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I was on vacation with my family in Iceland when my office called and shared the terrible news of Michael Jackson's passing. My wife and children were with me in the van. We could scarcely believe what we had heard. The children all remembered Michael fondly. He had given them their dog Marshmallow who's is a member of our family till today. My daughter teared up. And while I was heartsick at the news, especially for his three young children, I was not shocked. I dreaded this day and knew it had to come sooner rather than later.

In the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life what most frightened me was not that he would be arrested again for child molestation, although he later was. Rather it was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, "My great fear, and why I felt I had to be distanced from Michael ... was that he would not live long. My fear was that Michael's life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin, like Elvis... Michael is headed in that direction."

I am no prophet and it did not take a rocket scientist to see the impending doom. Michael was a man in tremendous pain and his tragedy was to medicate his pain away rather than addressing its root cause. On many occasions when I visited him he would emerge from his room woozy and clearly sedated. Who were the doctors who were giving him this stuff? Was there no one to save him from himself? Was there no one to intervene?

By the time I met Michael in the Summer of 1999 he was already one of the most famous people in the world. But he seemed lethargic, burned-out, and purposeless. He wanted to consecrate his great fame to helping children but knew he could not due to the 1993 child molestation allegations against him. He was cut off from family and was alienated from the Jehovah's Witnesses Church which had nurtured him. He could barely muster the energy to complete the album he was working on. The only thing that seemed to motivate him was his children, to whom he was exceptionally devoted.

As we grew closer I tried to impress on Michael that his salvation would come not from further concerts or album sales but from reconnecting with loved ones, finding a spiritual anchor, replacing his desire for attention with a hunger for righteous action, and surrounding himself with serious and wise friends. I took him to meet Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate. We lectured at Carnegie Hall together. At Oxford University he delivered a lecture asking all children to forgive their parents if they had been neglectful. On the way down to the University he had called his father Joe to tell him he loved him. All this was significant progress. He came with me to Synagogue and regularly attended Shabbat dinner. He seemed directed and content.

Alas, Michael could not sustain the spiritual effort. He felt that many of the activities I advocated he undertake, like the day he handed out books to parents to read to their children in Newark, New Jersey, was too ordinary for a superstar. He felt he was being demystified. He needed the throngs, he thrived on the adulation of the crowds.

In many ways his tragedy was to mistake attention for love. I will never forget how, when we sat down to record 40 hours of conversations where he would finally reveal himself for a book I authored, he turned to me and said these haunting words, an exact quote: "I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That's all. That's the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it." One cannot read these words without feeling a tremendous sadness for a soul that was so surrounded with hero-worship but remained so utterly alone. Because Michael substituted attention for love he got fans who loved what he did but he never had true compatriots who loved him for who he was. Perhaps this is why, when so many of his inner circle saw him destroying his life with prescription medication - something he used to treat phantom physical illnesses which were really afflictions of the soul - they allowed him to deteriorate and disintegrate rather than throwing the poison in the garbage.

Michael's death is not just a personal tragedy, it is an American tragedy. Michael's story was the stuff of the American dream. A poor black boy who grows up in Gary, Indiana, and ends up a billionaire entertainer. But we now know how the story ends. Money is not a currency by which we can purchase self-esteem and being recognized on the streets will never replace being loved unconditionally by family and true friends.

I miss Michael, I miss him very much. He was far from a saint. But there was a gentility and nobility of spirit that I found humbling and inspiring in a man so accomplished. My heart bleeds for his children whom he adored and who adored him in turn. I think of Prince and Paris and how attached they were to a father who regularly told me that he knew that when they grew up they would be asked by biographers what kind of father he had been. He wanted them to have only warm memories to share. Alas, the memories will remain incomplete.

I pray for them, I pray for his family. And I pray for America.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network, and is the author of many best-selling books, including the as yet unpublished In the Soul of Michael Jackson.

Two new books describe the decline and fall of Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street's most profitable, if not the most moral, investment banks. The books, House of Cards and Street Fighters, describe the culture of arrogance and greed that prevailed at Bear and the contempt with which they treated so many of their clients, not to mention each other. The two dominating personalities at Bear that play larger-than-life roles in both narratives are its legendary chairman, Ace Greenberg and its bridge-playing CEO, Jimmy Cayne.

One would have thought that given the colossal humiliation of having imploded and and been sold for $2 a share in March of 2008 and having served as the first collapse in the deck of cards that nearly brought down all US banking, the greedy sharks at Bear would have learned some sort of lesson. Surely they would have shown a modicum of humility.

Fuuggeetaboutit. I am a witness that Bear has, if anything, grown more arrogant, more contemptuous of its customer base, and more greedy than ever.

I have been a customer of Bear for about seven years. My wife and I have all our retirement savings in two IRA's in the bank. Our accounts were being personally managed by Ace Greenberg. I respected Ace because of his record of philanthropy and devotion to the Jewish community. Unfortunately, this never translated into caring much for our accounts. Ace was always friendly to me. He just never had time for me. With about two hundred thousand dollars in both accounts, I was a minnow in a sea of Ace's whales. So I didn't expect much and was grateful for whatever tiny morsels of attention I could pry out of Ace.

Our accounts never performed particularly well under Ace, but I bore with it because I was honored that a legend of his stature looked after our accounts.

But when Wall Street began to decline, our accounts dropped catastrophically. Ace had invested nearly all our money in large cap stocks which were battered the hardest on the street. I called Ace several times to discuss moving the money into other stocks, as usual I got about thirty seconds of his time on the phone. Growing increasingly worried at our dwindling portfolio, I suddenly bumped into another Bear trader, Matt Zimmerman, at a children's party. For the next few months he made a play to get our accounts. He emailed me, called my wife and did everything possible to convince us that Ace was wrong for us and although he was a very junior trader he had the time to really take an interest in our accounts. He told us that Ace was hurting our money by concentrating everything in large caps. He promised us the world. He was going to diversify, he worked with people in Europe, he had partners in every strata of financial investment. We were going to be a lot better off with him.

