CHAPTER 9

Drinking Bottled Water: Sin or Salvation?

If you are a sinner or evil in nature, this product may cause burning,
intense heat, sweating, skin irritation, rashes, itchiness, vomiting,
bloodshot and watery eyes, pale skin color, and oral irritations.
Warning: Consuming Holy Drinking Water^™ should not replace
attending church or any other establishment of worship.

—Warning label on the bottle and website of the company selling Holy Drinking Water

By many measures, bottled water is a scam…. It’s no wonder that some people even think it’s a sin.

—From the newsletter of the Fifth Episcopal District
Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church1

WATER HAS LONG played a central role in religion and faith, rites of baptism, purification rituals, Sumerian, Hindu, Christian, and other myths and legends of deities using water to mete out punishment or blessings, and in the centrality of water to the sacredness of life. The use of water for spiritual cleansing is common to several religions including Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Sikhism; but only the Catholic Church uses holy water as a sacramental to ward off evil. In the Catholic Church, water can be blessed by a priest or bishop and used for baptisms, blessings, consecration of a church, or aspersions during Mass. Only recently, however, have individuals explored the idea of commercializing different forms of “holy water.”

Religion has also, of course, been used for decidedly unholy purposes. In a remarkable moment of transparency, sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard reportedly said, “If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion.” Hubbard took his own advice and did both: his 1950 self-help book, Dianetics, created a new religion—Scientology. Some water bottlers have taken note. Given all of the diverse and sophisticated efforts underway to get people to buy bottled water, it was only a small step to take for some bottled water producers to use religion as a marketing tool. Some of these efforts have been tongue-in-cheek; others have been completely serious. And for a third group, it is sometimes hard to tell.

One of the strangest bottled water products is Kabbalah Water, which combines bizarre claims like Dr. Emoto’s molecular restructuring with unproven health assertions, religious mysticism, and a dash of pop culture. What is Kabbalah? The Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles describes it like this:

Kabbalah—the world’s oldest body of spiritual wisdom—contains the long-hidden keys to the secrets of the universe as well as the keys to the mysteries of the human heart and soul…. Kabbalah shows in detail, how to navigate that vast terrain in order to remove every form of chaos, pain, and suffering…. Its purpose is to bring clarity, understanding, and freedom to our lives—and ultimately to erase even death itself.2

Others describe Kabbalah as a splinter cult with connections to an old strain of Jewish mysticism. Rabbi Immanuel Schochet, a Toronto-based expert on Jewish philosophy and mysticism, described the Kabbalah Centre in 2004 as “not just a cult, but a dangerous cult. They are distorting kabbalah…taking some of our sacred books and reducing it to mumbo jumbo, all kinds of hocuspocus.”³ Rabbi David Wolpe of L.A.’s Conservative Sinai Temple was similarly critical: “Simple answers don’t grow souls. Red threads and magic bottles of water don’t change the world and don’t change people. To the extent that deep spiritual truths are put in a blender and served as superficial pabulum—it’s a disservice to a great tradition, and it is no better than spiritual snake oil.”4

Rabbi Wolpe’s comments about red threads and bottled water refer to another aspect of Kabbalah—their strong bent toward commercialism. Like most similar enterprises, Kabbalah supports itself with money from its followers and from the sales of, well, magical things, like red string that “protects us from the influences of the Evil Eye” ($26 for a package of string), scented candles whose “exact ingredients and preparation were directed by God to Moses” ($72 for a set), and most famously, Kabbalah water in bottles and in the form of a spray that uses “Kabbalistic technology” to “activate the cleansing power of water” ($10 for a small spray bottle). After all, if Kabbalah can “erase even death itself,” people are going to be willing to pay a pretty penny for that.

