- Rebecca Rosen doesn't see dead people.
-
- "I see their energy," said the self-proclaimed
psychic medium, the product of a Conservative Jewish household in Omaha,
Neb., whose hundreds of clients - movie stars and celebrity musicians among
them - are willing to wait three months and shell out $225 to spend an
hour in her airy Santa Monica, Calif., office.
-
- Many of her devotees say Rosen has a unique ability to
tap into the spirits of their deceased friends and relatives.
-
- Unlike many storefront psychics, Rosen, 28, does not
read palms, invoke astrology, interpret tarot cards or study crystal balls.
She says she relies only on her body to channel the spirits trying to convey
messages to her clients. The souls Rosen says she encounters during a reading
impress thoughts and feelings on her to decode.
-
- "It's like playing charades," Rosen said. "Sometimes
I'll feel like I'm being strangled so I'll have to interpret that as someone
having suffocated or drowned or choking. If I see a 'for sale' sign in
my mind's eye, I'll interpret that as someone having just moved or about
to move... When I see a bowl of matzah ball soup or a chanukiah, I know
the spirit or [the client] is Jewish."
-
- In recent years there has been a groundswell of interest
in paranormal spirituality among Jews and non-Jews. High-profile psychics
and authors John Edward and Sylvia Browne have become mainstream media
darlings. Rosen, too, is consulting with network executives about developing
a television talk show.
-
- The growing fascination with psychic mediums and various
other forms of mystical spirituality has not translated into a growing
acceptance among many Jewish scholars, though, who cite the Torah prohibition
of the use of "a charmer or a medium or a wizard or a necromancer."
-
- Rabbi J. Immanuel Schochet, a Toronto-based chasidic
scholar of Jewish mysticism, opposes the use of professional psychics.
Their growing popularity, Schochet said, stems people's desire to control
the future.
-
- "This portrays a lack of faith in God and, according
to Maimonides, is tantamount to idolatry," Rabbi Schochet said.
-
- But Rosen, who now affiliates with the Reconstructionist
movement, sees no inherent contradiction in her career choice and her religious
convictions. Neither does her brother, Rabbi Baruch HaLevi of Tifereth
Israel, a Conservative congregation in Des Moines, Iowa.
-
- "It's authentically Jewish to believe in the reality
of different realms and souls occupying those realms," he said. "The
Talmud offers many examples of rabbis who are crossing over and coming
back, whether it takes place in a dream, in prayer, in meditation or in
writing."
-
- Rosen said she first discovered what she calls her "God-given
gift" for communicating with spirits during her sophomore year at
the University of Florida. The marketing major had been struggling with
depression and taken to writing a daily journal to combat the symptoms.
While sitting in an off-campus bookstore one afternoon, she recalls feeling
a surge of energy pass through her body.
-
- "I felt my hand was on automatic," she said.
-
- An hour and 15 hand-written pages later, she had what
she interpreted as a message from her maternal grandmother, Ruth Perelman,
who had committed suicide a decade earlier.
-
- "The stuff she was telling me - I had no clue if
it was true, but it made perfect sense to my dad," said Rosen, who
said she uncovered through her writing the circumstances surrounding her
grandmother's death that her parents had never shared with her.
-
- "She was giving us information so specific as to
what happened and why," said Rosen's mother, Jan Goldstein, the executive
director of the Jewish Federation of Omaha. "We had to say, 'There's
something to this.' "
-
- Over the next two years Rosen said her grandmother was
an unshakable presence during her daily journal-writing sessions. "She
kept saying to me, 'You're going to meet your soul mate. His name is Ryan
and he'll give you a rose,' " Rosen recalls. "She told me his
birthday was Sept. 24."
-
- Two years later, while visiting her family in Omaha,
she was introduced to a man named Brian Rosen, and the two hit it off immediately.
-
- "Then I understood," she said. "Brian
rhymes with Ryan. Take the 'n' of Rosen and you have rose."
-
- Brian Rosen's birthday is Sept. 24.
-
- Some might find the story far-fetched but five months
later, Rebecca and Brian were engaged.
-
- During her post-college years, Rosen worked as a nanny
in the suburbs of Detroit, where in her spare time she gave $25 psychic
readings in a neighborhood coffee shop. As word spread of Rosen's psychic
success, her clientele - and her fee - increased. She left the nanny job
to devote herself full-time to her work as a medium, launching Rebecca
Rosen, Messenger of Light, LLC, shortly before moving to Los Angeles last
year.
-
- Among her throngs of Los Angeles-based clients wowed
by her apparent clairvoyance is Dorie Zuckerman, an artist who lives in
Pacific Palisades, Calif.
-
- After her 23-year-old son, Will, committed suicide last
year, Zuckerman saw psychotherapists and attended support groups for grieving
parents.
-
- "I tried all the Western garbage and nothing helped,"
she said.
-
- So when an acquaintance told her about Rosen, she called
to schedule an appointment, giving the receptionist only her first name.
Zuckerman walked into Rosen's airy office with low expectations and walked
out "absolutely in awe," she said.
-
- During their first session, Rosen referenced Will's surfboards,
the medallion Zuckerman had removed from around his neck after he died
and the memorial swim planned in his honor.
-
- "Rebecca was so accurate and so specific that it
was like picking up a phone to heaven," said Zuckerman, who scheduled
two subsequent appointments. "After three sessions with Rebecca, I
no longer wake up in the morning thinking, 'Why am I still alive?' I wake
up and feel that my son is around me all the time."
-
- And Rosen has impressed even ardent skeptics.
-
- Joel Tauber, 69, of West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., the
retired chair of the United Jewish Communities, the national umbrella organization
of Jewish federations, wasn't expecting much when his wife and daughter
arranged for him to partake two weeks ago in an hourlong telephone reading
with Rosen.
-
- His doubt, however, eroded when Rosen told him that the
person trying to contact him was holding up salami. He said he knew immediately
Rosen was communicating with David Hermelin, Tauber's longtime friend and
colleague who had died of cancer four years ago.
-
- "David and I went on many missions to Israel together,
and he would always bring a salami with him and start slicing it up on
the bus or even on the plane" to pass out to his friends, Tauber said.
"It was his hallmark."
-
- Tauber said he has no logical explanation for Rosen's
psychic powers but he said, "You clearly don't get the feeling that
this is a hoax."
-
- It's not, Rabbi HaLevi said.
-
- "A lot of Jews look at me cross-eyed when I tell
them my sister is a psychic," he said. "But then again, a lot
of Jews look at me cross-eyed when I talk about God. Jews have been overly
rational for the past few hundred years, even though our tradition is both
rational and non-rational."
-
- Rabbi HaLevi added that in some ways, his career as a
rabbi is similar to his sister's job as a psychic. "We both consider
ourselves guides on people's spiritual journeys," he said.
-
- Brian and Rebecca Rosen are expecting their first child,
a boy, this fall.
-
- "I have no idea if he'll have the same gift I do,"
Rosen said of her unborn baby. "But I can already tell he's a very
sensitive energy."
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