Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is an American Orthodox rabbi, radio and television host, and author. He befriended Michael in the early 90′s but their friendship only lasted a few years.
He believes Michael threw away his life, saying in one interview, “Michael knew what he was doing, he knew that the drugs he was taking – that the amount that he was taking – could kill him at any moment. And many people tried to stop him and discourage him, and it’s very, very sad and tragic that he lived with so much pain that he couldn’t stop.” Of Michael’s medical staff, he said, “With Michael, at times it appeared, he used to bring with him what I believed were unaccredited doctors, doctors who were probably very questionable,” he said. “I used to always ask why he brought them with him, he would always find a reason – he fell on his back, he broke his foot – he always needed a doctor. He always had excuses to why doctors were around.”
Boteach claims that Michael’s (alleged) drug use was the reason for the breakdown of their friendship. Michael’s former manager, Dieter Wiesner, told a British Tabloid that Michael had put Boteach’s name on an “enemy list” he kept. If such a list did exist, Boteach was probably on it because he clearly believed Michael was guilty of child molestation. In reference to the allegations, Boteach has said, “He [Michael] did good in his life, and he made people happy – and [for] some of whom he was very special – but he may indeed have been guilty of very serious crimes, which no one could excuse, and if he was guilty of those crimes, he deserves to be condemned.” (source: haaretz)
Below is a piece he wrote upon Michael’s passing.
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach | The Tragic End of Michael Jackson | huffingtonpost.com | June 26, 2009
I was on vacation with my family in Iceland when my office called and shared the terrible news of Michael Jackson’s passing. My wife and children were with me in the van. We could scarcely believe what we had heard. The children all remembered Michael fondly. He had given them their dog Marshmallow who’s is a member of our family till today. My daughter teared up. And while I was heartsick at the news, especially for his three young children, I was not shocked. I dreaded this day and knew it had to come sooner rather than later.
In the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life what most frightened me was not that he would be arrested again for child molestation, although he later was. Rather it was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, “My great fear, and why I felt I had to be distanced from Michael … was that he would not live long. My fear was that Michael’s life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin, like Elvis… Michael is headed in that direction.”
I am no prophet and it did not take a rocket scientist to see the impending doom. Michael was a man in tremendous pain and his tragedy was to medicate his pain away rather than addressing its root cause. On many occasions when I visited him he would emerge from his room woozy and clearly sedated. Who were the doctors who were giving him this stuff? Was there no one to save him from himself? Was there no one to intervene?
By the time I met Michael in the Summer of 1999 he was already one of the most famous people in the world. But he seemed lethargic, burned-out, and purposeless. He wanted to consecrate his great fame to helping children but knew he could not due to the 1993 child molestation allegations against him. He was cut off from family and was alienated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church which had nurtured him. He could barely muster the energy to complete the album he was working on. The only thing that seemed to motivate him was his children, to whom he was exceptionally devoted.
As we grew closer I tried to impress on Michael that his salvation would come not from further concerts or album sales but from reconnecting with loved ones, finding a spiritual anchor, replacing his desire for attention with a hunger for righteous action, and surrounding himself with serious and wise friends. I took him to meet Elie Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate. We lectured at Carnegie Hall together. At Oxford University he delivered a lecture asking all children to forgive their parents if they had been neglectful. On the way down to the University he had called his father Joe to tell him he loved him. All this was significant progress. He came with me to Synagogue and regularly attended Shabbat dinner. He seemed directed and content.
Alas, Michael could not sustain the spiritual effort. He felt that many of the activities I advocated he undertake, like the day he handed out books to parents to read to their children in Newark, New Jersey, was too ordinary for a superstar. He felt he was being demystified. He needed the throngs, he thrived on the adulation of the crowds.
In many ways his tragedy was to mistake attention for love. I will never forget how, when we sat down to record 40 hours of conversations where he would finally reveal himself for a book I authored, he turned to me and said these haunting words, an exact quote: “I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.” One cannot read these words without feeling a tremendous sadness for a soul that was so surrounded with hero-worship but remained so utterly alone. Because Michael substituted attention for love he got fans who loved what he did but he never had true compatriots who loved him for who he was. Perhaps this is why, when so many of his inner circle saw him destroying his life with prescription medication – something he used to treat phantom physical illnesses which were really afflictions of the soul – they allowed him to deteriorate and disintegrate rather than throwing the poison in the garbage.