One of the most famous and public followers of Kabbalah is pop icon Madonna and she made Kabbalah water famous, though she’s jumped around in her bottled water devotions over the years. (Older fans will clearly remember a certain notorious incident with an Evian bottle.) I’ve always liked Madonna. Her music can be innovative; her efforts to push the limits of pop culture have been fun to watch, even when (or especially when) she steps over the line of cultural sensitivities, and some of her charity work has been laudable. But her ties with Kabbalah and her apparent willingness to not only swallow, but actively promote, their pricey and mystically infused bottled water are hard to abide. It would be a small thing if Madonna simply used Kabbalah water herself—she can certainly afford its high cost. It is quite another thing for her to promote Kabbalah water to her adoring fans and to link it to her charity work. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, during her 2006 tour Madonna brought in thousands of liters of Kabbalah water and required her dancers and crew to drink the water because she believes it has regenerative powers, a claim promoted by the Kabbalah Centre itself. “We charge the water with positive energy so that it has healing powers.” In 2006 Reuters reported that her efforts to support a center for orphans in Malawi included requiring that they teach a curriculum linked to Kabbalah.

The best way to describe the claims made for Kabbalah Water is to share the mumbo-jumbo used by the Kabbalists themselves. Yehuda Berg, the son of the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre’s founder, asserts that the water is a tradition dating back centuries.5 This is a particularly odd contention, since the actual claims made on behalf of the water seem to originate in the recent pseudoscientific claims of none other than Dr. Masaru Emoto, described earlier in this book. What follows is the description of Kabbalah water from the website kabbalahwater.com:

Just as the sharing energy of water was fundamentally changed by human consciousness at the time of Noah’s Flood, Kabbalah teaches that the power of consciousness can also reverse the change….

A truly sharing consciousness, channeled through certain Kabbalistic blessings and meditations, has the power to return water to its primordial state of completely positive, healing energy. Through the power of these meditations and the consciousness of sharing that is their foundation, Kabbalah Water came into being—and its miraculous powers of restoration and healing became available to the world. Infused with sharing consciousness, Kabbalah Water manifests water’s primordial capacity to heal and protect….

The Kabbalistic blessings and meditations that are used to create Kabbalah Water, for example, bring about elegant and balanced crystalline structures in water, while negative consciousness has an opposite effect…. Because of its unique crystalline structure and fractal design, Kabbalah water is an excellent information transmitter. Positive, health-giving information is defined by symmetry and high energy, while low energy and entropy—like static in TV or radio reception—characterize muddled information. Therefore, the condition of the water we take into our bodies determines the quality of the information being transmitted to our immune system, digestive system, circulatory system, and even to every atom of our bodies….

The essence and foundation of Kabbalah Water is the consciousness of sharing which infuses it. Once, all the waters of the world were imbued with this consciousness. To learn more about the connection between consciousness and water, visit…6

And here the reader is directed to another website that uses the photographs of Dr. Emoto’s water crystals, where, perhaps to no one’s surprise, you can purchase a large variety of expensive water-related products.⁷

In mid-2005 another pop-music star, Britney Spears, jumped on the Kabbalah bandwagon, perhaps because of the influence of Madonna. (Her former flame Justin Timberlake had euphoniously described Spears as a “Madonna wannabe.”) Celebrity observers reported that her enthusiasm for Kabbalah water was so intense that the pregnant Britney planned to “deliver her baby in a special pool filled with 1,000 one-liter bottles of specially blessed Kabbalah water” at a cost of nearly four thousand dollars.⁸ Alas, celebrity births rarely go according to plan, and in the event the Spears-Federline offspring was delivered by more-traditional cesarean section at Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center.⁹

Okay, so what? In general, my tolerance for pseudoscientific nonsense is directly proportional to how harmless it is. If Britney wants to deliver her baby in a pool of Kabbalah water, who am I to complain—so long as her doctors have no complaints? And if Madonna drinks nothing else? Fine—it’s probably better than what most pop stars are consuming. But my hackles start to rise when pseudoscience begins to crowd out real science in a way that threatens public health or the environment. In the case of Kabbalah water, their mystical claims have spilled out into the real world.

