Matisyahu

Okay. So I stumbled upon Matisyahu one day a couple years back completely by accident. When I finally found him, I realized that I had been looking for his music for a long, long time.

Like most of us, he has a long, complicated personal story. Like me, has has suffered from the addiction disease and, like me, while struggling to free himself from his internal demons, he sought and found refuge in spirituality. For Matisyahu, spirituality initially took the guise of orthodox Judaism, and he dedicated himself completely to the exploration of Judaism. He grew out his beard, wore his hair with pe'ot (the side curls), donned a yarmulke, attended synagogue every Sabbath, and was generally very strict with himself.

As a side note, when I first achieved sobriety, I, too, felt that I needed an external set of rules for myself as a means of finding discipline in my life. For most of us who are addicts, by the time we seek help and are able to find the strength within to achieve sobriety, our lives have become unmanageable and chaotic. We have brought pain into our lives and into the lives of everybody around us. We have learned from experience not to trust ourselves, and thus dedicating ourselves wholly to an external set of rules is a logical step in trying to reclaim sovereignty over our lives.

I know that it sounds confused or confusing to try to discover personal sovereignty by giving oneself over to another, but there isn't actually any contradiction here. Addiction is funny like that: it is only when we give up that we finally move towards victory; it is when we seek help from others that we are able to help ourselves; it is when we subvert our own will that we find true freedom.

Perhaps it is contradictory, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Back to Matisyahu... finally sober and moving towards a clear head and a better understanding of himself, he began making music. His music is touching and beautiful and raw and stubbornly optimistic. It is emotional in a way that most popular music is not. He speaks about his love for the world, his dedication to other human beings, his need for a closer relationship with those around him.

Anyway, as he grew and became more comfortable with himself, he began to slowly shed the outward symbols and signs of his inner spirituality, beginning with shaving his beard and cutting his hair. He has not in any sense moved away from Judaism.

I do not want to speak for him, and I do not want to use him as a mirror for my own personal journey, so I will stop there and not conjecture about his motives. He and his music have been a constant inspiration for me. I do not know if I would have gotten sober and stayed sober were it not for Matisyahu, and for that I will forever be grateful.

Here's "One Day," a gorgeous song of his from 2009.