Maybe we should be grateful that Madonna didn’t choose to immerse herself in Catholicism, if this is the kind of perversion of Kabbalistic Judaism she’s gone for and given millions of dollars in support of.

It’s the LA Kabbalah Center, and The New Republic has a cover story, not online except for subscribers. Some excerpts:

Purim is a good time to experience the Centre, where Jews can pretend to be non-Jews, and non-Jews can pretend to be Jews, and everyone can pretend to be Kabbalists.

In the prayer room they call the “war zone,” where the cosmic battle against Satan is fought, several dozen young men are swaying to the rhythms of the morning Jewish service. I’m at the international headquarters of the Kabbalah Centre–the new-age movement that claims to have reached over three million people, including non-Jewish pop stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger, and Britney Spears. With its fast-paced prayers and separate seating for men and women, the Centre could be a typical Orthodox synagogue, except for a few oddities–like the fact that some men wear yarmulkes and prayer shawls and phylacteries, while others are bareheaded. Or that some of those wearing phylacteries may not be Jewish. The Centre has transformed Kabbalah–considered by Jews to be the inner sanctum of Jewish devotion and thought–into generic, nondenominational mysticism. It is “the secret” of life, according to the Centre’s website, supposedly studied by everyone from Plato to Shakespeare. In an interview last year with “Dateline NBC,” Madonna, who has donated some $5 million to the Centre, called herself “a Kabbala-ist [sic]” and noted the similarity between Kabbalah and punk rock. Both, she explained, are forms of “thinking outside the box.”

On the walls of the high-ceilinged, wood-beamed Centre headquarters hang photographs of the graves of famous Kabbalists. There’s also a chart of the 72 Hebrew names of God, as defined by Jewish mystics. Devotees wear t-shirts and truckers’ caps imprinted with those names; some have clipped plastic sheets from the chart to their prayer books and mentally insert the names into their prayers. The Centre calls Kabbalah “technology for the soul,” and that’s an apt description of its mechanistic approach. In the traditional Kabbalistic schools that have survived for centuries, the 72 names of God form the basis for arduous meditations and ascetic practices. Here, though, all you need to do is glance at the letters to be infused with their healing and invigorating power. In the Centre’s literature, each name is endowed with a quality that can readily be accessed–such as “defusing negative energy and stress,” “dumping depression,” and “the power of prosperity.” You can even call the Centre for a free ten-minute personal consultation with a highly trained 72-names specialist on how to find the name that best suits your needs. The Centre claims that merely scanning the text of the Zohar, the seminal thirteenthcentury Kabbalistic commentary on the Bible, offers divine protection. You don’t have to understand what you’re reading; in fact, you don’t even need to know how to read the Hebrew letters to absorb their magical properties. Everyone in the room wears a red thread around the wrist as protection against the evil eye. In the “Kabbalah Cafe,” located in the courtyard, a sign reassures patrons that all coffee and tea is made with kabbalah mountain spring water, blessed by the Centre’s leaders. An adjacent gift shop sells scented candles, for relaxation and better sex.

The Centre sees itself as, literally, the center of the struggle against Satan. By releasing the hidden traditions of Kabbalah to humanity, it claims, it is threatening Satan’s power of “chaos,” which is responsible for everything from wars and illness to depression. The end of chaos will mean the end of human suffering. And so the creation of the Centre is nothing less than the most momentous event in history.

Given the cosmic stakes, the atmosphere in the “war zone” is remarkably laid-back. A Centre official presiding over the prayers calls out one of the names of God and urges worshipers to meditate on its healing properties. His cell phone rings and he takes the call. After a leisurely phone conversation, he resumes the prayer, chanting, “The technology of the name is going into the stem cells, stimulating the immune system, reducing cellular blockage, back to the condition of receiving light.” Centre devotees close their eyes for about 20 seconds–speed meditation. Then they’re on to the next rapid prayer, with some waving their fists in the air for emphasis. I ask a young woman about the meaning of the name on which they’ve just meditated. “It removes negativity,” she explains. Is that what the name means? “It’s what it does,” she says.

*******************

Still, there’s a mystery here. Why have so many apparently intelligent, successful people fallen for magical trinkets like blessed candles and red strings? Is there some promise of redemption that those of us who’ve tried to understand this phenomenon have missed, some distortion greater than simply turning Kabbalistic wisdom into grist for supermarket tabloids?

