The Michael Jackson Tapes

by Shmuley Boteach

  Michael was anything but a monster. He was a thoughtful, insightful, deeply scarred, and at times very profound soul who was so broken that he could find no healing. No amount of fame or screaming fans would ever rescue him from his inevitable descent into the abyss.

  Michael deserved a different kind of attention, and the public deserved and needed to hear a different kind of message, a eulogy that could bring redemption to Michael’s life. In my sadness and self-questioning, I wrote and published the following words on July 5th, two days before the funeral and memorial service:The death of Michael Joseph Jackson is not just the personal tragedy of a man who died young. Nor does it solely represent a colossal waste of life and talent. Rather it is, above all else, an American tragedy. For whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, our obsession with Michael Jackson, our infatuation with every peculiar detail of his life, stems from the fact that he represents a microcosm of America.

  It has long been fashionable to caricature Michael as an oddball, as a freak. But how different were his peculiarities to our own?

  Michael’s dream was to be famous so that he would be loved. Having been forced into performing as a young boy, he never knew a time when affection was a free gift. Rather, attention, the poor substitute for love with which he made do, was something that he had to earn from the age of five. Hence, his obsession with being famous and his lifelong fear of being forgotten by the crowds. And if that meant purposefully doing strange things in order to sustain the public’s interest, he would pay that price too.

  But how different is that from the rest of us, living as we do in an age of reality TV where washing our dirty laundry in public makes us into celebrities and competing on American Idol promises us that we can be the next Michael Jackson?

  Of course, there was Michael’s constant plastic surgery. How much could one man so hate himself, we asked, that he is prepared to disfigure his face utterly? But the same question could easily be asked of millions of Americans, especially women, who live with extremely poor body image, who starve their bodies and undergo extreme cosmetic procedures—including sticking a needle in their forehead—to rediscover lost beauty and youth.

  Yes, there was Michael’s troubled soul. Could a man so blessed with fame and fortune, we wondered, really be so miserable that he had to numb his pain with a syringe of Demerol? And yet, my friends, America is the richest country in the world with the highest standard of living. Still, we consume three-quarters of the earth’s antidepressants and one out of three Americans is on an antianxiety medication.

  As far as Michael’s materialism and decadence, particularly when we watched him on TV spending millions of dollars on useless baubles, is it really all that different to the rest of us who have maxed our credit cards buying junk we don’t need with money we don’t have, to compensate for an insatiable inner emptiness?

  There were also Michael’s broken relationships. Two divorces, estrangement from brothers and sisters, and extremely questionable and perhaps even criminal sexual activities. Yes, few of us, fortunately, are guilty of such crimes. But the huge success of “barely legal” pornographic Web sites, Girls Gone Wild videos, and the sexualization of teens like Miley Cyrus should perhaps have us question the adolescent nature of our own sexual interests. As for broken relationships, Time magazine just reported that of every 100 marriages, 50 divorce, 25 stay together unhappily, and only 25 are happy.

  In sum, my friends, we are fixated on Michael Jackson because he was always just a very extreme version of ourselves and compacted into his short life a supercharged version of all the strangeness and profligacy of a culture which puts attention before love, fans before family, body before spirit, medical sedation before true inner peace, and material indulgence before spiritual enlightenment. Perhaps the only reason the rest of us did not become as strange or as broken as Michael was that we simply lacked the talent and the resources to do so.

  And therein lies a profound morality lesson. Where Michael goes, the rest of us go. Our obsession with Michael was always selfish. It was a focus on where we ourselves were headed, where our culture and our interests were leading us.

  And now we have the power to take a senseless tragedy and give it meaning by learning from the heartbreaking demise of a once-great legend that life is not about fame and fortune but rather about God, family, community, and good deeds.

  Rest in peace, Michael. May you find in death the serenity you never had in life and may they judge you more charitably in heaven than we did here on earth.

