Madonna sported Jewish symbols on her arm in the video for the James Bond theme song Die Another Day. The tattoo is written in Hebrew and is on her right shoulder written are the letters: the letters “lamed”, “alef” and “vav” (from right to left).

There is no such word in Hebrew and you can be sure that all the know-it-alls in the world immediately proclaimed it to be yet another celebrity foreign language tattoo gone bad. But the truth of the matter is that Madonna once again outwitted the sheep.

So called Rabbi, Yehuda Berg, a worldwide religious celebrity known mostly as the spiritual leader of the Kabbalah Centre which Madonna reportedly attends regularly provided the official interpretation.

Berg explains:

The “word” on Madonna’s shoulder is not actually a word, but rather one of the names from the 72 Names of G-d. Kabbalah explain that Moses used these names to split the Red Sea, and that we can use them to create miracles in our own lives. Each name draws a particular kind of energy. The name in the “Die Another Day” video is for eliminating the ego.

Kabbalah finds its main source in the Zohar, a text revealed to Moses de Leon in the thirteenth century based ostensibly on the writings of a second-century scholar Simeon bar Yochai. The Zohar parallels a tradition of commentary on the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, but claims there are hidden meanings in the arrangement of and comparisons between letters and words in which these books are written. This form of interpretation becomes quite complicated when the numeric significance of each word (Hebrew letters are each associated with a number) is taken into account.

Madonna began attending the Kabbalah Centre, an international school of kabbalah studies, in 1997 in an attempt to explore spiritual aspects of her life beyond her family or her success as a Material Girl. She was following in a long line of celebrities who, having become disatisfied with mere fame and fortune, turned to mysticism for new insight. The Beatles anticipated this spiritual turn and the seemingly inevitable irritation it provokes in many people.

Rick Ross, an American lecturer on “cults”, suggests a more sinister aspect of Madonna’s specific spritual path by providing links to numerous news articles calling the practices of the Kabbalah Centre, and its director Rav Berg, into question.

The Kabbalarians, a group whose philosophy is inspired by kabbalah, claim the name Lav is associated with an “independent, practical, analytical nature with skillful business abilities.” This describes Madonna but does not shed led either on the process by which the Kabbalarians came to their analysis or the “Die another day” video.

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Compiled by J. Andrews

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• An Open Letter To Madonna

The Fall and Rise of Mickey Stardust:
Glam rapper Mickey Avalon knows what it’s like to live and die in L.A.

by Neille Ilel, Izzy Grinspan, November 23, 2006 www.jewcy.com

People like to compare Mickey Avalon to Eminem, and maybe that’s fair: Get rid of Avalon’s Holocaust-haunted family and hand-jobs-for-heroin career track and Eminem’s Detroit trailer-park background, and you wind up with two white guys who both rap about their hard-luck stories. What these people forget, though, is that Eminem would be a total sex god if he weren’t such a homophobe — come on, you saw 8 Mile — and Avalon has no such masculinity issues. And while Eminem has devoted his life to hip-hop, Avalon is more of a hustler, using music as a vehicle to get his life to a better place. Putting his lanky body on display, Avalon rhymes about “sassy little frassies with bulimia” (of which he’s had many), and strung-out male prostitutes on Sunset (of which he was one), single-handedly forging a new genre—call it glam-rap—with every bat of his mascara’d eyelashes. He’s like the product of an unholy union between David Bowie and Run-DMC.

Busting Out: Mickey Avalon goes through the windshield glass

When I sat down with Avalon in late August, I wasn’t expecting him to be an unassuming little slip of a thing, hardly taking up space in the booth at Cantor’s Deli. It’s hard to believe this waif is the same guy who’s been writhing around on top of windshield-blown cars in West Hollywood nightclubs, or that he’s about to become famous. But given his single “Jane Fonda’s” prominent spot in a recent episode of Entourage, his record deal with Interscope, and a much-passed-around LA Weekly profile that’s now been optioned for a biopic, it seems like Avalon is perched on the brink of something big.

Read more from this article HERE