Kabbalah: Inside Hollywood's boutique religion

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Famous for its A-list disciples (Madonna, Demi Moore, Donna Karan), notorious for its branded accoutrements (red bracelets, mineral water), the LA-based Kabbalah sect has taken ancient Jewish theology and reinvented it for the modern celebrity age. When Daphne Merkin found herself in need of spiritual sustenance, she placed her faith in its tenets – and began an extraordinary 18-month journey...

What brought me to the small, neat office in the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles – at the tacky southern edge of Beverly Hills, where the upscale ambience of Doheny Drive turns into a decrepit stretch that includes two petrol stations and multiple Korean nail salons – was Madonna, who doesn't believe in death. And then there was my mother, who had recently died. Somehow, in an effort to reconcile divergent realities, I must have been looking for a resolution of the irresolvable, a way of navigating a path between the absoluteness of mortality and the lingering hope of something beyond it, between the immutable reality of personal loss and the promise of spiritual consolation.


In a world where everyone is angling for a piece of the kabbalah mystique – an esoteric occult offshoot of Judaism dating at least to the 13th century – the Los Angeles centre has been attracting Hollywood glitterati since it opened its doors in 1993. And who can blame the neighbouring institutions – the bevy of run-down ultra-Orthodox yeshivas and religious girls' high schools, many of which have their own makeshift signs attesting to introductory kabbalah classes – for trying to cut in on a share of the booty? It all looks so easy, not to mention remunerative, thanks to the pricey little trinkets offered in the centre's store (ranging from red kabbalah bracelets at $26 a pop to bottles of kabbalah water at nearly $4 apiece) and to the hefty donations solicited from members old and new.

Housed in a two-storey cream stucco building with a red-tile roof that fits in with the 1920s- and 1930s-style Spanish Moorish architecture that characterises the neighbourhood, the Kabbalah Centre is set in the midst of shabbiness hard to reconcile with any kind of drawing power. All the same, in its Los Angeles incarnation, the centre is spiritual home to Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Roseanne Barr, Donna Karan and any number of other celebrities who dip in and out as the spirit moves them. Most important, as anyone who has heard anything about the centre knows (and often it is the only thing they know), its public face is none other than the stridently non-Jewish and notoriously profane human meteor named Madonna.

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