Originally published April 20, 2010

BENYAMIN COHEN (Author of “My Jesus Year”): I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt in Atlanta, Georgia, one of eight children, the son of an Orthodox rabbi. I’m the only one that didn’t go into the family business. They are all rabbis or married rabbis.

I was always jealous. I grew up across the street from a Methodist church, and literally my bedroom window looked out at the church parking lot, and every Sunday morning I would see it was packed, and living in the Bible belt there are churches on every street corner, and their parking lots are full every week. Maybe I could go to church—not to convert to Christianity. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to go to find out what got people excited about worship, what got people excited about their religion. Maybe I could go and tap into that spirituality and find out the secret that I was never taught growing up, and maybe I could bring that back and apply it to my own Judaism.

Here’s one thing that I learned. I haven’t even walked into a church, and here’s already one thing I could write down and tell my rabbi—first-time visitor parking. I’m not talking about bringing Jesus into the synagogue. It wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t kill you to put a little first-time visitor parking sign in the parking lot.

I didn’t know going to church that they talk about the Old Testament. I assumed Jews have the Old Testament and Christians have the New Testament. I didn’t realize they have both, and this pastor got up and started giving an Old Testament sermon, and the way he was describing his interpretation was completely antithetical to what I had learned growing up. What came out of that moment was that I didn’t realize I cared so much about my own Bible.

At this Episcopal church they had a ritualistic service every week, and they had these nice traditions, and I was like that’s such a nice, sweet thing to have traditions and ancient rituals. I was like that sounds familiar. We have that in synagogue, and it kind of made me look at my own rituals with a new, fresh perspective.

Orthodox Jewry and Mormonism have a lot in common. We are both minorities in America. We both have special dietary—they can’t drink caffeine, and we have to keep kosher. They wear special undergarments, we wear special undergarments. There’s a lot of laws that dictate all their lives, and so for me I felt a real kinship with the Mormon community, and I went knocking door to door with these two female Mormon missionaries, and their conviction, these are girls 19- and 20-years-old, and their conviction for their religion was just awe-inspiring to me. I’m sure the woman whose house we were visiting, I’m sure she’s wondering why the Mormons brought their accountant with them. You know, what is he doing here?

I was feeling guilty at the end of the year that I kind of strayed from my own religion, and so I wanted to cleanse myself of that guilt, so I did what any good Jewish boy does, and that’s go to confession. I asked my Catholic friend, Vince, if I could do this, and he said, “No, only Catholics can go to confession, but I will sneak you in.” It was a very meaningful spiritual experience, and an interesting postscript to that whole episode is that the priest, now that the book has come out, the priest actually knows that I went to confession with him, and he called me and thanked me. He is so happy that I had a meaningful experience with him.

I for one feel a lot closer to a religious Christian than I do a non-religious Jew, because we have so much in common. People ask me if I found Jesus in church, and I personally did not, so to speak, find Jesus, but what I did find was true spirituality. That’s what I found in these places: the lack of cynicism, the openness to the experience, and the belief in God, whoever that God may be.

BENYAMIN COHEN (Author of “My Jesus Year”): I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt in Atlanta, Georgia, one of eight children, the son of an Orthodox rabbi. I’m the only one that didn’t go into the family business. They are all rabbis or married rabbis.

I was always jealous. I grew up across the street from a Methodist church, and literally my bedroom window looked out at the church parking lot, and every Sunday morning I would see it was packed, and living in the Bible belt there are churches on every street corner, and their parking lots are full every week. Maybe I could go to church—not to convert to Christianity. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to go to find out what got people excited about worship, what got people excited about their religion. Maybe I could go and tap into that spirituality and find out the secret that I was never taught growing up, and maybe I could bring that back and apply it to my own Judaism.

Here’s one thing that I learned. I haven’t even walked into a church, and here’s already one thing I could write down and tell my rabbi—first-time visitor parking. I’m not talking about bringing Jesus into the synagogue. It wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t kill you to put a little first-time visitor parking sign in the parking lot.

I didn’t know going to church that they talk about the Old Testament. I assumed Jews have the Old Testament and Christians have the New Testament. I didn’t realize they have both, and this pastor got up and started giving an Old Testament sermon, and the way he was describing his interpretation was completely antithetical to what I had learned growing up. What came out of that moment was that I didn’t realize I cared so much about my own Bible.

At this Episcopal church they had a ritualistic service every week, and they had these nice traditions, and I was like that’s such a nice, sweet thing to have traditions and ancient rituals. I was like that sounds familiar. We have that in synagogue, and it kind of made me look at my own rituals with a new, fresh perspective.

Orthodox Jewry and Mormonism have a lot in common. We are both minorities in America. We both have special dietary—they can’t drink caffeine, and we have to keep kosher. They wear special undergarments, we wear special undergarments. There’s a lot of laws that dictate all their lives, and so for me I felt a real kinship with the Mormon community, and I went knocking door to door with these two female Mormon missionaries, and their conviction, these are girls 19- and 20-years-old, and their conviction for their religion was just awe-inspiring to me. I’m sure the woman whose house we were visiting, I’m sure she’s wondering why the Mormons brought their accountant with them. You know, what is he doing here?

I was feeling guilty at the end of the year that I kind of strayed from my own religion, and so I wanted to cleanse myself of that guilt, so I did what any good Jewish boy does, and that’s go to confession. I asked my Catholic friend, Vince, if I could do this, and he said, “No, only Catholics can go to confession, but I will sneak you in.” It was a very meaningful spiritual experience, and an interesting postscript to that whole episode is that the priest, now that the book has come out, the priest actually knows that I went to confession with him, and he called me and thanked me. He is so happy that I had a meaningful experience with him.

I for one feel a lot closer to a religious Christian than I do a non-religious Jew, because we have so much in common. People ask me if I found Jesus in church, and I personally did not, so to speak, find Jesus, but what I did find was true spirituality. That’s what I found in these places: the lack of cynicism, the openness to the experience, and the belief in God, whoever that God may be.

What do you think the appeal is of your music?

It’s good music.

The deeper messages—do you think that makes it rise above in some way?

