Shabbos with Matisyahu

It's Monday morning, August 22nd 2005, and I'm taking a few moments to share with you the time that I spent with Matisyahu this past Shabbos.

I contacted Matisyahu a few months ago, after I discovered his music on the Internet. His reggae music is really good, and I have loved being able to embrace his lyrics in a way that I've never been able to embrace rastafarian reggae fully, despite the Torah that is often quoted.

All I knew was that I wanted to help Matisyahu reach Jews in Denver. I remember when I was younger not feeling that there was anything in Judaism with which I wanted to connect -- shul was all about my father and the people in his generation, Shabbos was either a pain (having to go to shul) or something about which to feel guilty about not observing. Jewish learning, after my experience being a trouble maker at my day school in Chicago, was something with which I was glad to be done.

In short -- there was nothing about Judaism to which I wanted to connect. How many others are there that feel right now the way that I felt then?

Matisyahu's music is incredible, and his lyrics show that his heart is turned toward Hashem. So when I heard that he was looking for a place to spend Shabbos before his concert at Reggae on the Rocks on Saturday night, I connected him with my Rabbi, Rabbi Avraham Mintz of Chabad's center in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Rabbi Mintz's wife Hindy puts on a Shabbos dinner that simply cannot be beat, for one, and Matis could come to services at the Jewish Center.

I was honored for my family and I to be invited to Shabbos dinner. Matis spoke about others whom he knew from Chabad, including a Rabbi who had helped him to connect with his own Judaism. We ate (and ate and ate!), sang songs and finally benched nearly three hours after the meal began. I really enjoyed the singing (both Rabbi Mintz and Matisyahu have voices that can sing higher than my own), which began with words and ended up on a journey of its own, in the wordless melodies for which Hasidism and Matis's own music is known. My wife, who is much better at meditating than I am, told me later that the singing was very powerful for her, and had she not been helping to mind my children and trying to stay connected with the conversation at the table, she would have loved to lose herself in meditating to the music.

The next morning we had a full house at the Chabad center. Matisyahu had an aliyah during the Torah reading (as did I) -- one thing that was really moving to me was the misheberach (blessing) given by the Gabbi after the aliyot. It was given in English, which I'd never heard before, and it was deeply meaningful to me.

Rabbi Mintz's d'var Torah touched on the Ve'Ahavta section of the Shema, which we read in the Torah portion that morning. He spoke of how important it is not to let material comfort and success come before serving Hashem, which is life itself. We felt very special in the Jewish Center, to have shared the day's Parsha and to have Matisyahu as our guest. On a week during which Matis's photo appeared not just in the Denver Post but in Time Magazine as well, there were only two sets of people in the world: those inside the Jewish Center with us, and everybody else.

After services we sat down to an Oneg of abundance and variety. I asked Matis how he had come to connect with his Judaism, and he said that he had been looking for years for something to give himself over to. For a while it had been music itself; he followed the band Phish on the road, immersing himself in music. He said that the music gave him a glimpse at true connectedness, of meaning, but that he came to realize that it was only an image, or an impression, rather than the real connectedness and meaning for which he was searching.

Through reggae he came to realize that one's roots are important, and he thought of the relationship between Hashem and the Jewish people, whom he described as always being connected (though sometimes at odds with one another!) -- like gefilte fish and horseradish, as he put it, which are always on the table together.

He said that once he began living an observant lifestyle and studying Judaism, he felt the kind of connection for which he had been searching. Every class he could take, he took; every teacher about whom he had heard, he sought out. I got the impression that, despite the depth that he has revealed in his music and at Shul that morning, Matisyahu is a soul just beginning its Jewish journey (though his thirst for Hashem runs deep -- Matis is not paying lip service to Judaism, but is opening his heart and soul to its blessings.)

I asked him about one of my favorite lyrics of his, which says "from the forest itself comes the handle for the axe" (from "Chop it Down," on his album Live at Stubbs). Did he write it, I asked, or did it come from the immense, deep body of Torah and Talmud?

It comes from the Tanya, he replied. He asked me what the words meant to me, and I said that I heard them as redemptive -- that the forest is what keeps us from Hashem, be it puruit of the material world, and that within that forest is a piece that, like the handle to an axe, can be used to chop down the forest and help us connect to Hashem. Like the feeling of loneliness or disconnection that results from living a superficial life -- that loneliness can be the key piece that brings a person to Hashem.

Matis said that in his case, it was the music -- his forest had been the music itself, and he had found a way to use his music to chop down the forest separating his soul from Hashem.

Saturday night, moments after Shabbos ended, Matisyahu headed to the Red Rocks Amphitheater to share that music with Denver, perhaps fanning the dormant embers of other Jewish souls lost in their own forests.