San Francisco in 6 Hours

I was in Ashland, at the Oregon Shakespeare Theatre, near where they filmed The Goonies and Short Circuit. Their airport only had one gate. The plane wasn't taking off. To be precise: It was leaving 1 hour late, which means my connecting flight would be 4 hours late. I would get into NYC at 1:30 AM and have to get home from there. I asked the flight attendant: Could I take a red-eye, stay in San Francisco for the day, and land at 7?

She gave me permission.

Heshy picked me up from the airport. We only had an hour before he left for work, so we did everything fast, even the used bookstores. He found a used copy of Yom Kippur a Go-Go, which somebody'd written a really sweet and meaningful dedication inside. I took a picture, but I'm not sure if it's kosher to share it, or if that would be too invasive.

Luckily, there was a ton of graffiti to distract us.

And some of the more boring variety:

But that's also the church I lived across the street from when I first moved to town.

In high school, I wrote stories about how my friend Adam was going to be a computer engineer and change the universe. And then it happened. I waited for him in this communist coffee shop while I wrote a picture book. I'm not just being conservative, it really was a communist coffee shop.

Then Adam picked me up and drove me around Bernal Heights. I think I spent more time in cars that day than I did in 5 years of living in San Francisco. He dropped me off at the rabbi's, and then I took a look at the new digs. I took tons of pictures of the rabbi's night garden, but none of them came out. Like much of San Francisco, I guess, you just had to be there.

Mendel and the new shul! It's actually a garage and it is so punk, yet paradoxically, so clean. They basically saved my life several times over when I lived in SF. Not to mention my soul. I'm overdue to give them a donation. If you've got a couple extra bucks, please donate too -- they give out free Shabbos meals to anyone who shows up.

Then we all made a mess together. And then the rebbetzin came to tell us to clean up, but I couldn't stick around. I was running late for my flight.

Last-Minute Preschool

You probably already knew about this -- so, you know, feel free to scoff at my misfortune -- but if you (a) have kids and (b) they’re old enough to go to school, you sort of have to apply to schools before they’re allowed to go there. I don’t know what I was thinking (maybe that we just drive up and drop the kid on the doorstep, like the proverbial stork, but with a 3-year-old?), but apparently I wasn’t thinking very much at all.

So right now, we’re going through the radical first step in sending our toddler to preschool. Which is to decide which preschool to send them to.

I was raised going to public school, but since then, a few things changed. I became Orthodox. Then I married into a pretty hardcore Hasidic family–and by “hardcore,” I mean that I now have relatives I’ve never directly spoken to, because they are women and I am not. For someone like me, who’s always been committed to public education and whose parents and sister work in public schools, it’s a big leap to send my kids, not just to a private nursery school, but to 12 years of a rigorous religious education, followed (probably) by seminary and yeshiva and some sort of religious-indoctrination camp.

But: We are, indeed, Hasidic Jews. And public schools don’t exactly have classes with titles like Intermediate Yiddish and Medieval Commentators to Jewish Scripture. If you’re committed to a lifestyle, you gotta go all the way.

My wife -- who, it should be noted, is both more comfortable with these things, and smarter than me -- told me to chill out. (She says that a lot.) In the time from my first IM (from work, of course, which went roughly: Matthue: School deadliens R like 3 wks ago!?! what do we do???) until I got home, she’d called up a dozen relatives and half a dozen schools, established that we were in hot water, but not entirely washed up, and that many schools were understanding of first-time parents and had flexible acceptance schedules.

In the meantime, since learning that we still had a choice, we’ve been trying to prepare ourselves for that eventual choice. We’re scheduled for a bunch of interviews, and we’re still  scheduling a few more. We’ve both made lists of the top three things we want in a school. (Well, my wife has. I’m still working on it.)

Here are hers:

1. The school shouldn’t care about surface Orthodox stuff (like asking “Do you wear stockings all the time?” or “Do you own a TV?,” even though we don’t) above basic things, like teaching the rudiments of kashrut, or having caring and involved teachers.
2. It doesn’t have to be a Lubavitch school, but it should have some sort of Lubavitch influence (She and her family are Lubavitch Hasidim).
3. It should be a place where people are warm and friendly (which seems like a given, but it never is).

I haven’t figured out mine yet, except that I’m really determined to find a school with a good secular studies program. Not like those scary Jewish day schools that start from first grade in grooming and prepping their kids to get into an Ivy (not like I even necessarily want my kids to attend an Ivy–we’ve seen what happens when Orthodox Jews show up in those schools), but one where English classes read real books and science is more than just “rain makes the flowers grow.”

Zealots and Bullies

So right now I'm on vacation in Chicago. Weird to do a trip where we're just visiting people and not Having Meetings or Running To Do Insanely Complicated Things In An Unreasonably Short Amount of Time or something of that sort. But before I turn my computer off and vacate, I just needed to share these two little parting gifts:

The Jewish Press, which is the biggest Orthodox paper in New York and which all my Hasidic Cousins actually read, wrote an article about art in the Orthodox world. More specifically:

A nascent community of religious artists - including the Orthodox African-American hip-hop musician Y-Love, poet Matthue Roth, novelist Tova Mirvis, and the novelist and playwright Naomi Ragen - are all working to create a more art-friendly and embracing religious model.

