POP GOES THE KABBALAH

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

If it were a fashion event, you might call it fabulous. Tonight's audience at Showroom Seven, a grand wholesale-retail space in midtown Manhattan, is peppered with actors, musicians, some designers for DKNY and others at home among racks of classy outfits destined for sale at Barney's or Bergdorf Goodman. Even the speaker looks swank, in perfectly coordinated suit and tie and black velvet yarmulke. But Rabbi Abraham Hardoon is not here to talk pret-a-porter; he is discoursing on the ancient esoteric Jewish tradition of Kabbalah.

Hardoon's topic--tonight and every Thursday, to packed classes--is how to align oneself with "the Light," the never-ending mystical emanation of the Unknowable God, Ein Sof. That he addresses this publicly at all is remarkable, since Kabbalah was a tightly guarded secret for centuries. The extent of change in that status, however, is revealed in a boast: "Someone came to me and asked, 'Is it true that Madonna studies Kabbalah?'" Hardoon says. He allows a Billy Crystal-esque pause. "Oh, you heard about that?" Laughter.

Yes, we've heard. Madonna threw a Kabbalah cocktail party. Roseanne compares Kabbalah--favorably--to quantum physics. Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand and actress Sandra Bernhard study it. And Hardoon's Kabbalah Learning Center, the controversial organization that attracts many of the stars, is just the largest and most flamboyant of hundreds of courses in Kabbalah and related Jewish mysticism in places as diverse as Sudbury, Mass., and Boca Raton, Fla. Academic involvement in the discipline has multiplied, as have tangential pop artifacts like the best-selling Bible Code and an X-Files episode about a golem, the Jewish proto-Frankenstein monster. Publishers are turning out dozens of titles on subjects ranging from arcana to kids' Kabbalah. Most intriguing, mysticism is increasingly viewed as the answer to what United Jewish Appeal officer Alan Bayer calls "a hungry, thirsty, bottle-of-water-in-the-desert need for connection with transcendent meanings" among ordinary Jews. Concludes Brandeis University professor Arthur Green, a scholar and advocate of mysticism: "For nearly 200 years, Western Jews tried to hide Kabbalah under the rug. Now it's been rediscovered and reclaimed as part of the Jewish legacy."

Jewish mysticism dates far back into antiquity, but the Kabbalah ("received" teachings) crystallized with the Zohar, the 13th century masterpiece set down in ancient Aramaic by the Spanish Jew Moses de Leon. Superficially, the book was a mystical novel, a kind of Celestine Prophecy precursor. But initiates knew better. Shrouded in its story lines were the keys to unlock the Hebrew Bible--and hence all existence. Whereas standard rabbinic Judaism sometimes seems to look backward to God's most intimate interactions with his chosen people and forward to a Messiah, Kabbalah stresses the Deity's presence as immediate at all times: an ongoing surge of light or energy communicated from the Unknowable to the material world via a series of 10 divine emanations, or sephirot. By studying and imitating these, the mystic could progress ever closer to their source. Sixteenth century master Isaac Luria added a gloss on Creation: God, having graciously receded to make room, channeled a ray of light into the resulting void through mystic vessels. Some of them shattered--the world became broken--and fallen sparks of the eternal were trapped in every aspect of our mundane existence. It is every human's duty, through good works, prayer and mystical contemplation, to raise the sparks back up to the Godhead and repair the world. In the 18th century, the reformer Ba'al Shem Tov's populist twist on this once secret tradition--that every humble act can be a celebration of God's immanent presence--became the heart of his own ecstatic orthodoxy, Hasidism.

