Matthew Miller was a Jewish stoner who dropped out of high school in upstate New York to follow the hippie jam-band Phish around the country. He grew his hair in dreadlocks and listened to Grateful Dead tapes. After finishing his studies at a wilderness school in Oregon, where he rapped at open mikes and practiced beatboxing in his bedroom, he moved to New York to attend college at the lefty-alternative New School. Sometime around 2001, he was approached by a Lubavitcher in Washington Square Park and subsequently converted to Orthodox Judaism.

Miller now fronts a rap-reggae band under his Hebrew name Matisyahu, performing in full Hasidic garb: a black hat, untrimmed beard, and long black suit jacket and trousers. His first album, Shake off the Dust and Arise, was released on the non-profit label JDub records and is currently out of print for contractual reasons. Though much of it is musically pretty generic, it feels solid and has a kind of purity to it, as if it were a lost piece from another era. There's something charming about it, especially the beauty of Miller's voice as he sings and chants.

His second album, Youth, was produced by NYC veteran Bill Laswell and released by Sony last year. More of a pop-hybrid, it quickly sold a few hundred thousand units. I have seen Matisyahu referred to several times as a superstar, which is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but his odd backstory does make great copy; he has been the subject of numerous magazine profiles, including one in Rolling Stone. Critics seem to agree that he is a genuine talent, not a novelty act, though Pitchfork came in heavily on the backlash at first, measuring him against the high standard of his Jamaican source material instead of gauging him more appropriately against bands with similar influences such as UB40, The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rage Against The Machine.

Matisyahu has two singles which made the Billboard charts, “Jerusalem” and “King Without a Crown.” The refrain of the former is “Jerusalem, if I forget you, let my right hand forget what it's supposed to do.” This is a magnificent and haunting lyric. My first take on it was: I am a warrior for Israel and carry my weapon in my strong right hand and I must never stop fighting for my people.

After a few more listenings, I took its meaning somewhat more broadly, as a lamentation of age: If I forget my past and my origins, may I be crippled. If I forget my true self, may my own body betray me as punishment.

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but this song makes me cry so hard I think I'm going to vomit. Why should it be so moving? I suppose it is sad to be reminded that we live in a world in which a person can forget even the thing they hold most dear. Family, friends, youthful dreams, whatever is forsaken must eventually be forgotten as well.

Perhaps it is even sadder to me because I don't know what my own right hand is good for anymore besides jerking off in the shower. When my daughter was two I used to feed her yogurt with a spoon but now she can feed herself. I still hold her hand for safety when we are in a parking lot or going down the stairs, her extended index finger wrapped in my grasp or mine in hers — it always makes me think of a “pig in a blanket”-- but when she outgrows this I fear my hand will have little left to do but shred junk mail and tear open bills.

I have no idea what I should be working on: another blog entry, a short story, a longer essay, some kind of publishable book. I'm not sure either of these hands ever knew what they were supposed to do. Did I forget my Jerusalem or never know it? Have I forgotten it once or a thousand times?

But isn't every Jerusalem lost the moment it becomes a symbol of something other than itself? Isn't a person lost the moment they have an emotional reaction to a mythic name, forgetting their actual hometown or the actual place where they are currently living?

Part of the figure's pathos comes from the employment of prosopoiea and catechresis, i.e. speaking as if one's hand were a person who could forget, when actually only a brain or mind can do so. The wrongness of this subliminally and fatally stacks the deck against memory's prospects: of course the hand will forget, dummy, because hands can't remember in the first place. The metaphor works in part by not working, by its awkwardness. It is programmed to fail, like a chassis meant to crumple in a crash or a windshield that will shatter to reduce injury.

Since the 19th Century, modern religion has tried to salvage itself by turning doubt into the central religious experience instead of faith, by feeding off of doubt as a noble and hysterical species of suffering, peddling agony as a replacement for grace, making doubt into a divine punishment for unworthiness and into a punishment for doubt itself. The lyric partakes of this strategic self-flagellation.

