BREAKING NEWS: Beverly Hills Rabbi (One Of The Four Beverly Hills Rabbis In The Story Below) Arrested For Child Sexual Abuse (ABC Eyewitness News report here)
Sensitive? Read this first.
1. I Discuss My Brother With Four Beverly Hills Rabbis
- What are you afraid of?
- I've been burned in the past. I'm being careful.
- What did you lose?
- I helped people and it worked out bad.
- I guess you try to help yourself? Does that always work out well? Why should it be different with others? You have to do what is best.
- I am.
- You aren't. You're judging me on the basis of money. Because you don't see any money you can't see anything. It's bad. You're a rabbi. You should be ashamed of yourself.
- I'm nothing.
- Nice of you to say. But you are occupying a place in society. If you weren't a rabbi here the person I'd be talking with now might have been someone reasonable. Not someone who hour after hour repeated that he doesn't know me and makes no effort to find out who I am. Who asks over and over if I am a criminal, a child molester. Four of you Rabbis here in this office, interrogating, trying to catch me out in inconsistencies. Not a spark of humanity. I was born, raised, educated within blocks of here.
- I have my point of view and your have yours.
- A rabbi says that? You know as well as I do there is only one truth. Judaism is the religion of rules. If there is no truth Judaism doesn't exist. It's pretty clear Judaism doesn't exist here. The only Judaism here is that I can speak openly to you and you don't run away. It's true you don't bother to reply but sit there, let yourself be condemned, and don't care. That's not Jewish. That's not anything.
- I'm sorry you think that way.
- So what did my brother say when you talked to him in the other office? I heard him answer that he had nothing bad to say about me.
- He said you did something to hurt him personally.
- Sure. He's fighting me over the family's money. I showed him I would fight back. I guess you feel for him, don't want him to lose money. You didn't even try to work things out between us? Reality to you is money. That's been your message to me hour after hour.
- I'm sorry.
2. Try To Stay Home
- Do you mind if I share your bench?
- No, sit down. Where are you from?
- I've been here many years. Originally I'm from Europe.
- From Italy?
- Yes. Where are you from?
- I'm from here. Though I just got back 10 days ago.
- From where?
- I've been in Europe most of the last 20 years. This time I was away about a year and a half.
- Where were you?
- Budapest, then Tel Aviv.
- What were you doing?
- Writing little stories and looking for a practical basis of life and not finding it.
- Doesn't sound good.
- It was terrible. From an economic point of view. But that's the wrong point of view.
- What's the right one?
- Artistic, emotional, intellectual, actually any point of view other than the economic.
- Everyone has to live.
- Well, in the economic world I live in everyone definitely doesn't have to live. I don't have to live. That's the message the world sends me. I have to live my life on another basis.
- How's that possible? You shouldn't talk that way. Everyone deserves to live. How are you living? Where have you living these past 10 days?
- It's a ridiculous, long story. Do you want to hear it?
- Yes, tell me. I don't often meet people like you.
- Well, first, I was in Tel Aviv and wanted to come home.
- Why?
- I was homesick. I was sick of Israel.
- Why?
- It's a terrible place.
- You had a terrible time there. Why?
- Because Israelis use money to isolate themselves from each other. No one needs to care about anyone or anything but acquiring and holding onto money. It's a catastrophe of human nature. Israelis are blind to each other except as sources of money and power. The human being has vanished.
- I find that very interesting. It explains my experience with Israelis here in Beverly Hills. So you wanted to come home.
- Yes. But I didn't have connections here in L.A. anymore. My family is at war with me. The only person I knew was a childhood friend and one year college roommate who I had lost contact with long ago. I looked him up and called his office in North Hollywood - he's a doctor - but he wouldn't come to the phone. Finally he talked with me. I told him I had to come home, and needed a place to go to. After a lot of protest he finally said, OK, call him when I arrived. When I arrived three days later and called him at his office he refused to come to the phone.
- So you had no place to stay? And he didn't care?