By April 2009 my wife and I had lost approximately forty percent of all our money with Ace Greenberg. Matt continued to press us to move to him. He told me to inform Ace that we were making a change and he would take it from there. I informed Ace that given the catastrophic losses we were suffering we thought it best to make a change. Matt got in touch with Ace, moved our accounts, and that's when the fun began.

We thought that having lost nearly half our money with Bear was bad enough. We were about to discover the greed of a bank that will do anything to milk whatever you have left. Matt, after promoting himself to us as a portofolio manager who did the same with Ace, only with far better connections and much more time, arranged to speak with us on the phone. He began to say that we had to liquidate our positions and move our money to funds he would be looking after. I listened as he went through all the stocks that he suggested we sell. We trusted him and agreed. The next day he called and said that he was moving our money into mutual funds. I was confused. Mutual funds? If I wanted that, I told him, I would have gone to Fidelity, where we once had our money (and did quite well). No, we wanted the personal relatioship of someone who would individually look after our investments, like Ace did and the way he promised us he would. No he said, he doesn't do that. He is going to give our money to someone else to manage. It was at this point that I got suspicious. What were the fees involved in having someone else look after our money? And it was then that I discovered that I had been had. That I was in the hands of a Wall Street con whose only desire was to milk me for as many fees that he could gouge out of me. He informed me that first there would be a 1.5% fee on all the money managed. Then, there was a fee of $75 per transaction from all the stocks we had sold the day before. Then, there would be an approximately 2% fee for the mutual funds. I finally got it. I was the mark. I was the sucker who was in this guy's clutches.

I protested. If you're not managing my money, then why are you charging me a management fee in addition to the mutual funds fee? In fact, I added, 'This is exactly the reason that NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was suing Ezra Mirken. It was not because Mirken had given his funds to Bernie Madoff who had promptly stolen them, but rather that Mirken charged his clients management fees when he never managed the money but simply passed it to Madoff.' Matt started getting flustered. I told him I was being gouged, that he was triple charging us on fees and that it was scandalous that he had liquidated our portfolio to make as many fees as possible without informing us. I demanded to speak to his superior.

The next day Matt called me with Ivan Alfaro on the line. Rarely in my life have I spoken to someone as contemptuous and arrogant as Mr. Alfaro turned out to be. He basically made me feel like an ignorant bumpkin who knew nothing of Wall Street. He justified all the fees, except for the transaction selling fees admitting that Matt should never have charged us since he was liquidating the position to put somewhere else. With the exception of that admission, he interrupted me, talked down to me, and spoke in an abusive tone. He told me that I ought to simply get another manager if we weren't happy with Matt. I was beside myself and demanded that I speak to someone else. He gave me the name of Gary Munowitz but with no phone number.

I called Bear's general number and after much obstuction got through to Mr. Munowtiz, the Senior Managing Director . He treated me just as contemptuously, told me he had no time to speak to me, and said I should call him after the weekend. I made it clear to him that it was his job to investigate and get back to me.

A few days later Mr. Munowitz called me with Mr. Longo, VP, Associate General Counsel at JP Morgan Chase. They told me that Matt had done nothing wrong. Bear would take off the selling transaction fee but would do nothing else. I told them that what I wanted was to restore the account to the exact position before Mr. Zimmerman had sold my shares, especially now that there had been a market rally that we had missed out on. They refused.

I made it clear that if forced to, I would take legal action to defend my rights.

It was at this point that something so surreal happened that you will find it incredulous to read. Ace Greenberg himself called me up. We had been friends for seven years. I had never complained to him even as he lost tens of thousands of dollars and had barely a minute to speak to me. He growled at me, "Shmuley, I am going to tell everyone in this bank that you're an extortionist. That's what you are. An extortionist. You better stop the pressure on the bank to restore your position. I am telling everyone here that you're an extortionist." I was in shock. So that's the way Bear Stearns works. They will lie to you and cheat you. And once you catch them in the act, in their unrequited arrogance they will threaten to detroy you unless you back off and go away.

I told Ace that I could not believe the way he had spoken to me. I told him that his accusation was deeply libelous. How could he threaten a friend and a well-known religious figure with spreading lies in order to silence him? I told him he was being misled by Mr. Zimmerman who had worked behind his back for a year to get him replaced.

A few hours later he called me back and said, "I had Mr. Zimmerman in my office. He denied everything you said. He never contacted you. He never lied to you. You're an extortionist and everyone here will be told."

I quickly got off the phone, had my office compile all of Mr. Zimmerman's emails to me, dating back to June, 2008, and had them sent to Ace, Mr. Munowitz, and Mr. Longo. The emails, which I include as an applendix, clearly demonstrated that Zimmerman had lied through his teeth to Ace. Ace then wrote back to me that he is no longer dealing with this. There was no apology and there was no retraction of the unbelievable libel against my name.

A short while later, Mr. Longo got in touch. He informed me that the bank would indeed restore the position. Based on their calucluation they owed me $3900. This was a pittance of the tens of thousands of dollars I had lost. Still, because I am not a fighter and simply wanted to put the episode behind me, I told them I would accept the settlement. I wanted to get away from Bear Stearns as quickly as possible.

Just when they were supposed to send the check and I was to move my accounts, I suddenly received a phone call from Mr. Longo. Bear Stearns would require me to sign a release. It was emailed to me, the most onerous release I had ever seen and a clear indication that Bear was terrified that the story of their greed, lies, and libel would leak. The release was not limited to Mr. Zimmerman's actions but encompassed all my years at Bear Stearns. Although I am a public figure who writes on values-based issue, it demanded that I essentially never tell a soul about what had happened. It gagged me from ever divulging Mr. Zimmerman or Ace's actions.