  Our Friendship

  How We Met

  I first met Michael in the summer of 1999 through my friend Uri Geller. While much of the world knows Uri through his claims as a psychic, I knew Uri as a close friend who lived in a town not far from my family’s home in Oxford, England. While I was born and raised in the United States, I spent eleven years at Oxford serving as rabbi to the students of Oxford University and as founder and director of the Oxford L’Chaim Society, a large organization of students that specialized in hosting world leaders lecturing on values-based issues. Uri and his family were frequent guests at our home for Friday night Shabbat dinners and we grew quite close.

  In the summer of 1999, I was a scholar in residence for a program in the Hamptons with my entire family as we prepared to move back to the United States. Uri called me up and simply said, “Shmuley, you should go and meet Michael.” I had known that Uri was acquainted with Michael Jackson and he explained that he’d told Michael about me and that Michael wanted to meet me. By that time I had authored more than a dozen books on marriage, relationships, parenting, and spiritual healing and I guessed that Uri felt Michael needed some guidance in his life and it would be good for him to connect with me.

  So, arrangements were made. Although I was interested in meeting Michael, I did not feel awed at the experience. I had counseled many people who lived life in the spotlight and was already of the opinion that fame did more harm than good in their personal lives. On the day of my visit, I remember knocking on the door of the beautiful Fifth Avenue townhouse Michael was renting by Central Park. Frank Tyson (whose real name is Frank Cascio), who served as Michael’s manager and who would later become a dear friend, opened the door, said hello, and let me know that Mr. Jackson had allocated thirty minutes for our meeting. Michael, who was languishing in his career and ostensibly working on a long-delayed album that finally emerged in 2001 as Invincible, was very different from what I expected—quieter, shyer, yet more open and more accessible than his public image would suggest. He introduced me to his children, Paris and Prince (then about one and two), showed me pictures that had arrived that day from a concert in Germany, and openly talked about a host of topics including raising kids, the challenges of living in a fishbowl, and my life and work as a rabbi.

  The conversation was more pleasant and substantive than I had expected for a man I believed to be inordinately materialistic. Our meeting went well beyond thirty minutes and by the time I left I felt that, for reasons I could not explain, Michael, a famous recluse, was becoming close to me.

  After that we spoke on the phone a few times and made plans for a second meeting. This time Michael himself answered the door, but only after checking that no paparazzi were standing outside. I had brought two small gifts with me. The first was a mezuzah, the roll of Biblical parchment that Jews affix to their door which brings the divine presence into one’s home. Normally, only Jewish homes display them, but I said to Michael, “God is the source of all blessing. Let this mezuzah always remind you of that.” He was moved by the gift and we jointly affixed it to his front doorpost. I also brought him a Chanukah menorah as a symbol of God’s light that should illuminate his life and home.

  Again our conversation was open, warm, and surprisingly trusting for a man I was told was so private. He showed me a full-page picture in The New York Post of him walking out of a meeting with the Dalai Lama the day before. He said that he found his conversations with me more enlightening than thos
e he had had with the Dalai Lama. Flattered and a bit embarrassed, I responded that the Dalai Lama was a truly great man and that I was not in his league, not a guru of any kind, but simply a man who had chosen to be a rabbi as a direct consequence of his parents’ divorce and that I was trying to figure out the labyrinth of life using the profound moral code found in God’s law, the Torah. Along the way, I sought to share with others what I had discovered about mastering life and establishing an ethical and spiritual foundation into which we could all anchor our lives.

  As I was leaving his townhouse, Michael suddenly said, “You know I’d really love to go to synagogue with you.” Surprised at the statement, I asked him if he was serious. “Yes, Shmuley, could you please take me to synagogue?” I replied, “Sure Michael. It would be a pleasure. I will take you to a synagogue I love.”

  The next week was the major Jewish festival of Simkhat Torah, the happiest day on the Jewish calendar. I took Michael to the most musical of all the synagogues in New York City, the Carlebach Shule founded by legendary Jewish folk artist Shlomo Carlebach, whose beautiful and soulful melodies have become justly famous.

