The Michael Jackson Tapes Read Free

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