Madonna has come and gone. Arriving in Israel on the eve of Rosh Hashanah on a whirlwind “Kabbalah” tour, the Catholic-raised pop idol took part in a “Kabbalah conference” and a few ceremonies, prayed at a grave or two, and departed in the private jet that had brought her. “I’m here,” she said, “as a student of Kabbalah. [Kabbalah] sees the world as a unified whole. A Kabbalist asks why.”

It’s easy to make fun, as many observers have done, of the pop Kabbalah that Madonna represents and that is being most vigorously disseminated today by a Los Angeles-based outfit called the Kabbalah Centre. Its director, one Yehuda Berg, said to be Madonna’s guru and that of several other Hollywood stars, peddles a concentrate of some elementary Kabbalistic beliefs and practices diluted by a large amount of snake oil.

It’s also easy to analyze sociologically where the Kabbalah craze comes from, if not why non-Jewish celebrities have been swept up in it. For decades, in America and elsewhere, there has been an unease in the Jewish community over the flocking of young Jews to various New Age cults and non-Jewish religions, most prominently Buddhism and Hinduism, in search of a mystical “spirituality” that Judaism allegedly lacked. “Where,” Jews have asked, “is the Jewish answer?”

Kabbalah is now touted as that answer. A tradition of Jewish thought going back at least 800 years according to the historians, and nearly 2,000, according to its own lore, it is being presented as the Jewish Buddhism, the Jewish Brahminism, the Jewish Sufism, and the Jewish Transcendental Meditation all rolled into one. Anything they can do, the Rabbi Bergs are telling us, Kabbalah can do better.

This isn’t, from a traditional Jewish point of view, a totally absurd claim. Kabbalah is indeed the central mystical tradition of rabbinic Judaism. It exerted great influence in certain eras and had much to do with the birth of Chasidism, and it has a coherent and complex world-view that purports to explain everything, from the psychology of the soul to the structure of the divinity. From its own perspective, it does have the answers and they’re truer and better than other answers.

Why, then, has it taken so long for Kabbalah to be popularized in an age in which, starting with the 1960s, there has been so much craving for mystical knowledge and experience? For two reasons.

One is that Kabbalah – like all true schools of mysticism, but even more so – is so rooted in the intricacies of a particular religion, and of its texts and customs, that it does not lend itself to popularization. You have to, as the Kabbalah Centre has done, almost violently wrench certain Kabbalistic precepts from their context in order to make them more widely accessible.

The second reason is that Kabbalah is a tradition that, even in the most Orthodox corners of Jewish life, has weakened considerably over the last 200 years and has all but ceased to be passed down on a teacher-to-student basis. In part this was due to Chasidism, which replaced Kabbalah as the main channel for Jewish mysticism while at the same time adopting many of its doctrines, and which is even less easily de-contextualized from the rich weft of Jewish ritual and practice. Even if you wanted to study with a genuine Kabbalah master and were willing to adopt the arduous life of an Orthodox Jew that he would require of you, you would be hard-pressed to find one.

And yet Kabbalah does, even on a popularized basis, have something all its own to say to the non-Kabbalist – and even Madonna appears to know what this is.

Like all mysticisms, Kabbalah stresses the presence of the divine in all things, although unlike most, it also stresses the distance between mankind and the divine. But where it is most different, particularly in its later, post-16th century form known as Lurianic Kabbalah after the great Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, is in its approach to the human ego. Lurianic Kabbalah does not, like Sufism, Brahminism, and Buddhism, see the self or ego as an illusion to be cast off. Rather, it views each human self as part of the transcendent body of all humanity, each cell of which is real and needs to be perfected as a means to the perfection of the whole.

This has interesting social and psychological implications. For a Kabbalist, one’s ultimate task in life is not to free oneself, by means of meditation or “enlightenment,” from one’s attachment to the ego and its problems, but on the contrary, to be thoroughly “egotistic” in the sense of accepting one’s self as an ineradicable datum that needs to be worked on and refined as part of improving the human condition.

It suggests a vision of human interconnection, on the one hand, and of human betterment, on the other, that does not depend on sweeping changes or on radical or utopian politics, as some have taken the Kabbalistic concept of tikkun or “repair” to mean, but on the slow, ameliorative incrementalism of improving little things. The messiah comes, in Kabbalistic theology, when the last little improvement is in place.

This is, perhaps, not even mysticism at all in the accepted sense of the term – or rather, if there is anything mystical about it, it lies in the perception that the private domain of each of us, though it may seem to have nothing to do with the welfare of the universe, is constantly affecting and being affected by it. This a useful thought for the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Mr.Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.