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Jody Friedman: "I

understand that what

I do is controversial."

goes by the moniker "the Happy
Medium," they are most often struck
by what a spirited, vibrant person she is.
Open and warm, she makes people feel
they're just sitting down to chat with a
friend. But the chat is punctuated with
spine-tingling familiar names and infor-
mation, stories of clients' past lives,
messages from the "other side" and
medical awareness, all with the assis-
tance of guides and angels.

COMFORT IS KEY

"She's very honest about it all," says a
Jewish client from Bloomfield
Township who prefers to remain anony-
mous. "She's the kind of person who
can make a nonbeliever a believer. The
information she gives is chilling, but
because she's so genuine, she makes
you very comfortable."
Marybeth Rosen agrees. The
Commerce Township resident and
neighbor of Friedman's says she was
always intrigued by psychics, but skep-
tical. "Not as much as my husband,
Michael, though," she says.
Soon after "Michael's father died,
he had a restless night's sleep, telling
his wife he'd had a very real dream
about his father. He later found out
his sister had also awakened at the
same time. The next day, he stopped
by Friedman's house to pick
something up.
"Jody opened the door and said, 'You
spoke to your father at 3 in the morn-
ing, didn't you?"' says Rosen.
"My husband had been so grief-
stricken, and he came home from talk-
ing to Jody so uplifted," Rosen says.
"After that, [Jody] kept getting mes-
sages from his father, about things that
made sense to Michael and his sister
but that Jody, of course, couldn't possi-
bly have known."
Friedman says her beliefs about rein-
carnation and angels are firmly ground-
ed in Jewish roots.

"It is true that Jews believe in
reincarnation and the afterlife,"
concurs Rabbi Joseph Krakoff, of
Congregation Shaarey Zedek in
Oakland County. Further, he says, "in
earliest Jewish mysticism, there are
references to angelology. And there
are many midrashim [interpretations]
which refer to angels as helpers
of God."
However, he points out, in the Book
of Leviticus, the Torah text states: "You
shall not practice divination or sooth-
saying," and later: "Do not turn to
ghosts and do not inquire of familiar
spirits to be defiled by them. I the
Lord am your God."
The first question people ask, he
says, is whether being a medium fits
into those specifications of divination
and soothsaying. "But it's really about
being concerned about the future and
asking God to tell what He has in store
for us," Rabbi Krakoff explains. "It con-
tradicts the idea that we have free will.
"There is also a concern that com-
munication with the dead would take
people away from God, and that it
would cause us not to live fully in this
world," he continues. "Judaism is very
rational and this-worldly. There was a
desire among our ancestors to have
answered questions of the world that
they couldn't answer. So there are com-
mandments saying, 'Don't go there,' or
[people] would become dependent
upon communicating with [those] who
have already died. And they would be
looking to the future. So people would
live in the past and future, but not the
present.
"That said," Rabbi Krakoff muses,
"our tradition is full of astrology, folk
remedies, superstition, divination, even
magic, in every time period and across
the globe. It's clear that it's forbidden,
but at the same time, there are many
examples of it being done.

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