I wrote back saying the release was preposterous. I asked them to please amicably settle this, that I would sign the release for Mr. Zimmerman's actions but would not be gagged. I told him it was a gift that I was prepared to go away for $3900 and that they should not be so stupid as to provoke me further. They insisted on the gag. I refused.

So, I was given no choice but to sue Bear Stearns.

I believe fervently that if we who are not investors, we who are simple people who simply want to put away money for ourselves and our families, must take action to stop the greed and corruption on Wall Street.

Of all the sins for which a leader can be guilty, few are as egregious as the simple refusal to lead. Watching President Obama's at first deafening silence and then weak and hyper-cautious words on Iran has been disappointing and painful.

Our President must decide if he will serve as leader or spectator of the free world. This time no one is asking an American President to send in troops. No one is suggesting the deployment of laser-guided bombs. All it takes is a forthright statement from the leader of the free world: "The people of the United States support the people of Iran in their legitimate quest for democracy and freedom and will hold accountable any and all parties responsible for the bloodshed of non-violent demonstrators."

Pretty easy, right? Our President doesn't think so. As he put it, "It is not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling." Wait a minute. Was our President seriously comparing the 1953 CIA-inspired coup of the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq to an organic uprising of the Iranian people against a sham election and a supreme 'religious' leader who threatened to kill them if they protest? And if the President is right and has no right to meddle, then why is he pressuring Iran not to develop nuclear weapons?

Of course we meddle. It's our job to meddle. That's what leadership of the world entails unless President Obama seriously believes that place America occupies on the global stage is akin to Denmark or Madagascar. Meddling is only wrong when it serves a country's selfish, imperial purposes. But when its purpose is to save life and uphold liberty it is not only permitted but obligatory. Plenty of countries rightly 'meddled' in the affairs of the United States when they saw black children being blown down by powerful water hoses and attacked by dogs at civil rights marches. Martin Luther King invited them to meddle, which is why he repeatedly said, "The world is watching," a phrase which President Obama is now using against Iran.

The United State ought to be meddling in Sudan to stop the Janjaweed militias from slaughtering innocent Africans. We ought to be meddling in Myanmar to free the courageous Aung Yun Suu Kwi. President Clinton has apologized numerous times that he did not meddle in Rwanda when 800,000 innocent people were hacked to death and we call the generation that meddled in Europe during the Second World War, 'the greatest generation.' For that matter, I am grateful to the France of the late eighteenth century for agreeing to meddle in Britain's internal affairs when they tried to brutally crush an uprising of colonists overseas. Without their meddling the United States might have been stillborn.

President Obama's advisers justify the President's silence saying that if the US President were to speak out it would be used by the Mullahs as evidence that the uprising in Iran was Western-inspired. Come on. They're going to scapegoat the Great Satan anyway. But how does that absolve us from doing the right thing?

Indeed, it was Dr. King who passionately rejected this argument of 'outside agitator' when it was used against him by eight white Alabama clergymen who accused him of fomenting hatred in their state when King lived in Georgia. In his memorable "Letter from Birmingham Jail" he said, "I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea."

Forty-six years ago another young charismatic President went to the very symbol of Soviet Oppression in Berlin and directly inserted himself into Soviet affairs by identifying himself with the people who were risking their lives for liberty. "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner."

With every passing day I grow more concerned about what might be termed 'The Obama Doctrine.' What is it? As best as I can discern, it is a preservation of the status quo. As Obama himself put it, "America does not presume to know what is best for everyone." Really? We don't presume to know that elections are better than dictatorships? We don't presume to know that women being beaten in the streets for showing an elbow is brutal and refusing to let them ride a bicycle is a form of gender apartheid? Rarely before has an American president spoken out so forcefully in favor of moral relativism. So much for the Declaration of Independence which was written by Thomas Jefferson as a universal proclamation of human liberty asserting that freedom is an 'inalienable' right possessed by each of G-d's children.

President Obama possesses the potential for greatness. He has the intelligence, charisma, and above all oratorical gifts to be an outstanding leader. But it will all hinge on moral courage. He seems too cautious, too afraid of upsetting people, too much a believer in his own popularity to ever risk being unpopular.

Moses was just another spoiled Egyptian prince until the day he chanced upon an Israelite slave being beaten. The Bible relates, "And he looked this way and that way and saw there was no man. Then he smote the Egyptian." When Moses saw there was none but him to address this moral outrage, he sacrificed his cushy position in Egyptian society and acted to right a wrong. At that moment he became instantly unpopular in Egyptian society but he also become an audacious leader. It should be noted that the great liberator and lawgiver could not give a public speech. He was a stutterer whose mouthpiece was his brother Aaron. But then, real leadership does not involve having the best mouth but rather the most courageous heart.


Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's newest book, The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger will be out in July. He is the founder of This World: The Values Network."



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There's a storm coming. It will pit a well-organized community of substantial resources but also substantial insecurity (particularly when it comes to charges of dual loyalty) against a popular president of considerable eloquence but misguided policies that identifies Israeli settlements as the main obstacle to Middle East peace. The inevitable clash will separate sunshine Jewish patriots who back Israel when convenient against those who stand with Israel even when it means losing their invitation to the White House Chanuka party.