It is so, so unimaginably cool to be cited as an example of how people can be Orthodox and artists and how it doesn't have to be some big religious crisis. This is my favorite part of the article, though -- apparently, before Yeshiva University introduced its business school, everyone thought it was a crazy idea:

In 1977, a fake ad in Yeshiva University's yearbook made fun of the idea of a business school at the university. The mock ad promised that a school of business "will be opening its doors to all students who cannot cope with liberal arts."

The rest is at the link.


And the Scholastic blog came out with a post about bullying, and how to deal with bullying, and what to do about it. And that, no surprise, one of the best ways to cope and not just be damaged by it is to read about it. They suggest a bunch of resources, and one of the recommended titles is 

Losers by Matthue Roth: This off-the-wall novel introduces readers to Jupiter—a Russian immigrant learning to deal with high-school life in America. With dead-on deadpan humor, Matthue Roth makes everything illuminated about American teen life—like Borat as directed by John Hughes.

Okay. Now I've got some Sears Tower to climb. Shabbos and out.

White Purim

I wasn't dreaming of a white Purim, but that's what we got. Saturday night, Shabbat went out, and I shoveled out our car in raver pants that were bigger and bulkier than a dress and a three-piece paisley suit. This was the kind of Purim costume that was the essence of last-minute decision-making: every weird object in your wardrobe thrown out onto the beds, picked over and jigsawed together into a more-or-less coherent outfit. My wife dressed as a pregnant flapper -- only half of it needed a costume. Our daughter was the easiest: we threw wings on her and called her a fairy. Mine was the trickiest of all our costumes, and took the longest time to get ready. A nice change from the usual going-out routine of me being the first dressed.

But here I was, shoveling away at the Brooklyn snow, making the design of my paisley suit more and more colourful by the moment. (I was dressed as, depending upon who was asking, either a pimp, a bootlegger, or one of my wife's accessories.) Itta came out, saw the car still three-quarters shoveled in after half an hour, and decided we'd never get there. So we called a cab.

We were an hour late, but the advantage of going to an event thrown by Jews is that everyone else is 90 minutes late. We ran in just as the crowd was starting to move away from the snack table and get pumped up for the megillah reading...despite the fact that you're not actually supposed to eat until after you hear megillah. But I'm just one of those anal folks. Seriously, in forty-nine years I'm going to be one of those 80-year-old men at the back of the synagogue complaining about everyone else. Tonight, I just shut up and enjoyed the show.

When you're doing an actual megillah reading -- in Hebrew, that is, and without a break to explain the action -- it's hard to have adults and children in the same room. Kids (especially kids that don't know Hebrew) are not going to follow the rapid-fire delivery. Many adults won't, either. As a potential cure, I've seen puppet shows and simultaneous storytelling.

I have to say, this was the first year I've seen a PowerPoint presentation in synagogue on Purim -- or any other day, for that matter. But, as PowerPoints go, this one was damn impressive. Achashverosh was played by Jabba the Hutt, and Haman, questionably, was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Mordechai was Dumbledore. Nice.) This was all the work of JLA Online, an LA-based collective, unsurprisingly.

Last year, my in-laws gave me an actual megillah. I don't eat animals and have some issues with using a parchment scroll, but I've decided to try and ignore that. For this year, at least. And, for the most part, it worked. I mean, as far as several-thousand-year-old stories go, it's a doozy. Fast-moving, plotted with an expert sense of narrative (I realized for the first time this year just how cinematic the megillah is, introducing the story with the character of Vashti, and then alternating between the story of Mordechai catching the king's would-be assassins with Haman's growing menace.) Even the vocabulary is made for performance -- intentionally simple, with lots of repetitions and mentioning the characters by name over and over again.

So I followed the story. Even though the reading moved with breakneck speed, I let myself get swallowed up. I stopped paying attention to my daughter alternately trying to wreck her wings and to repair them, and to the boys throwing Cheez Stix in the front, and to the rest of the world and even to how much my tied-up beard was annoying me. I just sat. Usually, I reserve this level of blacking-out-the-rest-of-the-world for praying, reading, and brushing my daughter's teeth when she really doesn't want me to. But tonight, I belonged to the story. And it was good.

A day later, I'm wondering whether this isn't part of the Purim mystique. We're commanded to get to the point where ad d'lo yada, where we don't know the difference between Haman and Mordechai. Usually this is interpreted as drinking. This year, since 4 shots before noon barely left me buzzed -- I built up my drinking resilience in Australia -- and since my parents were around and I needed to be responsible, I opted for Option B: the midafternoon nap. But really, I think what the rabbis wanted when they issued that commandment was for us to get to the point where we completely lose ourselves. Like Esther lost her sense of self when she went to the king, not caring whether she'd be sentenced to death. When we lose our senses of self in G*d. And when we lose ourselves in stories...or even, this year, in snow.

770s of the World

Admittedly, 770 Eastern Parkway, the biggest synagogue in Crown Heights and the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism, is not the most instantly recognizable building in the world. At least, not according to most people. (That would probably be, depending on your POV and cultural background, either the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the Haunted Mansion.) But in the eyes of many Chabad Jews, 770 is the first and last word in architecture, whether it's constructing a new school, a new synagogue, or the perfect little something to fill in the space between two office buildings.

The photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher went around the world, taking pictures of 770s and their spinoff buildings, from a block-wide school in Los Angeles to a summer camp in Montreal to a library in Australia...and, yes, a house between two massive office buildings in Brazil. Check out some of the photos below, and then check their site for all twelve 770s built all over the world.

