Keeping it kosher

FIONA SHEPHERD

"WHEN THE JEWS WERE SLAVES IN EGYPT, THERE was three things that they held on to, and one of the things was their Jewish name. The name in Hebrew letters has a really deep meaning. We believe that God created the world with those letters and his speech is in those letters."

There are many things one might expect to hear from the mouth of a rising rap star, but expounding the sanctity of the Hebrew alphabet is an unusual opening gambit. Yet, in explaining the adoption of his orthodox Jewish name, Hasidic rapper Matisyahu is simply establishing his street credentials like any other young contender, even if his message, look and culture are far from the hip-hop norm.

This New York-based rapper, born 26 years ago as Matthew Miller, is a tall, striking presence in his Hasidic garb and traditional full beard, but his imposing image contrasts with the accessibility of his music. His excellent new album Youth, due out next month in the UK, seamlessly blends Hasidic melodic tradition and Hebrew psalms with roots reggae rhythms. It went straight into the Billboard top ten in its first week of release in the US, where he has built up a hefty mainstream following over the last two years as a skilled musician and an advocate for his faith.

"I think most Jews in America are very disassociated and disconnected from their roots and what it even means to be Jewish," he says. "Being a person that was into searching for spirituality and looking into myself, I decided to start with my own life roots and my own culture and the more I learned, the more I took on."

The title track of Youth - and also its first single - is a motivational message to his younger self, which was inspired by his teenage search for meaning. Matisyahu dropped out of his strict Hebrew school in his teens and drifted for years, busking around the States with a djembe drum in tow. "I would play the drum and make up rap stuff about the scenery and the people," he recalls. While attending a wilderness school in Oregon, he played open mic sessions in coffee shops and with a band whose experimentations would lead to his idiosyncratic blend of hip-hop, rock and his beloved reggae.

He first heard Bob Marley when he was 14, and although it would be years before he found his way to a practising faith, reggae music provided a stepping stone. "I really connected with all the Jewish imagery - the lion of Judah, the Zion train," he says. "You can name any Bob Marley song and pull direct quotes from the Torah. These were things I was hearing my whole life but they didn't make much sense to me, and then hearing Marley's music made all those things come alive to me. I intuitively saw that there was some part of myself in that music which is connected very deeply to the Torah, that being the building block of the entire Jewish faith."

Matisyahu grew up in White Plains, NY, and it was back in New York where he finally committed to a strict Jewish faith, adopting the tenets of the ultra-orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch lifestyle, through which adherents seek to connect more deeply with their traditional Jewish roots, and settling in the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn - not your average 'hood for not-your-average rapper.

"My lifestyle in general is a lot different from that of a rapper. On an ideal morning I go to the ritual bath, which is a purifying pool of water men come to dip in. Then I spend a couple of hours praying and meditating and, if I'm in a community like Crown Heights, it's usually in the synagogue. So you'll have different groups of ten men praying together. At the same time, there will be little kids running around and people of all ages learning the Torah, and that's done pretty loudly.

"And in the same room there will be people dancing in a circle waving yellow flags and there will be some homeless guys because they don't kick people out. It's like this stew of chaos."

These days, though, the chaos of the synagogue is more often replaced by the upheaval of touring. Matisyahu's band hail from different faith backgrounds, so when it comes to living a kosher existence on tour, he is obliged to improvise. "When I'm on the road I'm careful about where I get my food," he says. "I pray either on the tour bus or in my hotel room by myself, and instead of going in the ritual pool I'll jump in the hotel pool or make the tour bus pull over at a lake and jump in the lake. So I have to be creative and find my own ways to do it. But Judaism allows for that. There's the ideal and there's what you do if you can't do the ideal."

There are other more fundamental social barriers created by the demands of his orthodoxy, which he must address as a performer in a somewhat, shall we say, tactile genre. "There's that clash which everyone always mentions about not touching women," he says. "We reserve touch for only those special moments between a man and his wife. So that's obviously something that can be a little complicated with things like stage-diving and even social norms like shaking hands. But besides that, it's just really normal to me."

Matisyahu celebrates this piety on album track Unique Is My Dove, which blends the doe-eyed devotion of a conventional love song with pledges of religious observance: "Dedicated to a life bigger than you or me, build a temple in our hearts for his majesty, stay simple, serve God, and keep our deeds clean." As an insight into a rapper's domestic life, it is leagues away from Eminem's fraught epistles to wife Kim and daughter Hailie.

As is the norm in the Lubavitch culture, Matisyahu married relatively young and has a baby son, Levi, who cries almost constantly in the background throughout our chat. As his wife, Tahli, is praying, she is not permitted to talk, so she signs for Matisyahu to get a dummy. That's certainly one way of reconciling his faith, family and work duties. Another was leaving a Passover gift of unleavened bread for staff at Sony's New York HQ - bread that is not puffed up with air being a symbol of humility in an ego-fuelled industry.

Matisyahu may be a novelty in the mainstream music business, but he is part of a burgeoning crossover scene of young orthodox Jewish musicians for whom "music is the quill of the soul". Some of the more Kabbalistic lyrical references on Youth will not be clear to non-Jews, but the album's central theme of breaking out of slavery is a familiar one in reggae traditions. Given the hardline Lubavitch stance on Israel, which makes no concessions to Palestinians, it is tempting to ascribe political zeal to titles such as Dispatch the Troops and What I'm Fighting For. But Matisyahu's lyrics call for reflection - and he even has an instrumental entitled Shalom/Saalam ("peace" in Hebrew and Arabic).

"There is an element there of something which is political, but I see it as more holistic," he says. " It's just a part of being Jewish, the deep connection with the land of Israel which the rest of the world would see as political but I just see as very intuitive. I live Judaism to its fullest. A lot of Jews are not necessarily showing themselves as Jews to the world. I am, so it's a big responsibility - not that everyone has to like you, but to try and represent Judaism in the most pure and positive way possible."

When Matisyahu makes his first foray to the UK at the end of May, he will perform for Glasgow's Jewish community in Newton Mearns, before casting his net to music fans more widely. His purpose is not to proselytise, but to touch people - in a ritually clean manner, naturally. "When I started in America, the core group of fans was Jewish. Certainly a lot of Jewish people feel that for once there's someone who represents their Jewishness and their culture, but now it's mainly non-Jews at my concerts. We're excited at becoming international and seeing how different people react to it. The music is for everybody - that's the way I feel."

• Youth is released by Columbia on 8 May.