Enter Katherine Harris and Florida’s environmental politics. Yes, that Katherine Harris. George W. Bush’s Katherine Harris. In 2005 the Orlando Sentinel reported that the State of Florida had, at the “behest of then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris,” studied the use of Kabbalah-blessed water as a cure for the very serious problem of citrus canker, a blight that was decimating Florida’s vital agricultural sector. Researchers apparently were asked to test the ability of “Celestial Drops” to stop citrus canker. Celestial Drops is a magic potion with “improved fractal design,” “infinite levels of order,” and “high energy”—claims virtually identical to those made for Kabbalah water. Celestial Drops was promoted to Harris and Florida by Rabbi Abe Hardoon, a teacher of Kabbalah, and New York cardiologist Artur Spokojny, who said, “We have reversed entropy and reversed the second law of thermodynamics.”10 When asked by a Florida reporter if the canker project was related to Kabbalah, Hardoon replied, “It is, and it isn’t,” and he referred all further questions to the Kabbalah Centre of Los Angeles.¹¹ Oh, and by the way, the stuff didn’t work on citrus canker.

Followers of Kabbalah are not the only ones using religion to sell bottled water. In recent years, more and more brands of bottled water have appeared on the market using religion as a marketing tool. And in the face of a growing backlash against bottled water, other religious communities are beginning to weigh in with moral and ethical judgments. Is drinking bottled water a path to salvation or damnation?

Those so inclined can now buy several versions of “holy” bottled water. One example is Holy Drinking Water, packaged at a private bottling plant in the city of Stockton, California. Businessman Brian Germann convinced clergy from the local Catholic and Anglican churches to pronounce blessings over his water, which he then labels and sells. Why would someone buy Holy Drinking Water at around $20 a case? To purify and protect your soul, apparently. “What if you could drink holy water as a defense against evil?” Germann said. As he explained to me, Germann hopes to get additional religious leaders to add their blessings and boost sales. Why? He’s agnostic on the question of whether Jews or Protestants would get the full benefit of bottled water blessed only by Catholic or Anglican priests, and so he wants to expand the options available to the public.

Germann may have trouble getting a rabbi to produce a Jewish version. According to Judaism, food and water can be blessed before consumption by any member of the faith, but “I can’t bless the water for someone else,” said Rabbi Avrohom Brod of the Chabad of Stockton.12 Similarly, Virginia Meagher, liturgy coordinator at the Catholic Diocese of Stockton, said bottled holy water isn’t sacrilegious, but with notable restraint said, “It’s probably not something we would encourage.” Water, she said, can be blessed by a priest or deacon at any time, but it’s then to be used to bless a new house or a sick person or in a religious ritual. Selling holy water, Meagher said, “seems to be against the reason we bless water.”

Germann’s bottles carry a label that warns sinners who drink the water that they may experience burning, intense heat, sweating, and skin irritations. This led to some amused commentary in the media, but Germann is keeping a straight face. The warning was intended “to be very serious,” he told me. There have been no reported cases of adverse reactions among local sinners. One possible reason is that Holy Drinking Water is purifying souls. Another is that sinners are staying away from the stuff, preferring the less-risky secular brands. A third possibility, of course, is that Holy Drinking Water is, well, just water. Germann, whose main line of business is producing software for law-enforcement services, says he hopes to expand his operations to include a holy spring water version and sales of larger five-gallon coolers for home and office use.

In a more tongue-in-cheek vein comes Holy Spring Water sold out of Pennsylvania. “If you drink our water,” the advertising for Holy Spring Water proclaims, “we guarantee that you will NOT GO TO HELL. If it tastes the same, costs the same, and may keep you out of hell, why (the hell) wouldn’t you try it?” The sellers of Holy Spring Water even offer details on their website for how to wash away specific sins. Lust, pride, and greed only require one bottle per transgression. Gluttony and anger require three bottles. Sloth requires nine, perhaps because after nine bottles you have no choice but to haul yourself out of the couch and head for the bathroom to do penance.13

Another version of bottled water that relies on religious, albeit tongue-in-cheek, messages is Liquid Salvation, offering “pure water for an impure world” with a marketing image of a 1940s-style pin-up girl portrayed as both a sexy angel and a seductive devil. The company is located in Henderson, Nevada, and sells a case of bottles for $29.17 plus shipping. But this product goes beyond tongue-in-cheek claims of salvation by claiming better hydration and, yes, a special “patented” process that breaks apart “clustered” water molecules. Miraculous indeed.¹⁴

There are many translations and interpretations of God’s commandments, depending on whether you’re a follower of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qu’ran, or any of the other versions of God’s laws. I’m pretty sure that none of them explicitly says, “Thou Shalt Not Drink Bottled Water.” In fact, at the risk of being struck by lightning, I imagine that there were times in the forty-year wandering of the Jews through the desert that even Moses might have found a vending machine with ice-cold bottled water (perhaps Mayanot Eden or Neviot-Tevaa Hagalil brands?) to be a blessing.