- That's the economic world. In that world, no one cares about anything except in their spare time. It's not just Israel. Israel is the extremity the rest of the world is moving towards.
- Then what did you do? Where did you sleep?
- I didn't sleep. I spent the night at a 24 hour restaurant in Westwood. The next day I was on the way to see if the Chinese woman I used to teach English to still lived in Beverly Hills when I saw outside a temple down one street a security guard, a sort of philosopher, I'd talked to a few times. I went over and said hello, told him my story, and he said go talk to the rabbi, here's here: he's the top guy, the most powerful rabbi in the city.
- Is that true?
- Probably. It is the richest temple in the city, with its congregation of Jews from Iran who took out all their money and escaped before the revolution. The rabbi was in the temple, sitting on one of the audience benches, and I went over. Explained my situation. He said, what do you want me to do about it? I said I was from this place, and was coming home, and wanted some help to do that. What could he do, he asked? Did I want money? No, I wanted to be treated as what I was. I wanted to believe there was some civilization here, where when someone returns home he is welcomed back in some form. The rabbi looked at me like I was a lunatic and said nothing. Then he said, look around, we're all old people here. Young rabbis will be coming in a little while. Wait. I went outside and waited. In a few minutes first one man, then another, then another came up to me where I stood before the door to the temple, asked me who I was. All three turned out to be rabbis. When the most powerful rabbi in the city came out the rabbis went over to him. The big rabbi simply pointed at me, and throwing out his fingers signaled they should go back to me and take care of the the problem I represented. So they came back, and asked me what I wanted them to do. I repeated what I'd already said. Come to their sport and cultural center they operated, the old YMCA, they told me, at 7:30 that evening.
- And you went.
- Yes. They were having a festival for little kids, hundreds of them were milling about in and out of the rooms. The rabbis were there, gave me tea, a sandwich, told me to wait. At around midnight, the kids had gone home, and I was invited into the office, where were the three rabbis from the temple, and the grey bearded head rabbi of this center. The head rabbi proceeded to interrogate me. Was I a child molester? A criminal? Why was I in Beverly Hills, not New York? What happened to my family? I answered all the questions, showed them a background report on me from the same agency employers and landlords use, a cafe acquaintance had paid for the report when she wanted me to work for her a couple years ago and sent me a copy of it. At the end, the meeting broke up without resolution. One of the rabbis asked me if I knew of a cheap hotel in the neighborhood, he'd pay out of his own pocket for night, it was almost 1 in the morning by this time.
- Did the rabbi pay?
- Yes.
- So they're not so bad.
- The next night once more I stopped by the center. Another one of the three rabbis was there. I told him if he really wanted to talk with a member of my family, I'd found the mobile phone number of my brother in New Jersey. Did he want to call? He did. I listened to their conversation on the speaker:
- This is rabbi Yossi in Beverly Hills. There's a man here, he says his name is Rex. Do you know any Rex?
- Yes.
- He says he's your brother. Do you have a brother by that name?
- I do
.- So this man here is your brother?
- I have a brother named Rex. But I don't know if he is there. How does he look?
- He has grey hair.
- Does he look Ok?
- Yes, he looks Ok. Can I ask you some questions?
- Yes
.- Is there anything we should know about him?
- Like what?
- He's told us he's just returned to L.A. and doesn't know any one here. Is that true?
- I haven't seen him in ten years. It could be true
.- Is there anything we should know about him?
- If you want to know if he is violent or steals, the answer is no.
.- You and he have the same mother and father?
- Yes, that's correct.
.- This situation is difficult to understand. You don't seem very interested. Why aren't you interested in him if you really are his brother?
- I got tired of him.
- You got tired of your brother?
- Yes.
- Why, if as you say he doesn't do anything wrong?
- He gets angry sometimes.
.- And does what?
- Says hurtful things.
- Says hurtful things?
- Yes.
.- What do you recommend we do?
- I couldn't say.
- There's nothing more you want to tell me?