Yes, it's a little weird. But just like we hang pictures of people to inspire us -- whether it's a rabbi above your child's bed to ward off evil spirits, Robert Pattinson hanging in your locker, or a picture of my favorite rock star next to my writing desk -- having an iconic building around is probably a good thing for inspiration, whether it's hitting new spiritual heights or just getting to synagogue on time.

B&H Photo: Camera Shopping As a Religious Experience

We love B&H Photo & Video, the only midtown New York store that I actually have fun in that doesn't sell comic books or Legos. It's not just a massive electronics store. It's not just a massive electronics store owned and operated by Hasidic Jews. And it's not just a Hasidic electronics store with bowls of free sour candy all over the place and mysterious, amazing conveyor belts over your heads that move merchandise with seeming lightning speed. It's unearthly. It's unnatural. And yet, it seems to function with all the determination and efficiency of a synagogue service.

Every time I visit the store -- whether it's a 3-hour trip to pick out a new video camera or a quick run-in for some batteries -- I come out with a new story. Sometimes it's as simple as the Satmar Hasid at the checkout counter asking me what I think of the Sleater-Kinney album blasting from my earbuds. Sometimes it's a little more complicated. Other times, I don't even have to go inside the store to get a new B&H story. Here are three of my favorites:

1. Someone stops me on the street. He asks, in bad Hebrew with a bad put-on Israeli accent, "Ayfo B&H" -- Do you know where B&H is? I start to answer -- in my own equally bad Israeli accent -- but then I stop. Something about the lilt of his Hebrew sounds familiar. "Are you Australian?" He is. He's from Sydney. He ends up knowing not just my wife, but her entire family. As a matter of fact, he had lunch at my parents'-in-law's house a few months ago. He apologizes to me for not wearing a yarmulke (I'm not clear on why) and wishing me a good Shabbos. It's Wednesday afternoon. It makes me look forward to Shabbat. It makes me feel good.

2. Someone stops me on the street. He asks me the same question -- in English, this time -- laughing, like he knows it's ironic. I answer, although I'm a little offended at the stereotype. I mean, does every Jew in midtown Manhattan with a beard and sidecurls have to be affiliated with B&H? If he stopped to pay attention to the person I am, and not just the way I look, maybe he'd be a bit less stereotypical and bit more astounded. I'm a freakin' Hasidic Jew who writes films, dude! I'm more than my payos! Just because I'm Hasidic, it doesn't mean I know every other Orthodox Jew in New York. Or where they work.

I smile. Graciously, I give him directions. Fifteen minutes later, we bump into each other at B&H, where I'm buying equipment for a new short film. Sigh. Not so ironic.

3. I'm waiting in line for a refund. I thought we needed a .25" microphone cord and we need a .125". When I get to the front of the line, the guy -- a clean-shaven Israeli guy who starts talking to me in Hebrew -- asks me if everything's inside. I tell him it's all there; I didn't even open it. He tells me, more as a by-the-way sort of thing than as criticism, that we all need to be very careful. People in the world distrust Orthodox Jews. They think we're all out to get them. That's why we need to be even nicer than the world, and more polite and more meticulous in all our dealings. Business. Personal. Life.

With that, he finishes scrutinizing the corners of the box -- all undented -- and drops it into the chute that takes it back home. He offers me a candy. In spite of myself, I accept. He smiles, seeing my momentary indulgence. And, as the others around him all chime in to add their two cents to the issue, he counts out one of each flavor candy from the bowl and gives it to me. When I protest, he tells me to give some to strangers. "They need it," he insists.

Later that day, I speak to Frum Satire. Without telling him about it, he tells me about his B&H blog post -- which talks about basically the same thing. And how B&H turns all that around. He asks: "How many instances can you think of when Charedi Jews make a good impression on non-Jews and irreligious Jews on a constant basis? It's unfortunate, but much of the world only has negative experience and rarely see the beauty of the ultra-orthodox community." Not at B&H, though.

4. This is a bonus -- not that it's an experience, just because it's cool. My cousin Mendy works for B&H's customer service phone line. The other day, someone called him Sammy. We asked what was up with that. He told us that (a) half the floor was named Menachem Mendel, and (b) no one can pronounce Menachem anyway.

Interview: Matisyahu Brings the "Light"

Here's the moment I knew Matisyahu had stopped being a Jewish phenomenon and entered the realm of pop culture. My sister, who was living deep in the Bible Belt, told one of her non-Jewish friends that I'd become Orthodox. "Oh," he said. "Does that mean he looks like that Matisyahu dude?"

Portrait by Schneur Menaker


Matisyahu might not be the official face of Judaism in America, but he's a lead contender. The reggae-singing phenomenon, a baal teshuvah who became Orthodox in his twenties, might have the most recognizable profile in pop music due to his beard alone. After learning to be religiously observant through Chabad, Matisyahu expanded his learning to include the teachings and prayer styles of Breslov, Karlin, and other Hasidic groups in addition to the Chabad rebbes.

Matisyahu's third studio album, Light, comes out August 25 -- almost six months after its expected release, and three and a half years since his last album, the pop-infected, Bill Laswell-produced Youth, which sold over half a million units.