It turns out, as our more devout readers will already know, that this lyric is the fifth line of Psalm 137. The first line of the same psalm was used in an internationally famous reggae song by The Melodians in 1969, “By The Rivers of Babylon.” The psalm's last line, which no one has set to music lately as far as I know, calls for the children of the enemy to have their brains dashed out against the rocks, on the assumption they won't be able to forget the past either and so peace can only be bought at such a price.

My generation was introduced to this song by the soundtrack to “The Harder They Come,” still arguably the best one-disc introduction to reggae music, though someone Miller's age may have heard it for the first time as a cover on Sublime's 1996 debut album. It seems the Melodians' version is also available on a 2005 world music compilation with the rather sheepish title “I Heard It On NPR” — I swear that's not where I heard it.

In its original Biblical context, the right hand is the one which the singer is using to play the lyre as he sings. Thus it is his art which he will lose if he gives up his roots, his art and consequently his livelihood. It is also, as any guitar player knows, a very accurate metaphor, since the fingerpicking patterns that folk music uses really are a matter of unconscious habit; they do seem to come from the hand, not the brain.

The video for “Jerusalem” shows Matisyahu performing while an ethnically diverse group of people lovingly place family photos on a transparent wall behind him. At the end of the video, he takes a photo of his own in his hands and adds it to the wall of memory. Some confusing Civil Rights movement imagery is mixed in, possibly an effort to soften the strangeness of what looks like a rapping rabbi and forestall the charge of cultural reappropriation.

When in a moment of innocence Matisyahu breaks into the relatively lightweight 80's pop hit “Break My Stride,” you realize he's still just a kid. At the same time, he makes it seem a vision of lost paradise. But earlier when he asks in the name of the Jewish people “Why is everyone always chasing we?,” the tone is somehow wrong and I can't help thinking of the 1959 Lieber-Stoller hit “Charlie Brown,” with its comic bass punchline, “Why's everybody always pickin' on me?”

“King Without A Crown”? Ehh, not so much. The song, considerably reworked from its earlier appearance on his first album, is soft at the center. My love will rip a hole in the ceiling, he sings, I give myself to you from the essence of my being. With its Caribbean smooth-jazz guitar on the chorus, it sounds like a self-indulgent, pseudo-sensitive incense-reeking big money Dave Matthews song.

When anyone says “I believe” repeatedly as Miller does here, what they believe becomes blurry and unspecific. When the emphasis shifts from what is believed to the act of believing itself, now taken as passionate and therefore inherently good, the content dissolves and the intellect does not go undamaged. This tends to go over well in entertainment since most people believe in something or wish they did, at least while standing before a stage. To keep repeating “I believe” in an ecstatic mode is not humble; it puts the emphasis on the I, the self, the ego.

To define a messy mass of dusty hand-me-down superstitions as belief is already prejudicial. To believe there are no gods is not to believe in nothing. The religious often frame it so either you believe as they do or you have no beliefs. They can't accept pluralism; this daily confusion is precisely what they are fleeing for the sheltering certainties of final revelation.

To accuse an unbeliever of being “a slave to yourself”, as the lyric does, is rhetorically effective pre-emptive nonsense. How is one to reply? I'm not a slave to myself, I'm a slave to... No right answer. By setting the terms in this way, the believer wins a priori. Of course you can say you are not a slave to anyone but that answer is dull and prosaic. It seems to operate on a lower and less poetic level, as if you somehow lack a spiritual dimension altogether. Because the words have been put in your mouth they feel like a cliche as they come back out. You may try to explain your objections to the phrase itself but this would require a long answer and morons consider all long answers to be bullshit.

The refrain of the song is “I want Moschiach [the messiah] now,” which I can't help find somehow offensive. It sounds a little like the old ad slogan I want my MTV. If I were God and heard a human say I want the Messiah now like they were ordering in an expensive restaurant, I would certainly crush the insolent bug into dust, if not for the fact that it would be beneath me to even hear them.