I think that’s one aspect of it, yeah, yeah. I mean in music there’s content. Then there’s the actual music or the sound, you know, and I think that people listen to music for a variety of reasons. I think the people that listen to my music listen to it for the experience that they have, you know, whatever that is, when listening to the music, and part of that might be the music itself. A part of it might be the lyrics or the content. For me, it’s not really about—it’s hard to decipher between the two. It’s kind of one thing, you know, and I guess in today’s music that you hear a lot today or always, sometimes the lyrics are very shallow and very sort of just kind of filler, you know what I mean? I don’t feel that’s the case, really, with my lyrics, you know. I try to tell a story or I try to bring forth some type of idea or a feeling, you know, through the words and the music.

Do you have an idea or a message or something that you want to put out, or does it just sort of happen organically because it comes from some place deep inside of you that just all comes together?

Yeah, it’s sort of the lyrics that I write are sort of just a reflection of my work that I do, I guess, my spiritual work, you know, emotional, intellectual, or whatever, my inner work, whatever I have going on, what I’m working on, the project that I’m working on, and then that’s what I deal with in my music, because it’s really one thing for me. Like my life is not separate from my music, you know. It’s not like a day job that I leave and go home. It’s my—who I am as a person, and how I’m, you know, trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person, whatever it is, is all totally bound up with music, how I see the world and experience the world, how I put it out there and take it in. It is all kind of one thing.

I’ve asked several other artists from different traditions who are spiritual or religious to describe for me or talk a little bit about this connection between music and spirituality and a relationship with God. How does that work together for you as an artist and a person of faith and spirituality?

Well, I think that listening to music or creating music is a spiritual undertaking, so the process of creating music, you know, involves listening. It involves sensitivity, it involves humility, you know, and then also it’s something which is higher than words. It evokes emotion, and it has the ability to, I think, really transport people someplace. To take people out of—to put people into the moment, you know, I guess, to kind of  cut away distractions and have people experience themselves, you know,  or community, like at a concert, for example, you know, there is a certain energy that’s created, you know, and that doesn’t require even an artist who has a spiritual tendency. You know, at a rock show, there is a certain energy that is created.

Is it heightened if the spiritual dimension is there? It’s almost like a transcendence or something. Does that get heightened if the spiritual enters into the mix?

Yeah, I think it can. It depends. You can have an artist that is spiritually minded but is not a great musician and is unable to create that energy, you know. You have some artists, take an artist, for an example just because he’s the perfect artist for this, like Michael Jackson, you could argue as to whether or not it’s really spiritual music. I mean he had songs that were certainly meaningful and powerful, and he certainly had some type of spiritual impact on anyone that really listened to his music. But I don’t necessarily know if he was coming at it from that place. But when he would perform, just the way he would move through music or sing you could say that that was affecting people. I think that if you have musician; let’s say, here’s an example, like Bob Marley, who is like a great musician and powerful presence and also with a spiritual message, yeah, you have the ability to create something really amazing. And those iconic figures like John Lennon or Bob Dylan or—I don’t know if you would say they were spiritual, but they were certainly infusing their music with so much meaning, you know, so certainly in a sense, yeah.

Let’s talk a little about the CD. You’ll be doing a lot of the songs from the “Light” CD. What were some of the inspirations for you as you were putting that together?

The way the process started for me was I sort of have a friend who is sort of a teacher sort of. He hates to be called a teacher, but I don’t know what else to call him, but a man who we have a lot of conversations, and we study together, and we started out by really delving into a rabbi named Reb Nachman from Breslov Hasidic movement in the 1800s, and he had some very sort of controversial and sort of edgy ideas about God, about spirituality, so we really started by studying his works, and there were two works in particular that became the backdrop for the record. One was a dream that he had, which I don’t know if it has a name, I think it’s just called “The Dream.” He mentioned that it was sort of like all of his teachings, his life were sort of found in that dream, and then the other one was the story of “The Seven Beggars.” Along with some of his teachings he has a safe or a book called Lukutei Torah, and we took that, and there was also some teachings from the Alter Rebbe that we incorporated. Alter Rebbe was the Shnuer Zalman of Liadi, was the first Chabad Rebbe; also around the same time. They were contemporaries and actually had some pretty stark difference of opinion about God and how to serve God, so we began sort of comparing and contrasting and, I guess, that became in a big way the backdrop for the record—a lot of the ideas, you know.

Give me an example, maybe, of how that came to fruition in some of the songs.

Like how it worked exactly?

Like that was the backdrop, but then how did some of those teachings, those ideas about God that you were studying and that that you were thinking and learning about, how did that then get into one of the songs?

So the process was kind of really pretty interesting, actually. It was like basically about a year of us discussing these things and, you know, emails back and forth and questions, and then it became pared down into writings, basically, sort of longer writings, sort of like pages and pages on each idea, you know, and basically “The Seven Beggars,” for example. There’s each beggar really represents another idea in the service of God, and so let’s say we would take one of those beggars, like the blind beggar, and we would start with that idea and then we would sort of have this thing, and then we would pare that down. Ephraim [Rosenstein] would write it down from sort of a pages and pages on it to, like, a very intuitive language, almost like poetry, like very more instinctive, emotional, maybe 15 lines or something like that. And then when I went to write my record I had this packet of ideas with maybe about 20 ideas, each about like anywhere from 10 to 30 lines or so, and I kind of kept it with me wherever I was writing, and then there was this whole backstory of all, you know, all the work we had done leading up to that, and when I would go to write music, whoever I was writing music with we would work on a track, let’s say, and then basically when the track was not complete but on its way, I would sit and listen to it, and then I would kind of read through these ideas and feel like which one felt like the right idea for that music, and then I would start to write lyrics based on  those sort of paragraphs, and sometimes I would take actual words from there, sometimes I would change and develop, because a lot of songs are more wordy, you know,  and that’s kind of how the songs came into play. Also, what we did was, around that time, I started to sort of like I had done some things, like I did the John Lennon compilation for Darfur, and I was involved in a movie that was made about sex trafficking in Asia, and so I started to, like, get this more awareness about child atrocities around the world, child soldiers, sex slaves, and the whole story of “The Seven Beggars” is about two children that are lost in a forest. So, like, you have this idea to try to incorporate more modern-day issues into this fairy tale kind of story. And we wrote this fictional story, sort of like “Remake of the Seven Beggars,” as if it was, like, two child soldiers in Africa, and so there was at the same time also this story about these two children, child soldiers, sort of running through the desert, basically, and how they come into contact with like these different ideas, and so initially the record was going to be like a total like story, and then I kind of decided to pull away from that, but I still used like the backdrop of that story about those children throughout the whole entire record.