Since then, Matisyahu has gone back to the basics. He has a new songwriting cave (an old warehouse in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood), a new synagogue (a Karlin Hasidic synagogue, where the prayers are shouted at the top of your lungs), and, perhaps most radically, a new sound to his music. His new songs, both on last year's single Shattered and on Light, still have the reggae influence that dominated his earlier albums. Yet new album's tone is darker, more varied, and beat-driven. "One Day," the album's first single, has a dreamy, summertime quality that is equal parts Bob Marley playing acoustic and "Eye of the Tiger"-like '80s jams. "Master of the Field" is an electronics-heavy jam that brings his vocal beatboxing to the forefront.

MJL spoke with Matisyahu and learned out about his new band, the stories behind the Light songs that he isn't telling anyone else, and why Matisyahu just can't stop loving God.

MJL: A while ago, you told me how Israel right now is for Jews how Greenwich Village was to hippies in the '60s -- wild and innovative, the only place where Judaism's really alive and mutable and organic, whereas in the United States, Jews are sort of stagnant. Do you still feel that way?

Matisyahu: Anywhere in America where I happen to be -- Crown Heights, Willamsburg -- in any Jewish community, it seems like there's one type of Jew. There's pressure to fit in and dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and if you don't do that, it's almost like you're not Jewish. And then in other places, there are a lot of different types of Jews -- and, in those places, you lose the intensity of belief and of observance and of the lifestyle. And that's only among religious Jews. In America, you can be Jewish and elect not to have anything to do with Judaism.

In Israel, even sitting in the airport, you're among a hundred different kinds of Jews, and it's amazing. It's inspiring. Everyone's doing their own thing, but it's not just their own thing -- they have a whole community of people backing them up.

Then you come back to America, and you really feel that we're a small minority of people. We're trying to hold onto something that doesn't necessarily fit into our hands. In Israel, Judaism is alive. It's a real, tangible, living thing.

Is that where the titles come in? Your last E.P. was called Shattered, and it seemed like the very small prelude to something a lot bigger. And then the new album's going to be called Light.

Yeah, it all kind of figures together. There's a Kabbalistic idea of the first world being shattered, utterly destroyed, and the second world -- the world we're in right now -- being a tikkun, a fixing, of the first one. Are you an artist?

Do you mean --

I mean, like, a visual artist.

I draw a little, but I don't really know what I'm doing.

I know what you mean. That's where I am, too. (Laughs.) So when you look at something without light, it looks dead. It's two-dimensional, without any depth or substance. If there's no shadows and no light twisting off of surfaces, it's like it doesn't exist at all. Just like that, when a person looks at the world, it's like it's dead. Then, with light and a backdrop, everything becomes revealed, and their depth comes out.

That's what Shattered was about. Naming the E.P. "Shattered," it was about stopping running away.

I was running for the past few years, running nonstop. My career, my marriage, my kids -- but mostly my career. This past year I've spent mostly at home, going to minyan, working on my record, jamming in my studio.

The songs on Shattered, and the stuff that's been released from the new album so far, is all way different than anything you've done before -- it's more beat-driven and electronic. Why the change?

The foremost changes were all vocally. Musically, we've used elements of reggae, but it's not traditionally reggae. If you listen to my first single, "King without a Crown," it's not reggae -- the beat isn't a traditional reggae rhythm. It's not really a reggae song.

Your vocals, though, really are very reggae-influenced...

It's true. When I sing that song, a lot of my earlier songs, I'm using a Jamaican accent. When I was first developing my singing, I was only listening to reggae. When you listen to only one kind of music, that style penetrates you. A lot of the big reggae singers, the people who've been around for years, they take new techniques and integrate them into their singing. These days, I'm listening to a lot less reggae. I'm listening to a lot of different things.

Do you feel like you need to keep a certain level of reggae influence in your music? Are you feeling pressure to keep it or to move away from it, one way or the other?

In this record, I allowed myself to drop it. Reggae isn't the prevalent music style I'm listening to these days. Also, I've been taking voice lessons, developing my voice to go in different directions as well. I'll hold onto the reggae in some places -- others, I'll just let it go.

Musically, I allowed for all my interests to come together. I've been writing the music for Light in a different way than we've ever written before. [Guitarist and musical director] Aaron [Dugan] and I -- we wrote all the songs together, all very free-form. He'd play guitar, and I'd beatbox and sing. We'd go into the studio and start jamming for an hour and a half. We'd hit record, and then when we finished, we'd play it back and listen to it.

Then we had a bunch of guests on the album. Ooah from Glitch Mob did a bunch of electronic stuff. We had a producer from Jamaica, Stephen McGregor, and another, Motivate. People are like, "He's lost his reggae thing, he's not reggae anymore -- " It's ironic, [McGregor] is this 17-year-old kid who's producing Sean Paul, Trevor Hall, he's a singer-songwriter in the Marley mold, and another producer who's done Fishbone.

You write really candidly about God, praying, and your relationship with your religion. Does it feel different to write, or less confidential, when you know a million people will hear it? How do you get to the safety of trusting yourself?

It's entirely different. My band, my writing, everything. We changed the band around after Youth. There's a new bassist and a new keyboardist. Building the new band has been a two-to-three-year process.

And then, lyrically, my teacher, mentor, friend Ephraim Rosenstein -- he takes a Chabad ideology and compares it to Breslov ideology -- he asks what's important in each one -- and then he brings in other philosophies, contemporary philosophers like Nietzsche, and he takes wider themes from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. First we break down the themes into simple ideas. Then we bring in stories to illustrate these ideas.

That's kind of what Rebbe Nachman did. He says that the most important ideas can't be transmitted as abstract ideas, that they have to be transformed into stories.

