I want to make a fresh start.
I call a friend Wednesday morning.
Friend: "You’re going to be coming out of the kosher Subway on Pico Blvd and we’re going to pull you into a van and take you to San Bernadino for three weeks of active deprogramming.
"Aliyah? What are you smoking?"
Luke: "I’d like to work on my Hebrew."
Friend: "That’s UCLA Extension. Seven to ten. You want me to sign you up?
"Go work for a jeweler downtown.
"You’d hate it in Israel. The majority of Israelis are not religious. You’d be with the nutters. Your love of porn would rekindle. The next thing you know it’ll be the song from Midnight Cowboy and you’re back on the plane.
"Come on. I’m the Ghost of Hanukkah Future.
"I can see you now with a beard down to your knees living in a settlement with an uzi putting stones on Baruch Goldstein’s grave. All supported by my tax dollars."
Luke: "I want to be an integrated person. I want to carry a gun. I want to shoot terrorists. I want to bring the moshiach."
Friend: "You and Ahmadinejad."
"You need to voluntarily commit yourself for 48 hours. It’s like a mental detox and then you’re free. ‘I want to work in an office park selling magazine subscriptions to save enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Israel to make aliyah to live in a settlement where I’ll never be accepted and forever suppress my healthy urge to download pornography.’"
Luke: "I want to live in Jerusalem."
Friend: "You’re close enough to Jerusalem. You live amongst the Orthodox."
Luke: "You’ve never been to Israel. If you went, you’d believe."
Friend: "I’ve never been to Baghdad."
"You think that when you move into some settlement on the West Bank, uzi on your shoulders, beard down to your knees, all of a sudden you say to yourself, ‘Now would be a good time to listen to Air Supply.’ You click that on. You think Rabbi Goldstein isn’t going to smash that vinyl LP with extreme prejudice? He’s not going to want to hear that crap. ‘What is this, Levi?’ ‘It’s from my youth.’
"He’s going to smash it."
"The minute you go online, and it’s going to be dial-up, and download porn, it’s over. You’ll be caught and exiled. As you’re leaving, Palestinians will hurl stones at you."
"The Talmud, please? It’s all man-made. Find another rabbi in the Talmud who says porn is acceptable. ‘In 51 CE, Rabbi Yose Mendleson said that to celebrate the naked body openly and commercially is not a sin.’ You just need one Talmudic citation and find a rabbi who says, ‘We can probably stretch this to include porn.’
"And your rejoinder is, ‘I’m not doing any gay porn. It’s all straight.’ And you’re fine.
"This is something out of The Counterlife. You’re Philip Roth.
"I can read it now, ‘American blogger befriends Yigal Amir and I’ll read a quote from Adlerstein defending the correspondence. ‘Yigal Amir is a political prisoner and the correspondence with him is an attempt to let the rest of the world know that a hero lies in prison.’"
Luke: "Adlerstein believes the opposite. Stop slandering the rabbi."
Friend: "You should be running down Pico Blvd arms flailing screaming, ‘I’ve seen the future.’
"I’m offering you freedom and you want to remain a slave. I’m brandishing the key to your chains. You’re been imprisoned for so long that you don’t know what to do. You’re an Iraqi. You don’t know what to do with freedom so you start blowing stuff up.
"That van is going to die on the 101 as you try to drive to Calabassas every morning to some job in a boiler room where you’re going to sell magazine subscriptions. You’re going to be 300 pounds from eating snickers bars. And you’re going to be constantly hung up on… You’re going to have a cigar-chomping boss cursing you out for not making your quota.
"Forget the rabbis. They have congregations paying their salaries. You’ve got to eat.
"I’ll find you a nice Reform synagogue where everybody is in the same industry. Then you can connect! ‘Hey man, what do you do?’ ‘I’m uhh, I’m uhh, I’m in entertainment.’ ‘Really? What’s the name of your company?’ ‘Umm, Up The Ass Productions. It’s distribution.’
"You can wear the tallis still.
"This will be your most heavily trafficked post in the past month, notwithstanding your Eliot Stein post. Internet pioneer. Yeah, it was him and the crew at the Pentagon that created Arpanet. He had a celebrity column.
"He was the first person to teach high school history. Before then it was just known as social studies. He went to the California Department of Education and said, ‘I have an idea and we can put this in every high school in America.’"
Luke: "I’m going to sell religious artifacts. The Luke Ford Lulav."
"Where would the first Jewish suicide bomber go?"
Fred suggests:
1. Mecca (during the Hajj)
2. The Dome of the Rock
3. KPFA in Berkeley
4. Anyplace else in Berkeley
5. A Louis Farakhan gathering
6. Gaza
Chaim Amalek writes:
Such attempts at humor prove that just minutes detached from the world of porn, you have lost your way. What law firm will hire you on as a manretary now?
Maybe there is a hedge fund in LA run by guys who are really way into porn. And maybe one of them would be willing to hire you.
Now that you have "left" porn, how rooted are you to LA? If you really are leaving porn, why should you remain there? Living in NY (where there is no porn industry worthy of the name), the yetzer horah would have far fewer opportunities to lure you back into the fleshpots of Onan and, believe me, you would find it far far far easier to be a Jew – ANY sort of a Jew – living here than you do living there. You wouldn’t need a car, so you could ditch the van, and you could milk your legit media connections here in ways not possible there.
So why not give New York a shot?
Avraham writes:
Levi, It sounds like you are standing at a crossroad in your life. Don’t listen to them. Listen to your inner / authentic voice. Parshat Lech – Lecha and it commands: Go! Not to San Bernadino, New York or Bombay. Leave it all and go TO YOU… Into your authentic self, where you will find the answers. Follow your heart. Don’t fear the journey of self-discovery. You aren’t loosing much here. I SAY GO!!! It doesn’t have to be forever. Please stay in touch with your readers. CAUTION: Be realistic and know what to expect there. At age 40 the likelihood of you carrying a gun has diminished to zero. You are too old for the army. Use your pen. Your words are sharper then a weapon.