Those teachings are infused throughout the all the music, it sounds like.

Yeah.

Talk about the theme of light and how that plays into it for you.

Well, in a nutshell there’s Kabbalah. The Kabbalah talks, Jewish mysticism talks about the creation of the world, and the basic idea is that God when he wanted to create the world withdrew His light from the center of His being. His light is like all being. Everything is consumed within God. So in order for Him to create like the other, He had to sort of pull out His core being, pull like out His light from the center, and then He created this sort of void or this sort of empty space within, and then the world basically exists inside of that empty space. And the light is surrounding it like on the outside, and I find that to be really, really, really—I find it to resonate like very much with like my experience in the world, you know, that in any spirituality basically, Eastern religion or Judaism or any tradition, there’s a feeling of sort of having to get in touch with the empty, withdrawing of the self. In Judaism it is called bittul. It’s sort of roughly translated as humility, but the ability to almost like sacrifice or to eliminate some aspect of yourself in order to make this space, and then the idea is not to totally get lost in that darkness, but to be rooted in it with the sense there is above all of it there is this surrounding light.

One song I wanted to talk about specifically on the CD is the one getting a lot of play on NBC and the Olympics, “One Day.” How did that come about? What do you think about that song becoming an anthem for promoting the Olympics?

It’s really great in the sense that, I mean, there’s—it’s a very sort of simple song, not—it was written after all of sort of—the record came later, and it was just sort of  went into the studio and I didn’t put too much thought into it and just wrote, and there were co-writers also, it wasn’t just myself, but just a basic, sort of, you know,  hopeful song, you know,  just to in some ways naïve, but just tap into that sort of just raw place of hope, I guess, and that is sort of what the Olympics is about to an extent, too—people, countries coming together that have differences, kind of rising above that.

How do you see your music, even the spiritual underpinning of it, evolving?

Well, I would say that when I sort of, the first record that I made, ”Shake Off the Dust,” which became “Live at Stubbs,” because that was a live, pretty much live version of those songs, was made while I was in yeshiva, and I was, you know, not raised religious, and then I went to college, and in my last year of college I became religious and went to move to Brooklyn into like a full religious environment and pretty much spent the days studying Torah for about a year and half. I didn’t leave much, and I was just right there. So the first record I made was pretty much made on Fridays, was like the one day you could leave the yeshiva and you could go, and what people would do was to go into the city, into New York, and find Jews, basically working in businesses or on the street and talk to them about Judaism. Try to get them to do mitzvahs and stuff like that, put on tefillin, light Shabbos candles, that kind of thing. So what I started doing was going to a studio, to a friend of mine’s studio, and that’s when I started working on the record. I had been sort of removed from my creativity, because up until that point all I did really was write lyrics and listen to music. What is that, left brain? Right brain? So anyway when I went to yeshiva I tried really just to be focused and learn Torah and then, you know, when I would learn I would find lines in the Psalms, or in the Tanya, which was the main sort of book in Chabad, the main ideological book, that I found really beautiful or inspiring or—and all of my creativity was kind of festering and bubbling, and then on Friday I would go and I would just  basically take one of those lines, one of those ideas, and try to develop a song around it with a vision, you know. And that’s really how that first record was made. The first song that I made was even before that, before I went to yeshiva, that was the first version of “King Without a Crown,” which was my song that did really well on radio, and that song was prior to all of that, and that was at the time when I was becoming religious, and it was really just about very, sort of, you know, about my experiences up until that point, just basic self-help type, you know, although that’s not a great word to use, but just like my lessons that I have learned, and that song was written in maybe twenty minutes, you know. That’s a lot of words. So like when the track was going I just wrote all of my, you know, I write more like, you know, a rapper would write at that point, the flow was more like writing a rap, you know, writing a rhyme, and so it would just come out in that form, and it was all about basically devotion to God and belief, faith, you know. The new record was more developed, sort of the next stage in my spiritual progression, and therefore it was, you know, more time spent on the ideas. The first one was kind of more like “I love this” or, you know, like that first dating someone for the first time versus like a relationship that’s been developed, God love-hate relationship, you know, you’ve been through something with somebody, and you have difficulties and problems and you don’t understand each other and you try to work through it. That’s more of what my relationship with Judaism developed into versus the first, which was total blind devotion, just falling in love with it.

I want to ask you about that. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about how that spiritual journey has changed, and moving away from Chabad and now where you are with all of that.

