Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.
Jay MichaelsonContributing Columnist
By Jay Michaelson
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News An Awakened Soul
Is spiritual development really as important as intellectual development? Today, one often finds in Jewish culture a mutual suspicion between those who value intellectual education (and its likely material consequences) and the “spiritual” types who like to chant, meditate and “explore their feelings.” On the one side, many well-schooled Jewish adults regard today’s would-be mystics…
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Culture A Theory of Everything
Franz Rosenzweig is one of the most mentioned and least read of the Jewish philosophers. Everyone with an interest in modern Jewish philosophy includes him in its highest circle, along with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas and, if religious philosophers are included, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rav Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. But while even laypeople…
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Culture He Wandered the Earth as an Exiled Man
Chronicles: Volume One By Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $24. * * *| Toward the end of last year’s rambling, barely coherent film “Masked and Anonymous,” Bob Dylan, its masked and anonymous star, spoke in voice-over one of his most direct and self-revelatory addresses. Fittingly, it was about the limits of what we…
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Culture The Buddha From Brooklyn A Lama Talks About Enlightenment… With a Yiddish Twang
You think you know the story: A Jewish kid from Brooklyn, N.Y., goes off to India for several years, meditating on a mountaintop. He transforms himself into a new person, changing his name from Jeff Miller to Surya Das, abandoning his jeans for saffron robes, and now he spends all day expounding sweetly on peace…
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Culture The Holy Fool How One Writer Conveys Spiritual Truths That Are Seriously Funny
Because I first met Eliezer Sobel on a meditation retreat, the first things I remember about him are his socks. The most important rule at such gatherings, where taking off one’s shoes is inevitable, is to bring good socks. But Sobel’s weren’t just the warm, wool socks that every retreat veteran has. They were loud,…
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Culture Setting Yiddishkeit To Mambo, Metal And Surf
Meshugga Beach Party: Sixteen Songs of the Chosen Surfers (Halakahiki Records) The Makkabees: Volume Aleph (self-released) Yiddishe Cup: Meshugeneh Mambo (Yiddishe Cup) * * *| There are some who believe that authentic Jewish genius lies in the moral and legal codes of our ancestors; others, in the monotheistic impulse, or in the faith that sustained…
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Culture New Books Blend Kabbalah, Psychotherapy and Self-Help
The Secret Life of God: Discovering the Divine Within You Rabbi David Aaron Shambhala, 192 pages, $21.95. * * *| Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing And Inner Wholeness Estelle Frankel Shambhala, 332 pages., $24.95. * * *| As everyone seems to know by now, Kabbalah has broken into the mainstream. Thanks to…
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Culture Mystery Sells: What the Kabbalah Centre Actually Teaches
The Power of Kabbalah By Yehuda Berg (Jodere Group, 2002) * * *| The 72 Names of God By Yehuda Berg (Kabbalah Centre International, 2003) * * *| Mainstream Jews cannot stand the Kabbalah Centre. You can tell by the way they mock it, highlight its every flaw (huge offices! expensive bracelets!) and deride Madonna,…
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