And You Thought All That Kabbalah Stuff Was Fake
Radar Online today published the first dispatch in Mim Udovitch's four-part expose of the Kabbalah Centre, "Hollywood's hottest cult," as the magazine puts it. The fruit of a "four-month Radar investigation," it's a compelling premiere: A well-crafted overview of the Centre's odd religious mysticism-meets-pop culture popularity, complete with an ominous nut graf (or, really, nut sentence) — "a close look reveals an organization more committed to questionably financial deals and celebrity wrangling than to advancing an ancient Jewish mystical approach to life" — and a ten-item list of "findings" Radar will present in coming days. Some of the more interesting examples:
•The Centre's solicitation of freelance ghostwriters on the website Craigslist, to help the Bergs write "scholarly" books on Kabbalah, some of which the writers are encouraged to model on new-age best-sellers.
• The Centre's use of cultlike techniques to control members, including sleep deprivation, alienation from friends and family, and Kabbalah-dictated matchmaking.
• The bizarre scientific claims made by the Centre's leaders on behalf of Kabbalah Water, ranging from its ability to cleanse the lakes of Chernobyl of radiation to its power to cure cancer, AIDS, and SARS.
It's tempting stuff, and we're honestly looking forward to the rest of the installments. It's the sort of top-notch, heavily reported, presumably expensive journalism that you'd think they'd put in their print magazine, to entice subscribers, rather than giving it away for free on the web.
Turns out, that was the plan.
Udovitch spent several months reporting on the Kabbalah Center, amassing cartons of research and reporting. But when it came time to write the piece, the usually prolific freelancer couldn't put the pieces together. Radar editors, desperate to get the attention-grabbing investigation into their (re)debut issue, shopped the project to several writers, seeking someone to mold Udovitch's troves of information into a workable narrative. But it didn't happen.
So we're very happy to see Udovitch was finally able to pull her piece together. (God knows we shudder at the idea of writing more than a handful of paragraphs.) And we hope she didn't have to tie a red string around her wrist to get rid of the hex.