- No.
- What did the rabbi decide?
- Not to do anything.
- Where did you go?
- The 24 hour restaurant.
- All night?
- No, I met there a piano teacher who used to give his lessons at a church near where I was living 2 years ago. He was having dinner with a couple a girls, students of his. He asked me what I was up to, I told him, he wished me good luck, and left. But he returned a little later, and said come to his house for the night.
- That was lucky.
- Yes. The next night, it was the 24 hour restaurant again.
- You can't live that way.
- No. But the day after, the piano teacher came to find me at my usual Starbucks, said he'd decided to pay for a couple nights at a hotel for me. I slept through those days and nights, and when they were up was walking by the Jewish center on the way to Westwood when the rabbis outside asked me in to join in the prayers. This kid was there now they'd suggested I meet before, but who I hadn't be able to reach by phone or email. I ended up staying with that kid that night. The next night he wasn't home, so it was the 24 hour restaurant.
- What about the Rabbis?
- What about them?
- They won't help you?
- There's nothing in it for them.
- What are you going to do?
- I can always go back to Israel.
- I thought you hated it there?
- I was homesick so I came home. I'm glad to be here. But it is an economic world here, and as I said, I don't live in that world. That world doesn't want me, and I don't want it. I can't ask what is impossible.
- But you said it was the same in Israel.
- It is. It's worse. But here the economic world is actively at war with its competition, the human worlds. You can't live here without money or a place to live. You'll be preyed on by the violent, both by violent officials and the violent for the hell of it. Israel is not at that point.
- You should try to stay here. It's your home.
- I'm trying.
3. The Elohim And Unaccountable Evil
- You have to make your peace with Saturn.
- How do you suggest I do that?
- You must become prosperous. Have you read Manley Palmer Hall? He was a 33 degree Freemason, an outright genius. He knew how to deal with the Elohim.
- The Elohim? The gods?
- The gods who have to be appeased.
- I'm prosperous in my own way.
- You have to do it their way.
- Make money.
- Yes.
- Sorry, can't oblige the gods. You know, my father was a Freemason, 32nd degree.
- Impressive.
- But he destroyed himself.
- He tried to outrun the Elohim and they caught up with him. Families can be totally dominated by a single planet.
- I never thought of it like that, but I like the idea. It would explain how my whole family turned evil. I'd kept a distance from my family for most of my life, then suddenly one by one they declared war on me. It came out of nowhere.
- Nothing comes out of nowhere.
- Of course not. I don't believe or disbelieve in what you've been telling me, astro-numerology, the planet Saturn, the Elohim. I take it as an allusive sets of symbols, aids to imagination. But maybe there's something to my father's membership in the Freemasons. He got rich very quickly around the time he joined. Later he suddenly shut down his business, moved from L.A. to San Diego, and there, on his second wife's instruction, forbade me to visit my three half brothers. I was declared a bad influence. Then he went off to Thailand with wife and sons and disappeared, cutting off all contact.
- He angered the Elohim.
- But where did all this come from? My two brothers soon also declared me a bad influence on their children, they took control of all family assets, and worse, much worse followed. Can astro-numerology explain this? Was it some revenge of the Freemasons for my father breaking one of their commandments?
- Possibly. As I said, families can be totally dominated by a single planet. You were the exception, and by your opposition strengthened the planet's influence.
- So when my father broke some occult deal with the Freemasons, my brothers, even my mother became by influence rule breakers too? Why would they? They weren't Freemasons.
- Because of the power of order on people who are without order. The Elohim were restraining the influence of Saturn.
- And without that restraint, the planetary influence broke out on them? Then I am caught up in this cosmic accounting, with the Elohim pursuing my entire family, who are pursuing me?
- Yes.
- Wild.
- Don't you wonder about our meeting tonight? I've been two weeks wandering from place to place. You have been....?
- Two weeks since I arrived from Tel Aviv.
- And we meet at Starbucks right before closing, both on our way to this all night restaurant.
