Dear Id,
It was great to meet you last week at shul..
Very rarely does one meet such a bright, funny fellow.
I have not read critically, but there’s obviously a theme here around self-promotion of the bad-boy you. This is a dead-end, my friend. My unsolicited advice is that you start taking the high-road, Jerry Seinfeld route. Dumber people have done harder things than to put negativity out of bounds. And if that means no more notoriety, so be it.
You’ve reinvented yourself a few times I see… now do it properly. If you have something clever to write about, that is constructive and positive and does not promote lashon hora, do it. Otherwise, get into real-estate or ice-cream scooping or latte making, or whatever. Swallow your pride, and move one. Negativity is a dead-end and you’ll be the loser.
You’re not alone, my friend. Life is a struggle and we’re all battling through, making compromises every day. Yashir koach.
Dear Ego,
Great to meet you.
I don’t think this is a fair evaluation of my work. It’s too easy to dismiss critical but accurate reporting as lashon hara and too easy to dismiss a joke or satire as lashon hara. There’s no inherent virtue in being positive or pious. In the end, you have to evaluate a body of work on its merit and there’s no shortcut to assessing that. Just because a Jewish Journal cover story labels me as a lashon hara trafficker doesn’t make it true.
"Lashon hara!" is usually the first refuge of rascals.
Dear Id,
This stuff is very black and white. When you talk about someone else negatively (especially truthfully) to more than 10 people, you are effectively killing them. When you choose to be religious, you agree to respect a fence around the torah. You agree to stay "on the plantation" for your own preservation (and for "god"). You agree to do the things that "god" wants or if you take a secular, pragmatic view — which simply don’t improve your lot, over the course of time. What goes
around, comes around. Did you read this week’s parsha on good and evil? Us humans need structure and rules, especially those of us inclined to relativistic thinking.
>"Lashon hara!" is usually the first refuge of rascals.
Name-calling is a defensive posture, characteristic of someone who is unwilling to take the second of the two options we discussed at shul. 99% of humanity would give their left testicle for your brain – and your looks. Why are you the last to realize just how many wonderful options you have that are well within the plantation and which will make you rich in so many ways. More importantly, you owe it to yourself, to your potential as a human being, to break your apparent addiction to notoriety.
You get 4,000 page views a day. Why don’t you have advertisers on your site? Is it because you’ve created a toxic envelope around yourself? Do I need to critical read your entire body of work to find out why?
Dude, I like you very much but I will not expose myself to hurt. With your proclivity for defensiveness, secret tape-recording, and public blogging platform, why would I want us to be closer friends? Would I want you to do to me what you did to Dennis? Are you going to blog about me now? Our short relationship is already playing out like the story of the frog and the scorpion trying to cross the river. The scorpion poisons the frog mid-way and when asked why (because he will drown too), says "because I’m a scorpion." I’m a new friend, and that’s
where we’re headed.
This blogging, secrecy, shaming judaism, etc. is bad for friendships, bad for finances, and it just cannot be good for you.
The last time I tried to intervene in somebody’s life, they hurt me badly. He apologized, but the damage is done.
Levi, I wish you luck. You’ve chosen a great play-book (judaism), now use it to your advantage.
