I don’t think I’ve ever told on anyone to authority. I never dobbed in another kid to a teacher or to my parents or to any authority. I hated kids who did that.
I grew up a preacher’s kid on Seventh-Day Adventist college campuses. It felt like I couldn’t get away with anything. I was always watched and reported for my sins. When I was at Avondale in Australia, other kids would tell on me all the time for swearing, rambunctious behavior and the like. Yep, they’d go to the teacher and report that I said the word “bloody.” They’d tell on me for making fun of the retarded kids visiting our school. They’d tell on me for having a pile of candy (a sin in Adventism).
This didn’t happen to me nearly as much at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley. California Adventists were much cooler than Australian Adventists.
It never occurred to me to dob anyone in. If I had a problem with somebody, I either tried to work it out with the person directly, or I spoke to mutual friends, or I did nothing.
Australian author Bob Ellis nails it: “Being a Seventh-Day Adventist was hard but it was kinda fair. They quickly sorted out the ones they couldn’t trust and branded us with the mark of Cain and sent us wandering, fugitive sinners, through the Land of Nod for all our days.” (The Nostradamus Kid)
When I converted to Judaism, I got turned in to the rabbis for my indiscretions. I remember when I was in Orlando and attending the Conservative synagogue Ohev Shalom. I met this woman who was attending college out of town. So I started writing to her. In one letter, I included an article my Christian mother wrote about trying to understand my interest in Judaism.
So this girl showed my letter to her mother and her mom sent her to her Hillel rabbi. They were worried I was trying to infiltrate the Jews to make converts to Christianity. My rabbi eventually reviewed my letter and attachment and saw nothing wrong with it.
So one Friday night at shul, I ran into the girl and her mom and they made some awkward explanation and I avoided them after that.
Oh, I also got into trouble when I wouldn’t let this dyke into shul when the rabbi was speaking. She took it to the board and I got relieved from my usher position for acting like a Nazi.
In March of 1994, I moved to Los Angeles. At a singles event in a shul, I showed this guy some lingerie photos a girl had sent me. And this guy turned me in to the organizer. Oy vey!
On an intermediate day during Succot, I exchanged a bunch of tawdry notes with a woman in an Orthodox rabbi’s succah. We forgot the paper and the rabbi found it and called me up and got stuck into me. He didn’t call the girl. He probably knew she wouldn’t take any of his remonstrance. There’s something about me that screams, “Kick me!”
Over the years, fellow congregants would turn in things I wrote online to the rabbi and I’d get called on the carpet and sometimes asked to leave the shul.
2 He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
4 Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