The bogus issue of settlements is already being swallowed whole by many well-meaning Jews. Last week Dan Fleshler, a leader of Americans for Peace Now wrote in the New Jersey Jewish Standard that Obama has no choice but to pressure Israel because "it is fruitless for a well-armed, occupying power to negotiate the terms of a viable settlement with an almost defenseless occupied people unless a third party mediates and presses both sides." In reading Fleshler, one wonders whether he has been himself occupied with building a settlement on the moon with no knowledge of event's on earth. Is he seriously suggesting that the thousands of Katyusha rockets and non-stop suicide bombers that have killed more than a thousand Israelis (the population equivalent of thirty thousand dead Americans) have come from a 'defenseless' foe? Would Fleshler likewise argue that the United States ought to have pressure from, say, Russia or China to make peace with the terrorists in Afghanistan, seeing that America now represents a 'well-armed, occupying power' against the comparatively defenseless Taliban? Or is it only Israel that is forbidden from defending itself. Sorry Mr. Fleshler, but Jewish values do not dictate that the only moral Jew is a dead one who refuses to fight in the face of a sixty-year terror onslaught.

Any return to the 1967 borders, which is what Obama's attack on the settlements represents, is simply suicide for Israel. The borders are utterly indefensible. The Arabs know it, which is why they press for it. Had Israel not dismantled its settlements in Gush Katif, Gaza would not have become a terrorist state ruled by Hamas, an organization that kills even more Palestinians than it does Israelis.

But misguided Jewish apologists aside, are the rest of us prepared to speak up against the policies of the administration? By this I do not mean the drunken racist rants of the American Jewish hooligans who got attention disgracing themselves on YouTube last week, their bigoted drivel against our democratically elected President representing an abomination to Judaism. I have already written several columns lamenting how a small minority of the large and praiseworthy contingent of Jewish youth who go to Israel from the United States after High School ostensibly to study in Yeshivas end up instead hanging out on Ben Yehudah Street making asses of themselves. That they have no proper supervision and that they are allowed to go through their year in a drunken stupor is an outrage that must be finally addressed by the institutions who host them.

Rather, I mean courageous and intelligent criticism that accepts the President's praiseworthy efforts in making peace but decries his soft posture on tyranny when he bows to an Arab potentate who oppresses women and warmly embraces the dictator of Venezuela.

Asher Lopatin was one of the first students I met at Oxford and the University's first orthodox Jewish Rhodes scholar. Today he is the successful rabbi of one of Chicago's most youthful congregations. He is also Rahm Emanuel's Rabbi. But that did not stop him from criticizing the White House Chief of Staff in Newsweek for his unfair pressure on Israel. Rabbi Lopatin could easily have basked in the aura of being Rabbi to one of the most influential men in the world. Instead, he spoke truth to power.

In promoting the new translation of his Hebrew prayer book, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks constantly reminds us that he studies Bible with the Prime Minister of England. That's nice. But a few years ago Rabbi Sacks spoke out publicly against Israel, telling London's Guardian newspaper, "There are things that happen on a daily basis which make me feel very uncomfortable as a Jew." Sacks is a brilliant man but with a long history of pandering to whatever audience he happens to be addressing. He would do well to remember the admonishment of Mordechai to Esther on the responsibility of being close to political power: "If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place."

But while Europe and the UK are significant, the main battle lines will be here in the US and now is the time for American Jewry to organize. From schools to Universities to Shules and JCC's we must make it clear that when seventy-six percent of Jews voted for Obama and filled his campaign coffers with cash it was not in the expectation of biased policies against Israel. We're upset, disappointed, and we won't take it. We'll march in the streets, write op-eds and blogs, and publish ads making it clear that America should be standing with the Middle East's only democracy and America's most reliable ally. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, our President undermines his moral authority when he pledges that henceforth America will "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," but then only applies that pledge to Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela, but not to Israel.

Last year, right after Obama captured the democratic nomination, I received a phone call from his campaign asking if I would serve as one of the national chairs of 'Rabbis for Obama.' It was a tempting offer. I was moved by the candidate's remarkable personal story, his iron discipline, his soaring oratory, and most of all, the fact that his victory would be the culmination of my hero Martin Luther King's dream of a man being judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. In the end I declined because I feared that Obama would draw a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians and pressure the former to appease the latter. But even I never suspected that it would happen so quickly and so lopsidedly.


Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network. His upcoming book is The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger.

America is obsessed with a husband and wife who are driving their family off a cliff. Jon and Kate Gosselin were just a nice couple with a lot of kids. Then television got a hold of them. Funny thing what fame can do. It put Susan Boyle in an institution after just a few of her fifteen minutes had ticked by on Britain's Got Talent. And it's tearing the once-happy Gosselins apart, even as the disintegration of their marriage proves the largest rating bonanza for the TLC network in its history.

But at what cost?

TLC is a moral network. I know because they spent millions of dollars sending me around the country healing families in crisis on Shalom in the Home and we are about to launch a new program devoted to helping married couples whose sex lives have disappeared. And yes, their agenda is to make a TV show. But there were many occasions when after a few days of filming the network told me they had the show they needed but I insisted on staying a few days longer to help a particular family through its issues and no one objected even though it cost the network thousands more dollars. On other occasions during counseling alarming facts about particular families came to light during the filming. But we kept it off the air, even though the shock-value would have been great for ratings.

So why this time, when it comes to Jon and Kate, is the network sitting back and letting a family implode, especially when no one doubts that fame and fortune have played an important role in the family's demise? That question has been put to me by hundreds of our viewers who write to me, baffled that TLC has done nothing to save the marriage, if indeed it can still be salvaged at all. I cannot answer that question and I believe that TLC has a responsibility to try and help this family.

Some want the show taken off the air. They feel that reality TV in general is the real enemy, exploiting innocent people's problems to draw viewers. While I don't want to comment on Jon and Kate in particular, there can be no question that a great deal of reality TV is inane, embarrassing, and exploitative. So why, aside from the obvious ego considerations (there are no serious financial considerations as these shows make very little money), do I serve as a reality TV host?

