I asked if he thought [Chabad] had helped him heal from the pain of his parents’ divorce. “Well, I was hoping it would, and, yeah, it did,” he said, before continuing: “I don’t think the healing was very deep, because I don’t think I’ll ever be healed. I’ve kind of come to that understanding and conclusion that I will never fully heal, and that my life is a different mission therefore—it’s a different calling—that my life is going to be about battling my nature at all times, and fighting the darker emotions at every opportunity. … If you’re healed, then you just live life—it’s uncomplicated, it’s all pretty. That’s just not me.”
Above: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Tablet Magazine has a long profile of the man who claims to be "America's Rabbi," Shmuley Boteach.
Boteach has a long history of extreme self-promotion, abuse of his employees, looting his own nonprofit, and generally bad and always selfish self-promoting behavior.
But he also has a very troubling family history which he is very candid about.
Much the information Tablet published is not new – although its own interviews with Boteach are. Roger Friedman and the New York Daily News Gatecrasher broke most of these stories on Boteach. Friedman outed Boteach's financial and other shenanigans at least as far back as 2001. Tablet's writer, however, acknowledges neither source.
Still, the profile gives you a good recounting of Boteach's behavior, and has some priceless quotes from its own interviews with Boteach, like this one:
When we spoke for the first time in his office in Englewood, [Boteach] told me how Chabad differed from the cult his mother originally believed it to be. “The goal of Chabad is personal empowerment, to internalize Jewish convictions and to live in a place where you can spread them,” he said. I asked if he thought it had helped him heal from the pain of his parents’ divorce. “Well, I was hoping it would, and, yeah, it did,” he said, before continuing: “I don’t think the healing was very deep, because I don’t think I’ll ever be healed. I’ve kind of come to that understanding and conclusion that I will never fully heal, and that my life is a different mission therefore—it’s a different calling—that my life is going to be about battling my nature at all times, and fighting the darker emotions at every opportunity. … If you’re healed, then you just live life—it’s uncomplicated, it’s all pretty. That’s just not me.”
Also especially interesting is this:
Michael Gross, who helped raise funds for the Oxford Chabad house—which was to become the L’Chaim Society—said he had misgivings about Boteach that he voiced to Chabad leadership from day one. “When I met Boteach [in 1988], I was immediately convinced that he was totally unsuitable,” Gross wrote to me, in an email. “He was totally self-obsessed and lacked any form of objectivity. He turned the Chabad house into a vehicle for his self-promotion and self-advancement and basically became an impresario by using the prestige of Oxford to attract celebrity speakers. I informed the Chabad leadership immediately, but they said that he was charismatic … and claimed that they could control him, which was delusionary.”…
"[Boteach was] totally unsuitable…totally self-obsessed and lacked any form of objectivity," is essentially a paraphrase of what I told Chabad several days before Boteach left the US for Oxford in 1988.
In 1994, Chabad fired Boteach – essentially for the exact reasons Gross and I independently warned of.
As Tablet notes, Boteach told an interviewer in 1999, “Sure, I love promoting God and Judaism, but let’s call a spade a spade: The main reason I’m on TV is because I want to be a celebrity.”
In the end, in Boteach's mind, everything is always about Shmuley Boteach.
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