As Matisyahu has gotten more famous, his image has become more iconic. In the video for “King Without a Crown” he is presented in digitized outline, a suitable object of veneration like a Soviet-style poster, with his lyrics spelled out large and legible like propaganda slogans. We are shown a troubled youth in a hooded sweatshirt and old sneakers walking the lonely streets of the city. Matisyahu's image follows him, his holy message the salvation just out of reach. At the same time, the video has the slick look of those iTunes commercials in which an iPod-equipped urban hipster walks past a psychedelic rock poster as it comes to life. I think this is a worse video than the one for Jerusalem, because Matisyahu is moving from being one seeker among many to a kind of cheap pop prophet in and of himself, a figure larger than life.

Oddly, the king without a crown the lyrics refer to is not Jesus or Jehovah but rather the seeker who has not yet found God. As I understand it then, the seeker is the king and God is merely the missing crown. To me, this shows the same lack of genuine humility as the repeated demand for a messiah did.

I like the lyric “If your cup's already full then it's bound to overflow,” which draws on a traditional figure of the body as a cup and the soul as the liquid which fills it. It's an old Kabbalistic trope which Harold Bloom mentions in his Irvine lectures on The Breaking of the Vessel, which Dylan glancingly refers to when he sings about drinking from his broken cup, and which Pete Townshend derives from the Sufi poet Hafiz when he titles a solo album Empty Glass. It says you must be humble to be ready to learn, to recognize the opportunity when it presents itself. It takes knowledge to make knowledge, as Socrates knew, a preliminary and negative knowledge which is a knowledge of the absence of knowledge. It takes an open mind and a tolerance for seeming chaos.

I first heard of Matisyahu when a friend e-mailed me a video clip of him covering “Message in a Bottle.” Miller's high, sweet voice makes the choice of a Sting song surprisingly appropriate. The clip was made when Yahoo! Music approached him to do a cover as part of a promotion for a youth-marketed drink called Pepsi Smash. (He may not have forgotten Jerusalem, but I think it's fair at this point to say he has forgotten JDub Records.)

Matisyahu takes the beverage bottle Yahoo gives him and stuffs his own message into it, by adding a rap interlude towards the end. Here's the longer version from his album:

Forgive me if I explicate. The flat screen is used as an emblem of sinister modernity when in fact it is just a pricier TV set, not qualitatively different from a cathode ray tube; to resent it is to resent money and novelty not technology itself. Matisyahu wants to suggest that the modern and the new have no content but undoubtedly more people saw his video on the Internet than in any other medium. He IS the content, and his questioning of its content is an empty gesture. But just like the cup he referred to earlier, a bottle must be empty to be useful as a vessel... His lyrics are full of the rhetoric of militancy, but here he tries to distance himself from the “call of the wild,” the obsolete axe of battle... His anti-sex rhetoric is vague and seems to conflate intercourse with masturbation. It's hard to imagine how masturbation produces sorrow; I'm fairly certain it can help relieve it. We can't plant every seed because they require care to grow, and I don't see the point of holding it all in... The phrase “pretty temporary” is unclear; it's actually supposed to mean “temporarily pretty.” There is a reason we need to distinguish adjectives from adverbs and there are consequences to abandoning grammar for the primitivism of a fake exotic patois... The last lines praise roots and sources because without them there are no footsteps to follow: here a telling switch is made between past and future. In Matisyahu's worldview that which is past provides us with footsteps to follow, but unfortunately such footsteps could only lead us backwards, and not into the future.

There are two strong motives for conservativism. One is practical and economic but usually covert: those who benefit under the current system wish to preserve their privileges. The other is a strong and deeply rooted psychological fear of change, which I would dub fluxophobia. It is something we all begin to feel to some extent with age, but the conservative embraces it to the point where they can't even understand or evaluate any of the changes which they are afraid of. They choose to avoid the encounter. The less they know of the world, the more it frightens them, until in the end they are helpless prisoners of their unrevised beliefs, terminal fluxophobes.

