Rabbi with a cause

The American hip-hop phenomenon Matisyahu neither looks nor conducts himself like a pop star. A grave young New Yorker who once went by the name Matthew Miller, he is a practising Hassidic Jew. He has embraced an existence both frugal and elaborately observational. Matisyahu wears a thick black beard and ceremonial robes. His homeboys do not call him Mat.
This complicates his life in a million trivial ways. For instance, there is little point in asking Matisyahu to perform on a Saturday. The Hassidic prohibition against working on the Sabbath means he will not play until after midnight. Nor is he exactly a thrilling dining companion – with his strict kosher regime Matisyahu will be forever denied the touring musician’s staples of beer and pizza. Also, Hassidics are forbidden from physical contact with women outside of their family – reducing the potential for three in a bed groupie romps.
Very often, stars who are solemn and self-serious on stage turn out to be pictures of chilled-out normality away from the crowds and the cameras. Matisyahu, just 26 but with the mannerisms of a person far older, is not such a star. Shooting the breeze in a room at Dublin’s Morgan Hotel, hip-hop’s hottest property has the grave air of a preacher about to deliver a funeral homily. It's not that he's humourless - rather, one senses that the concept of humour is completely alien to him.
Such becomes clear when I mention the current vogue for Jewish rappers, not all of whom are as devout – or genuinely Jewish – as Matisyahu. I’m thinking of such Ali G derived ‘heeb-hop’ popsters as 50 Shekel and 2 Live Jews. Clearly, these artists have tongues planted firmly in cheek. As the first hip hop practitioner to put Judaism at the heart of his artistic identity, does Matisyahu feel an affinity?
“I don’t get those guys – not at all,” he says sniffily. “They are not being respectful to their tradition, to the faith. They are joke acts and I believe I have nothing in common with them.”
Matisyahu writes music in the same spirit as he lives his life: his reggae-flavoured rap is self-consciously anthemic and steeped in iconography. To describe an artist as preachy is nowadays one of the higher insults you can fling at them. Matisyahu, however, is at pains to lecture the listener. He thinks modern audiences ought to be more reflective, less hedonistic. You can dance to his ditties – for all his po-facedness Matisyahu knows how to string his beats together – but you might also use them as the basis for a bible studies class, which at least sets him apart from 50 Cent.
He wasn’t always so solemn. As young Matt Miller Matisyahu was actually a bit of a tearaway. Friends recall that as a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, Miller was the archetypal classroom stoner. He once drank an entire pitcher of mushroom tea; following several scrapes with the authorities, he was expelled from high school. All of the while, there were hints of the – no pun is meant – messianic figure he would become: Miller’s deepest musical loves were Bob Marley and Phish, performers whose music was drenched in spirituality. Simultaneously, he was developing an obsession with Israel – aged 16, he spent six months backpacking around the Holy Land.
“I suppose I was looking for something in my life,” he reflects. “Growing up as a Jew in New York, I always had a sense that my family and my community were paying lip-service to their faith. They’d go to the synagogue every week, but when they left, that was it. It was forgotten about until the next week. Israel is a very secular country – things weren’t so different there. It really didn’t live up to what I had expected.”
Miller’s spiritual re-awakening began in the last place you might imagine –  New York’s boho Washington Square district, while he was hanging with friends. Sitting on a bench one autumn afternoon, he struck up a conversation with a Hassidic rabbi. The preacher was a reformed rocker; once he had been a soul adrift just like Matisiyahu
"He had been on a similar path to me. He was on Grateful Dead tours and stuff like that. You usually think of a Hassidic person as being really unrelatable - like, not funny, certainly, and this guy immediately broke all of those stereotypes.”
Not long afterwards, the rabbi invited Miller to a night of Hassidic celebration at a nearby synagogue. In a room of religious devotees, Matisyahu felt as if he was coming home. "There’s one night when you dance with the Torah, you take it outside into the street and you drink a lot. So while we were all drunk and dancing around the park with the Torah, I looked around and I thought, well, you know - like, this is not so far off."
Fundamentalism has something of a damaged reputation in the United States at the moment. Nonetheless, Matisyahu’s strict observance of Hassidic ritual has done his career little harm. Several weeks ago, his second album, a reggae flavoured collection of roots pop called Youth, debuted at number two in the Billboard charts. It would go on to sell two million copies, mainly to a white, college rock audience for whom Matisyahu has come to stand as a sort of latter-day Marley
I wonder whether it's difficult to be spiritual in modern America, where religion has become a battle ground in the culture wars?
“For me, religion is about reaching out to other people,” he states. “It’s like my music. The message I want to convey is one of hope and inspiration. I don’t want to tell anyone how they should live their lives. But if my example and my songs can show them that there is a better way, then I am very happy with that.”