Matisyahu Who?

I start my Zoom interview with Matisyahu asking for help.

Matisyahu is the Jewish reggae rapper with on-again off-again chasidic ties. There’s been a lot written about him, but even after combing the internet I couldn’t get a sense of who he really is. So I asked.

“My stage name is Matisyahu,” he replied. “My birth name is Matthew Miller. I grew up in White Plains, N.Y. Went on a sort of introspective journey. Became a chasidic Jew when I went to college. Started doing music, signed a record deal, and have been a musician for the last 25 years.

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“I’m a father of six, a husband — and that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.”

Really it isn’t. That was just a brief summary of his Wikipedia page. Miller, 45, was raised in a Jewish household in Westchester County. His dad, Robert, ran a homeless housing agency and mom, Rochelle, was a school social worker. He attended Hebrew school and had his bar mitzvah at Bet Am Shalom Synagogue in White Plains.

On the surface, anyway, it seems like a traditional Jewish upbringing.

So I asked him how he got from there to here. At this point, he lit up a doobie I hoped would loosen him up a bit and give me the story behind the story.

“What seemed like a traditional life was not traditional,” he said. “My parents are from the ‘60s. We lived in Berkeley, California, until I was 5. The first concerts I went to were the Grateful Dead, when I was 1 or 2 years old. I guess you could say it was like a typical suburban Jewish home, but with socially conscious parents.

“When I was a teenager, I became really interested in music and really excited about a band called Phish. That’s P-H-I-S-H. By the way, we have 30 minutes. I have another interview. Just so you know, because I could ramble on about things. I tend to give in-depth answers. I don’t like giving short answers so you might only get a few out of me. So you want to pick your questions carefully.”

True to his word, he rambled on: “I went to Israel when I was 16 on a program at the Alexander Muss High School in Israel.” (The school is a pluralistic institution with roots in the American Jewish federation system; it’s now part of the Jewish National Fund.) “At that point, I was into really listening to a lot of Bob Marley, and reggae music was something that was interesting to me.”

At this point the doobie might have kicked in because he revealed an aspect of his personality I don’t think he’s spoken about before, his kind of obsessive behavior.

“You wanted to know a little something about me? One thing about me is that I’ve always, whatever it is that I am interested in, kind of will take it on completely.”

As a child, he continued, he used to enjoy playing soldier, until his parents showed him an HBO documentary, “Letters From Vietnam.”

“I never played with another gun,” he said. “When I was into reggae music, reading about Bob Marley, listening to it, and finding it appealing and a deep connection with it, I started growing dreadlocks.

“When I got into Judaism, it wasn’t just to read a book about it. I wanted to see what it felt like to wear a yarmulka out on the street and have the full experience of feeling what it means to be Jewish.”

It was similar to what happened after he first saw Phish. “I went to my first Phish concert when I came back from Israel, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I took LSD, and this experience, I feel, really changed my life.

“It made me feel this kind of belief in God and in the idea that there is something deeper than the reality we’re seeing, that there’s a third dimension to things, and that music was something that was deeply ingrained in my soul. It was something I was destined to be a part of, to make music. And so that first Phish show was transcendent.”

He quit high school, took drugs, and followed the band on the road. He participated in a drug rehabilitation program in Oregon, started rapping there, and returned to New York, enrolled in the New School, and studied Jewish spirituality.

As “part of my journey in terms of being connected to my Judaism, I was going all over the city, exploring different Jewish synagogues, everything from yeshivas to chasidic to Reform.” He remembers ending up at a late-night minyan at the Carlebach Shul on the Upper West Side. “When I walked in, I knew I had found my place. That became the center of my spiritual world.”

As he had been with his toy guns and dreadlocks, Matisyahu went all in and continued to explore. He affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement for a while, “and then I started learning more about outside the Chabad canon of chasidism. I started expanding my kind of Judaism. Not being just one thing, but kind of like taking from different places in terms of what things are inspiring to me. Now I really don’t identify as anything other than Jewish.”

The one constant in his life has been the music. I wondered if as a white Jew he received any pushback from the Rastafarian community. “Most of the reggae artists were very open to me because they realized I was contributing to the expansion of reggae music into different worlds.”

There was one interesting incident early on: “I was in Amherst, Massachusetts, visiting friends for Pesach. One of them said, ‘There’s a reggae show down the road. Do you want to check it out?’ So I went, and as I often would in those days, I asked the band if I could sit in and perform, do a few verses.

“They allowed me to, and the crowd erupted, as it would in those days. It was mostly a West Indies, Jamaican crowd. I was just getting stated. I wasn’t performing as Matisyahu. They heard me do my thing. It was different from what they were expecting to see, but somehow made sense in their hearts.

“But there was one lady who was very upset. She came over and made a whole scene, yelling ‘What does he know about Selassie?’” (That’s Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974.) “Then an older rasta, a gentleman with a cane — I remember him very clearly — long white dreadlocks, walks forward. Everyone gets kind of quiet. He gets a certain level of respect from them. And he says, ‘He knows from King David.’

“The Rastafarian religion is based on the idea that Solomon and Sheba had a child, and that child is the ancestor basically of Selassie. Sometimes someone will ask me how I feel about that, and my answer is always the same. Music is music, and if you’re a person who feels music, who understands music, then music will touch you, and it won’t matter where you’re from or where the music is from. It’s irrelevant.

“The reggae music catalog was built on inspiration and literally direct quotations from the Old Testament, which is the Torah, you know, the book of the Jewish people. The book that the Jewish people gave to the world. So my music comes from a Jewish source, and it comes from a place that I’m very familiar with and very comfortable with and very much attached to.”

October 7 has affected him, of course. Three of his shows were canceled “out of maybe like 120, but three shows is three shows too much,” he said.

What changed more is the meaning of his lyrics. “The words from a lot of songs throughout my entire catalog are kind of fluid in a sense that they can change meaning over time and depending on who’s singing them. A lot of my songs have metaphors referring to spiritual struggle or emotional struggle or inner struggle.

“After October 7, as I sing these songs, they become very literal, very physical. So, if I’m saying you’re a warrior, fighting for your soul, taken from the world above, and broke down to the world below” — the lyrics of the song “Warrior” — I’m thinking of these Israelis who were kidnapped and taken to tunnels below. And when I’m singing ‘Lord raised me up from the ground’” — from “Lord Raise Me Up” — “I’m singing again about those hostages that are living this hell of a life underground in the tunnels.

“After October 7, I feel there’s a real paradigm shift in the world, and not just for me. I think it’s for every Jew in the world today. Every Jew is faced with the question of what it means to be a Jew, how Israel fits into the picture, and how important it all is to them. I think it’s a unique moment in time.”