Kabbalah ranged where conventional Judaism would not. The sephirah inspiriting the material world--the Shekinah--was feminine; her hoped-for reuniting with the masculine Holy One introduced both a feminine divinity and frankly sexual imagery to Judaism. Angels and demons struggled in Kabbalistic pages, reincarnation was championed, number codes abounded. Sublime spirituality coexisted with "practical Kabbalah," the use of magic charms or amulets. Such aspects were profoundly embarrassing to the 19th century founders of Reform Judaism. Reform together with the similarly rationalist Conservative movement and modern Orthodoxy came to dominate American Judaism. After the Holocaust wiped out many of its key teachers, Jewish mysticism seemed destined to languish as a superstitious whisper.

Then two things changed. A postwar Israeli burst of Kabbalah scholarship yielded modern Hebrew translations and annotations of vital texts. And seekers appeared. Many younger congregants yearning for individual spirituality became impatient with American Reform and Conservative Judaism's longtime emphasis on communal concerns such as Israel and synagogue building. Some left; some explored Eastern meditation. And some, notes author Rodger Kamenetz, decided that "Kabbalah is the poetic language of the Jewish soul."

Kamenetz, who wrote the best-selling The Jew in the Lotus, has chronicled that growing recognition in a sequel released last month, Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters. He is part of a publishing mini-boom. Jewish Lights, a small house whose star is mystically oriented Reform rabbi and NPR commentator Lawrence Kushner, expects to sell 200,000 books this year. God Is a Verb, a Kabbalistic primer by Rabbi David Cooper, recently tore through three printings in two weeks. Says a publishing spokesman: "Every Jewish book that comes through, whether we buy it or not, people want to append mysticism to it. 'How do we get the Kabbalah audience?' It's kind of becoming pop."

And kind of becoming spiritual practice. Los Angeles Kabbalist Jonathan Omer-Man has tutored more than 3,000 students in Kabbalah and the contemplation of such seemingly simple mantras as the headings for the first four Torah readings in the book of Genesis. A meditation conference organized by the Bay Area group Chochmat HaLev drew 500 people. Spiritual life at Rabbi Rami Shapiro's Temple Beth Or in Miami features a custom-built meditation garden. All told, Omer-Man believes, there are some 200 "small scale" programs of experiential mysticism countrywide.

Many neo-Kabbalists, especially those influenced by the wildly creative Jewish renewal guru Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, tailor their teachings to the spiritual aspirations of liberal Jews, rather than revive the Orthodox devotion that was the Kabbalah's original context. Another thing entirely is the empire of Kabbalah Learning Center leader Rabbi Philip Berg, which claims to serve 10,000 students through programs in eight countries. Berg offers a profitable self-help program featuring a regimen of personal "corrections"; devotees like Hollywood producer Sandy Gallin admit its basics are similar to those offered by Deepak Chopra or Marianne Williamson. Yet the center seems simultaneously embedded in a religiosity that verges on the magical. Students learn that just running their eyes over the Zohar's original Aramaic can ensure good luck, and they chat blithely about which of its 24 volumes they carried around that day, despite being unable to read a word. Sandra Bernhard, who introduced Roseanne to the center, argues that there is integrity to Berg's fundamentalist entrepreneurialism. "The basic principle is that you're here for a deeper reason than meets the eye," she says. "You're here to get past desire for oneself alone, to eradicate pain and suffering. I think everybody's trying to achieve that." She adds that she was raised Conservative and Bat Mitzvahed.

In the end, the only way for Americans to judge the virtue of such claims would be to read for themselves, previously a tortuous undertaking. But this year a Chicago foundation hired scholar Daniel Matt, author of The Essential Kabbalah, to write the Zohar's first complete English translation with commentary. Volume I is due in 2000. A long time ago, Hasidic sage Manahem Mendel of Perimishlany said, "Calling the wisdom of Kabbalah hidden is strange. Whoever wants to learn--the book is readily available." He didn't know how right he'd be one day.

--With reporting by Nadya Labi and Richard N. Ostling/New York and Jacqueline Saviano/Los Angeles

With reporting by NADYA LABI AND RICHARD N. OSTLING/NEW YORK AND JACQUELINE SAVIANO/LOS ANGELES