwani]

The generous truly know
What will be given
If they don't stop, you know
The gates of heaven are always open
And there's this God in the sky and the angels
How they sit, you know, in front of the light
And that's what it's about

- repost from 2006

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What is "Displaced Talmudic Energy?"

Jenna Weissman Joselit asks at HuffPost, "Do These Amazing Jews Have 'Displaced Talmudic Energy?'" If we bought the analysis referred to in the article about talented contemporary Jews, we would begin to refer to this syndrome as DTE. Alas we do not buy the theory.

The Talmud is a literature with distinctive contents and ways of thinking about the world. If it was a source of "energy" we would be among the first to market Talmud-Water or Talmud-Bracelets and try to get Madonna interested in the Talmud.

Wait a second, those are not bad ideas.

We do track a high sense of drama in the world of the Talmud and a conviction that we Jews are stars at the center of the stage. That is at most an idea, a concept or a meme, and not an energy bar.

The idea of DTE is part of what Joselit cites from the book by the forward to a book by Sidney Offit, "Nine Lives: Favorite Profiles of Famous People from the Annals of Moment Magazine." [Help us please - we cannot find any record of this book.]

Here are some of her observations about the phrase.

[Offit...] wonders how it is possible for so many contemporary artists, performers and cultural personalities from Tony Kushner and Jon Stewart to Bob Dylan and Brian Epstein to hail from a Jewish background. But where his predecessors looked to lineage, Offit does them one better. His canny explanation: "displaced Talmudic energy."

Is he actually suggesting that the "famous people" who figure here had at one point in their lives taken up the study of the Talmud and, having subsequently abandoned that pursuit for the stage, found that their engagement with the ancient text continued to influence their way of being? At first blush, readers might be forgiven for thinking that's what Mr. Offit means. After all, he does go so far as to call Jon Stewart a "modern Talmudist."

But I don't think that's really what he has in mind. Rather, by his lights, "Talmudic energy" -- displaced or intact -- has little to do with the actual study of the ancient text as much as it does with a particular sensibility, one sustained by the spirit of inquiry, an appetite for questioning and a penchant for detail.

I don't doubt that the innovative and influential personalities profiled in this book possess these qualities - and in spades. But why call them examples of "displaced Talmudic energy"? Why, in fact, go all the way back to the Talmud? Might not contemporary readers be better served and more effectively enlightened by explanations that highlight economic forces, say, or the historic role of the Jews as latter-day brokers of both goods and ideas? And what about the galvanizing, generative effects of marginality on creativity?

Although essentialism has fallen from grace and out of favor in most contemporary circles, it continues to hang on within Jewish ones, pace Mr. Offit's "displaced Talmudic energy." I'm not sure why, but I suspect it's one way to keep celebrated Jews close at hand and within the fold.

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New from Talmudic Books: "The Kosher Kabbalah: Non-Esoteric Passages from the Zohar" Kindle Edition

New from Talmudic Books, "The Kosher Kabbalah: Non-Esoteric Passages from the Zohar" [Kindle Edition], Maurice Simon, Harry Sperling, Paul Levertoff, with Reuven Brauner (selection, preface and notes). $.99.

This amazing book contains a carefully chosen selection of 837 of the non-esoteric portions of the Zohar, Judaism’s most fundamental and influential work of the Kabbalah, the corpus of Jewish mysticism.

You can read the first 71 selections free on Amazon using "Look Inside".

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