The Michael Jackson Tapes

by Shmuley Boteach

  MJ: Believing in children. Believing in young people. Believing that God gave me this for a reason to help my babies.

  SB: So even though the older people were mean you still believed the younger generation had a kindness in their hearts?

  MJ: Absolutely. I am still to this day trying to figure it out. I am having problems in my heart with the Jewish thing. I am having a big problem with it.

  SB: What Jewish thing?

  MJ: When I found out the count of how many children in the Holocaust alone died. . . . [starts to break down]. What man can do something like that? I don’t understand. It doesn’t matter what race it is. I don’t get it. I don’t understand that at all. I really don’t. What kind of conditioning. . . I don’t understand that kind of thing. Does someone condition you to hate that much? Is it possible that they could do that to your heart? They can’t do that to mine. Could they do that to yours? I’m sorry.

  SB: They could only do it to us if we made ourselves susceptible or if we severed our connection with a God who demands righteousness.

  MJ: Hitler was a genius orator. He was [able] to make that many people turn and change and hate. He had to be a showman and he was. Before he would speak, he would pause, drink a bit of water, and then he would clear his throat, and look around. It was what an entertainer would do trying to work out how to play his audience. He would go into this fury of the first words he would say and he would hit them hard. But where did he come from? I know he failed school and he wanted to be an architect. He failed a lot of things. But I think it all happened in prison, the whole Mein Kampf thing, didn’t it? I really believe that.

  Michael’s analysis of Hitler as showman was brilliant. I subsequently watched many of Hitler’s speeches and Michael was absolutely right. Hitler would get up to speak, pause, make the crowd eager with breathless anticipation, and only then would he slowly begin.

  SB: Where he first wrote the book and began to formulate his ideas?

  MJ: Yeah, yeah. He built that anger, so strong, while [Nelson] Mandela did the opposite. He became a lamb in prison. He had no bitterness, to this day saying even though he is eighty and his youth is gone—because he was in prison so long—he doesn’t regret any of it.

  SB: But is his youth gone?

  MJ: [No], he is sweet, very childlike.

  SB: Does he like to giggle?

  MJ: He loves children because when I went to see him I had some kids with me and people were saying the kids have to stay, but Michael Jackson can come. I said, “I’m sure Mr. Mandela wouldn’t mind seeing children. I won’t go in unless the children go too.” I remember his representatives looked at me like this [makes stern and suspicious facial expression] and they went back and then they said, “Everybody come.” The first thing Mandela did is run to the children and pick them up and hug them. I knew he was that kind of man and he loved them. He was talking to them and then he shook my hand. I knew I was right.

  SB: Are you the opposite of Hitler? God gave you this phenomenal charisma and while he [Hitler] brought out the beast in man, you want to bring out some of that innocence and goodness in man. The darkest most malignant forces were unleashed within the Germans at Hitler’s direction. Now God gave you phenomenal charisma as well. Are you using it to bring out the innocence and goodness in man?

  MJ: I believe that. You can change them because going to my show is like a religious experience because you [go in] one person and come out a different person. You really do.

  SB: Is that one of your objectives, to try and pull that out of people, not just give entertainment?

  MJ: Absolutely, and we do it. I wish you could have seen some of the things we have done in concerts. Like we have had a huge tank on stage like an army tank and a soldier gets out and points it at everybody. And then he aims it at me and then the whole audience starts booing. This happens in every country. . . and I take the gun and I put it down and they start screaming. And then a little girl—I always have a little peasant girl—with a flower comes up and brings it to the soldier, right in his face, and he breaks down on his knees and he starts to cry. And the crowd goes crazy every time. Then I start giving this speech, and another little boy comes forward and he starts doing this speech in sign language and you look in the audience and everybody is crying. It happens in every country. That is part of Earth Song. I have been an ambassador of goodwill all over the world spreading this message. Then we do Heal the World, children of all nations circling this huge globe, and we have a big screen showing all the world leaders in the back and it is just amazing stuff. When other singers are singing about sex and I want to get in a hot tub with you baby and rub you all over and [yet I’m the one who] gets battered in the press as a weirdo. Does that make any sense to you? SB: No, of course, not right.

  MJ: It is not right, is it?

  SB: It is changing in front of your eyes.

  At that time, through our efforts to have Michael speak at places like Oxford, and surround himself with credible and respected statesmen and childrearing experts, he was beginning to get positive publicity. He was regaining lost respect.

  SB: What if they wouldn’t understand? What if they were like the Nazis, just evil people?

  MJ: I can’t imagine that I couldn’t reach their hearts in some kind of way.

  SB: So you believe that if you were face-to-face with Hitler you could . . .

  MJ: Absolutely. Absolutely! He had to have had a lot of yes people around him who were afraid of him.

  SB: You believe that if you had an hour with Hitler you could somehow touch something inside of him?

