Let Madonna Join, Not Lead, Judaism's Spiritual Journey

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 27, 2003 | by Shmuel Boteach

Byline: Shmuley Boteach, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

So Madonna has written a children's book, The English Roses, which is based on kabala and features as its lead character a girl named Binah. Should the Jewish community not embrace her as our savior and princess, the woman who helped make Judaism sexy?

No. And here's why: The fact that Judaism is becoming increasingly dependent on depraved pop cultural icons to make it appeal to the masses is a sign of desperation rather than achievement, failure rather than success.

Religions have staked claims to authenticity for millennia, and it is a fool's game to debate the legitimacy of one over another. But the overriding characteristic that has distinguished Judaism from every other world faith and made us Jews justly proud is its demands for moral excellence. As recently as 60 years ago a pope watched 6 million Jews die and never once condemned it. Likewise for many Muslims today, there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between religious zealotry and simple humanity, such that the more you claim to love God the more you seek to blow up His children.

Not so Judaism, which cries out that the only true test of religious piety is where the end result is human decency.

How different are the portrayals of the founder of our faith, Abraham, from the founder of the Christian faith, Jesus. To the latter is ascribed countless miracles and divine qualities. Abraham, however, does not perform a single supernatural feat in the whole of Genesis. Rather, he is portrayed as a caterer who sits outside his tent awaiting hungry wayfarers and a man who, even after victory over kings, refuses to take any kind of loot or booty. In short, he is a not a god-man, but a good man, not a saint with celestial power but a human being of outstanding moral courage.

Islam today has lost its direction because it has lost its heart. Judaism dare not make the same error by losing its moral compass, by failing to inspire in its representatives, or to demand of its adherents, a passion for moral rectitude and ethical greatness.

Madonna has been studying cabala now for a good many years. The same woman who helped debase the dignity of women everywhere with her mainstreaming of sadomasochism, who helped launch a decade of decadence and misogyny with her music videos and who in her 1992 book, Sex, bared every region of her body for money and publicity now is a devoted student of the most sacred mystical texts in Judaism.

Has it made her into a better person? Has she ceased her contemptible portrayal of women as the lecherous man's plaything? Was an ennoblement of character in evidence in the recent MTV music awards, where the publicity-famished star "swapped spit" with Britney Spears while millions of teen-age girls looked on?

And what of her most recent film, Swept Away, which itself was swept away by critics who described its embarrassing amalgam of "vulgarity, nudity, adult situations, sex, bad taste, bad acting, bad judgment."

Kabala argues for the spiritual supremacy of women over men, for radiance over masculine expedience. Yet Madonna has spent her career dishonoring women, portraying them as chunks of meat bereft of personalities or even souls. She set back the cause of female recording artists by a generation by showing a full 50 years after the feminist revolution that a woman cannot sell a record unless she takes off her bra.

Just look at Madonna's sleazy imitators, Spears and Christina Aguilera, for confirmation. One's heart goes out to three desperate women reduced to outrageous antics because they have no real talent. Somehow I don't remember the Beatles having to run around in thongs with guitars to sell out a stadium.

Madonna has taken the Zohar "the book of luminosity" and made it dark. While Judaism always will flourish with spiritual seekers, it will founder with publicity seekers.

God promised Abraham that his children would be "like the stars of the heaven," not the stars of the silver screen. The stars of heaven give light amid an all-encompassing darkness and, indeed, the Jewish nation has retained its righteousness in a dark and cruel world.

But movie stars are counterfeit constellations, artificially illuminated fakes set in a world of make-believe.

Far from aggrandizing kabala, Madonna's practice of it sends the message that one can be mystical without being spiritual, and one can claim to be holy while having lost all dignity.

Sounds pretty fake to me.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is a nationally syndicated radio host and author of The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age (HarperCollins). His e-mail address is Shmuley@Shmuley.com.