Back to Madonna and Kabbalah

...Madonna’s philosophical notions, beliefs she has taken from Kabbalah, which is a Hebrew word for the teaching. Kabbalists believe there were two revelations on Mount Sinai: what God told Moses to write on the tablets, and a secret teaching, what the Infinite whispered to the Finite, which was then passed from father to son. Most celebrity religions, which is what Kabbalah became in L.A., offer distinct levels of understanding — one for the masses, another for the elite — which echoes the existing celebrity worldview: outside or inside, onstage or plunged into darkness.

For Madonna, Kabbalah, as taught at the Kabbalah Centre, had the advantage of seeming to reinforce what she already felt to be true: there is no good and evil, no right and wrong. All such distinctions are artificial. “Ultimately everything’s good,” she told me. “Even bad is good, because bad is there to help you resist it. You need to have that resistance to be good, and, let’s face it, the worst things that happen are always the best things that happen. If you look back at your life and say, Well, what did you learn? What happened that changed your life, that made you strong, that made you grow, it’s always things you perceived as bad.

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I asked Madonna about Kabbalah. She looked at me as if to gauge the nature of my interest, then spoke.

“A lot of people join the group, but don’t know why,” Madonna said. “I was raised a Catholic and was never encouraged to ask questions, or understand the deeper meanings or mystical implications of the New Testament or the history of Jesus, or the fact that he was Jewish, or anything, you know? So I rejected that, because who wants to go through life being told you do things because you do things? When I started going to classes and studying [Kabbalah], I did it out of curiosity. I was told it was the mystical interpretation of the Old Testament.”

She said Kabbalah is a philosophy, a way of understanding, lessons.

“Like what?” I asked.

She said, “One is that we are all responsible for our actions, our behavior, and our words, and we must take responsibility for everything we say and do. When you get your head wrapped around that, you can no longer think of life as a series of random events — you participate in life in a way you didn’t previously. I am the architect of my destiny. I am in charge. I bring that to me, or I push that away. You can no longer blame other people for things that happened to you.

“The other is that there is order in the universe, even though it looks like chaos. We separate the world into categories: this is good and this is bad. But life is set up to trick us. It’s a series of illusions we invest in. And ultimately those investments don’t serve our understanding, because physicality is always going to let you down, because physicality doesn’t last.”

She looked out the window. Los Angeles was there, the hills studded with houses, marbled by streets and ablaze in light, rising and falling, ending at the sea. It seemed to beckon in the way of those crystalline landscapes in old Flemish religious paintings, where Jerusalem looks just like, say, Holland, not because the painter was stupid, or untraveled, or did not know, but because, when you believe, every city is Jerusalem. “You have to get to a point where you care as little about getting smoke blown up your ass as you do when you become a whipping boy in the press,” Madonna said, “because ultimately they both add up to shit. You just have to keep doing your work, and hope and pray somebody’s dialing into your frequency.”

She then said, “If your joy is derived from what society thinks of you, you’re always going to be disappointed.”

From an interview with Rich Cohen