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Kamenetz, who wrote the best-selling The Jew in the Lotus, has chronicled that growing recognition in a sequel released last month, Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters. He is part of a publishing mini-boom. Jewish Lights, a small house whose star is mystically oriented Reform rabbi and NPR commentator Lawrence Kushner, expects to sell 200,000 books this year. God Is a Verb, a Kabbalistic primer by Rabbi David Cooper, recently tore through three printings in two weeks. Says a publishing spokesman: "Every Jewish book that comes through, whether we buy it or not, people want to append mysticism to it. 'How do we get the Kabbalah audience?' It's kind of becoming pop."
And kind of becoming spiritual practice. Los Angeles Kabbalist Jonathan Omer-Man has tutored more than 3,000 students in Kabbalah and the contemplation of such seemingly simple mantras as the headings for the first four Torah readings in the book of Genesis. A meditation conference organized by the Bay Area group Chochmat HaLev drew 500 people. Spiritual life at Rabbi Rami Shapiro's Temple Beth Or in Miami features a custom-built meditation garden. All told, Omer-Man believes, there are some 200 "small scale" programs of experiential mysticism countrywide.
Many neo-Kabbalists, especially those influenced by the wildly creative Jewish renewal guru Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, tailor their teachings to the spiritual aspirations of liberal Jews, rather than revive the Orthodox devotion that was the Kabbalah's original context. Another thing entirely is the empire of Kabbalah Learning Center leader Rabbi Philip Berg, which claims to serve 10,000 students through programs in eight countries. Berg offers a profitable self-help program featuring a regimen of personal "corrections"; devotees like Hollywood producer Sandy Gallin admit its basics are similar to those offered by Deepak Chopra or Marianne Williamson. Yet the center seems simultaneously embedded in a religiosity that verges on the magical. Students learn that just running their eyes over the Zohar's original Aramaic can ensure good luck, and they chat blithely about which of its 24 volumes they carried around that day, despite being unable to read a word. Sandra Bernhard, who introduced Roseanne to the center, argues that there is integrity to Berg's fundamentalist entrepreneurialism. "The basic principle is that you're here for a deeper reason than meets the eye," she says. "You're here to get past desire for oneself alone, to eradicate pain and suffering. I think everybody's trying to achieve that." She adds that she was raised Conservative and Bat Mitzvahed.
In the end, the only way for Americans to judge the virtue of such claims would be to read for themselves, previously a tortuous undertaking. But this year a Chicago foundation hired scholar Daniel Matt, author of The Essential Kabbalah, to write the Zohar's first complete English translation with commentary. Volume I is due in 2000. A long time ago, Hasidic sage Manahem Mendel of Perimishlany said, "Calling the wisdom of Kabbalah hidden is strange. Whoever wants to learn--the book is readily available." He didn't know how right he'd be one day.
--With reporting by Nadya Labi and Richard N. Ostling/New York and Jacqueline Saviano/Los Angeles