  MJ: Absolutely. I know I could.

  SB: With Hitler? Come on. Michael! Hitler?! So you don’t believe there is anyone who is completely evil and there is no way to touch them. So you don’t believe in punishing the wicked because then. . .

  MJ: No, I believe you have to help them, give them therapy. You have to teach them, that somewhere something in their life went wrong. They don’t see what they do. They don’t understand that it is wrong a lot of times.

  SB: But Michael, there are clearly people who are irredeemable. Like Hitler. He was evil incarnate. There was no humanity there for you to address. You’d be speaking to the abyss, to a darkness like you never before witnessed. What about someone who has killed a lot of people? Don’t you believe that there should be no therapy for them? They are murderers and they need to face extreme punishment.

  MJ: I feel horrible about it. I wish somebody could have reached their hearts.

  SB: What if they have done it already? They’ve already killed their victims.

  MJ: If they have done it already, it is wrong.

  This was crazy stuff. A man who believed he could change Hitler in an hour. Hitler, the most evil man that ever lived. A man who systematically gassed and murdered six million Jews, including a million children, as well as six million other civilians. Michael can be forgiven for being naïve. But a man who’s convinced that he can transform darkness into light and evil into goodness might take the next step to believing that normal rules of right and wrong need not apply to him. He might also believe that he had a very special healing power with children which others might see as wrong but which he understood to be comforting. Truth be told, I should have challenged Michael much more forcefully on his Hitler comment. I should have said to him outright, “Michael, you’re not the Messiah. You could not have prevented World War II. So let it go.” I blame my own cowardice for not having done so. Still, I decided to approach the issue with determination but using soft gloves.

  SB: I am going to clarify this. The interesting thing about how you look at the world is that you view it through a child’s eyes. Okay, the other side of that is that just as children would find it difficult to grasp that someone can be truly evil—which is why kids are so trusting—you have the same issue. Even when evil stares you in the face you want to say it has some good. So I wouldn’t ask someone like you to construct a whole judicial system of punishment because
that’s not what your contribution to the world is, and frankly, you’d do a bad job. A punishment comes into the world once you have adultlike gestures that are cruel, and then you need punishment. But then in a child’s world those things don’t really exist so you don’t need the same punishment. But come on Michael, do you really think you could have gotten through to Hitler?

  MJ: Uhuh. Yes.

  SB: By finding the good in him somehow?

  MJ: Yes, I think I could have. I really do, I think. Nobody really talked to him. I think he was surrounded by, I hate to say this, brownnosers. But that’s what they were. That’s what he wanted. That’s what they did.

  SB: He was never challenged?

  MJ: There were Germans against him. They even tried to kill him, remember?

  SB: Yeah, Claus von Stauffenberg. But he and his plotters numbered, at most, a few hundred out of a population of tens of millions. On this one there is simply too much distance between us, Michael. Hitler was intrinsically evil. You could never have gotten through to him. The only thing to do with people like that is purge them from the world.

  So you have forgiven everyone in your heart except for certain members of the press who are mean and people who hurt children?

  MJ: Yes.

  Following the Golden Rule—With All People

  Shmuley Boteach: Let’s get back to justice. When you see so many injustices with no recourse to justice, when people are killed and their murderer is never found, when garbage is written about you and people get away with it, in fact they are promoted, how do you continue to believe in justice?

  Michael Jackson: I don’t believe in justice. I believe in it but I don’t believe that. . . .

  SB: You don’t believe that the righteous are going to be rewarded and the wrongdoers will be punished? That good people should prosper and wicked people should founder and sink?

  MJ: All these are man-made things. I think evil is in people’s hearts. This is where you and I might disagree. I don’t think there is some devil out there manipulating our thoughts. That is what I was taught.

  SB: Judaism doesn’t believe in the devil. So we don’t disagree nearly as much as you might think. Where we do disagree is in the belief that people who do very evil things eventually internalize those evil things to such a degree that it becomes an inextricable part of who they are. They may only start out doing evil, but after a while they become evil. A famous Jewish philosopher named Maimonedes said “Habit becomes second nature” and they become one with what they have done. They become evil. There is no hope for people like Hitler. And no one, not even you, can get through to them. They are evil to their very core.

  MJ: I thought the devil is very evil. He is in this room and he is behind all the evil in this world. The devil is awfully busy. Look how everyone is turning gay and look at how women are doing this. I think the devil is man himself.

  On the gay comment, I think Michael was paraphrasing what people who blame everything on the devil might say, rather than expressing his own view. Certainly, Michael never made anything like a homophobic comment to me, and it would be highly out of his character to have done so. He was not judgmental in that way, although he would sometimes play a guessing game as to whether some men he met were gay, based on their growing too attached to him.

  SB: How can we get people to sustain a belief in justice in such a cruel world?

  MJ: Follow the Golden Rule. Be kind to your neighbors, love them as much as you would love yourself, do unto others. . . .

