M
y journey to discover my roots and explore Jewish spirituality – not through books but through real life. At a certain point I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity … to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. pray better,” he says. “I was looking for that immediate, spiritual, emotional connection with God.” His quest also led him to want to look the part, so he began wearing a yarmulke and tzitzit to see what that would feel like. He was trying to unite the inner and outer man, the prayer with the image. The journey was lonely – until he connected with a chabad rabbi, entered into the Orthodox community of Crown Heights, and religion and the rules began to synchronize. His quest also entailed a form of discipline. He had “lived a little bit of a wild kind of life,” Matisyahu says, and felt guilty about things. Religion kicked in as he attempted to forge a life that did not involve “sex, drugs, that kind of stuff,” and he came
42 Jstyle
Fall 2013
to embrace Orthodox Judaism. “There was no going halfway,” he says; he couldn’t live by some rules but not others. What was the most difficult part of shedding his Hasidism? It’s not a matter of parts, he says, but of incremental, below-the-surface changes. “Over the span of 10 years, from the time I became religious to that day, there was a lot of movement for me,” not all of it visible. “Even though I had sort of started to interpret Judaism in my own way and begun to loosen up on some of the rules and focus on a lot of different aspects,” there was a “shift where I really let go of the idea … I stopped trying to work within the guidelines of Orthodox Judaism. “I shifted from seeing
the religion and the rules as actual rules to it being more of a guideline. It’s like when you’re talking to God straight up there are no rules. The guidelines are supposed to bring you to that.” Shedding Orthodox strictures and trappings was liberating, he suggested. His shaving was an expression “that this is no longer about transgression or sins, that the laws are not about God expecting us to do something. It’s no longer that God wants us to be a certain way or to do certain things … and the goal is to talk to God. And I do. And once I felt like I had that, I felt like I didn’t necessarily need to keep fitting myself into the rules. “So this touring musician is who I am and I’m a creative person, but I was always trying to blend it in.
Now I take from what I’ve learned – the Hebrew, the concepts, the ideas, the emotions, the feelings – and incorporate that, and that feeds my soul and who I am and the music that I make.” What he has learned is “to not judge. I’ve learned that as a person through this experience. No one has the answers.” As for fashion, “I still, like, love the idea and look of a Hasidic guy, not styled, like, in a designer way. When I first became Chasidic, it was all about the idea of why I did it, it was all about getting away from style. But then that became my whole entity; I was wrapped up in that.” By letting go in December 2011, “it was sort of the same experience, just happening in an opposite way.” js
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