Monday, July 14, 2008

More "Kabbalah"

Even the New Yorker is in on the act:-




Madonna may be the world’s most famous adherent of Kabbalah (or “that ghastly sort of adulterated popular Kabbalah,” as Bloom put it), and, according to that day’s Post, Rodriguez had recently decamped to the Four Seasons, where he was seen sipping tea, more like a scholar of Jewish mysticism than like a slugger...

...Rabbi Allan Nadler, the director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University, said last week[.] “But what a field of academia I’m in!” He explained that he’d been exchanging e-mails with a colleague in Jerusalem about possible textual antecedents—say, in the Zohar or the Sefer Yetzirah — for soul-mate poaching, and they had been unable to come up with any. “One of the dominant features of Kabbalah was teaching self-denial and asceticism,” he said. Nadler is an out-spoken critic of the Kabbalah Centre, in Los Angeles, where Madonna, Britney Spears, and Demi Moore, among others, have supposedly found inspiration. “It teaches self-fulfillment to the point of becoming God,” he said. “So these are gods-in-training.” Not that he thought a more authentic dedication to Lurianic Kabbalah could help a millionaire ballplayer. “The true Kabbalists, they fasted, and I think baseball players need their carbs,” he said, and added that Rodriguez’s bronzed complexion seemed incompatible with intense Aramaic study. “If you’re a Kabbalist, you really have no time for the sun.”


Source

Kinda reminds you of this cover:-

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