  SB: How do you feel when you see people get away with cruelty? Are you angry? Do you say, there is no justice, these are mean people?

  MJ: I get angry, yeah. But I know that is the way of the world. That’s the theme of my world show: Be kind, heal the world. Let’s walk out of here a different human being. Let’s love. It’s like going to church, but I do it without preaching. I do it through music and dancing. Marilyn Manson says onstage, “Kill God. . . take your Bibles and tear them. . . .” Yet the press doesn’t attack him! And he has got breasts on just like a woman. . . .

  SB: So when you see people who are mean, who are very prosperous, do you ever look at God and say, “I can’t figure it out?”

  MJ: No, because I know how I feel.

  SB: So what do you do at moments like that?

  MJ: I believe there are some good people in the world and I do believe there is a God. I don’t believe that God judges. I don’t think that He is upstairs going, “You are alright. But I am going to tear you up.” I wouldn’t do that.

  SB: There is no hell in Judaism either. There is punishment for the sake of cleansing, but no punishment for the sake of damnation.

  MJ: Really? I think that is all beautiful because we were all taught to believe in the devil and Lucifer and the burial ground, where you never get resurrection and judgment. There is a decision being made right now as we talk. Jesus is putting certain people on the left and certain people on the right, and when the end of the world comes all those people on the left will be swallowed up and they will be dead forever.

  That’s not fair is it? There are a lot of beautiful, good people in the world no matter what religion, no matter what race. If there was really such a thing as real true heavenly justice, I don’t think Hitler would have got away with what he did as long as he did. Then you get those people who say, “It happened for a reason, to teach the world never to let it happen again.” My foot! You don’t need a million of those little kids to die to teach the world. I am not going for it. They let him get away with it.

  SB: One day when this is over we will get Elie Wiesel to take you to Auschwitz, where so many of those children died. That would be poignant. You have to read his book, Night. His book is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. He was sixteen years old when he was at Auschwitz. He is the most famous Holocaust survivor in the world.

  Professor Elie Wiesel is a prince of the Jewish people and one of my greatest heroes. As I mentioned earlier, I introduced Michael to Professor Wiesel, the Nobel Peace laureate, and they had several meetings. Wiesel was my guest over two visits while I was rabbi at Oxford, and we have become close friends. It was my fervent hope that Professor Wiesel would take Michael under his wing, and it was Michael’s great honor to have one of the world’s foremost humanitarians believe in him for a few months. Later, when Michael got arrested on charges of molestation, I called Professor Wiesel and apologized for vouching for Michael and what I thought to be his sincere intentions to help children. Professor Wiesel once told me that he saw compassion in Michael’s eyes, but also cautioned me about celebrities in general. He has always been a wise counselor in my life and I continue to be blessed with his inspiration and guidance.

  MJ: He is not bitter. He is like Mandela in that way.

  SB: So you don’t believe in justice? You have seen it subverted too many times to believe in it?

  MJ: I believe there should be justice but I don’t believe in the justice system. That’s what I should say. You have seen the things that go on in the world and how people get away with them.

  SB: The majority of the good people that you have met, have they prospered?

  MJ: Absolutely.

  PART 3

  FAME IN ADULTHOOD

  Thinking About Ambition, Success, and Honesty

  Shmuley Boteach: So ambition can be a good thing so long as it is not ruthless, so long as it doesn’t involve jealousy and envy?

  Michael Jackson: Yeah, so long as it is not hurting anybody. Ambition is a wonderful thing. To know how the mind works and the power of thought and how we create our own circumstances in life. And to know all those goodies about the brain because we don’t come with instructions when we are born. You have to find the truth to life and once you know those things, it’s amazing you know your possibilities.

  SB: So you want to foster that ambition in children, not stifle it? MJ: They have it. You have to just will them on.

  SB: Another thing. Let’s talk abou
t honesty. One of the most childlike qualities is brutal honesty. Sometimes telling our children the truth hurts. But they always say it like it is. Especially before they’re old enough to learn how to lie. If you are fat they will say you are fat. If you are ugly they will say you are ugly. If you smell they say you smell. Is that always a good thing, or do we have to be more diplomatic?

  MJ: I think we have to teach them to be kind and teach them how you can hurt other people’s feelings. We went there [to the recording studio] yesterday, Prince and I. One of the musicians who works with me is fat, very fat, and Prince said, “He has a stomach which looks like a balloon.” I said, “Prince, you are right. But if you see him don’t say it in front of him because you could make him cry.” He said, “Okay, I promise.” Just teach him that you can’t hurt people.

  SB: Okay, but what about encouraging our children to tell the truth? So you are not saying to Prince that that is not true because that is not a childlike quality to make him lie. You are just saying sometimes you hold the truth inside. You didn’t say to Prince, “He’s actually fine the way he is. He’s not fat.”