Well, basically, you know, like I was raised not very religious, but I went to Hebrew school, with some Jewish identity, and really my first, like, interaction with spirituality I would say was through the music of Bob Marley and hearing all the references to the Old Testament and to Judaism in the context of reggae music and getting high and everything that came along with that. And so that was obviously for me, as a fourteen-year-old, very accessible and very interesting and inspiring to me versus, you know, the typical Hebrew school experience being bland and unrelated to my life as a kid. So that was the first thing. It was like wow, why is Bob Marley singing, taking all these quotes from the Psalms? I know that I’m Jewish, that I have some kind of connection with that, Psalms and Old Testament, and it made me intrigued to start to get interested in my heritage, really, for me, and then along with that I went on this trip to Colorado, and it was like a wilderness trip, and I think for the first time when I was out in the wilderness I felt that feeling of that void space that we were talking about before, that feeling of emptiness, and delving into that and trying to figure out what that was, you know. Then right after that trip I went to Israel, and so in Israel I guess I started to feel an exposure to Judaism beyond the scope of what I had been brought up with or used to seeing, in the sense that seeing, you know, so many different types of Jews, it was sort of like Malcolm X, you saw the Malcolm X movie when he went to wherever it was, Mecca, and he was used to seeing like only one type of Islam. Then he went there and he saw these different people, you know. It’s the same experience for Jews that go to Israel, when you grew up with one strain of Judaism and then you see all around you so many different types of Jews relating to Judaism in different ways, but Judaism is at the core of it all. It’s not like in America, where it’s sort of the afterthought or just some part of, you know, your identity. There it’s alive and very real, and that had an impact on me. So then I came back to America, went back to high school, and that winter I went to a Phish concert for the first time. I had LSD for the first time and totally had just an amazing experience with music and with, you know, experiencing a whole other dimension of life, a core dimension of experience, what things mean really, you know, in so much of a deeper way than I had ever experienced anything. So by that point I realized that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to live like—I don’t want to be normal anymore. I want to go for this experience, and then the next, I guess, time between 16 until the time I was about 22, when I became religious, so about six, seven years became for me all about how to reach those depths, you know, or heights, and whether it could be done through drugs or sobriety or religion or, you know, or being in the wilderness, Israel, whatever it was, I sort of tried to find music. That’s when the journey started for me, and I got to a certain point I think where I felt very stuck and very, like, unable to get to that place, you know, to get back to that experience, and I knew that it had to be done without any crutch, or any substances and drugs or anything like that. So I really felt that the way to do it was to, like, really delve into my spiritual tradition, the heritage, and even though I didn’t know that much about it, just from seeing pictures or, you know, little things that I had read, I realized that there was something to that, and that was a part of me, that whether I would agree with it or not agree with it, it’s something that’s alive in me, it’s like in my DNA, and it’s a part of me, so rather than, I guess, exploring other religions and things, I figured I would start with this, the way that I am and the state of being that I was in at that time, when I was 22 or whatever, or 21. I really jumped into it full-force. The first thing was through Shlomo Carlebach and his music and his shul on the Upper West Side, and I got really excited about being Jewish. I started wearing a yarmulke, and I loved all of a sudden the fact that I had this identity. When I was on the train or walking down the street it felt so amazing to take on feeling of when other people see you it’s a certain thing, not just what you believe, who you are, and also all my life I felt very much on the outside, you know, and being Jewish, it fit in with my experience, you know. Everything kind of fit together.

Shlomo Carlebach

So I really got into that, and then I met a rabbi, a Chabad rabbi who had come from similar experience as me, like Grateful Dead and very young, charismatic, and funny and had gone through all the drugs and stuff, and I saw him in the way he was living, and he had like already two kids. He was living in the Village like doing outreach to basically Jews, to young Jews and stuff, and he was an extremely just fun person, lighthearted person to be around, and I am not that way. I can be—everything to me is, like, you know, so heavy, like this decision to be religious or not be religious, so I really got close to this guy and moved into his, you know, went through some hard things with my parents and then moved in with him and his family and slept on the couch in his two-bedroom apartment for about four to five months, and we became very good friends, and we would do these ridiculous things, like on Shabbos walk three miles to the mikvah and, you know, wake up at three o’clock in the morning and try and say the whole book of Psalms and, then, before morning prayers, you know, I would walk to different shuls and, you know, from Brooklyn to Manhattan over the bridge, and I started right away, got indoctrinated in the Chabad thinking. Right off the bat I started going. One rabbi asked me to start putting tefillin on somebody, a Russian kid who had been injured in the hospital. So I started going, started going everyday to the hospital putting on tefillin on this kid, and I was just starting to put tefillin on myself, you know. I was explaining to him you have to put on tefillin, this is why you have to do it, you have to start keeping Shabbos, and so I started to take on this whole other persona, personality that wasn’t really me, and just trying to—then I moved to Crown Heights. I got really into it. It was an interesting experience for me, because in some ways it was very—there was a lot of light, it was very purifying. I really was able to get past a lot of the things that I hadn’t been able to get past before, and I, you know, cut out so much stuff, you know, that is, not necessarily healthy things, things like, you know, whatever it is, you know, TV and, you know, any type of partying. I got really focused and tried to really, you know, purify myself. And on the other hand it was a very, like, dark experience as well, because I really sort of got into, almost into this whole loss, really, the line of where you draw when you’re trying to kind of lose yourself as to where it’s healthy and where it’s you start to become schizophrenic, you know, or totally lose your mind almost. I was really walking that line very, very much, and then I found, basically, I started doing my music. I had some people who really believed in me early on and kind of got me started doing my music, basically, and then I found this really amazing therapist, and we started really talking, who is the guy who became the co-writer with me on this record and stuff. Later we became just good friends, and I started to reevaluate everything that I had taken as ultimate truth, you know, and to pull back and say okay, that it’s time to start now reevaluating everything, questioning everything and not accepting everything as blanket—really reevaluate all the decisions I had made and to kind of reemerge, bring myself back into the picture and make decisions for myself based on what seemed right and what was wrong, and I was lucky to have this friend and guide to really help me to do that, and that process has continued, that balancing process of when you are dealing with religion and when you are dealing with ultimate truth, the idea of ultimate truth, or an ultimate idea is like such a little bit shady, dangerous place to be, and on the other hand you see in, like, American society, you know, in Western society, the total rejection of that based on history with whatever it was, Communism, Nazism, whatever it was. Anytime there was an ultimate idea it usually ended up not working. So Western society has been very much, is very much about not having ideas. At the same time, you can see that doesn’t really work in a lot of ways also, or in my experience it didn’t. So it’s this balance, of kind of going back and forth and trying to figure out, continually and always will be, finding the right questions, not having the answers. It’s funny, because you find that people—religious, nonreligious—everyone has their answers, and people are so quick to give these answers, and it’s really, for me, my whole spiritual process or growth process is all about, sort of trying to eliminate the answers within myself and be okay with being in the question, in the question mark, in the nothing, in the void space, and trying to find the right questions.