Definitely. I did a project for the John Lennon Save Darfur project to end child slavery, and I'd been studying a lot of Breslov stories, and I looked for a way to link these together.

I came up with two children -- child soldiers in Africa, they've been forced to fight a war. They escape their army, and then they're lost in a forest, like in [Rebbe Nachman's] Story of the Seven Beggars. One song is called "We Will Walk" -- it's about continuing on, no matter what happens. "Two Child One Drop," from Shattered -- it's pretty clear, it's about killing someone, which Hasidic tradition compares to embarrassing someone. It's like putting a gun up to someone's head and making them do something.

Is it something that you expect people to pick up on and intuit when they listen to your music -- or do you think they're just going to go, wow, that's some intense violent imagery, and move on?

I don't know. A lot of it's not explicit in the songs, Africa or Rebbe Nachman -- maybe when they read this interview with you, they'll get it. But I think the ideas come through.

Rabbi Rosenstein and I came up with thirty categories of ideas, of stories -- and then we pared the concepts down to words. Then we went into my studio in Green Point, just Aaron [Dugan, Matisyahu's longtime guitarist] and I -- Aaron would play and I'd beatbox. We'd jam for an hour without stopping.

Then I'd listen to the sound. It was some really dark stuff we were coming up with. I'd take the music, write down some lyrics, and form the songs that way. We brought in other people -- I flew to Jamaica, where we brought in [legendary drum and bass production team] Sly and Robbie. We had the oud player from The Idan Raichel Project, Yehuda Solomon from Moshav singing Hebrew on top of me. The songs ended up in a totally different place from where it started.

Has all the new stuff you're doing transitioned into your live show?

A lot of what we've been doing is totally new. We've abandoned writing set lists in advance. We're abandoning expectations about what the show should be -- we have moments of in-between songs and improvs that become longer than the songs themselves. There's better dynamics. People drop out, we get quieter than we've ever been. The space and the music almost do the job for us. The lyrics are the smallest part.

Are you nervous about the reception of the album? It feels like a lot is riding on this new record -- it's really experimental, but it's also really personal.

In the end, when someone listens to the record, they won't hear that story I told you. I guess the worst reaction could be, "Aw man, this is a love story, Matisyahu isn't writing Jewish songs anymore."

Or everyone might love it, and decide you're not writing just-Jewish songs, but universal songs -- songs that hit everyone in the same way. There was one song about a boy dying in a desert, telling a girl to carry on without him. I was playing some of the songs for my wife's family, and my sister-in-law was like, "What girl is this about? It isn't about my sister." In a way, that's the best compliment I could get.

Oh, no way.

It's official: we got our first Lubavitcher Rebbe video as a wedding souvenir last night.

Free Love and Communal Shabbos Dinners

When I lived in San Francisco, I didn't have much going on in the way of hospitality -- mainly because I had so much going on in the way of running to concerts and readings and bars and keeping myself sleep-deprived after hours.

My one respite from the constant influx of alcohol and art was to throw Friday night Shabbat dinners. I could spend pages telling you about it, but I actually already wrote a book about it, so I'll skip that part for now. At any rate, when I was out-cooked, around the time of the holidays, I used to go to the local rabbi's house for Rosh Hashana dinner and Passover seders and stuff.

Always, without exception, there was a formidable crowd -- a combination of local families stopping by, semi-detached 20somethings looking for a free and decent meal, and the odd traveler. One of those travelers, brought by a friend of his who owned a (fabulous) local bed and breakfast, Noe's Nest, was Robert Altman. "Oh, wow!" I gushed. "Like the dude who made all those movies!"

"I am not," he replied -- gallantly, and especially so, considering that, on a later occasion, he would (good-naturedly) rant that everyone mixed them up, and his web site was ranked higher on Google.

Robert, it turned out, was a cameraman in his own right -- and one of more than significant merits, having been the photo editor for Rolling Stone magazine for much of the Sixties. Through the meal, we sat next to each other, sticking out in both our career choices (him: photographer, me: professional poet) and attire (him: black mock turtleneck; me: probably something 20 years old and paisley) and not exactly fitting in with the rest of the crowd, although fitting in in the way that we were all of us mismatched, all of us more-or-less haphazardly tossed into the melting pot that is a Chabad House.

Through the meal, he kept joking that he wasn't really Jewish because he didn't keep kosher and this was his first Rosh Hashana meal in years. I kept telling him back: if he hasn't done any of that and he still remembers he's Jewish, he's doing better than most of us.

Flash forward the better part of a decade. I live in New York now, and walking down 35th Street on my way to work, I pass a bunch of familiar-looking black-and-white photos, iconic flashes of the '60s: they are familiar because they are the photographs of my childhood, but they're not only familiar because of that. They remind me of the first time I Googled Robert, really Googled him: a flood of images, some of them iconic, some of them just really damn good (check his portraiture of Tina Turner). That night, meeting him as just some random guy at an even randomer meal for the Jewish New Year, it seemed like a logical extension: just some well-dressed dude who had a knack for telling good stories and better jokes.

Back in San Francisco, we met up a bunch of times. I invited him to my poetry readings; he invited me to his parties -- including, for some reason, a huge exhibition inside an abandoned warehouse in SoMA where his sorts of people rarely if ever ventured and where my sort of people frolicked nonstop. They didn't expect to see some punk kid in a yarmulke and foot-long sidelocks, both more overtly Jewish and more overtly non-Jewish than they were (because most of them were Jews anyway)...but I think after a while I just became one more part of the landscape, one more odd person doing things his own way, just like the rest of them were.

