Celebrity Kabbalah

There's just all kinds of problems with this:

According to Fox News online columnist Roger Friedman, Madonna's upcoming album, "Confessions on a Dance Floor," includes a paean to 16th-century modern Kabbalah founder Isaac Luria. Titled "Isaac," the song features a spoken interlude by Yitzhak Sinwani of London's Kabbalah Centre.

Putting aside the fact that Yitzhak Luria was not the "founder" of the Kabbalah - the primary text of the Kabbalah, the Book of the Zohar, was written at the end of the 14th century, though it is traditionally attributed to Shimon Bar-Yochai, a rabbi who lived in the first century AD - I can't imagine that an artist as shallow as Madonna would dare grapple with the actual nature of his theology. Luria created an extraordinarily dark vision of the world which essentially amounted to the rejection of reality itself in the name of a mystical transcendance which would dissolve the material world into the divine. In Lurianic Kabbalah the physical world is the result of a deformation, a breakage in the divine system that occured in the very moment of Creation. Its a despairing and extraordinary theology that deserves better than a dance number as its tribute. I also can't imagine a rabbi such as Luria regarding the modern day celebrity worship upon which Madonna thrives as anything other than a modern form of idolatry. On the other hand, if this dumbed-down "Kabbalah" makes people less hostile towards Jews and Judaism I suppose it can't do any harm, but it does speak to the seemingly unstoppable modern trend of turning everything - human beings and religions alike - into a shallow, easily digestible shadow of its true self. Personally, I wish Madonna and the rest would stick with nonsense like Scientology and leave something as beautiful and complex as the Kabbalah alone.