Two reasons. First, let's get real. There is a greater chance of Jimmy Hoffa being found on the surface of the moon than networks dropping the 'unscripted' format. So we may as well utilize the genre to inspire families to fix rather than ignore their problems. Reality TV can help.

Second, and more important, what reality TV, Facebook, and Twitter all point to is a desire on the part of the average citizen to be the center of attention. Perhaps it's the fact that our parents missed too many of our Little League games or that our mature relationships are often so loveless and broken. Whatever the reason, there is a dearth of love in our lives and so we compensate with the poor man's version of affection, namely, attention. We all want to be celebrities. And our lust for fame has made us into a generation of narcissists who update our Twitter status with what we ate for breakfast and how are hemorrhoids are faring. But in the course of sharing the details of our days with others, believe or not we have stumbled on a solution for one of the biggest problems of human existence: growing bored with our own lives.

Time was when everyday life was seen as so monotonous that you had to retreat into Star Trek science fiction in order to keep things interesting. Teens especially spent huge chunks of their time immersed in fantasy video games. But along came reality TV and demonstrated that things as simple as speaking to your spouse and being raised by your parents could actually be interesting.

One of the things that most undermines a marriage is when a husband and wife fail to highlight the small things. A man comes home from work, his wife asks him how his day went and he offers a monosyllabic retort, "Same." Conversation over. In truth his wife is fascinated by the small things of her husband's day. He's the one who thinks it's boring. Indeed it can be said that in life there are no small things. The good life accrues to those who see the ordinary as extraordinary, the natural as miraculous, and the everyday as unique. Couple are held together not by the giant canvass of momentous experience but by the small fibers of everyday occurrence.

This is also an important lesson for our teenagers who too often make the mistake of idolizing famous rock stars because of the perceived glamour of the celebrity's red-carpeted life. While the Jonas brothers are singing in front of fifty thousand crazed girls, Sheila is making her bed and taking out the garbage. But if, by some mechanism, sharing the experience of doing something as ordinary as homework could be seen as glamorous and something others wish to read, perhaps, the teenager might be reengaged in their own lives instead of living vicariously through a damaged star.

Reality TV might just bring us back to reality. Facebook and Twitter might just lead us to appreciate the small stuff, so long as we don't go off the deep end and make them into super time-wasting indulgences of unfettered narcissism that preclude us from ever meeting real people.

It helps that Twitter let's you post only 140 characters at a time, a near impossibility for a Rabbi and a clear indication of anti-Semitic intent on the part of its creators.

So let me practice my brevity by summarizing my points in Twitter format:

1. Reality is always more interesting than fantasy.

2. Little things are really big things. Nothing in life is inconsequential.

3. Fans are good. Followers are better. Friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter.


There, all done. Now back to writing my twenty-page Sabbath sermon. I know you can't wait.

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Here's a glimpse of religion in America. All gays all the time. It seems that there is nothing else that can capture the spiritual imagination of this nation. Jesus came to the world to stop the damned gays. He had precious little else to say.

Forget the fact that we Americans are desperate to be liberated from our materialism and narcissism. Or that our youth are clamoring for anything other than American Idol to inspire them. We clerics will get around to it just as soon as we stop them gays.

The latest installment in the American obsession with gay marriage comes from Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who said in the Miss Universe competition that she opposes gay marriage and was immediately championed as a Christian heroin throughout America. But it seems that her Christianity could not find expression in preventing her from posing topless for men or having the Miss Universe pageant pay for her breast implants. Now I ask you honestly, what is a bigger threat to heterosexual marriage today? Gay marriage or porn? When a wife waits alone in bed for her husband who is downloading pictures of naked women on his laptop, do you really believe she consoles herself by thinking, "Well at least those gays can't marry"?

For all my Christian brothers and sisters who scapegoat gays for undermining the institution of marriage, I would remind them that we straight people have done a mighty fine job of destroying it ourselves, thank you very much. The gay population in the United States is at most ten percent while the heterosexual divorce rate is more than fifty percent and has been so well before gay rights ever became a national issue.

The foremost danger to marriage in our time is the wholesale degradation of women in popular culture. In magazines, on TV, and especially on Internet porn, women are portrayed as the libidinous man's plaything, not an equal to be respected but a subordinate to be used. On college campuses male womanizing is an expected right of passage. Why devote yourself to one woman when idiotic shows like The Bachelor reinforce the idea that the rich and good-looking guys get to have a harem. Even well-meaning women like Miss California who participate in porn become complicit in their own degradation and further the male view that a woman's principle purpose is to satiate male erotic needs.

Beauty pageants don't help much either and it's surprising that my Christian clerical brothers haven't spoken out against them as they have gay marriage. Can you believe that sixty years after feminism rightly pointed out that a woman's mind is even more important than her legs we still have televised contests of women parading around in their underwear for Donald Trump to rate their bodies? And what would Jesus say about Miss California's implants? Would he endorse the message that women ought to stuff their chests with silicon to appear as perfect male eye-candy, or would he emphatically declare that beauty is not merely skin deep?

How any of this congruent with Christian values is beyond me, but it seems that we've entered some weird Twilight Zone where opposition to gay marriage alone makes one into a Christian in good standing.

Look. I'm not here to condemn Carrie Prejean and I can of course be just as religiously inconsistent. But my point is that America has real problems and can really use an authentic spiritual voice to lead us out of the shallowness, greed, divorce, and teen sex that are plaguing our country. And so long as we make gay marriage the only issue of importance we abscond our moral responsibility to provide spiritual leadership to a starving generation. Most of all we shift our focus away from combating the misogyny that has become such a central staple of American culture.