- Are the Elohim after you too?
- No. I have several things to work out in my life, and this is what I needed.
- I don't need this. But I can take it.
- Good for you. That's all that matters. Make your peace.
- But how?
- Be prosperous. Do your work. Get out of your situation.
- Tell me how. I have no idea.
- What are you doing?
- Nothing! I write my stories and wait for good luck.
- Do you think that is enough?
- Do you have a better idea?
- Make money.
- How?
- It will come to you.
- I'll ask the Elohim. Next time I see them.
4. Fighters And Rabbis
- One thing I don't like is they're racist.
- "It's in the genes of Arabs to be killers."
- Yeah. That's what the rabbi said. But I like coming here. And I'm out of money. Though they really make you work for the food. They can pray and sing twenty four hours a day.
- You heard though what the rabbi said at the end of the sermon? It's a mistake to run from, you should run to.
- What does it mean?
- It means don't be afraid or angry, hate or despair, don't run from. Go get what you want, run to it.
- That's good. Do you like the rabbis?
- The rabbi went on about how their movement reformed Judaism, got rid of the empty practice of rituals, traded it for true spirituality, spirituality so powerful a spiritual person could recognize a spiritual person at first sight.
- And what do you think?
- They transmit a tradition they don't understand. They're not spiritual. They worship money and prosperity. You remember how when we came in, you said this was a nice house they have?
- Yes.
- The rabbi said they've got half this block in Beverly Hills, and God willing they'll have the whole block, the whole city soon. They think I'm evil because I don't have money.
- And they think they're good because they do.
- And they'll be better when they have more.
- Some spirituality. What are you doing later?
- Nothing. Go to the cafe and write down a story. I came here from the lawyers of the Beverly Hills doctor my wife married without divorcing me who now wants to divorce her without paying her anything.
- What did you tell them?
- Before he married my wife I went to the doctor's office. He wouldn't see me, so I left a note saying as far as I knew I was still married.
- He married her anyway?
- Yes. My message to the lawyers was this: my whole life was tied up in my marriage. In practical terms, the doctor caused me great harm. If he wanted to make good on that, we had a shared interest in dissolving his relation to my wife. But I wouldn't help someone who'd harmed me.
- What did they say?
- They'd pass on the message to the doctor.
- What do you think will happen?
- No idea. If you've had enough of the rabbi's food, we can go.
- Come with me to the TV studio and watch the fight.
- So it's something like the original Harvard Facebook. Except it is not still images of two girls you have to rate better or worse, but two live video feeds of people competing for your vote. You've been on yourself?
- Yeah. Between eight and ten they pay ten dollars a minute.
- You stay on extra minutes as long as you win?
- Yeah. I've made over eight hundred dollars so far. But it's making me paranoid.
- Why?
- Hackers found out where I live, that I'm Jewish. They found me on social media. Neo-Nazis are writing to me.
- They know your address?
- No. Beverly Hills.
- How did they find out you are Jewish?
- I wore a yarmulke.
- Why did you do that?
- It's show business.
- It's a night of moving from one ridiculous evil to another.
- Neo-Nazis going after me is no joke.
- They don't know anything important about you. This fight here tonight is fake, right?
- My fight wasn't fake.
- You went to the fight like you went to the rabbis thinking what they offered was real, but it's not.
- Being hit in the face was real.
- The rabbi's food was real too. I mean it isn't about what it seems to be about. The fight was about selling ads on broadcast TV, the sermons and prayers are about acquiring wealth, power. Look at these guys. The host is half the weight of the professional fighter he is up against, he's so thin his pants are falling off and he's wearing a low cut pink t-shirt and you take this seriously? You said it yourself, it's show business. Show business is about mass approval. Mass approval is about money. Money is about power. There's nothing good for the spirit here.
- I like it. I've made me a lot of money the last two weeks.
- From tonight turn your back on it.
- The rabbis are racist and money crazy, but I met you there.
- Not everything is fake.
