O RLY?

Finally, in what seemed to me a startling detour, she [Madonna] asked whether I believed in death. I answered somewhat bleakly that I did. When I turned the question back on her, she announced that she didn’t because she believed in the concept of reincarnation as taught by the Kabbalah Center. “The thought of eternal life appeals to me,” she told me, as though she were trying on a new outfit in front of a mirror. “I don’t think people’s energy just disappears.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by this — whether Madonna believed in a concrete form of reincarnation whereby she would return to earth as herself, all blond ambition and strenuously toned body, or in the more abstract concept of gilgul neshamot. But it made eminent sense that her link to the center would be based on something more than an altruistic vision of egoless self-betterment and earthly bliss, which is the message she conveys in her statements and songs. When I asked her why she hadn’t stuck with Catholicism, which incorporates belief in an afterlife, she snapped in reply: “There’s nothing consoling about being Catholic. They’re all just laws and prohibitions. They don’t help me negotiate the world.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13kabbalah-t.html?scp=8&sq=&st=nyt