Yahweh Rastafari! Matisyahu and the Aporias of Hasidic Reggae Superstardom

1. First Encounter: Passover Projections

The scene opens at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City during April 2004, where a happening event in the new Jewish art and cultural scene was in progress. Organized by the former Knitting Factory music impresario Michael Dorf, the Downtown Seder gathered an eclectic set of Jewish luminaries, ranging from Douglas Rushkoff to Daniel Liebeskind to Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Each of them was asked to perform a ritual bit and to celebrate the festive Passover meal that commemorates the night when the Israelites were liberated from the land of Egypt and from slavery. One of the many musical performers that night was the man formerly known as Matthew Miller, now known as Matisyahu. Matisyahu went on stage after dinner, toasting and rapping out his musical combination that crosses Hasidic song (niggun) and Rastafarian reggae and that demonstrates how intertwined these two Nietzschean "slave moralities" are in ideological terms, as they are bound up with a transcendental otherworldliness. From this perspective, it was very fitting to see Matisyahu performing at a Passover Seder—the holiday that brings Jews and blacks together in their shared histories of slavery and their shared hopes of liberation.¹

Figure 1.

Matisyahu enacts the Passover story of the liberation from slavery in Melissa Shiff's video installation Passover Projections: Slaves to Memory at the Downtown Seder, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York City, April 2004. (Photo credit: Louis Kaplan)

Beyond the musical performances, the comedy shtick, and the various speeches featured at the Downtown Seder, artist Melissa Shiff also set up a video installation in the lobby, which served as a kind of snare or booby trap for the unsuspecting guests as they walked by; Matisyahu was no exception—he was lured into the frame, as captured in this digital photographic memento (see Image 1). The image features at its center this tall smiling figure who seems quite amused at finding himself transplanted into Shiff's video installation Passover Projections: Slaves to Memory, which superimposes people into Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments at the moment when the Israelites are leaving Egypt (Mitzrayim, the narrow spaces) and crossing the Red Sea.² One also notices that Matisyahu has been projected onto a wall of matzo (the unleavened bread of affliction that one eats for the eight days of the festival), which served as a movie screen. Shiff uses contemporary technological media to enact the ancient injunction found in the ritual haggadah (story) that one should act, as if he, too, were leaving Egypt in order to take up the subject position of the oppressed who becomes liberated in the reactivation of the Passover narrative. It is quite appropriate to behold Matisyahu taking part in the performative playacting of Shiff's Passover Projections and imagining himself as a liberated slave who has left Egypt behind. (Is this imagining of liberation perhaps a metaphor for the transcendental itself?) This image reminds us of the ways in which Matisyahu himself has utilized strategies of projection and transposition in order to put himself into the media spotlight by performing the role of the Hasidic reggae superstar. Taking up the question of deconstruction and the thinking of Jacques Derrida, this essay offers a look at the aporias and paradoxes of these strategies of becoming (or projecting oneself as) Matisyahu, even as it unpacks the problematic ontotheological discourse in which Hasidic reggae superstardom is inextricably wrapped.

2. "A Deconstructionist Rabbi"

In the 2006 online article "Matisyahu: A Deconstructionist Rabbi," Rabbi Levi Brackman expresses his firm conviction that the Hasidic reggae superstar Matisyahu offers an example of what the editors of CR refer to as "deconstruction in music." While I have always been a staunch proponent of the infinite play of the signifier, I find such a religious conversion to be somewhat incredible. It is difficult to comprehend when we consider that the message Matisyahu delivers is firmly rooted in an ontotheological discourse and the dogmatic system of beliefs of the Lubavitch sect, where...