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That makes him different from some of the other religious groups on the lot. A hundred feet from where the Gefiltefish RV is parked, a van flies a large flag with a Star of David and the logo "Twelve Tribes of Israel." The flag belongs to a Jews for Jesus outfit, a growing sect of Protestantism often accused of being a cult. (Orthodox Jewish groups have formed the organization Jews for Jews to combat their evangelical message.) Standing in front of the flag, a vaguely hippie-looking woman is preaching as if she were standing on a soapbox. The crowd on the strip walks by, paying no attention.

Meanwhile, seven shows into the tour, the good rabbi can't walk 15 feet without some hippie he'd met earlier running up to him and giving him a hug. He stops often to chat about how Phish is playing this year. "Their jams aren't going anywhere. I don't know, man, but I've been really disappointed by this tour," he says to a particularly red-eyed kid who nods in agreement.

The rabbi moves on, briskly walking down the runway and handing out free stickers. The Phishheads snap them up, but look puzzled by the logo. Skaist explains the that Hebrew letters on the sticker read "Lama," the name of a popular Phish song and also the word "why" in Hebrew. Phishheads understand the double meaning and ask about the Web address printed at the bottom of the sticker. "We're Jews on Phish tour," he tells them, often inviting the kids back to the RV for a more meaningful conversation. He figures he has 50 such conversations a day this way.

Back in Israel, Skaist might wear a Phish shirt on Tuesdays when he plays his regular club gig at Mike's Place, a bar frequented by the non-religious and one of the few places you can hear live music in Jerusalem. Here, though, it's the standard white shirt and black pants. His concern is that if he dresses like a hippie, the kids might not understand what he's all about.

Skaist, 34, has six children, a Jewish-themed grunge album in his past and ticket stubs from 18 Phish shows before this tour. Phish doesn't tour the Middle East so he plans his frequent excursions to North America to coincide with concerts.

Earlier this year, Skaist wrote an essay titled "Teaching a Rabbi to Phish," and posted it on JamBands, a Web magazine dedicated to hippie-rock music and culture. In it, the rabbi explains that when a student of his at Bar Ilan University first introduced him to Phish, he wasn't impressed. He theorized the reason was because music is culturally relative:

A musician doesn't write music for the culture. The culture develops around the music and the persona of the band.

The theory would also explain why it took me so long to get into Phish. I did not have the cultural background to appreciate it. I grew up in a strict orthodox environment where secular music was taboo. Although I sneaked a lot of good music into my system (Beatles, Floyd, Jethro Tull, Zeppelin, etc.), my exposure to the cultural aspects of Rock and Roll in general was minimal and my exposure to jam bands was non-existent. I was not properly equipped to interpret the music.

Personally, I don't think the rabbi gives himself enough credit. While the Skaist family has a long lineage of important rabbis, he's always been a bit of black sheep. In his teenage years growing up in Queens, N.Y., and Baltimore, Md., he hung out with secular Jews and gentiles, playing Missile Command and Asteroids in the arcades, lounging in pool halls and doing drugs. In 1982, he went to see Pink Floyd, a show that he now admits he can hardly remember.

When he was 17, a rabbi picked up on his fondness for music and burgeoning passion for literature and philosophy, and encouraged him to examine it through a religious paradigm. By the time he was 20, he had stopped doing drugs and was well on his way to becoming what he is now: a rabbi and professor of Jewish philosophy, who, for his course books, uses Robert M. Pirsig's "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and a play by George Bernard Shaw (which is of note because Shaw was an avowed humanist -- read atheist).

"Judaism has to stand up to the test of outside knowledge," he tells me. It's a statement that I find shocking considering the closed nature of his ultra-Orthodox community.

I ask him to compare his Orthodox Judaism with the New-Agey spiritualism found on Phish tour. "They are both quests for truth," he replies. For Skaist, each scene has its truth and the knowledge gained from each is valuable.

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"I have not studied enough about the nature of the universe to know whether there is a God," says Jacob Goldsmith. At 18, Goldsmith is remarkably articulate and open to talking about himself.

"Music is religious," he says, noting that he finds spirituality in the free-form jams of Phish, the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. Goldsmith is the average kid you find hanging outside the Gefiltefish RV. He wears a tie-died Phish shirt, and his hair is long and curly, falling down his neck like a hanging fern. He lives with his parents in Chicago's upper-middle class Jewish suburb of West Rogers, where earlier this summer Benjamin Smith shot down three Orthodox Jews in his spree of neo-Nazi rage. Jacob's background is Reform, and while he was active in Jewish youth groups and Chicago's larger Jewish community when he was younger, he's no longer involved in anything explicitly Jewish. That is, other than Phish, we joke.

It's why a few shows back, when he saw Gefiltefish's Israeli flag blowing in the wind, he decided to check it out. "I found Rabbi Skaist amazingly personable," he says. Through subsequent conversations with the rabbi, Goldsmith says, he is again feeling a connection to the Jewish community and is even thinking about going to Israel to learn more about it.

Like most of the kids on the lot, Goldsmith will undoubtedly grow out of his hippie stage. He might even come to feel nostalgic for the days when he could see all the facets of the universe as just different dimensions of a giant yin and yang. It's also possible that the seeds Rabbi Skaist and Gefiltefish planted in him will blossom, with Goldsmith one day becoming Baal T'Shuva. But I doubt it. Orthodox Judaism requires what seems to me to be unimaginable dedication and sacrifice. If you have never directly felt the presence of an almighty, you would never feel compelled to follow the tenets of Jewish law.

Which prompts the question whether Gefiltefish will, or could, have any lasting spiritual effect on Phishheads. Faith is ineffable, like being rocked on LSD; you can never really describe it to someone who has never experienced it. Especially to people as religiously confused as myself, it's impossible to explain the power of epiphany -- or bitachon, in Hebrew. The concept is too foreign. As much as I enjoyed being let into the Orthodox world for a couple of shows, I'm still left wondering. If Orthodox Jews have resorted to Phish tour in their attempts to save North American Jewry from oblivion, maybe the boat has already sunk and all Skaist and company are doing is fishing for the few survivors.
salon.com | August 21, 1999

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