Friday, April 30, 2004
Another group whoring out Judaism
Let me give you some advice. If there's a Jewish group, and they spell God with an o, stay away. They're probably out of their minds and screwing up something important, like Madonna's Kabbalah center, or wherever she goes. I mean,
The Centre claims that merely scanning the text of the Zohar, the seminal thirteenth-century Kabbalistic commentary on the Bible, offers divine protection. You don't have to understand what you're reading; in fact, you don't even need to know how to read the Hebrew letters to absorb their magical properties. Everyone in the room wears a red thread around the wrist as protection against the evil eye. In the "Kabbalah Café," located in the courtyard, a sign reassures patrons that all coffee and tea is made with kabbalah mountain spring water, blessed by the Centre's leaders. An adjacent gift shop sells scented candles, for relaxation and better sex.
The Centre sees itself as, literally, the center of the struggle against Satan. By releasing the hidden traditions of Kabbalah to humanity, it claims, it is threatening Satan's power of "chaos," which is responsible for everything from wars and illness to depression. The end of chaos will mean the end of human suffering. And so the creation of the Centre is nothing less than the most momentous event in history.
If that doesn't sound like intellectual whordom, I don't know what does.
The Centre claims that merely scanning the text of the Zohar, the seminal thirteenth-century Kabbalistic commentary on the Bible, offers divine protection. You don't have to understand what you're reading; in fact, you don't even need to know how to read the Hebrew letters to absorb their magical properties. Everyone in the room wears a red thread around the wrist as protection against the evil eye. In the "Kabbalah Café," located in the courtyard, a sign reassures patrons that all coffee and tea is made with kabbalah mountain spring water, blessed by the Centre's leaders. An adjacent gift shop sells scented candles, for relaxation and better sex.
The Centre sees itself as, literally, the center of the struggle against Satan. By releasing the hidden traditions of Kabbalah to humanity, it claims, it is threatening Satan's power of "chaos," which is responsible for everything from wars and illness to depression. The end of chaos will mean the end of human suffering. And so the creation of the Centre is nothing less than the most momentous event in history.
If that doesn't sound like intellectual whordom, I don't know what does.