Patti Stanger, Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker, and I recently debated in Los Angeles in front of 1100 young people about Patti's belief that women ought to marry rich husbands. I argued that this just fuels the stereotype of women as greedy gold-diggers prepared to sell themselves as a commodity to a guy with cash. When men come to believe these stereotypes it affects their respect for women. Soon they believe that can they can neglect their wives as long as they give them credit cards. But three quarters of all divorces today are initiated by wives who are making their own money and would rather be alone than remain with a distant husband in an empty marriage. The most influential TV show over the past decade was Sex in the City where four female friends have nearly given up on men and turn to each other for intimate companionship instead. As for married women in America, approximately thirty percent are on an anti-depressant and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times scored big by publishing a book suggesting that perhaps women are better off without men.

As for the guys, well, the only ones who still want to get married are gay. While the gay men are out petitioning the Supreme Court for the right to get hitched, the straight guys are inventing brilliant excuses not to wed their girlfriends with whom they have lived for years and even have children. It's curious that Brad Pitt proclaims that he and Angeline Jolie, who admirably have six kids together, will only get married when all people, gays included, can wed. But that has not stopped him from adopting children even though in most states gays can still not adopt. Which just goes to show you that when a man wants to find reasons to stay single he becomes as bright as Einstein.

We can save marriage in America and get men to become gentlemen who treat women like ladies. But that must be accompanied by women not only demanding male respect, but respecting themselves as well.



Rabbi Shmuley Boteach this week publishes his new book, "The Blessing of Enough: Becoming Materially Content and Spiritually Hungry." He is the founder of ThisWorld: The Values Network. www.shmuley.com

Last Friday night at our Sabbath dinner table I was asked by one of our esteemed guests, Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey, what I thought of Bergen County's Blue Laws. Roughly stated, the Blue Laws here in my county of New Jersey -- one of the largest shopping mall Meccas in the United States -- mandate that, in the words of the ordinance of the borough of Paramus, the 'physical, intellectual and moral good of the community requires a periodic day of rest from labor.' All stores, with rare exceptions, are closed on Sunday, America's Sabbath.

I told the Governor, a man of unique sincerity and humility, that the consensus among all economists is that the American economic collapse came about through greed, reckless spending, and reckless borrowing. What better way to remedy it than to give our citizens the gift of a day of saving rather splurging, suffused with peace rather than clogged with traffic, a day where remedy our inner emptiness not through the impulse purchase but through prayer at Church, bike-riding with the kids, and lunching with friends.

At this my soul-friend of eighteen years, Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, a rising political superstar, interjected with an objection. 'But Shmuley, then Bergen County's retailers lose revenue from all the shoppers who are going to go elsewhere to buy what they need.'

It's rare that I disagree with Cory. But here I countered, "President Bush thought that the answer to 9/11 was to encourage not sacrifice but shopping. (His exact words, on September 20th, 2001, were, "Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.") He is a religious man, but he forgot to remind us to reconnect with family and rediscover our spiritual center. And the economy didn't turn out too well with that message, so we have to try another."

Of all the remedies to the American consumer insatiability that so undermined our national character and finances over the last few years none is as effective, nor as direct, as America simply rediscovering its lost Sabbath. Last year I launched a national program called "Turn Friday Night into Family Night" for all American families of every religious, ethnic, and political persuasion to create a weekly family dinner event. Our public service announcements, featuring leading celebrities and politicians endorsing the idea, are already airing on television, courtesy of the Discovery networks, and thousands of families have already signed up.

But beyond a weekly family feast, we need a national Sabbath.

As a kid growing up in Miami I often went to the mall with my friends on Sundays. It was weird, standing around, looking for things to do, at best grabbing a movie. Thankfully, I was never fully bitten by the shopping bug and today I am bored to death whenever I go shopping, as every self-respecting man ought to be. Not because I'm less materialistic than the next guy, but, having discovered the joys of riding my bike by the Thames when I lived in Oxford, or taking long walks in the woods by our home here in New Jersey, shopping is a mediocre substitute by comparison. As a parent I have learned that one of the best gifts I can give my children is a love for being free and outdoors rather than being indoors at a department store where nothing is free.

Every human being begins life experiencing an inner emptiness. And the steps you take to fill that void will constitute the single greatest determinant of character. The notion that a person's truest self is most revealed in the disposition of his 'play' time is anticipated in the Talmud (Eruvin 65b) which declares that a man's character can be tested in three ways: be'kiso, be'koso, u've'kaaso, what he spends his money on, what he says when he is intoxicated, and what provokes him into anger.

But there is a further opinion in the Talmud: Af Be'sahako, 'also, in his "play.' A person is known by how they use, or abuse, their leisure time. Victor Frankl says in Man's Search for Meaning, "There is a kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. Such widespread phenomena as alcoholism and juvenile delinquency are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them.... Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money." Or, in the case of modern America, the will to spend money. In this Frankl was prophetic. Studies show that the number one cure to depression in America is shopping.

Summing up the negative consequences of inactivity and how this can lead to toxic dispositions like greed and insatiability, the ancient Rabbis declared, "When there is nothing to do, you do what you ought not do." How odd that a country with such a noble heritage like the United States has now been reduced to finding meaning through material acquisition.

I recognize, of course, that an economy needs people to consume and that stores need people to shop. But given the spendthrift and wasteful ways that have not only eviscerated our national treasure but have also made Americans into a world caricature of material indulgence, a spiritual renaissance is called for.

I believe in the tension of the weekdays. Inner pressure leads to external action and internal unease motivates us to maximize our potential through professional achievement and hard work. But I believe equally that if that tension and individual effort is not balanced by a day of peace and communal sharing our lives will fall into a state of toxic imbalance. We will lurch, as we have already, from being a country of great wealth to a country that has stared the prospect of bankruptcy in the eye. And not just financial bankruptcy but the far more insidious personal bankruptcy of an empty life, devoid of purpose and meaning. No wonder then that all work and no play makes Johnnie a dull, boring, and broke, boy.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach launches his newest book, The Blessing of Enough: Becoming Materially Satisfied and Spiritually Hungry, on June 1st. Follow him on Twitter as RabbiShmuley.