In a side room, the photography on the wall shifted abruptly, and there were canvases scrawled with otherworldly abstractions -- some sort of Miro aliens with bodies made of different kinds of fabric. There was a guy who started talking to me, the artist of these paintings. Later, Robert told me he was the lead guitarist of one of the biggest bands of the '60s. He sold all his guitars and swore only to paint. Everyone said his painting was awful. Truthfully, though, I really liked it -- that is, until he tried to sell me one of them for $26,000. I told him I hadn't even owned $26,000 over the course of my life.

He threw his arm around my shoulders and gestured grandly to the painting. "Then you can look at them for free," he said. "This art, kid -- it's yours. For the next ten seconds, at least. Enjoy it while it lasts."

Robert Altman's series The Sixties is now showing at Macy's, 34th St. and Broadway in New York. He'll be signing books today from 5-6 p.m. -- I've got to pick up my kid from day care, but you should stop by and say hi for me.

How Jews Look

A while ago, I got an email from some chick saying asking if I could talk about about being shomer negiah. Yes, it sounds totally sketchy, but Judy Prays was a filmmaker and making a documentary, and you all know how much I like to talk. So, in that context, it was less sketchy -- not much less, but less.

When I started working at MyJewishLearning, one of my first gigs was to start producing short films. I called in the heavy artillery -- by which I mean, Judy -- and we set to work on creating a sort of anti-how-to series.

By which I mean, instead of showing how people should do things, we showed how Jews actually do do them.

The first one premieres today! Check it out:


And this all comes just in time for this week's Torah portion: It's all about the clothes of the High Priest! Whoo, mysterious.

The Conspiracy of Covering Up

Because it's impossible to write enough stories on Hasidic Jews and sexuality, Nextbook has an article on dressing modestly in Crown Heights. The neighborhood in Brooklyn is home to the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Jews, although, because of their commitment to outreach, they're known in press circles by their colloquial name of The Hasidic Jews to Turn To Whenever We Need A Story About How Weird Hasidic Jews Are.

And, no matter what else I say about the Hasidim in my neighborhood, they never fail to disappoint. When I read the article's lede -- "An outsider visiting Crown Heights might be forgiven for thinking that the women in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood represent the height of modesty" -- I was baffled. After all, shuttling between Boro Park and Williamsburg, where the most common accoutrement for women is a body-sized pillowcase, the far-more-liberal Crown Heights is mostly known for French designer clothes worn by 22-year-old MILFs in 4-inch heels pushing baby carriages.

Every year, some people in the community pick a pet cause, and this year, that pet cause is tzniut, or modesty. Admirably, much of the attention has been devoted to modesty among men -- making sure that they're wearing tzitzit, and that their shirts cover their elbows (which is commonly known as a commandment for women, but many observant Jews seem to forget it's also for men). So far, much of the push for tzniut has taken the form of lectures and group Torah study. But there's a new poster campaign, in pink of course, and, like Barry White says, this one's for the ladies, calling attention to such things as:

• Skirt length! ("No part of the knee is visible--even sitting")
  
• Sleeve length! ("Upper arm must be constantly covered...with sleeves extending past her elbow")
  
• Leg wear! ("Going about bare-legged without stockings...is a most grave offense")

The prominent respondent in the article is Ms. Bronya Shaffer, whose primary credential given in the article is being "a mother of 10" (she also answers questions on AskMoses.com). Her critique is admirable, and very postmodern:

"The medium [of the posters] itself is antithetical to the very essence of modesty," she said of the posters. "It’s not the Chabad way. I cringe at the specter of kids, young boys and girls, reading in huge letters, in bold technicolor, about uncovered legs and necklines and tight clothing."

It's a valid point. But how do you reconcile the medium with the message -- that is, getting your ideas across and perpetuated, but not making it seem overt or lusty?

And, somewhat relatedly, how can Chabad continue to be poster-boys and girls for religious Judaism, both positive and negative, and in some way avoid this fetishistic what-are-the-Hasidim-doing-now attitude?

After Mumbai

A reader wrote in, asking me to post this article, which is the most complete account I've found so far of the siege against the Mumbai terrorist attack.

It's been a long Thanksgiving weekend. I know, today's Monday and we're back in work mode, but it feels like the weekend isn't over yet. It was a hard holiday; harder for other people than for us, but thinking that doesn't make it any easier. At our Thanksgiving table was my cousin's boyfriend, who's from Mumbai and whose parents are safe, but who still hadn't heard from his friends; my wife, whose sister is scheduled to go on vacation in India later this week and who's still thinking of going; and all of us, most of whom aren't religious, though we've all been guests at a Chabad house at one point in our life or another.

It's scary. It's mind-boggling, and anger-inducing, and it's pretty messed up. It's hard to pinpoint the exact point of origin for our sadness -- another terror attack, another few hundred people killed -- but the sheer mass of casualties, together with the randomness of the attack itself, which targeted Americans and Britons but took the form of bullets sprayed into crowds of people, gives me a place to start.