Doing this balancing in your personal life, is there a sense that also happens professionally? Is there a struggle for you trying to work out your spirituality? Is there a tension? Do you hear from some folks saying, well, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so Jewish overtly in your music or on stage? Or maybe you’d have a broader appeal if you did this or that? Is there a tension or a struggle in how you work that out as an artist, yes, but also as an artist who’s public?

I haven’t really had too many experiences with too many people telling me how Jewish to be or what, career-wise. I mean my career took off based on the fact that in a lot of ways that, you know, there is this very outwardly looking Hasidic Jew doing something totally not typically Jewish, and my song that was on the radio, I mean, the choruses has the word “Moshiach” [Messiah] in it. So you couldn’t really—it would be hard to make the argument. What I had had to deal with a little bit is more from the other side as I’ve sort of grown and evolved in different ways and different things, a lot of people are quick to say, oh, he must be—he’s not wearing his hat anymore. Must be the record company doesn’t want him to wear his hat. That’s always, you know, again it’s amazing how people are so quick to think they have the answers and quick to judge. It’s made me a little cynical about people in general, yeah.

Do you wonder about the layers in your music and who it’s appealing to or who’s getting—I’m sure a lot of people who hear the music don’t make the connection with Rabbi Nachman and all of that. So how do you balance the appeal to the audience when you’re bringing in your specific spiritual ideas?

I ran into this issue a lot live in the sense that, you know, my experience of live music is about a spiritual experience, you know. My experiences that I had were spiritual experiences, and that’s always been what I try to create, you know. And the people that come to my shows are not necessarily looking for that, you know, all the time. A lot of my fans are, a lot of fans from all over the board, such a wide variety of people that come to my shows. And, you know, some people have more of a religious, whether it be Christian or just belief, and they are looking for that at the show. Some people are coming from more of a jam-type of fan experience. Those people are also looking to totally immerse into the music, but I get a lot of like frat kids and young kids and, you know, young religious kids. It’s just their night out. They’re cooped up in yeshiva, and now they are here to be totally wild and crazy. It’s a big challenge to try to take people into that place. I do it a lot differently than maybe how I started doing it. Like at first when I was more early on in my career, when I was coming right out of yeshiva, you know, I felt like I had this sort of specific, like, very small kind of things I’m supposed to say to people, like it’s my duty to say this type of stuff, whereas now it’s more about really trying to achieve that, not to say it, but to achieve that experience through the music and through my own experience that I’m having and how I’m relating it, and it’s grown, and its been five years, and there’s been a lot of growth, and I see, like, the potential to continue to grow so much, to try to become a master at creating and trying to create this experience that people can really tap into something authentic, whether it’s a deep place within themselves or whether it’s God or something bigger than themselves, and yeah, I just—yeah.

The song “Silence” starts with a prayer in the music, but there is also some very real theological wrestling going on there, too. I’m just wondering how that maybe in some way shows or demonstrates your relationship with God, or what that song means to you? It was one that really spoke to me.

Yeah, that song sums up kind of a lot of, I guess, where I am now, you know, with things. This idea like I’ve been kind of been talking about, about allowing yourself to go kind of inwards and to face yourself and to go into that, allow yourself to be, I don’t know, I guess just to get in touch with darker or deeper parts of yourself and not run from them, you know, or avoid them, and that’s a certain aspect to that song, like crushing the fantasy. That’s one of the lines in there, “crush the fantasy.” It actually pertains really quite well to Hanukkah and to light, because one of the lines there which is taken from actually an idea in Chabad or in Chassidus in general, in Torah in general, is the olive oil, like in the Temple. So they would take the olives and crush the olives, and then through that process they would make the olive oil which then go to light the menorah, which is the whole story of Hanukkah, and the light and all of that. So that process has to come through this crushing of the olives, you know, and that’s the same metaphor for crushing the fantasy, and then allowing for, you know, some light to come out of that, which is, I guess, is a really central theme in my music in general, in the record, in the story of Hanukkah, and in the spiritual process in general.

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(from movie trailer, various voices): I’ve tried to be a serious man. We’re going to be fine. I’ve tried to do right, be a member of the community. Please just tell him I need help.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: “A Serious Man” is a dark comedy that asks some universally serious questions.

CATHLEEN FALSANI (Author, The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers): Why do we suffer? If God is there and God is a good God, why do bad things happen to decent people? I don’t care what flavor of spiritual person you are, or if you are a person of faith or not, there is no real good satisfactory answer to that.

LAWTON: Religion columnist Cathleen Falsani is author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. She says the brothers’ newest film grapples with those theological questions in unexpected—and yes, quirky—ways.

FALSANI: It’s a powerful film, but it’s a powerfully funny film as well, and in the Coens’ 25 years of filmmaking, it’s often their funniest films that are in some ways the darkest, the most serious spiritually.

(from movie): Honey, I think it’s time we started talking about a divorce.

LAWTON: Set in 1967, the story centers around a Jewish physics professor, Larry Gopnick, who experiences a Job-like set of personal and professional calamities. He looks to his faith to make sense of it all.

(Larry Gopnick, from movie): Please, I need help. I’ve already talked to the other rabbis. I’ve had quite a bit of tzurus lately. Marital problems, professional, you name it. This is not a frivolous request.

LAWTON: He doesn’t find any easy answers.

(dialogue from movie): Rabbi’s secretary: The rabbi is busy. Larry Gopnick: He didn’t look busy. Secretary: He’s thinking.

FALSANI: To their credit, the rabbis in the film don’t really try to give an answer. I think they kind of encourage the wrestling out of the answer, which is, in fact, in my estimation, to continue to live your life.

LAWTON: The film is full of Jewish motifs. It’s set in a community outside Minneapolis, where the Coen brothers themselves grew up in the 1960s. They say with “A Serious Man” they wanted to explore what they call “the whole Jewish Midwestern thing.”

ETHAN COEN (filmmaker): The whole incongruity of Jews in the Midwest, Jews on the plains. It’s just—it’s odd, and that incongruity is something that we kind of wanted to get across, too. It’s its own strange subculture.

Ethan and Joel Coen

LAWTON: They acknowledge nervousness among some Jews about how the film may come across.

