A really interesting interview with Mattasiahu from the Forward.
Some excerpts
Matisyahu, born Matthew Paul Miller, is well known as a genre-busting Hasidic reggae artist who performs in tzitzit. But with his new EP, ”Shattered,” and current tour, he shows a new, bold eclecticism that demonstrates a simultaneous evolution in his music and religious attitudes. He’s taken true steps — away from Chabad in his religious observance, and away from more conventional reggae in his musical development — and has opted instead to define his own new path.
.......
“I’ve been through all these different phases in Chabad. Chabad has been a bit of a roller coaster for me. It was very pure in the sense that I totally divested myself from all of the confusion that I was living in. I wasn’t getting high, I wasn’t with women — I was waking up every morning and learning Torah all day. And so, in certain senses it was a pure process,” Matisyahu said.
“But there was a lot of alcoholism going on, in my experience, and a lot of borderline —” He interrupted himself. “I definitely lost myself, as well, in the process, in the sense that I somehow stopped thinking for myself. I became completely dependent on other people for my sense of what was right and wrong. I felt incapable of making my own decisions. I was borderline completely losing my mind.” And then, he said, he pulled himself out of Chabad.
It was during this period that he began working with the now Jerusalem-based therapist Ephraim Rosenstein, whom he now considers his personal friend and religious mentor.
“[Rosenstein] was able to help me come to some realizations that were really ground-breaking, and kept me from where I think I would have lost my mind in the state of being I was in at that time,” Matisyahu said. “After that happened, once my therapy came to a certain place, and I’d gotten pretty healthy, I wanted to continue with my spirituality. I guess the therapy to me was sort of getting to know myself as a valid means of spiritual growth. I wanted to take it from a personal to an intellectual kind of thing, so we started learning together. Instead of therapy, I was paying him to discuss ideas, basically.
“I’ve stopped identifying with any group of Judaism. I would now call myself an Orthodox Jew. I try to keep the tenets of halachic Judaism as strongly as possible, but I don’t identify with any one movement.”
He noted that he has not severed ties with the movement completely: “My kids go to a Lubavitch yeshiva and are named after rebbes. I have Lubavitch friends, and we stay with shlichim [emissaries] around the world. I feel I have some in-depth knowledge of Hasidus and Chabad philosophy, and close ties with Lubavitch. But I don’t feel the need to be any one thing.
“In Chabad, there was always the tendency to deify everything, whether it was the rebbes or the learning,” Matisyahu said. “[There was] this sense that you couldn’t ask questions about any of it, that if you didn’t accept it, you weren’t accepting the Torah. It was as if you weren’t religious, and that this was the one path and the true path and that anything outside of it, even if it was a different kind of Hasidim, was certainly looked down upon.” With Rosenstein, he said, Matisyahu relished a different mode of studying, which focused on placing teachings into historical and social contexts and then comparing them with other Hasidus and philosophies of Judaism.
“.......
“I took classic Jewish works and stories and things that are really universal. I found them within Judaism, but any spirituality or religion around the world would identify with the themes,” Matisyahu said. “I tried to take in certain situations, like current events that I felt fall in line with those themes. The lyrics are an outgrowth of the philosophy, but manifest themselves in a more current format.”
One song, “So Hi So Lo,” stems from a famous story of Nachman of Bratslav. “This was his most famous story about two kids who get lost in the wilderness and have to make it through,” he said. “That became the theme, in a lot of ways, for the record and especially for this one song, that theme of being children in the forest.
“It’s central to Judaism — the exile, galut, is compared to being lost in darkness, dream, forest, wilderness. There’s a sense that the people are still traveling through that in their own ways, in terms of spirituality.”
The story took on another dimension on another track, as he became more aware of refugee camps in Sudan and Ghana and of child soldiers in Africa. “I had heard a story about some child soldiers that had escaped from a group and traveled 1,000 miles across the desert to safety,” he said. The song connects the story to another legend of Nachman of Bratslav.
Matisyahu’s music and religious attitudes reflect a new openness to the external world. The performer now listens to Icelandic band Sigur Rós, as well as to reggae star Sizzla. Yet his relationship to popular music now is different from what it was prior to his Crown Heights musical hiatus.
“Before I came into religion, I completely depended on music to be the glue that would bring my experiences together,” he said. “Walking down the street and not listening to music, everything felt disjointed and chaotic. When I was listening to music, it all came together. That was what music was for me. It’s what gave me my inner sense of hope and of unification of my own dreams, of what I wanted to do with my life and of overcoming the whole world.
“After I became religious, I didn’t feel the need for that anymore, the need for music to make that happen,” he said. “If things were chaotic and disjointed, I wanted to feel that, not to use music as a false glue. It was almost like getting high. It felt like I was cheating the reality, conning myself into this place. So I never again returned to listening to music in that same way.”
He struggles, he says, with balancing the secular and religious worlds, trying not to notice, for example, women at his shows who are dressed immodestly, yet not being able to wholly connect to his audience as a result.
“......He is quick to note that he doesn’t condemn people who take a different approach to modesty: “I’m not like, ‘how dare they come to my show like that!’ People are who they are. I put myself out there; they can come dressed how they want and do whatever they want while they’re there. But for myself, it’s kind of funny. I feel some sort of block. Sometimes I want to be totally open, want to take everybody in, make that connection with the audience. If I see a pretty girl, dressed sexy, I’m almost afraid to look at them. I feel like they’re going to think I’m looking at them in a sexual way.
“I wasn’t raised religious — I’m from the whole American culture. When I started putting on a yarmulke, I said, I represent much more. I represent these things, and I cannot be a hypocrite. Normally if you’re religious, you don’t look at women. But in my situation, I’m supposed to be open and loving. And so it stays in the forefront of what I’m dealing with, and how to balance it all.”
In response to my question of what “much more” meant, he said: “I think what I represent to a lot of people is sort of like someone who is a regular guy, a normal guy. A lot of people — young, Jewish, non-Jewish, whatever — are going though similar experiences of trying to figure things out. I think a lot of people see themselves in me, either in a certain genuineness or humility maybe. I don’t see myself as this big star; I see myself as a kid who is still trying to figure it all out and put it together.”
Exemplifying one of his many supreme balancing acts, one of our conversations transpired over cell phone as Matisyahu was driving an RV through the Toronto night, answering my questions with grace over the yells of a hysterical toddler while simultaneously trying to follow the GPS directions to his wife’s grandmother’s house.
Before we hung up, I asked if the GPS was working.
“I guess I’m not as far away as I thought I was,” he responded.
Comments