In a far more serious vein, the growing revolt against bottled water also has a religious component to it. Clean drinking water, like air, some religious leaders argue, is a God-given resource that shouldn’t be packaged and sold. Others have gone further and declared that drinking bottled water is immoral and even a sin. In June 2005 a group called Presbyterians for Restoring Creation (PRC) organized a conference called Sharing the Waters of Life at which church members were asked to avoid bottled water, especially those packaged in disposable PET containers. In May 2006 PRC launched a campaign urging people to sign a pledge against bottled water and to take the message to their churches.

In August 2006 the Thirty-Ninth General Council of the United Church of Canada (UCC) issued an advisory: “Avoid those purchased water bottles—where possible.” The Council voted to discourage the purchase of bottled water by its congregations, noting its conviction that “water is a sacred gift” and “the privatization of water must be avoided.” Together with the National Council of Churches (NCC), the UCC produced a documentary on the moral and ethical dangers of water privatization, including bottling water for sale in poor areas of the world. Cassandra Carmichael of the NCC said, “The moral call for us is not to privatize water. Water should be free for all.”15

The following month, the Emmitsburg Province of Daughters of Charity adopted a formal stance against the use of bottled water and developed an educational program to help make the public aware of their concerns about the privatization of water. The Daughters of Charity belong to an international community of Catholic women consecrated by private vows to follow the teachings and inspiration of Vincent de Paul and to serve the poor. In their belief, commercial bottled water is one more barrier to serving the poor with access to the most basic of God’s gifts: clean fresh water.

A few weeks after the adoption of this position, the National Coalition of American Nuns published an “Open Letter to Catholic Voters” calling for action in opposition to “the present bottled water culture promoted by the marketing agents of corporations such as Suez, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola.” The Coalition’s Board then committed not to buy commercially bottled water “unless absolute necessity requires such a purchase” and urged others to join in this effort.16 In December 2006 Sister Mary Ann Coyle, who regards drinking bottled water as a sin, told the Religious News Service, “Our faith tells us to be just and not exploit the poor.”¹⁷ In 2009 twelve Episcopal bishops from the western United States issued a letter to members in advance of the church’s annual General Convention in Anaheim, California. Their message? Stay away from bottled water, and don’t bring it into the convention: “We urge you to encourage delegates not to buy bottled water, but instead to bring metal or ceramic water bottles that can be refilled with tap water.”¹⁸

But religious doctrine can be an ambiguous thing, apparently even to the religious. Father Robert Sirico, a Roman Catholic priest and president of the Acton Institute, which promotes a more libertarian and market-oriented approach to religion, disputes that there is any moral problem with bottled water. “Where is the moral peril?” Father Sirico asked. To the bottled water consumer, he writes in an essay in the National Catholic Register: “You are not engaged in a sinful act. You are exercising a choice that is a human right, and supporting an ingenious institution—the free and enterprising economy—which is a powerful means of material liberation for the whole world.”¹⁹ I’m not sure what religion actually espouses the dogma of “material liberation” (not counting the religion of free-market capitalism, of course) or where consumer “choice” is codified in human rights law, but Father Sirico goes further, describing efforts to ban bottled water as “water socialism” and calling for the commodification of water as a necessary precondition for making water available to the masses. In other words, the failure to meet basic human needs for water is not the result of the failure of governments to provide safe water; it is the fault of “trade barriers and socialist structures.” Water, Father Sirico says, should be treated like any other marketable product or simple commodity.

But is it? Water is not just another marketable product. It stirs far deeper feelings than the sales of carbonated soft drinks or blue jeans. And it is stimulating a far deeper response from local communities, environmental activists, and the general public, producing what may be a serious and permanent change in perception and hints at new thinking about both bottled water and water in general.