Matisyahu has gone through some drastic changes in recent years, and this was the capper. In 2011, he’d shaved his beard and announced that he was backing away from Hasidic Judaism, a decision that caused some trouble for Orthodox fans. He then quit working with record labels, with whom he had produced one Top 40 song, “King Without a Crown,” and several others that hit the Billboard charts. He moved back to New York, he and his wife divorced, and he had a daughter with another woman. Top all that with three cases of lice, and he knew it was time to do something drastic: He cut off the dreadlocks he had been growing for years, one part delousing effort and another part ritual.
“It was kind of cool,” Matisyahu recalls. “I kind of like to do that. I tend to do it every couple years — kinda grow my hair out and shave it. Shaving is kind of a thing for me, I guess. I tend to live my life in cycles and patterns, and I find myself, when I come into a new place, wanting to have some kind of physical representation of that.”
Change has been a constant in Matisyahu’s life. He grew up in the Reconstructionist Jewish denomination, a politically liberal and religiously observant movement. Although he connected with his community, he questioned his identity. As a kid in New York City, he listened to hip-hop and latched onto reggae, moved by the genre’s biblical imagery. “It made me curious about wanting to look into my spiritual tradition,” he says. “The place that I saw the most devotion and intensity was in the Hasidic world. As I started to dip into it, I realized that I could make this jump, and that might be the salvation that I was looking for, in becoming a newer, better version of myself.”
By his early twenties, he was studying Torah and Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. He meditated and followed Jewish law. Immersed in the ecstatic spiritual practices of Hasidim and diligently attempting to observe the daunting 613 commandments that many rabbis say are outlined in the Torah, he aspired to be a tzadik, a righteous person, a source of light in a fragmented world.
At times on his religious journey, he felt “like someone in a cult, someone completely brainwashed, who can’t take five steps without asking their leader or supervisor how they’re supposed to walk,” he recalls. At other times, he experienced “very beautiful, purifying moments.”
In the early 2000s, Miller was studying at a yeshiva when he began to record music and tour as Matisyahu. He sought perfection in his music, too, approaching it with the same fervor as he did religion, becoming an unlikely master of hip-hop and reggae.
While touring, he continued to observe the weekly holiday Shabbat, not working from sundown on Friday through sundown on Saturday. On those days, he didn’t drive, use electricity, cook or play musical instruments, which kept him from performing Friday night concerts and driving to the next town on Saturday. That cut into his bottom line and put him out of sorts with the rhythms of most music fans who flock to weekend shows…but it kept him good with his God.
Some weeks, he’d spend Shabbat with a family that would take him in, but his spiritual experience would be up to the whims of his host and whatever guests they invited. On other nights, he would hole up in a motel, with no lights, telephone or television, light candles alone, recite the Shabbat prayers and eat prepared kosher meals in solitude. Sometimes he liked the ritual; other times, observance felt like prison.