Hasidic reggae-rapper Matisyahu shaves beard

So far the answer appears to be no. Matisyahu has been photographed wearing a yarmulke and tweeted that he would pray just as always. On his Twitter account, he also thanked fans who made him kosher food while on tour.

But the events have stirred a passionate debate about just how and if the two worlds can blend. A Chabad-Lubavitcher rabbi who knows Matisyahu well, but who asked not to be named, said he felt the pressure was just too much. “While Reggae mirrors some of the warmth in Hasidic life, it has nevertheless a looseness and freedom that just doesn’t jibe with Jewish structural life,” he said. “I pray he finds his way back.” The rabbi’s words speak to a long-running debate in the Hasidic Jewish community: What is the relationship between creative expression and devout religiosity?

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( Matt Jelonek / GETTY IMAGES ) - Matisyahu performs in Perth, Australia, in 2010 with beard and locks.

It’s a struggle chronicled in the Chaim Potok novel “My Name Is Asher Lev,” in which a Hasidic painter struggles to balance his art and his faith.

Lani Santo is executive director of Footsteps, a secular organization that provides support to those who leave Judaism's ultra-religious communities. The organization’s Internet mailing list was flooded after Matisyahu’s shaving tweet. “Across the board it’s very challenging for our participants to balance the pursuit of individual creative expression with an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. There’s not a lot of gray areas,” she said. “What Matisyahu worked to do was really an anomaly in that community.”

Matisyahu is known as a Ba’al T’shuva, which means he was born a secular Jew, but decided to take on a religious lifestyle. He was born Matthew Miller and was a musician who, by his own account, started taking hallucinogens and following the rock band Phish on tour. But he changed his name after becoming a follower of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Hasidic Judaism that is seen as more open than others because it reaches out to unaffiliated Jews, often on college campuses, and to Jews living abroad.

In many ways, Matisyahu was their most famous member, becoming Billboard magazine’s reggae artist of the year in 2006. (He left Chabad to explore other branches of Hasidism in 2007, saying, “I felt boxed in.” But he continued, for a while, to live with his wife and children in their official headquarters of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.)

“It’s a really fascinating moment. But for young Chabadniks who were excited by Matisyahu’s success as a validation of their entree into the mainstream, I’m sure it’s disappointing,” said Sue Fishkoff, author of the book “The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch.”

“He’s a young man searching for his spiritual path,” she said. “He may go through other iterations, like many of us do.”

While some of his fans wonder if he shaved to bolster ticket sales, his friends say they respect what they see as his honesty about his spiritual journey. “It will be interesting to see how things will play out — if he keeps the signature beard and payos [sidelocks] off,” said Erez Safer, chief executive of Shempseed, a recording label that has worked with Matisyahu and other religious musicians.

“It had become his brand.”