  No one except the rabbi knew that Michael was arriving. Jews do not activate electronics on holy days, so we took no pictures, made no recordings, informed no press, and tried to make it a truly personal and spiritual experience. When he turned up, the congregants were excited to see him and welcomed him warmly. He, in turn, put away his shyness and seemed to feel at home, humming along with the music, swaying with the rhythms, shaking the hands of all who greeted him, and blushing all the while. In his speech, the rabbi said that he hoped “Brother Michael” enjoyed this somewhat different kind of music. Michael, looking blissful, seemed enraptured by the atmosphere. This was clearly a man with a spiritual bent who hungered to be reconnected. He later told me that that evening at the synagogue was one of the happiest of his life. And he told Frank, his mother, and others the same thing. That evening made a mark on him.

  A week or so after his wonderful experience at the Carlebach synagogue, Michael invited me and my family to his home for dinner. I explained that we’re kosher and he went out and got a kosher caterer. When we all had dinner with him, I really started to notice just how shy he was.

  Sitting there altogether, I found it almost impossible to imagine him as a superstar. He seemed so utterly ordinary. He remained shy even in his own (albeit temporary) home and I noticed that he hated existing at the center of attention in an intimate setting. Having people look at him up close made him feel like he was being evaluated and he became reticent. I surmised that perhaps this was due to the fact that he believed people were looking at him as a freak. But then, as we were getting up from dinner, which he barely ate, he hummed a tune from one of his songs and in that instant the beautiful voice reminded me of his vast talent that was usually nowhere apparent.

  On Thanksgiving, Michael invited my entire family to see Disney’s Toy Story at a regular theater. Michael’s family and mine came in once the movie started and everything was dark. The last few rows had been blocked off and the theater brought all of us popcorn and drinks. I sat one row in front of Michael as he laughed uncontrollably throughout the movie. At first it struck me as juvenile. After all, this was a kid’s film and I was attending it only for the sake of my children. But to be honest, hearing Michael in fits of laughter in the seat behind me was liberating, like it was okay for adults to let their guard down and see the world through the innocent eyes of a child. Soon I was laughing as well. This episode made Michael more human and further endeared him to me. Just before it was over we left. We missed the very beginning and end, but no one ever knew Michael Jackson was in the theater.

  Some other family “adventures” didn’t feel as innocent and uncomplicated. There was a shopping trip to FAO Schwartz that Michael intended to be the toy spree of a lifetime for my kids. He said he often went there and they closed the whole store for him. “I love it there,” he said “We’ll go, just us, and the kids can get whatever they want.” So my wife and I discussed it and decided we would join Michael but with an important caveat. We sat our kids down and explained that they could each spend 25 dollars maximum—two gifts, 12 bucks each.

  The trip was an adventure. When we got to the store Michael came to life. He seemed to know it intimately and took us to every floor, trying toys, demonstrating how they worked, encouraging the kids to fill up their carts. Our children were showing the toys to us saying, “Ma is that too much?” Michael was watching and said to us it wasn’t fair since they closed the whole store and we were barely going to spend 150 dollars. Some other kids came from another family and they didn’t have the same constraints. But I was adamant. I said to Michael, “There’s no negotiation on this. Everyone has sucked you dry. Believe me, there’s a part of me that can be as materialistic as the next guy. But we’re never going to have that type of relationship.”

  And this attitude was critical. I had already noticed that one of the biggest problems in Michael’s life was the gravy train of hangers-on. If I were to ever become one of them, my very morality would be compromised, which would be terrible for me but even worse for Michael. He needed people with values in his life, not sycophants who could be bought. And I also detected Michael’s inclination to buy friends, which was a sure sign of insecurity. He had to know that he was enough, just the way he was.

  All in all, our families had become fairly close throughout the fall, having several Shabbat dinners at our house, and once a week Michael and I would get together to study and talk. Michael expressed his thanks for the inspirational dimension he said I brought to his life. In turn, I thought him the consummate gentleman, that rare Hollywood celebrity who actually cared as much for other people as he did for himself.

