JustASC

Celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach drives a lot of people crazy — for his apparent hunger for the limelight, for injecting himself and his Torah-meets-Oprah philosphizing into the latest celebrity scandal, or for his disingenuously irreverent marketing of fairly conservative Jewish family values (his latest book is the Kosher Sutra). He also irks other Jewish writers and clergy — and I’m one of them — who would love even a fraction of his audience.

What bugs me, however, is the presumptuous of his enterprise. Part of what makes Rabbi Boteach so prolific is his willingness to put words to paper and paper to printer without the sort of rigorous process of introspection or research that would lead to  real  — what’s the right word? Oh yeah: knowledge.

For example, look at his take on the Tiger Woods affair(s) in the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. He doesn’t accept the idea that celebs like Woods cheat because they can, or that in their circles, the temptations are many and the constraints are few. Nor does he discuss the range of reasons that might lead a young man with infinite means, infinite fame, and a convenient travel itinerary to stray.

No, Boteach, based on nothing I can see but his own certainty, knows exactly why Tiger Woods — a total stranger to him, apparently — cheated:

In truth, men have affairs not for physical reasons but for emotional ones. They cheat not out of a sense of confidence but out of a state of brokenness. Not out of a sense of how desirable they are but out of a sense of what failures they are. And this is especially true of men like Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton who live in a hyper-competitive environments where they realize that they are only special to the extent that they keep on winning. Men like these are particularly broken, living as they do just one failure away from obscurity. They know that their value as human beings rests entirely in other people’s hands. And they live in permanent and painful insecurity. They constantly question their self-worth and they turn to women both to feel desirable and sexy and to comfort them from their pain.

To which the only thoughtful response must be: How the hell does he know? Did Tiger or Clinton confide in him, the way Michael Jackson apparently did? Does he know anything about Tiger — a famously private person, before the scandal hit — other than what he read in the papers this week? On this he bases a diagnosis?

If Boteach used similarly broad, unfounded generalizations in the context of therapy or counseling a congregant, he’d be committing malpractice.

 A couple of years back, in an essay on the “herd isntinct,” Boteach writes, “The desire to be loved is so strong that most people are prepared to erase their individuality, obliterate their uniqueness, just in order to be accepted.” How is it not erasing Woods’ individuality or uniqueness by presuming, with so little first-hand knowledge, to know what is or is not going on inside the golfer’s head or family? 

In another essay on Jewish values, Boteach wrote:

Practicing humility involves listening to other people’s stories without always having to inject details of your own. Being humble means refraining from judging people and instead seeking out their virtue.

Sounds like good advice. Men like Shmuley ought to heed it.