Michael’s death is not just a personal tragedy, it is an American tragedy. Michael’s story was the stuff of the American dream. A poor black boy who grows up in Gary, Indiana, and ends up a billionaire entertainer. But we now know how the story ends. Money is not a currency by which we can purchase self-esteem and being recognized on the streets will never replace being loved unconditionally by family and true friends.
I miss Michael, I miss him very much. He was far from a saint. But there was a gentility and nobility of spirit that I found humbling and inspiring in a man so accomplished. My heart bleeds for his children whom he adored and who adored him in turn. I think of Prince and Paris and how attached they were to a father who regularly told me that he knew that when they grew up they would be asked by biographers what kind of father he had been. He wanted them to have only warm memories to share. Alas, the memories will remain incomplete.
I pray for them, I pray for his family. And I pray for America.
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what I was trying to say, the Rabbi is talking like Michaels problems, all came from within. The fears, Michael was talking about are the real threats, He was seeing around Him. But the point You make about the doctor filling a void, is valid. I just didn’t see it that way. But I still don’t like it when pros. like the Rabbi, or talking head “hair helmets”, use their talents to smooth-away, the hard questions, in a death like Michael’s.[or the events of 9-11]
Very true. There is a big difference between problems from within and those from without. By what we have found out lately, it would seem that his problems stemmed from external fears he was experiencing, very real fears for his life.
In the Rabbi’s very smooth little talk, we don’t see the fear that gripped this man. Not the fear of passing out books!!! This sales pitch, is just so much hypnotic “warm milk” let me try it??? “the good doctor was only doing what he could, to fill the empty soul of Poor MIchael Jackson” well that made me feel better, how about this. “once we get this S.O.B., in a box, we can start snarling and biting each other over what was left of Him”. Sorry!!! I must have missed Temple again.
Hey Brian.
What do you mean with ‘we don’t see the fear that gripped this man’?
What do you think he could have feared?
When you say ‘the good doctor was only doing what he could, to fill the empty soul of Poor MIchael Jackson’ it makes a lot of sense to me. The more time i spend investigating into his life, the more i have the impression that he must have been a very empty soul with not many ways to reflect himself in the world around him. The people that he was in contact with couldn’t be trusted as the one half was probably there to keep him under control and the other half to get into his money. And he never had the time to develop a personality like other people when they grow up. I red somewhere that he had a very weak handshake which somehow fits into the picture. . .
I hate to say this,,, but June Gatlin is the only Spiritual advisor, to Michael, worth listening to. Rabbi Shmuley is not to be trusted. It is all politics, with the Rabbi. I’am not anti-semitic,[unless I'am anti-self] but the good Rabbi, is sanding off the edges. HE KNOWS A LOT MORE THAN THIS!!!
June Gatlin, she’s the one who released that recorded phone conversation with Michael where he expressed morbid fear of Dr Tohme Tohme isn’t she? i don’t know much more about her…
As for Rabbi Boteach, i thought he had some interesting things to say about how fame made Michael a really lonely individual. Other than that, i think he may be here to push an image of Michael as a drug addicted pedophile. That’s just a thought, i don’t know the Rabbi’s background…
I agree with that statement about Rev. Gatlin. I believe that if Michael had gotten some help earlier from her or from his trusted friends Pentecostal ministers who are brothers and sisters Pastors Andre and Sandra Crouch and stuck with either of them. He would have been better off. See, Rabbi Schumley is nothing but a cash cow. If someone came to me for counseling as a celebrity or even a regular person, I would not publish anything that they tell me in private. This man only wants to make money and it is disgusting period. I wonder at times how MJ’s family sincerely feels about hearing these tapes. I also do not like or can stand Doctor Loose Lips Arnold Klein. He was never a friend of Michael’s and although Michael had those health problems he should have found someone else to treat his skin. Dr. Klein is not someone he should have gotten tangled up with because he is slipping out all of MJ’s secrets. True or false. Michael should have cut him loose period.
The Rabbi seems to be saying quite a lot about Michael, and it’s interesting that he does so even though they stopped being friends years ago. He met Debbie Rowe through Dr Klein, perhaps that’s why Michael never left, he trusted Klein and they had a working relationship that spanned decades. Imagine having to find another doctor and having to start all over again with your Vitiligo treatments with someone else. Having to build up all that trust again may have been too much for Michael.