5. BattleCam Kid
- I can't rely on my family. If I die, I've lived a full life, even though I'm only 22 years old. I've managed a medical marijuana dispensary, I've fought off gangsters. I've traveled to 20 countries, I've hung around millionaires until I got tired of them, I've been a regular on broadcast TV.
- That's all?
- How many kids my age can say the same?
- You haven't done anything. You're a Beverly Hills kid.
- And what are you? I don't even know where you are really from. Where are you from? See that hole in the wall? I did that with my head when I was dared to on Battlecam. I don't care if my mother loses her deposit on the apartment.
- You don't respect your mother.
- Why should I? She sent me to the psych. ward.
- You threatened to kill her.
- No I didn't.
- Yes you did.
- Ok, maybe when I was drunk. I was under stress. You stole from me.
- I did not.
- Yes you did. My iphone disappeared when you were here. My guitar disappeared another time when you were here. Things disappear when you are here.
- You left the door open. Anyone could come in. I'm hungry. Do have any money to buy a cup of noodles? I could get two.
- My mom pays 1400 dollars a month for this place, but I'm broke.
- Do you have a couple of dollars?
- Yes. Here.
- I'm going then to the market.
- If you can't find the noodles, call me.
- Do you remember when you went for Chimichungas and couldn't find them?
- Yeah. You told me one aisle, then said another. I gave up.
- Ok, see you when you get back.
6. The Rabbi Works His Magic
- I'll make a deal with you. You let me keep my books here and you can wrap your strings around my arm.
- O.K.
- What do you get out of this?
- Good will come.
- Magically.
- Yes. You don't believe?
- That God likes my arm wrapped up in strings while I repeat words in a language I don't understand?
- Yes.
- The magic is supposed to be for you anyway, not me. It was like you sending me to stay with the Beverly Hills kid. God rewarded you for it, but not me.
- How was it?
- That kid! He and his medical marijuana sleepover friend. Every night they say they have no money, they're hungry, they haven't eaten all day, would I buy them food? This in their fourteen hundred dollars a month apartment.
- His mother pays.
- Yeah, and when finally I'd had enough and wouldn't pay he told me to go, and next thing I know he's coming back from the store with a bag full of groceries.
- What does he do with the money his mother gives him?
- What else? Buys drugs.
- I feel bad for him.
- Why do you care? He's the usual drug addict.
- His father died, his mother was sick. It's not his fault.
- Nothing is anyone's fault. Anyway the magic you want to work on him is supposed to do you good, not him. The strings go from you to me to him.
- I would like to help him.
- He's just someone in trouble you can work your magic on when he comes for a free meal. Are we through? The stings are very tight.
- All done.
7. Genius And The Gods
- Where are you coming from?
- I was talking with your double at the cafe.
- My double?
- He does numerology, studies the Kabbala, relates symbols, demons, angels, gods from every religion, considers himself a spiritual force. The last thing he said was pretty funny.
- What?
- That when people called him a genius he protests, "Don't insult me. I'm god. I create geniuses."
- Was he serious?
- I think he was. But he calls his Facebook page "The Church Of Comedy". He knows his claims aren't getting him anywhere so he exaggerates for comic effect. He says he's the best musician, as good or better than Mozart, the best filmmaker but is being kept out by the powers that be. He says he will be the world's first Trillioniare. Every one of the best movies of the past 20 years stole their ideas from his life. His family were the most important people in all professions. I could be his assistant if I wanted. One day soon we'd go to Hawaii where his 84 year old mother lived with his two young children, and once there we'd start filming the story of his life.
- The world is filled with all kinds.
- You don't think he's the same kind as you?
- I study computers too. Does he?
- He says his brain is better than any computer invented.
- Where is he now?
- I refused his job offer and told him to go home to his kids.
- What did he say?
- He got angry. Said I was a bum. He helped people wherever he went, films had been made about him. He'd go home, but had important things to do first.
- Who's to say? Maybe he does.
