I’ve heard of orthodox Jews who become rappers (see: Matisyahu ) but Shyne is the first rapper I’ve heard who has become an orthodox Jew.
In 1999, Shyne (born Jamal Michael Barrow), his mentor Sean “P.Diddy” Combs, and Combs’ then girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, were involved in a shooting at a Manhattan club which left three people injured. As a result the 21-year-old rapper, whose debut album was pending release, was charged with and convicted of multiple felonies, including attempted murder.
Now he is out of prison and living as Moses Levi , an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem where “he shuttles between sessions of Talmud study with some of the most religiously stringent rabbis in the city and preparations for a musical comeback.”
“The science of Judaism” as Mr. Levi refers to it, has become his system for living, a lifeline that connects him to God and becoming a better human being. He sees no conflict fusing the hip-hop world with the life of a Torah-observant Jew.Mr. Levi speaks in the style of the urban streets but combines his slang with Yiddish-accented Hebrew words and references to the “Chumash” (the bound version of the Torah, pronounced khoo-MASH) and “Halacha” (Jewish law, pronounced ha-la-KHAH).
As in: “There’s nothing in the Chumash that says I can’t drive a Lamborghini,” and “nothing in the Halacha about driving the cars I like, about the lifestyle I live.” As a teenager he started reading the Bible, relating to the stories of King David and Moses that he had first heard from his grandmother. At 13 (bar mitzvah age, he notes) he began to identify himself as “an Israelite,” a sensibility reinforced after finding out his great-grandmother was Ethiopian; he likes to wonder aloud whether she might have been Jewish.
He was already praying daily and engaged in his own study of Judaism at the time of his arrest but only became a practicing Jew, celebrating the holidays, keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath under the tutelage of prison rabbis. In Israel, he said, he had undergone a type of pro forma conversion known as “giyur lechumra” (pronounced ghee-YUR le-kchoom-RAH).
Read the rest of the interesting profile here . Oh, and he’s right: I checked the Pentateuch and there’s no prohibition against driving Lamborghinis.