As the reports poured in, conflicting reports gave us hope. I was twittering about it all day. I hit refresh on the New York Times frontpage with a frenzy I hadn't felt since 9/11. I was addicted. I wanted to know what was next. Like watching a TV show on DVD, I wanted to keep popping in discs, watching the episodes one after the next. We left to go to my uncle and aunt's for dinner. My uncle and I sneaked away to his laptop, refresh after refresh. I finally stopped twittering with the news that the survivors had been rescued. I could breathe again.

The next morning, we got a call from a friend with the news. The siege was not over. But the bodies had been recovered.

Itta and I both lost it. She pulled the car off the road and we both cried. Her uncles, her friends and most of her cousins ran Chabad Houses. All over the world, they were supposed to be the refuges of innocence, the place you ran away to whenever you needed something. Sure, some Chabad House rabbis are insane -- you almost have to be, to set up camp in a random city and open your door to whatever strangers come knocking. But by and large they are selfless people. Itta kept saying, "They had a deal with God. God was supposed to protect them." And, yeah -- God kind of screwed this one up pretty badly.

On one hand, there's the miracle of the rabbi and rebbetzin's almost-2-year-old son, Moishe, and his escape. On the other -- if God let their son escape, why not everyone else? And why not the hundred-and-whatever other people who were killed?

Right now I'm watching my daughter boogieing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy," one of her favorites. Times like these, you don't question where you get your wisdom from; you just take it. Prince is doing a dramatic voiceover: "Life means forever and that's a mighty long time/But I'm here 2 tell u, there's something else: The afterworld."

I'm trying to wrap my head around it. We spent Shabbos with Rabbi Shem Tov, who said that, as good people, we can question what happened -- and we almost need to -- but there's no way that we can understand it. It's impossible, he said, for the human mind to comprehend the way God operates. We don't know how the world stays balanced, and why evil has to exist in order to let good continue to exist too. But it's hard not to look at the result of the equation -- crazed terrorists: 1; good people: 0, and lying in a pool of blood -- and keep up the good faith.

Mumbai is quiet

Twitterers are saying that CNN broadcast their room number on TV. I couldn't find any official media reportage, but a couple are suing CNN -- it doesn't say much more than that -- for endangering them by recklessly giving away information.

This Shabbos will be Moishe Holtzberg's 2nd birthday. Chabad is running a mitzvah campaign -- no money, just good deeds. The numbers are growing. It was 285 last night, and then 20 minutes later, up to 360. I pledged to learn the daily Torah reading every day. I'm still a little uncomfortable about the possible sensationalism -- no, the definite sensationalism -- but, dammit, people all over the world are waiting for a reaction from Chabad. I think this is the most positive reaction that an organization could have.

Chasidic beatboxing keeps Matisyahu moving

Matisyahu is in a delicate place right now.

Not emotionally (although in conversation he is raw and perceptive -- he always seems to know what you're thinking, and he's two steps ahead of the question you're about to ask) and not physically (on the night we speak, he's in Norfolk, Va., where soon he will play to a packed crowd of 1,500 in a refurbished 1920s theater). On Nov. 18 he'll be at the Club Nokia in Los Angeles.

Careerwise, however, he's straddling a chasm.

On one side is the possibility of being a one-hit wonder -- his debut single, "King Without a Crown," appeared on all three of his albums to date, and after a strong first few weeks on the Billboard charts, his most recent record, the major-label debut "Youth," fell quickly from sight.

On the other, Matisyahu holds a lucrative contract with Gary Gersh, who manages Beck and the Beastie Boys. His tour is progressing swiftly, new buzz for his upcoming CD is positive and strong, and his upcoming eight-night run in New York concerts over Chanukah is as eagerly anticipated as anything he's done.

But the most persuasive evidence for the longevity of the iconoclastic Chasidic Jew can be found in his new album, "Light," scheduled for release in February. It's a departure from straightforward reggae as well as an experiment in storytelling and pop music. It's also a more intricate statement about God than even his fans are accustomed to hearing.

Last month, the label released a four-song E.P., "Shattered," which finds Matisyahu backed by straightforward hip-hop beats, Postal Service-like indie-tronica and even spoken word (but the good kind of spoken word).

"Smash Lies," the first song on "Shattered," combines an oud, orchestral samples, a Timbaland hip-hop beat and the artist himself ducking in and out of harmonies, preaching and vocal percussion -- and, by that last part, I mean beatboxing, but also a new technique in this song that jumps from beatboxing into rapid spitfire vocals and back again. "Two Child One Drop" takes cues from dance hall queen M.I.A., with a wild, uneasy tape loop floating through the groove.

And "I Will Be Light" is a sad and playful acoustic song, driven by a chorus of oy yoi yoi's, but sounds more like an amiable barroom singalong than a perfectly harmonized chorus ... in other words, a new Matisyahu.

Reinvention is kind of becoming the theme of his life. Partially, the responsibility for this new sound falls upon his new songwriting partners, including an oud player, a hip-hop beatmaker and a teenage reggae prodigy.

Partly, however, it's Matisyahu who signaled this new direction.

"When I started out, I sang in a Jamaican accent," he says as matter-of-factly as if remarking that he sings at all. "But most of what I'm listening to these days isn't reggae. I've also been taking lessons, developing my voice."

What is he listening to these days? Mostly, Ephraim Rosenstein.

Rosenstein, whom he refers to as his "teacher/mentor/friend," is a Jerusalem-based therapist and educator. Together, they studied the Tanya -- the fundamental book of Lubavitch Chasidim, through which Matisyahu started becoming religious -- and studied its ideology together with the ideology of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, another Chasidic teacher, as well as other philosophers.