While claiming to humble himself before God, Matisyahu raises himself above his fellow men, who he condemns rather than loving. He criticizes them for watching TV and having sex. His true message is: In the name of the Lord I lord it over you, I take up the cudgel of the ancients.

In reality, there can be no such thing as a “message of love.” There is only love, which is rare and precious, love between one person and hopefully another. The supposed love of an imaginary benevolent master is a cowardly type of ignorance. To anyone with a heart it is revolting to hear people speak of religion as a love for God or even to speak of human love as being commanded by God.

Religion is not beneficial, nor is it harmless. It obstructs social progress, interferes with sexual adjustment and emotional well-being, and opposes science and the proper practice of medicine. If the idea of God's love really is the only comfort for some, it only shows what a wretched world the supposed lovers of God have made.

In both Jerusalem and Message in a Bottle, the best part is when he goes postmodern by adding a disparate fragment, but it is at the same time unpostmodern in that the effect is extreme sincerity, and it also works against his explicit thematics because in both cases he is undeniably breaking a tradition: adding a snatch of pop song to an old psalm, adding a freestyle to a rock classic. Authority usually comes from tradition, not reason or direct experience, but tradition is continually being reinvented, secretly adapting while trying to hide the adaptations necessary to preserve its authority.

Tradition is a virus which must adapt to find new hosts every generation. It derives its authority from the assumption of an unbroken continuity but this is never actually the case. For example, the Amazon rainforest is revered because it is assumed to be primeval growth, but it is not. A rational argument can be made for its ecological role, but most people take the shorthand.

It is not questioning Miller's faith to suggest he may be aware of an element of showmanship in his self-presentation. In the video for “Youth” he dons a track suit and hits the court to shoot some hoops, so he could probably get permission to do his concerts in a track suit as well. Choosing not to do so may not simply be observance; it may in fact be a canny sense that the novelty of an unworldly appearance will help him get his foot in the door. This is not tradition in the ordinary sense; it is a use to which tradition may be put.

In a way, Miller reminds me of John Walker Lindh. Both were disaffected teens who found solace in the subculture, but instead of coming back they headed farther out. Both crossed a line of identification first into the underground world of black music and then by making a leap into strict religious orthodoxy.

Generally, any white suburban teen is considered inauthentic by the general public, including themselves; they haven't suffered. Sharing this sense, some are driven to adopt false and unstable identities. Lindh tried to be Malcolm X while Miller tries to be Bob Marley.

Lindh is now serving out a 20-year sentence under special restrictions which include being forbidden to discuss his experiences in Afghanistan or to speak Arabic aloud. He has finished memorizing the Koran in prison. Meanwhile Miller continues to study the Torah every day, even in his hotel room on tour. He has given up stage diving because of a restriction on touching women even accidentally; when he does it in a video, the director has arranged that only men will catch him.

I used to spend the better part of every day in Washington Square Park, often with my friend Brad. We would watch the girls go by and talk about whatever books we were reading.

Sometimes the Lubavitchers would park a huge mobile home at the edge of the park and try to get young Jews to come aboard; everyone referred to it as the Mitzvah Tank. I remember once a Lubavitcher came up and asked Brad if he was Jewish and he said no. Don't you feel like you're lying?, I asked him afterwards.

I don't think anyone on earth really knows what they are supposed to do with themselves. Those who arrive at hard certainties can only do so through madness and error and through a dangerous narrowing of their experience.

There is a devilish paradox involved in tradition, in that the people who take up its burdens most forcefully are usually converts and outsiders who by doing so are betraying the tradition they were actually raised in. Buonaparte was not French, Hitler was not German, etc. My point is not that people should stick with their own kind but rather that the moment at which they are switching teams is the one in which they assert most strongly they have found their true and inalienable identity, as if the motive force of identity were its own practical impossibility.

The truth is we are lost until death. As long as you live you are lost, but the littlest bit less at least for knowing it — or so I'm betting.