Matisyahu: The Stumbling Block

Born Matthew Miller in 1979, Matisyahu grew up with three passions typical of many teenagers: smoking weed, listening to Bob Marley, and avoiding the perceived stagnation and conformity of organized religion. After dropping out of high school and traveling the country to drop acid and watch Phish concerts, he landed back in New York City where, at the ripe age of 19, a fateful encounter with a Hasidic rabbi set him on a path back to orthodox Judaism throughout his twenties.

Despite associating with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community in Brooklyn and joining a yeshiva to study Torah (effectively severing himself from the culture), the city of man kept calling. Matisyahu, in a grand amalgamation, made the decision to write, play, and record music throughout his religious renewal, culminating in the release of his first album, “Shake Off the Dust…Arise” in 2004, and a subsequent live album in 2005. Many critics and music-lovers (myself included) initially deemed Matisyahu to be, at best, a novelty act, a Jewish kid trying to win over hip hop and reggae audiences with his unique appearance - at worst, a vapid religious singer using music as an evangelistic tool, subordinating musical ingenuity and boldness to a packaged and predictable message.

But Matisyahu had us all fooled.

The spiritual and philosophical depth of the poetics contained in "Shake Off the Dust" obliterated the gimmicky or opportunistic singer we'd deemed Matisyahu to be. There was no agenda; Matisyahu was not selling Judaism to reggae, or reggae to Judaism, or Jewish reggae to the culture. And he was certainly not, like so many insipid Christian rock artists and televangelists, peddling God for a buck. The plaintive and exultant sounds of King Without a Crown, Aish Tamid, and Candle were more reminiscent of an ecstatic saint-like figure alone in a cave than a pragmatic believer with an axe to grind; they sounded like the songs of a modern Augustine or King David shouting and singing in solitude, not a WoW Worship compilation contributor encouraging the crowd to clap along.  

The inexhaustible dynamism of Matisyahu's music lies not only in the fact that he was a musician long before falling in love with orthodox Judaism, but also in the alacrity and completeness of his conversion, an interior mystery which we only catch glimpses of as listeners. Moreover, he refers to his spirituality as an unfolding process and journey, not a static end. Since releasing his first album and the subsequent gem "Youth," Matisyahu has attested to challenging his own religious conceptions and even his affiliations, as "total blind devotion" gave way to a more tempered and thoughtful theology focused on "asking the right questions."

As his spirituality has evolved, so has his music. His 2009 album "Light" blends rock, dancehall, and hip hop with the usual reggae bounce. The hit "One Day" was an anthem for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, but the album also contained priceless wonders like "I Will Be Light," a contemplative and melancholic song that asks:

Who am I? Where am I?

What is this place? We're just spinning in space

The cryptic response, the song's chorus and title, is as powerful and meditative an answer to unanswerable questions as Aloysha's kiss in The Brothers Karamazov, and illustrates the depth and mystery of faith with a provocative but inspiring sense of the darkness it wrestles against. In fact, the dichotomy of darkness and light is the unifying theme of the entire album (borrowing as he does from the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah, which conceives of the universe as a sort of a vacuum from which God has withdrawn his infinite light).

In addition to releasing another live album, Live From Stubb's Vol. II, the brand new tracks "Sunshine" and "Open the Gates" point to another album in the works (he has also hinted on his web site that he is developing new concepts for an album with long-time collaborator Ephraim Rosenstein). Where Matisyahu goes from here is anyone's guess; it's as much a riddle as what made 19 year-old weed-smoking Phish head Matt, a plain kid from White Plains, turn back to his Jewish faith and heritage, and become one of the most recognizable talents in the music industry.

One thing is certain: he is here to stay, and will continue to trip up our culture's breezy assumptions about the faiths of antiquity being somehow "behind the times" and incompatible with post-modern culture, and about young people finding nothing to admire or love in the solidarity, strength, and maturity of time-tested religious orthodoxy.