As we started moving forward through the first decade of the 21st century, the cure-all spiritual phenomenon seems to be the Jewish Cabala (or Kabbalah). The Cabala is not new as it’s been around for centuries.
The Cabala is ancient magic. It is an exotic blend of devilish, sometimes fanciful, New Age mystical practices topped by a philosophical bent of Jewish supremacism. Orthodox Judaism, or Phariseeism, is rife with cabalism, and Jewish rabbis are the Cabala’s greatest promoters. I will write about this New Age and its movement later.
An explosion in mainstream interest in cabalism was boosted by many big-name celebrities who hawked cabalism as the miraculous answer to all of man’s problems. An undercover BBC reporter who had infiltrated a London cabala group had witnessed singer Madonna and Guy Ritchie chanting mystic spells to “cleanse” Chernobyl, the site in Ukraine of a nuclear plant disaster in 1986.[1] Other news accounts link entertainers Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Demi Moore, Shirley MacLaine, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and a legion of other “stars” with practice of Cabala.[2]
Wandering Jewish teachers had brought their ancient wisdom to Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, Caligula’s Rome, and Ivan the Terrible’s Moscow over the course of 5,000 years. The more time passed, the more the rabbis found the jaded rich eager for their wisdom.
The Kabbalah Centre, which opened in Los Angeles in 1984 and in Richmond Hill, New York, a year after, might have seemed frivolous because it looked like a Jewishy New Age emporium selling “Sexual Energy” and “Dialing God” candles and magic amulets, but in reality, it is a much more grievous practice.
By 2006, in their zeal to spread Kabbalah throughout the world they already had some 50 Centres and satellite branches internationally. “Deeply complex, dangerous even, Kabbalah was reserved for married Orthodox Jewish men over 40. As a prerequisite, they had to have mastered the entire rabbinic literature. Once they joined the ranks, they routinely fasted and rolled around naked in the snow in the name of self-abnegation before God.
‘It was esotericism par excellence,’ says Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish Studies program at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. ‘It was the equivalent of a truly elite monastery somewhere in the middle of nowhere.’”
[1] Kabbalah The Cure-Ail, New York Post, online edition, 2005
[2] Ibid; also see “Roseanne makes nice in reality tv”, The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, July 25, 2003, p.l.; “Kabbalah goes Hollywood like a Prayer”, by Yossi Klein Halevi, The New Republic, May 10, 2004, p. 21; and “Once Secretive Jewish Mysticism Gains Popularity,” by Rachel Graves, Associated Press, January 18, 1998.