On Friday October 23, 1998, I sat in a London hotel room with Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, a world authority on Jewish history, as his son Binyamin, the Prime Minister of Israel, signed the Wye River accords. The professor, the patriarch of a family of hero sons who nobly serve the Jewish state, including Yoni who fell at Entebbe, had been my guest lecturing to our students in Oxford on the Spanish Inquisition. It was clear that this famous Jabotinskean defender of Greater Israel was pained by his son's actions and he commented to me that, given the immense pressure from President Clinton, his son had no choice but to capitulate and forfeit land to Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Now, 11 years later, Binyamin Netanyahu is again Prime Minister and he is no doubt about to face the same pressure from a new American president as he travels to Washington to meet Barack Obama.

I first met the Prime Minister when as Israel's young deputy Foreign Minister he accepted my invitation and electrified audiences of thousands at Oxford, most of whom were hugely hostile to him. Over that and future visits I discovered that Netanyahu is a Jew of immense pride and an orator of unequalled power. Contrary to the constant press billing of him as "a hardliner," at Oxford he went out of his way to court the Arab and Jewish students who came to heckle him and managed to befriend more than a few. His message was consistent. The only hope for Middle-East peace was Arab democratization. He repeatedly cited the unassailable fact that in the history of the world no two democracies had ever gone to war against one another. If there was to be Middle East peace it would have to come not from Israel, a liberal democracy, making territorial concessions when it was already the size of a postage stamp but from the Arab world liberating their citizens from political tyranny and the Palestinians ceasing to teach their children that Israel is a cancer that must be eradicated.

So what changed at Wye? We all know the answer. With the sole exception of Yitzchak Shamir, every one of Israel's most recent Prime Ministers has caved to incalculable American and international pressure to exchange "land for peace." In every instant the surrender was catastrophic providing Israel with neither peace nor respect. Menachem Begin allowed Jimmy Carter to bully him into the Camp David accords. Yet Carter today accuses Israel of apartheid and Egypt exports more anti-Semitism than almost any nation on earth.

The Oslo accords are the greatest self-inflicted wound by any nation over the last fifty years. Oslo gave us the suicide bomber which gave us Israel's fence which gave us the condemnation of Pope Benedict last week in Bethlehem.

And where is Israel after all these concessions? It is arguably the most hated and most vulnerable nation on earth. So hated is Israel that when the Iranian President broadcasts his intentions to destroy it, no other nation even has the decency to break off diplomatic relations with Iran and Netanyahu himself is reduced to supplicating the Pope, whose Vatican enjoys full diplomatic relations with Iran, to condemn Ahmedinejad's promise of another holocaust.

Last June I watched a compelling candidate Obama address AIPAC and say that he would get involved in the peace process "from the start of my administration." But did that mean pressure on Israel from day one? This year I heard Rahm Immanuel say that the solution to Iran's bellicosity lies in progress in Israel's peace process with the Palestinians.

Come on Rahm. Say it ain't so. Surely you realize that it's not Israeli intransigence which is responsible for the mess in the Middle East but that the fault lies with Arab leaders who have oppressed their people and denied them democracy and human rights for more than half a century and have successfully scapegoated Israel as the source of Arab suffering.

This week Netanyahu has the opportunity to marshal his stunning eloquence to set the record straight.

He can begin by responding to Pope Benedict's criticism of Israel's security fence and recent war in Gaza. Surely it's a little bit rich for a man who travels around in a bunker-on-wheels to condemn Israel for protecting its citizens. If Israel had Canada as a neighbor it wouldn't need a fence just as if the Pope only spoke to nuns he would not need a traveling fortress. No doubt we Americans would prefer to forego the intrusive security at our airports. But we submit to the inconveniences because we don't take kindly to the sight of our citizens leaping from burning skyscrapers.

As for Gaza, the Pope himself witnessed the ravished state of Germany after the Second World War. But he would presumably not blame the demolition in Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden on the allies but on the German people themselves who democratically elected a genocidal maniac as their leader and then dragged the world into history's bloodiest war. He could have warned the residents of Gaza that in Hamas they similarly elected a terrorist organization, sworn to Israel's destruction, as their leaders and that there are consequences to using one's territory as a launching pad for murderous rockets.

In our age some religious leaders make the mistake of believing that morality always involves love but never hatred, an embrace of victims but never a revulsion of their oppressors. My Christian brothers especially quote Jesus as saying, "Love your enemies," as a teaching against hatred. Little do they focus on Jesus' precision in saying "your enemies," rather than "G-d's enemies." Your enemy is the man who steals your parking space. G-d's enemies are terrorists who murderer His children.

Rather than perpetuating the myth of Arab victimhood, Western leaders, the Pope included, should call on our Islamic brothers and sisters to restore Islam to its historical grandeur as a religion that once embraced the Jewish refugees of the Spanish Inquisition when they were expelled by Catholic princes who betrayed Christianity by preaching violence in G-d's name.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of "This World: The Values Network." Follow him on Twitter or read his website here.

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, says that she should not be penalized for her opposition to gay marriage and that America is a place for freedom of speech. She is absolutely right. People should not be penalized for their opinions.

But what puzzles me is how she believes that gay marriage would harm the institution of marriage and is anti-Christian but that her posing topless is none of those things.

Huh? The real danger to marriage in our time is the rampant culture of male womanizing, lack of commitment, and the assault on women's dignity which treats women as masturbatory material for men. Women who engage in pornographic offerings become complicit in their own degradation and further the male view that a woman is not to be respected as an equal but rather, is a means to salacious male ends.

