Word: cabalistic
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...then mark my words: something ain't right at the Ciccone-Ritchie home. Presumptuous? Maybe. But a casual glance at the lyric sheet for American Life, Madonna's bipolar 10th album, proves that at the very least, the world's most famous yoga-practicing B-movie Cabalist is going through a rough patch. If you don't believe her words, listen to her voice. American Life is the first Madonna record that suffers from a complete lack of exuberance. It's not bad, but like a Prince album without lust or an Eminem song without rage, it takes some getting...
...agree that much of life is otherwise inexplicable. Why would a devout Jewish husband tempt his beautiful new bride into adultery with a loutish footman? What could prompt a spirited girl to masquerade as a yeshiva boy and then marry a village's most eligible heiress? In The Cabalist of East Broadway, a morose old Hebrew scholar suddenly abandons New York City for a young wife and fame in Israel. Just as suddenly, he returns alone to his old haunts. He tries to tell the narrator why: "Man does not live according to reason...
...culls other patches of information from fellow denizens of a chaotic late-medieval society. Only after he gains an idea of the forces that have controlled him, and the real roots of his family, is he able to direct his future--which he chooses to do through belief in cabalist prediction...
...blacks out and wakes beneath a gallows. The rest of the journey is taken up with his discovery of the truth surrounding that mysterious experience. Through the stories of the other fabulous figures he meets--an erudite aristocrat-turned gypsy, a rational skeptic, a hermit and exorcist, a cabalist--he comes to recognize the silliness of most taboos and their religious rationales. And he returns to search for the sisters...
...successfully is 2001--which concerns technology, not humanity. The reason The Saragossa Manuscript works is that Haas sees social reality, when bounded by hypocrisy, to be truly phantasmagorical, and perceives the special logic of dreams. The only man in the film with the same argumentative power as the cabalist is the rationalist--but he is historically inappropriate, and ineffective at protecting himself against Inquisitors...