- No, he doesn't. Like money has to increase for the banker, for him ideas have to show profit by leading to other ideas. The banker and corporations don't know what to do with the money itself, and he doesn't have a clue what use to put ideas to. What about you? What use do you put your ideas to? I'd like to hear you talk about yourself, what happened with your family. Where are they?
- In my heart.
- Yesterday you said you'd go make some money, but here you are.
- You're here too. What about the woman you met?
- The one who filled her apartment with hundreds of objects she found on the street? She offered me a nap on her couch. Today I met another woman on the way to the market. She advised me to become an apartment manager. When had a long talk, I told her a lot of stories, and when we were saying goodbye she turned her head to look directly in my eyes and asked me if I had seen her 2nd bag, the one with a gun in it.
- Was she crazy?
- I don't think so. I don't know how to make money. I don't claim my ability to make connections puts me in touch with gods. But you said you knew how to make money.
- I went to the Chancellor's office today.
- For money? Did you see him?
- I talked to the secretary and got tired of waiting.
- What did you want?
- I said I deserved a meal ticket. I was a UCLA graduate and one day I would make the school famous.
- What did she say? Are you going to the diner? Let's walk. Socrates said he deserved a meal ticket too, when the court found him guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens and worshiping false gods and asked him to name the punishment he deserved. Do you want to hear something else?
- What?
- A couple years ago, when I first tried to return for good to L.A. and was with my wife, I went to the Chancellor's office with a request too and ended up talking with his secretary.
- What did you ask for?
- I'd applied to study philosophy and had been rejected. I asked why, and the department head said it was because they saw philosophical problems as confusions caused by misuse of language, but I wanted to work out the problems by telling stories of how people actually lived. He suggested I study literature instead. I wrote to all the University administrators, Chancellor included, saying something like:
- That I had no right to tell the department what to do. I said I did. That the University was acting for the interests of bankers and corporations, concerned only with the mindless application of technique. But it was a public institution and was obligated to respect also the other aspects of human life.
- That's it?
- You know, the Athenian court didn't give Socrates his meal ticket. They executed him.
8. The Care And Feeding Of Vampires And Zombies
- Excuse me. We were making a bet. Are you a writer or an actor?
- What did you say?
- Writer. Because of the pen.
- If I have something so inefficient to write with I must be doing something more important than being useful. You win.
- What do you write? Really important things?
- Stories from my life.
- How is your life important?
- Well, you got it right from the start: because it is useless.
- Your life is useless? Nothing happens?
- No, a lot happens. For example last week I visited a law office at that high rise building over there. I'd gotten an email a month before from a L.A. video journalist saying she was writing a book on dangerous woman and wanted to make my wife its centerpiece. She proceeded to ask me if I had documents about my marriage, wedding certificate, was I still married or divorced, would I testify in court, were the stories I'd written about my wife truth or fiction? I replied she sounded more like a private detective than a journalist, and asked how she heard of me. She knew a girl from her new age church who knew the Beverly Hills doctor who married my wife and now wanted to divorce her.
- Your wife married another man without divorcing you?
- See? Things happen in my life. I wrote the journalist a couple weeks ago that if she would like to meet I had arrived back in L.A. from Israel. The next day I received an email from the doctor, my first contact from him. And the following day his law firm wrote me, asking if I would visit them.
- What did they want?
- Help them prove my wife was not legally married to the doctor so he would not have to pay a divorce settlement.
- What did you say?
- I didn't see how I could help the doctor. I didn't like the idea of helping people who harmed me. If he was willing to do something about the disruption his arrival in my life had caused, we could talk.
- Did you mean money?
- Yes. Or something else. I like stories to continue.
- What did the lawyers say?
- They'd ask their client.
- And then?
- The doctor never answered.
- Why?
- Because I'm a useless sort of person when everyone is expected to be useful. I was writing with my inefficient pen about vampires and zombies. Want to hear?
- Everyone likes vampires and zombies.
