If it were a fashion event, you might call it fabulous. Tonight's audience at Showroom Seven, a grand wholesale-retail space in midtown Manhattan, is peppered with actors, musicians, some designers for DKNY and others at home among racks of classy outfits destined for sale at Barney's or Bergdorf Goodman. Even the speaker looks swank, in perfectly coordinated suit and tie and black velvet yarmulke. But Rabbi Abraham Hardoon is not here to talk pret-a-porter; he is discoursing on the ancient esoteric Jewish tradition of Kabbalah.
Hardoon's topic--tonight and every Thursday, to packed classes--is how to align oneself with "the Light," the never-ending mystical emanation of the Unknowable God, Ein Sof. That he addresses this publicly at all is remarkable, since Kabbalah was a tightly guarded secret for centuries. The extent of change in that status, however, is revealed in a boast: "Someone came to me and asked, 'Is it true that Madonna studies Kabbalah?'" Hardoon says. He allows a Billy Crystal-esque pause. "Oh, you heard about that?" Laughter.
Yes, we've heard. Madonna threw a Kabbalah cocktail party. Roseanne compares Kabbalah--favorably--to quantum physics. Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand and actress Sandra Bernhard study it. And Hardoon's Kabbalah Learning Center, the controversial organization that attracts many of the stars, is just the largest and most flamboyant of hundreds of courses in Kabbalah and related Jewish mysticism in places as diverse as Sudbury, Mass., and Boca Raton, Fla. Academic involvement in the discipline has multiplied, as have tangential pop artifacts like the best-selling Bible Code and an X-Files episode about a golem, the Jewish proto-Frankenstein monster. Publishers are turning out dozens of titles on subjects ranging from arcana to kids' Kabbalah. Most intriguing, mysticism is increasingly viewed as the answer to what United Jewish Appeal officer Alan Bayer calls "a hungry, thirsty, bottle-of-water-in-the-desert need for connection with transcendent meanings" among ordinary Jews. Concludes Brandeis University professor Arthur Green, a scholar and advocate of mysticism: "For nearly 200 years, Western Jews tried to hide Kabbalah under the rug. Now it's been rediscovered and reclaimed as part of the Jewish legacy."