Iget the beginning of an answer at an evening prayer service in the “war zone.” The Rav leads his disciples in the Kaddish prayer, shouting its words as if in a rage. Then he interrupts the conventional service and begins chanting “Chernobyl” and other names I can’t identify. A devotee explains, straight-faced, that these are all names of nuclear power plants: The Rav is trying to heal the problem of nuclear waste, which the Centre’s devotees believe is spreading aids. “Whooo!” calls out Berg and his followers, waving their hands as if to send the healing vibrations onward. Pointing up toward heaven and then down to Earth, they shout the word “immortality” in several languages. Why immortality? I ask another devotee. “Because each person is potentially a messiah,” he replies. “Immortality isn’t just in heaven. It’s possible right here on Earth.”

Physical immortality? Was the Centre promising its people the end of death, the ultimate chaos? Did the Centre believe that we could literally become gods in these bodies? Could that explain its obsession with prolonging the life span, the eerie meditations on stem cells, the focus on the names of God as transformative agents for one’s DNA, the blessed water that produces a “higher molecular order … necessary for eternal cell regeneration”? According to Berg’s book Immortality, yes. Published in 2000, it is not one of his better-known works–he has authored over a dozen–but it is surely his most revealing. Written in short chapters, some no more than a page long, the book is a rambling attempt to link Kabbalah and science in an argument that physical immortality is not only possible, but also imminent. Repeating a pattern that appears throughout his ideology, Berg begins with a legitimate Kabbalistic idea–that the fall from Eden created the illusion that the consciousness of human beings is separate from that of God, displacing our Edenic experience of the oneness of existence. Satan, continues Berg, can only control human beings who are imprisoned in that illusion of fragmentation. And so the way to defeat Satan is by restoring our unified consciousness. But, then, Berg makes an extraordinary leap, applying Kabbalah’s teaching about consciousness and the soul to the organs of the body. Illness, he insists, can only be implanted by Satan in an organ that is “differentiated,” like a heart or a lung. But, by meditating on the names of God, we can transform our differentiated cells into undifferentiated stem cells. In so doing, we outwit Satan, rejuvenate the body, and transform our cells into eternal receptacles for “the light force.” “Satan has no affinity for an undifferentiated state, and, therefore, he cannot bond with the cell,” he writes.

This is no mere speculation. In prayer and study retreats around the holiday of Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people, Berg and his followers stage preliminary forays into immortality. No one who has participated, he writes, has died in the four months following a retreat.

I checked back with a former Kabbalah Centre insider I’d interviewed and asked whether immortality is really the Centre’s ultimate goal. “They don’t tell everyone who walks through the door that it’s really about immortality,” she replied. “But, subtly, the more you get into it, the more they reveal their real agenda.” Another Centre participant told me that her teacher had hinted that The Rav was working on achieving immortality, but she hadn’t assumed he meant it literally.

So I asked Berg’s son Yehuda how the Centre can promise immortality of the body, when Kabbalah speaks only of the immortality of the soul. “The Zohar talks about how Moses didn’t die,” he replied. “Or Elijah, who went up with his body. If that is possible, then everything is possible. Things are changeable: That’s the basic attitude of the Centre. Not to accept things as is.”

But Kabbalah speaks of bodies of light, not eternal bodies of flesh. Why would we want to hold on to these bodies forever? “We would live in the physical body with the consciousness of the soul,” Yehuda told me. “We’re transforming the physical body from a receiving nature to a giving nature. The most difficult part is transforming the body into soul consciousness and to become God in our receiving vessel. We’re born with a DNA that’s all together, the first cell at the time of conception, and then things start getting fragmented. So you try to go to that place where everything is one, and you inject a name there.”

In the “Dateline” interview, Madonna’s teacher at the Centre, Eitan Yardeni, noted that many people who come there to study “get just one percent of Kabbalah, which improved their life one percent.” But, he added, “I can tell you that, with no shame, Madonna is under the category … of the people that gets it.” But what exactly does she get? Has the “material girl” been spiritually transformed, or has she merely graduated to materialist spirituality? For what, after all, is more likely to entice a sex symbol confronting middle age than the promise of eternal youth?