- Of course they do. We live doing things without end, accumulating more and more things done, each for its own sake. Instead we might have been working towards finding friends, falling in love, making life beautiful and fair. Working towards being able to stop working. A vampire can't stop seducing his victims. It's his work. He doesn't want their love, their beautiful society. The union he seeks isn't mental. He physically incorporates his victims into his own body by drinking their blood, and by the death of his victims he excludes the possibility of resting even for a moment in a new society. He must go on, always go on, finding new victims, always doing without rest. That is what makes him a symbol of our times.
- But you do things too, like what you did with the lawyers.
- Useless things. Ridiculous things that don't lend themselves to infinite accumulation. Vampires and zombies both are creatures who do things without rest. Doing without rest, they might as well be dead. A life of restless activity is equivalent to death because it excludes the good of life. Zombies are flesh eating corpses animated against their will by a magician, whereas vampires are corpses animated by the blood of their deliberately sought victims.
- And what are you, vampire or zombie?
- Resisting being either. The doctor and lawyers are vampires who'd like to drink my blood.
- What about your wife?
- Vampire.
- Vampires want to make you into a vampire too.
- That was the 19th century, the new, self conscious consolidation of the murderous doers without end into a social class. Since the 20th century we have zombies. Zombies express the idea that society itself has become a machine for making masses of individuals into doers without end against their will.
- Why does society create zombies?
- Because society has come to be based on doing without end.
- Don't think me a child asking why over and over, but why is society based on doing without end?
- Once it begins, it increases. People only doing understand and cooperate better with people doing the same kind of thing. This translates into monopolies, which, disrupting society, force even more attention to doing. History draws this fatality out of human nature.
- From everyone's except yours?
- A writer wants to write beautiful stories, and when done rest in the beauty created. A mother like you wants to live in the midst of the love of her family, not accumulate children.
- If useless people, as you call us, exist the whole society is not vampires and zombies.
- No. But our flesh and blood is their food and drink.
- Will you write this down in a story?
- Sure. I don't think anyone can use it for anything.
- How do you make money?
- I don't make money.
- How do you live?
- It surprises me that I do. I'm turning into a new kind of monster, a combination zombie forced to go without sleep and vampire squeezing out stories from the lives of the useful.
9. Seducers
- Who gave you my phone number?
- Liz. You don't know her?
- No. What did she say?
- That like the rest of the people here in Beverly Hills she was too busy making money to be a human. Being human apparently is a rabbi's business so she gave me your number.
- She should give me the money to help people she sends to me.
- I'm not asking you for money.
- What are you asking?
- For you to be human, and be concerned about another human being.
- A lot of people are in difficulty.
- My difficulty is easily removed, and with mutual benefit.
- How?
- Making friends.
- The families I know all have children.
- And I am a potential child molester. I heard that already from the last rabbi. Not every stranger develops into a child molester.
- Bad things can happen.
- And no one should take any chances with strangers. No one who hasn't given his life over as hostage to the community will ever be trusted. Do you know what this reminds me of?
- No.
- Nabokov's "Lolita". Of course it does. With all this talk of wondering if I am a child molester, and the book on my mind anyway because I've got a first edition copy of it in my bag I'm going to try to sell. But it's you guys, you rabbis, I see in the role of seducer, not me. You rabbis claim to know what is good, but don't hold yourselves to practicing good with strangers. The narrator of Nabokov's novel, an English Professor, knows how to speak and see clearly, but uses his knowledge to seduce a young girl. Talking with you rabbis is like reading that book: I can't help liking your clarity and accomplishment, but your ability obviously is being used to bad purpose. It's like a train wreck you see coming and can't help watching. You don't care about me, though you are willing to practice your rituals on me, proclaim your intention to live, learn, love, improve, exactly as Nabokov's character pretends to care for the little girl he seduces and ruins.
- You said you teach English. Can you teach me?
- Yes.
- Come back tomorrow at 10.