  As a brief aside, I should mention that I never attempted to proselytize Michael to Judaism. Believing in the authenticity of any faith that leads people to God, Judaism is not a faith that seeks converts, and we are commanded, even if someone approaches us to become Jewish, to turn them away at least three times. I repeatedly encouraged Michael to return to his Christian roots, in particular to the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church, where he had been raised. I brought him into our Jewish rituals, philosophy, and Friday night Sabbath table as a means to help him reconnect with the beauty of prayer and the moving sound of worshipful music, all in the wider context of inspiring him to bring spirituality back into his life. I certainly believed that Judaism, with its focus on family, community, and righteous action, could play a very positive role in Michael’s life. But one does not need to be Jewish to be enriched by Judaism.

  Before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, without having accomplished any real progress on his new album, Michael left New York and went back to California. We kept in contact by phone, talking about family and relationships.

  Neverland

  What transformed our relationship from one of a warm friendship to that of a truly intimate bond was Michael’s invitation to me and my family to join him for a few days at Neverland in the summer of 2000. It was August and we were already in Los Angeles visiting my father and brother. Since we were just a few hours away and hadn’t seen him for months, we drove up for a short visit, which ended up stretching to nearly a week.

  I think Michael sensed that I had something he needed—perhaps it was a sense of purposefulness. I knew what I wanted to do with my life; I had been a rabbi at Oxford and had built an organization that had an effect on its students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike; and given my parents’ divorce, I had dedicated a large part of my life to counseling couples and writing books seeking to increase the passion and intimacy of couples. I had a sense of mission, and Michael seemed to have lost his.

  Michael rolled out the red carpet for us. When we arrived he was outside with his children, accompanied by animal trainers with deer and even an elephant, a horse and buggy, and chefs and footmen dressed in appropriate attire. Michael was out to make an impression and he succeeded. We were
overwhelmed by this fantasyland we had just entered.

  My impression as soon as we arrived at Neverland was that by building this magical paradise Michael was making a statement. He had created his own private universe, a world of children’s laughter, fun and games, cartoons, and candy. A world with no pain.

  Every human being and every culture has a different vision of paradise. A year later on September 11, 2001, the world would discover that for an Islamic suicide bomber it could be an afterlife filled with wide-eyed virgins. For a shallow materialist it might be a place where money grows on trees. For Jews it is a future where the predatory instinct has vanished and the wolf lies down peacefully with the lamb. For Michael Jackson it was a place where no one ever grows up.

  Michael was a gracious host. He gave my family and me an extensive tour of the almost-three-thousand-acre ranch, showcasing his home, which was not all that large, the rides in the amusement park, the animals in the zoo, and the video and arcade room. I remember vividly how he took us to the reptile house and instructed the zookeeper to take out a poisonous rattlesnake, which Michael held with tongs. Contrary to all the press reports that Michael was a germophobe, afraid of his own shadow, clearly this was a man who was not easily shaken. He took us all around the property on his train, after which we toured much of the giant ranch on all-terrain four-wheel quads, with Michael in the lead wearing a large white helmet. We had dinner together that evening, and he told us how happy he was to have us at Neverland. But what interested me most was that even at Neverland, amid his graciousness, Michael, although more relaxed, still appeared shy, uncomfortable, and troubled.

  A few days after we arrived, another family also came to stay on their first visit to Michael’s ranch. I got the feeling that Michael invited the boy, Gavin, to Neverland solely to impress me with how devoted he was to children with cancer. Michael was hoping that I would vouch for him to the world. So I had to witness his commitment to the needy with my own eyes. Gavin was wearing a hat because chemotherapy had made him lose his hair. I watched Michael as he spoke to Gavin and encouraged him never to be ashamed of his baldness. I found it commendable that Michael would try so hard to give the boy a sense of his own beauty amid the ravishing effects of the treatment.