ETHAN COEN: People were really supportive in the Jewish community especially, but you know, occasionally people would ask, you’re not making fun of the Jews, are you? This really deep Jewish thing where, you know, is this good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?

LAWTON: Like Larry’s son, Danny, the Coen brothers went to Hebrew school and were bar mitzvahed. They’ve indicated that faith no longer plays a central role in their lives, but they are notoriously reticent to discuss their personal beliefs or the messages in their 14 films.

FALSANI: They don’t say a lot about what they believe or don’t, but their movies are filled with theological and metaphysical and existential questions.

LAWTON: Falsani admits those themes may not always be obvious in what she calls “the Coeniverse”—the enigmatic and sometimes violent worlds the Coens have created.

FALSANI: I think there is a moral order to the Coeniverse, if you will. It might not be the moral order we were hoping for, but it’s there.

LAWTON: “A Serious Man” may be more overt than other Coen films in its religious exploration, but it is no more obvious in its conclusions. Still, Falsani says, in true Coenesque fashion, meaning can come by simply raising the questions.

(Larry Gopnick, from movie): I need help.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We remember the Holocaust today with a profile of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a Jewish troubadour in the 1960s and ’70s who preached love and peace and whose music has become a staple of religious observances in Jewish synagogues and homes. Carlebach was a Holocaust survivor who refused to lose his faith in God and in humankind. Our reporter is Menachem Daum, in New York. He says every melody in this story was composed by Shlomo Carlebach.

Rabbi SHLOMO CARLEBACH: After the Holocaust it’s so easy to be angry at the world, and it’s so easy to condemn the world. But we have to continue to love the world. We have to.

MENACHEM DAUM: In response to the Holocaust, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach stressed the power of joy and the ability of every individual to become God’s partner in fixing the world.

Shlomo Carlebach in Poland

Voice of Rabbi CARLEBACH: The most important thing today every person has to do is to cleanse their hearts from anger, and the only way of getting rid of anger is when you fill your heart with a lot of joy.

DAUM: Carlebach was quite unorthodox for an Orthodox rabbi, giving up the pulpit to spread his message through music. While often at odds with the Jewish establishment, alienated young Jews of the ’60s and ’70s responded to his universal teachings, and he became known as the “rebel rabbi” of the Jewish counterculture.

Rabbi CARLEBACH (clip from concert, singing “The Song of Sabbath”): Let’s teach the whole world to sing a song of Shabbos. In cold Siberia this is what keeps them warm. They sing a song of Shabbos.

(in interview): It has to be so strong, this Jewishness, that nothing in the world should move them, to un-Jewish them. But, on the other hand, it has to be completely connected to every human being in the world.

Professor ARI GOLDMAN (Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism): Shlomo had some way to electrify people and to inspire people. He felt, you know, one person at a time he could change things.

CONCERT ANNOUNCER: Let’s hear it for Shlomo Carlebach and Ritchie Havens.

(Clip of Shlomo Carlebach and Ritchie Havens in Crown Heights, New York concert)

Monika Krajewska

DAUM: Shlomo devoted much of his final years to improving the relationship between Jews and others. He was determined that hatred should never be passed on to new generations. He gave this message to both Jews and non-Jews in such places as Israel, Russia, Germany, and Poland. Many Jews, especially Holocaust survivors from Poland, condemned Carlebach for reaching out to the Polish people.

VOICE OF JEWISH SURVIVOR: They had hatreds towards the Jews. How can you make peace in a situation like that?

Rabbi CARLEBACH (on bus tour): I bet you know we are coming to Poland, and it’s like we have the privilege of the Polish people look at us. So maybe we can really bring them a little message from heaven that there’s hope for the world, because everybody wants the world to be better. Nobody wants the world the way it is. The only thing is nobody shows them a picture of a better world. If we can walk around and show them some good pictures — you know, the best picture is the way one human being greets another. That’s all there is to it.

(singing during concert in Poland): You know, my beautiful friends, I’m the first time in Poland, and I had the sad privilege to be in Maidanek. But when I walked away I was full of hope.

CAMP GUIDE: They shot 18,000 Jews in Maidanek in one day and burned the bodies.

Rabbi CARLEBACH (singing during concert in Poland): When I walked the gas chambers it was clear to me — dawn is breaking. I want you to know, my beautiful friends, don’t ever give up on the world. Don’t ever give up on any human being, because we all are God’s image.

Professor Ari Goldman

MONIKA KRAJEWSKA (Artist and Writer): We are Polish Jews, and we have Polish friends, and many of those friends fell in love with Rabbi Carlebach. This is simply because of his message of love and peace. And it’s not words like you read in the newspaper or statements made by politicians. But you feel it.

(1995 clip of Pope John Paul II in Giants Stadium listening to performance of Shlomo Carlebach’s song “Because of My Brothers and Friends”)

DAUM: Rabbi Carlebach died in 1994. A year later, his song of peace that he sang at every concert was chosen to honor Pope John Paul II.

NESHAMA CARLEBACH (Rabbi Carlebach’s daughter at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale performs “Because of My Brothers and Friends” during a Martin Luther King Day concert): I think my father would have loved it. I think he would have loved just the feeling of the worlds coming together, because that’s really what Martin Luther King was wanting to accomplish and definitely what my father was wanting to accomplish.

Prof. GOLDMAN: The Jewish world embraced him after his death. When he was alive he was often a pariah, and I don’t think anyone could have imagined the kind of impact that his music would continue to have these many years after his death. It’s remarkable.

Voice of Rabbi CARLEBACH: This person asks me, “What’s your message?” So I said my message is nothing you don’t know. The only thing is we got to do it. Everybody knows it, but we never do it. My message is that there’s one God. We are one world. We are all brothers and sisters.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Menachem Daum.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This weekend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, religious services are planned around the country to remember him and his legacy. Some of them will be in synagogues that are honoring both King and the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of King’s many courageous supporters. Heschel is widely considered to be one of the greatest American religious figures of the last century — a rabbi, theologian, social activist and mystic admired by Christians as well as Jews. He would have been 101 years old this month.