Miss California also reportedly accepted breast implants for the Miss Universe pageant. Now, aside from the silly relic of beauty pageants still existing in a time when women ought to be appreciated for their minds and not just their legs, surely dissatisfaction with one's body and implanting foreign objects to enhance one's perceived physical shortcomings somewhat negates the Christian and spiritual message that beauty is something more than skin deep. Surely, if asked, Jesus would have said that women are more than male eye-candy.

Whether people oppose or support gay marriage, one thing is certain: since the gay population in the U.S. is approximately ten percent, and the heterosexual divorce rate is about fifty percent, we straight people ought to be blaming ourselves for the destruction of marriage instead of finding scapegoats.


Rabbi Shmuley Boteach achieved worldwide recognition from bestsellers like Kosher Sex, radio and TV shows like TLC's "Shalom in the Home", and syndicated columns in the international press. In 2000 he was the London Times "Preacher of the Year".

For more information contact Kennia Ramirez on 201 816 3540 or write to Kennia@shmuley.com.

David Brooks wrote in last week's New York Times that what he learned upon his most recent visit to Israel is that an Israeli's greatest fear is to be seen as a frier, a sucker. Perhaps it's a lesson that we Americans ought to learn as well.

Over the past few months it is clear that Wall Street has made the American taxpayer its sucker. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Wall Street pay levels have now returned to 2007 levels, with Goldman Sachs now having "set aside $4.7 billion for worker pay in the quarter. If that level continues all year, it would add up to average pay of $569,220 per worker -- almost as much as the pay in 2007, a record year." The problem is that Goldman Sachs, along with most Wall Street banks, has taken billions of dollars in government bailout money and, as the Times argued, rather than continue to pay their employees astronomical salaries 'some of that revenue... could be used by bailed-out banks to pay back taxpayers."

If you had told me that the day would come when the average American taxpayer, who makes on average $45,000 a year, would be asked to donate toward the income of those making at least ten times more (let alone those who are making tens of millions a year), I would scarcely have believed it. But welcome to the modern American rip-off.

When I lived in England for eleven years I often pondered on the difference between the English get-in-the-cue mentality versus the sharper American elbow sensibility. We used to be a nation that just wouldn't take it. Two centuries ago we rebelled against the British for taxing our tea. But today we largely remain silent as we are taxed to help Wall Street bankers make the payments on their Hampton homes and convertible Ferraris.

Look, if you're a wealthy American and you want to buy a Yacht, G-d bless you. There ought to be no class warfare in a country that prides itself on rewarding people for entrepreneurial effort. But you can't ask secretaries, flight attendants, and firefighters, who are struggling to pay their utility bills, to finance your butler.

Where is the reform of Wall Street that we were all promised after the scandals that started with the collapse of Bear Stearns a year ago and continued with the million-dollar bonuses that were paid to the geniuses at AIG who left the American taxpayer with a $200 billion dollar bill?

A few weeks ago my new Bear Stearns account manager attempted to hit me with triple commissions on a new investment strategy for my retirement account, after it had already shrunk by a third. Had I not asked questions, I would have been charged a percentage on the total amount invested, the mutual funds they were going to place my money into (which begs the question, why should I pay them just to hand over my money to be managed by someone else?), and finally a commission on every sale of stock that had to be liquidated in order to place the money in a managed account. After raising a ruckus the fees were refunded. But surely the publication of the new best-seller A House of Cards detailing the fall of Bear Stearns due to irresponsible greed would have been enough for the firm to want to reform their ways. Apparently not.

And this just seems indicative of the general direction of America. We're all expected to tighten our belts and get serious about saving money as our government engages in reckless spending and taxes us up the wazoo.

I live in New Jersey and if any of you are thinking of joining me you ought to first grow a third kidney to make sure you can pay the taxes. In my small town of Englewood we pay some of the highest taxes in the nation. Yet the street down the road from me has pot-holes that can you descend into and resurface only about a week later. There are arcane rules about what you can leave for the garbage, so you end up owning a large vehicle to make regular trips to the local dump. The public school system spends on average $23,000 per child per year, even as their test results are some of the lowest in the State. Still, Governor Corzine, a man I know personally to be kind, dedicated and brilliant, thinks the remedy to our state's problems is to raise taxes further. Many of us are thinking it might be time to find a new home.

And what shocks me while all this goes on is how little protest anyone hears. In our city a brave man name Raphael Bachrach tried to establish a Hebrew language Charter school which might have allowed some of the religious Jewish parents to recoup a couple of bucks of their hard-earned tax money through the establishment of a school where Hebrew and Jewish history would be taught. It died a quick death through lack of support.

Are Americans getting soft? If we would have lived under George the III, might we just have sipped our expensive and tax-laden tea with a few empty murmurs about the injustice of being taxed unfairly?

About eighteen years ago I started writing essays about the dangers of Wall Street. At Oxford I watched as scores of my students who were studying law and medicine abandoned their intended professions to accept high paying jobs in finance. What would happen to a society, I pondered, in which the brightest minds were no longer building anything but were simply taking one hundred dollars and making it into two? Not that finance isn't important, but the industry became so dominant that it created a brain drain in nearly every other sector. Who would create the medical breakthroughs of tomorrow? Who would invent renewal sources of energy? But what I did not foresee is that even with all those brilliant people Wall Street itself would collapse. The reason, money without purpose creates a zero sum game in which accumulation alone becomes the objective. The system is gradually bankrupted by greed.

The people I personally know on Wall Street who never succumbed to that greed were those who saw money as a means rather than an end. They made huge amounts in order to give away huge amounts to worthy causes. In other words, they placed justice at the center of their financial enterprises.

But a lot of us are feeling that there is little that is just right now in American tax and bailout policies. And since the cornerstone of every society is justice, it's a problem that has to be remedied before people lose faith in the system.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values Network. His most recent best-seller is 'The Kosher Sutra.' www.shmuley.com.