I was sitting with a group of Gentiles last week. They were discussing Shmuley Boteach’s book “Face Your Fear“. They love his TV show "Shalom in the Home."
They were impressed I knew Shmuley.
He was one rabbi they could connect with. It seems for most Gentiles that Judaism is a foreign language. They don’t have the foggiest clue. Only the rare Jew can communicate the tradition to the world.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the renowned U.S. writer and broadcaster, has said that pop superstar Michael Jackson "threw his life away" by taking doses of medication he knew were lethal.
"As far as Michael Jackson is concerned, his death is a terrible tragedy, a terrible loss of life, a terrible waste of human potential," Boteach, a onetime friend of the late superstar, told Haaretz this week. "I’m very sad that he threw away his life, because he did throw away his life."
Boteach, 42, whom Newsweek ranked seventh on its 2009 list of the "Top 50 Rabbis in America," was a friend of Jackson’s for several years at the beginning of the decade.
"Michael knew what he was doing," he said. "He knew that the drugs he was taking – that the amount that he was taking – could kill him at any moment. And many people tried to stop him and discourage him, and it’s very, very sad and tragic that he lived with so much pain that he couldn’t stop."
The rabbi said he never said Jackson taking drugs; but he added that he speculated that the "King of Pop," who died on June 25 after reportedly having been administered drugs such as propofol and lorazepam, had in fact been using narcotics.
