I would imagine that the family of Farrah Fawcett must feel terrible that their death is not the big news. I’m sorry that I’m being nasty; the whole celebrity thing irks me. In fact, the reason that I feel most aligned with Orthodox Jewry is because I am an anarchist at heart; I feel that we should all have access to G-d without hierarchy. Hmmm, shades of the Korach rebellion, perhaps. And perhaps that is why he was so successful in marketing his complaint; we are all holy, aren’t we?
I have always been wary of charisma; I never went in for the rebbe thing of any level. Even before I heard about the Shlomo Carlebach concerns (and heard from friends later on about the veracity of the nastiness of the charisma head), I didn’t trust him. When I first met him, he looked at me and said, “No hugging, right?” I guess I had that glare down, even back then. Uh yeah, no hugging! I never got it, and even more than that, I had the intuition that something was very wrong. Oh come on, it doesn’t take intuition; it just takes paying attention. And that we’ve established is not something people like to do.
So this world frenzy over the death of a music man just passes me by. Especially when there is true sadness that is being forgotten by the second.
This cult of celebrity is not new, of course, I remember going to visit the Palace at Versailles back when I was a teenager and hearing about how the people of France were so thrilled that their king could have such a place. It stuck with me that people could get a sense of pride from that; what is that about? They could never achieve it, so someone else should have it? Of course, the movie and music stars of today are our royalty (King of Pop, for example), so it follows that the same laudatory praises would be applied to such figures, despite (or because of?) their common flaws…
This need to attach to the charisma of a person is of course the way to avodah zarah, where a person or a thing has to fill your need to…your need to…what, exactly?
I remember that encounter with Shlomo Carlebach, very vividly.
well, that’s very odd, since it happened before you were born!
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