For an ancient form of mysticism, Kabbalah has sure proven remarkably hip. Thanks to celebs like Madonna, Britney and Ashton, Kabbalah ranks as high on the pop culture buzzometer as Pilates and low-carb diets.
Or perhaps even as popular as that staple of lowbrow lit: the murder mystery.
At least that’s what Arthur Asa Berger hopes. The Mill Valley author has just published a new novel, “The Kaballah Killings.” It tells the story of detective Solomon Hunter, who investigates the murder of professor Azriel Moshe, a Kabbalah expert found dead in his San Francisco office. The suspects: Moshe’s staff of brilliant international Kabbalah researchers, each one more suspicious than the last.
Along the way, Berger manages to explain the kabbalistic understanding of the universe, no red strings attached.
For chapter epigrams he pulls quotes from the Zohar (the fundamental text of the Kabbalah) and other scholarly sources. He even drew the cute cartoon illustrations that pepper the book throughout.
“I took a course at [Tiburon’s Congregation] Kol Shofar on the Kabbalah,” says Berger. “Then I got other books and said to myself, ‘Maybe this would be a fun thing to teach.'”
The impulse to teach is not surprising given that Berger was a professor of American studies at San Francisco State University for nearly 40 years. His specialty then and now is pop culture or, as he affectionately calls it, garbage.
“Let’s face it, most of it is garbage,” he says of the torrent of media and cultural oddities that constantly rain down on American life. “They even have a discipline now called Garbagology.”
But he loves it, and thinks even the most odious reality show on Fox offers insight into culture and civilization. Not that he throws Kabbalah in with the cultural trash. Far from it. Rather, he thinks it answers a deep human need.
“People are looking for something beyond the rational to understand their place in the universe,” says Berger. “For people with these mystical inclinations, Kabbalah provides something important.”
Not necessarily for Berger himself, though. While fascinated with the subject, the author counts himself among the rational and the secular.
A native of Boston, Berger grew up in a non-religious Jewish household, though he attended Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah. But he went on to write his 1964 doctoral dissertation on the comic strip “Li’l Abner,” which gives a clue to Berger’s outlook on life.
“I don’t take myself too seriously,” he says. “I’m basically a humorist and a writer who happened to get caught up in academia.”
Berger has actually written extensively on the subject of Jewish humor, particular in his book “The Genius of the Jewish Joke.”
As to how and why the humor gene seems so dominant in the Jewish people, Berger has a novel theory. “I argue that it comes from the pilpul,” he says, “the ingenious analysis of Talmud/Torah, with people poring over it and offering their analyses of what this or that phrase means. Push that sort of thing forward a few hundred years and you get lawyers and comedians.”
You also get quick-witted novelists. Berger has written many other academic mysteries, several featuring detective Solomon Hunter (not Jewish despite the name) and one even co-starring Sherlock Holmes himself. His next one will be loosely based on the classic Japanese film “Rashomon,” which tells one story viewed from multiple perspectives.
Though semi-retired, Berger remains extremely active and as intellectually curious as ever. Apparently, no one knows, not even he, what will ultimately strike his fancy.
“I recently took a cruise to Alaska,” he says. “The sociologist in me got interested, and when I came home I wrote a little book on cruising.”
“The Kabbalah Killings” by Arthur Asa Berger (152 pages, PulpLit Publishing, $12.95).