Our segment was produced by Steve Brand, a New York filmmaker who is completing a documentary on Heschel called “Praying With My Legs.” Brand gathered powerful recollections from those who had known Heschel and who wish his prophetic voice were still sounding.

Heschel marching in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Photo courtesy of AP Images)

It was his participation in the civil rights movement that first made Heschel widely known. In a famous photo of the Selma march in 1965, its leaders wearing garlands, Heschel was the white man with the prophet’s beard, two to the right of Dr. King. That was the occasion on which Heschel said he felt he was praying with his legs.

Rabbi ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): God is either the father of all men or of no man, and the idea of judging a person in terms of black or brown or white is an eye disease.

ABERNETHY: Heschel also publicly and passionately opposed the war in Vietnam.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): How can I pray when I have on my conscience the awareness that I am co-responsible for the death of innocent people in Vietnam? In a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible.

PETER A. GEFFEN (Founder, Abraham Joshua Heschel School, New York City): The war in Vietnam, for Heschel, was an ultimate act of dehumanization — to no longer even see that there was an enemy on the other side who was a human being. And Heschel was convinced that if I act with a disregard for the humanity of my fellow human beings, I am ultimately — I am really ultimately attacking God.

Dr. Susannah Heschel

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, teaches Jewish studies at Dartmouth College.

Dr. SUSANNAH HESCHEL (Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Department of Religion, Dartmouth College): He upset a lot of people, because he felt his role was to go and tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

My father was sleepless over Vietnam. He would be up late at night — one, two, three in the morning — couldn’t sleep he was so upset. It was on his mind all the time.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s experience of the Holocaust was one reason for his social activism. He had seen close up what racism and apathy can do, and how violence towards human beings often begins with the abuse of language.

Dr. HESCHEL: Hitler, he said, did not come to power with tanks and machine guns. Hitler came to power with words.

ABERNETHY: Heschel was raised in Warsaw and did graduate study in Berlin. Just six weeks before World War II, he was able to escape from Europe. Heschel’s late wife, Sylvia, remembered.

SYLVIA HESCHEL: There were sisters of his who were killed, and that was a very painful thing for him — very. His mother died of a heart attack as soon as the Nazis came to the door. She just fell to the ground. It was awful.

Sylvia Heschel

ABERNETHY: But Heschel never blamed God.

Ms. HESCHEL: He said God didn’t do it. Man did it.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s biographer is Edward Kaplan.

Professor EDWARD KAPLAN (Author, SPIRITUAL RADICAL: ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL IN AMERICA): There are moments when he talks about overcoming despair and overcoming gloom. But the response to the catastrophe is not to focus on the catastrophe but to focus on human possibilities.

Dr. ARTHUR GREEN (Rector, The Rabbinical School, Hebrew College): When you asked Heschel Where was God during the Holocaust, his answer was always, of course, where was man? But if you read Heschel carefully, I would say, God cares. God weeps with man at his sufferings, God participates in human suffering, and therefore God was there in the Holocaust.

ANDREW YOUNG (Human Rights Activist): Whenever I get a little down or depressed I go get one of his books and I read the prophet Isaiah, what he has to say about Isaiah, because Isaiah was written at a time of the desolation of Israel, and yet it’s the loftiest vision of dreams for humankind. It’s peoples’ ability to have faith in the midst of persecution and destruction.

ABERNETHY: At the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Heschel was a professor of social ethics and mysticism, two powerful strands of Jewish thought. From the prophets he learned to speak out about the world’s evils. From his ancestors, who were Hasidic Jews known for their ecstatic spirituality, he learned to celebrate life.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): I say that this world in itself is so fascinatingly mysterious, so challengingly marvelous, that not to realize that there is more than I see, that there is endlessly more than I can express or even conceive, is just being underdeveloped intellectually.

Rabbi MORTON M. LEIFMAN (Vice President Emeritus, Jewish Theological Seminary): One of Heschel’s main attempts in getting to you, in a sense, is his own sense of “radical amazement” — to be aware of so many different things: “Did you notice the trees?” Well, Heschel was in love with trees. You’re walking in Riverside Park: “Don’t forget the trees,” you know, “don’t forget the river.” You have to react.

ABERNETHY: Heschel described the spiritual power he felt as “the ineffable.”

Ms. HESCHEL: Oh, ineffable. He loved that word — that which is inexplainable but you know is there. It points to something beyond — that which we pray to, meaning God.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s biographer notes his use of dramatic language to try to reach others’ hearts, not just their minds. He read a Heschel description of a mystical experience.

Prof. KAPLAN (reading): “A moment comes like a thunderbolt in which a flash of the undisclosed rends our dark apathy asunder. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. It has entered our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake.” I can’t believe that someone could write a passage like this without having experienced it himself.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s deep spirituality drew many Christians to him. He had many friends who were Christians, among them the Catholic priest and anti-Vietnam war activist Daniel Berrigan, who became a friend.

Father DANIEL BERRIGAN. S.J. (Human Rights Activist): I was seeing someone who was totally immersed in his own religious tradition and was at the same time charmingly ecumenical, you know, and open to others. I began to understand that the two went together, that if you were a person of deep faith you were open to others, and you didn’t draw lines or boundaries or say we’re inside the circle and others are out. He was one of the chosen who believed that everyone was chosen and that the very fact of existing in the world meant you were chosen.

ABERNETHY: Heschel fought all anti-Semitism. He campaigned for the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union, and at the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, he lobbied hard against church teachings that demeaned Jews or anticipated their conversion.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): I came out with a very strong rebuke. I said I’d rather go to Auschwitz than give up my religion. My being Jewish is so sacred to me that I am ready to die for it.

ABERNETHY: Over his lifetime, Heschel published 18 books and more than 100 essays. He was driven to show the relevance of Jewish scripture to modern life. In THE SABBATH, he saw time as something to be made holy. In MAN IS NOT ALONE and other volumes, he said God expects and depends on human beings to carry out his will.

Dr. ARNOLD M. EISEN (Chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary): So Heschel can say to the world, you know, the challenge today is nihilism. He says the enemy we all face is nihilism. The world is going to hell. The sense of meaninglessness is pervasive, and we have to do something about this.