"We would take themes like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, repentance, and then break down those themes as ideas, as single words," Matisyahu said. "And then we'd bring in stories."

Some of the stories were biblical. Others, like the proliferation of child slavery and the genocide in Darfur, were more current.

Gradually, the stories built into a cohesive narrative. Matisyahu tells the story like a novel, or maybe like a folktale: Two children in Africa, coerced into serving as soldiers, sneak away from their army and escape across the desert. For much of the story, they're lost in the desert -- just like the narrator of "The Tale of Seven Beggars," a Chasidic story originally told by Rebbe Nachman.

"Each idea became a chapter, and from those we would write songs," Matisyahu tells it. In his studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, his longtime guitarist Aaron Dugan would start playing and Matisyahu would jump in, beatboxing -- "We'd run for an hour without stopping," he said.

Often, when they would play back the music, he said, they'd both be struck by the darkness. From there, the duo brought in other collaborators. Matisyahu flew to Jamaica to record with Sly and Robbie, generally known as the top-shelf reggae rhythm section, as well as Stephen McGregor, a reggae producer who's still in his teens.

"People are like, 'He's lost his reggae thing; he's not reggae anymore' -- it's ironic, it's this 17-year-old kid who's producing Sean Paul and the Fugees."

His list of collaborators on "Light" also includes Ooah, a hip-hop producer and member of the Glitch Mob, as well as the oud player from Idan Raichel's band. Yehuda Solomon, lead singer of Los Angeles-based Moshav, was also brought in to add world-music-sounding Hebrew vocals over Matisyahu's English vocals.

If the songs on "Shattered" veer in directions that are surprising to the artist's existing fans, "Light" abandons the path entirely. The first track, "Master of the Field," was released as a free download on Matisyahu's Web site. It treads on ground both familiar and new, with classic Chasidic (and, yes, Lubavitch) metaphors -- the titular master is a reference to the Jewish month of Elul, when the king comes out to greet his subjects on their territory. Musically, it borrows from the confines of his previous work (reggae-tinted keyboards, infectious pop hooks, a beatboxed transitional bridge) but a little before the two-minute mark, the song explodes into a totally different vein. It's not pop music, it's not experimental, but it manages to retain its catchiness while paring down to little more than a drum-and-bass beatbox and a chanted chorus.

Matisyahu doesn't expect everyone to grasp the multilayered story on his album, or even to understand his new direction completely. "In the end, when someone listens to the record, they won't hear that story," he said. "When my sister-in-law first heard 'Two Child,' which is a song about a boy dying in the desert telling a girl to carry on, she was like, 'What girl is this about? It's not about my sister ...'" He laughs. Then, with a measure of sobriety, he adds: "Other people say, 'He isn't writing Jewish songs anymore.' They don't realize it's about the world. It's about everything."

What We Leave Behind

During Yom Kippur services this year, I came up with the best praying strategy I've ever had, I think. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to write it down and look it up next year...except, of course, I never do.

I'm a regular Ashkenazic guy. Blase Hungarian features, thick Carpathian mountain hair, the same prayerbook as half the universe uses...but, for Yom Kippur, I wound up in a Chabad synagogue. Chabad uses a different nusach than most of the rest of the universe. (It's technically called "Nusach ha'Ari," after the Arizal, except that he'd been dead several hundred years when it was invented by the Alter Rebbe, the first Rebbe of Chabad.) To make a long story much shorter, it's mostly the same prayers, in an almost completely different order than, ahem, normal...or, "normal" if you're a Carpathian like me.

We prayed all day yesterday, except for a 20-minute break at 4:30 or so to pop home and see my daughter. Most of it was silent, to ourselves, punctuated sporadically by a call-and-response hymnal, or a sudden moment on the part of the prayer leader of "Hey! This would sound really good sung aloud." (I can only guess that's what he was thinking. I was praying with a 100-year-old machzor that used to be my great-grandmother's; there's no call-and-response instructions, only big text and little text.) Anyway, for about three-quarters of those responsive readings, I was on a totally different page -- in a different section, and on a different mental plane.

And it was totally great.

With nothing to cling to, all I could cling to were the words. As a result of working here (and from a couple years of praying every day) my Hebrew's getting better, and individual words stuck out at me as I went -- healing; forgiveness; screw up. ("Screw up" is my personal translation of "to sin," since there isn't any literal sinning in Judaism.) But the more I went, the closer I got to that ideal relationship that all the rabbis talk about when they talk about Yom Kippur: the idea that it's just you and God alone in a room, and you're not sure whether to say "thank you" or "I'm sorry," and you end up saying both.

That's where this whole confusion about YoKo comes from. Nobody ever says "Happy Yom Kippur!" But people who regard it as sad and mournful aren't getting the whole picture, either. There's a story in the Talmud about how, when we fast, God is fasting, too. Not because God is getting ready to make harsh judgments on us, but because God doesn't want to make harsh judgments, and God's hoping not to have to.

It also got me thinking about the recent exhibition of the diary of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut killed in the Columbia crash. Thirty miles from the crash site, in the middle of a field in Texas, a farmer found the pages -- literally the last thing in life that he left behind. Paper is one of the most intangible, temporary things to leave. But praying, talking, our secret whispers -- if we die this coming year, that's all that we have left, too. Words? Emotions? Complaints? But if you're saying something good, it's nothing to be ashamed of at all.

crossposted from MyJewishLearning