“These are all very talented people—especially Lenny Kravitz,” Rabbi Allan Nadler, the director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University, said last week. “But what a field of academia I’m in!” He explained that he’d been exchanging e-mails with a colleague in Jerusalem about possible textual antecedents—say, in the Zohar or the Sefer Yetzirah—for soul-mate poaching, and they had been unable to come up with any. “One of the dominant features of Kabbalah was teaching self-denial and asceticism,” he said. Nadler is an out-spoken critic of the Kabbalah Centre, in Los Angeles, where Madonna, Britney Spears, and Demi Moore, among others, have supposedly found inspiration. “It teaches self-fulfillment to the point of becoming God,” he said. “So these are gods-in-training.” Not that he thought a more authentic dedication to Lurianic Kabbalah could help a millionaire ballplayer. “The true Kabbalists, they fasted, and I think baseball players need their carbs,” he said, and added that Rodriguez’s bronzed complexion seemed incompatible with intense Aramaic study. “If you’re a Kabbalist, you really have no time for the sun.”I disagree. A balanced life finds time for both Aramaic and the sun.
UPDATE: Joshua Waxman find precedent for soul-mate poaching in Genesis Rabba.