ABERNETHY: His friends say Heschel did a lot about it by what he taught and even more by how he lived.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “Directions,” ABC, 1971): We are called upon to be an image of God. You see, God is absent, invisible, and the task of a human being is to represent the Divine, to be a reminder of the presence of God.

ABERNETHY: One year after he said that Heschel died, on December 23, 1972. He was just 65 years old.

BOB ABERNETHY: All over this country, wherever church and synagogue attendance is falling off, places of worship are redesigning their observances to try to make them more meaningful, especially for the young. In reform and conservative Judaism, a renewal movement has begun called Synagogue 2000. Its leaders want to revitalize Jewish prayer and community. Lucky Severson reports from a Synagogue 2000 workshop.

LUCKY SEVERSON: These rabbis, cantors, and Jewish leaders from the Washington, DC area are learning how to make synagogue worship more spiritually rewarding.

Mr. RON WOLFSON (Synagogue 2000): All those from Fairfax Jewish Congregation, where are you? Come on.

SEVERSON: They’re part of a national effort to transform synagogues into places that will attract more members and entice those who do attend to return. It’s called Synagogue 2000, and its co-founder is Jewish educator Ron Wolfson.

Mr. WOLFSON: And one of the things we’ve been working hard on is to create a more welcoming ambiance in the congregation, a place where you’re greeted warmly at the front door, where you’re given the access skills to participate in the service; it’s not just assumed that you know what to do.

SEVERSON: More than anything, Synagogue 2000 wants to create a place where people can feel a closer relationship with God and with each other.

Mr. WOLFSON (To Audience): A congregation where people come and everybody knows their name, a congregation where you’re deeply connected and deeply rooted.

SEVERSON: Wolfson and Synagogue 2000 co-founder Rabbi Larry Hoffman have crafted a step-by-step itinerary for change, a detailed plan that includes everything from making prayers more personal to coaxing rabbis and cantors to create services that encourage more participation. They found some inspiration in places you might not imagine: megachurches.

Mr. WOLFSON: These megachurches have designed worship services specifically for seekers; have thought a lot about their market, if you will, and are reaching out to the unchurched. We think that there’s something to learn there.

SEVERSON: The heightened Jewish interest in spirituality reflects a spiritual hunger of people of all faiths, but until recently, Jews hadn’t made a special effort to embrace the searchers who were turning elsewhere. They had other pressing issues.

Jews have always been united against their enemies from without, threatening their physical survival. But now it’s their spiritual survival that worries particularly the baby boomers, who are searching for meaning in their synagogues and haven’t been finding it.

Popular Jewish songwriter Debbie Friedman always felt like a spectator in her worship services: choir sang, people didn’t. It was almost by accident, while setting ancient prayers to contemporary music, that she discovered how to get people involved, particularly young people.

Ms. DEBBIE FRIEDMAN (Composer/Performer): These kids who had been singing in services — Peter, Paul and Mary and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell — started to sing this piece and stood there with their arms around each other, and they were weeping. And what I realized at that moment is that there was finally — that that was a language that they could understand.

SEVERSON: Today, Debbie Friedman’s rendition of Jewish prayers are sung in synagogues across the country and have made prayers more fulfilling for many, especially for those in search of healing.

Ms. FRIEDMAN: We’re doing these healing services because they’re not — because healing isn’t being addressed, until recently anyway. In the last 10 years it hasn’t really been addressed. It’s been a no-no. “We can’t talk about spirituality, and we can’t talk about God and we can’t talk about sickness.”

SEVERSON: But 30 years ago, when she started, her approach of inclusion was almost considered heresy by some.

Did they call you a renegade when you first started?

Ms. FRIEDMAN: I didn’t know that I was doing anything wrong. Who knew? You know, writing prayers, who would ever in their right mind think that if someone is writing prayers, that they’re doing something bad?

SEVERSON: Her melodic prayers have attracted young Jews around the country, but the concern is, according to one estimate, only four out of 10 Jews are members of a synagogue and roughly half marry outside the faith. That’s one reason for this novel approach to reach and keep young Jewish seekers. It’s called Makor, and it’s in Manhattan. Makor has turned out to be an enormous success. It features an arts and cultural center with a cafe and live music. Upstairs you’ll find serious classes in Judaism, but Makor offers more than just spirituality.

Would you also like to meet a woman here, a Jewish woman?

Mr. SIMON NADULEK: Correct.

SEVERSON: That’s one of the reasons?

Mr. NADULEK: One of the reasons. And I’m taking kabbalah classes, which are interesting; I never did that before. So it’s a learning process and meeting people at the same time.

Rabbi DAVID GEDZELMAN (Makor): People are, in some ways, coming for the entertainment and then checking out courses on Jewish text, kabbalah, meditation, and discovering a deeper connection to Jewish life and a connection that they can only call their own.

SEVERSON: In the popular kabbalah classes, students study ancient, mystical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible that were once reserved only for Jewish scholars. They say the classes give them a deeper understanding of life and a closer relationship with God.

There are also classes in meditation, an ancient Jewish practice that was lost and refound. The practitioners say it helps them feel closer to God.

Ms. FRIEDMAN: I think we have to do anything and everything that we can to involve the community in every way that we can.

SEVERSON: But as Debbie Friedman discovered years ago, change does not come easily, then or now.

Rabbi LARRY HOFFMAN (Synagogue 2000): The greatest obstacle, really, is people, institutions do not change evils. We see ourselves, therefore, as the intervention that can help institutions do what they want to do, even if they can’t do it themselves.

SEVERSON: Some critics argue that the quest for more spirituality could come at the expense of serious study.

Mr. WOLFSON: We think that there’s something deeply missing in people’s lives if they don’t have a spiritual community to belong to, and we think that’s what synagogues ought to be for people. And we’re going to have to do some work to get them there.

SEVERSON: So far there seems to be great interest in Synagogue 2000, but it’s too early on to know if it will keep Jews coming back for more spirituality. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Lucky Severson in Maryland.