- Tomorrow at 10 then. I'll get you to read "Lolita" out loud. Here it is, the first Israeli Edition, copy number 586, the 1958 Jerusalem printing. And here is the memory book from a teen-aged girl in Budapest, entries from 1937-1941. She was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1944.
- How do you know that?
- The Holocaust Archive Yad Vashem in Jerusalem sent me a copy of the entrance questionnaire she had to fill out at the camp. The signature is the same as on the first page of the book, here, see?
- What are you doing with the book? Have you looked for the girl? She might pay a lot to get it back.
- I couldn't find her. I found the book on the street in Budapest a few years ago. I looked into how it got there and what happened to its owner, and learned a lot of history. I learned something particularly nasty about the Jewish leadership in Hungary.
- What?
- The head of the Jewish Agency, together with the head rabbi in Budapest made a deal with the Nazi Adolf Eichmann sent to Hungary to organize the transportation to the death camps: if they could save a chosen thousand of their people, they'd pay Eichmann a thousand dollars per person, and would not disclose to the Jews boarding boxcars at a rate of more than 10,000 a day they would be executed upon arrival at in Poland, were not going for "relocation" as they were being told. Had you heard of this?
- No.
- It's not a nice story. It's just about the worst story I've every heard. I've thought a lot about it. I came to the conclusion that the Jewish leaders dismissed the poor Jews boarding the box cars to their deaths just like you rabbis here in L.A. dismiss me. I'm not really on your team. The head rabbi and head of the Jewish agency in Budapest told themselves they couldn't help the majority, they should save those they could. But deciding to save those they could, they relied on a judgement of probable outcome should informed people attempt resistance, and probable outcome of their own campaign of lying to the people. They were most likely wrong about the possibility of resistance, the probability the people they refused to help also could have lied their way to some partial escape if they'd know the true situation. The leaders saw themselves as professional liars and managers, and other people as the lied to and managed. I think you rabbis do the same with me. The words of your rituals say you care, but you don't. You say you can't help me because you don't let yourselves feel the normal urge to pull a stranger to his feet stumbling beside you on the stairs. Instead of feeling the normal urge to save, you feel the urge to act in role as liars and managers, managers of others who are not professional liars. Like the Budapest leaders you tell yourself helping me means risking harm to those closer to you. Your reasoning about probabilities is just as faulty, is a direct consequence of isolating yourself in your own group of professional liars. It's just my opinion, you understand. I'm a child molester to you, you're a hypocrite and liar to me. Fair is fair. See you tomorrow for your English lesson.
- Not to do anything.
- Where did you go?
- The 24 hour restaurant.
- All night?
- No, I met there a piano teacher who used to give his lessons at a church near where I was living 2 years ago. He was having dinner with a couple a girls, students of his. He asked me what I was up to, I told him, he wished me good luck, and left. But he returned a little later, and said come to his house for the night.
- That was lucky.
- Yes. The next night, it was the 24 hour restaurant again.
- You can't live that way.
- No. But the day after, the piano teacher came to find me at my usual Starbucks, said he'd decided to pay for a couple nights at a hotel for me. I slept through those days and nights, and when they were up was walking by the Jewish center on the way to Westwood when the rabbis outside asked me in to join in the prayers. This kid was there now they'd suggested I meet before, but who I hadn't be able to reach by phone or email. I ended up staying with that kid that night. The next night he wasn't home, so it was the 24 hour restaurant.
- What about the Rabbis?
- What about them?
- They won't help you?
- There's nothing in it for them.
- What are you going to do?
- I can always go back to Israel.
- I thought you hated it there?
- I was homesick so I came home. I'm glad to be here. But it is an economic world here, and as I said, I don't live in that world. That world doesn't want me, and I don't want it. I can't ask what is impossible.
- But you said it was the same in Israel.
- It is. It's worse. But here the economic world is actively at war with its competition, the human worlds. You can't live here without money or a place to live. You'll be preyed on by the violent, both by violent officials and the violent for the hell of it. Israel is not at that point.
- You should try to stay here. It's your home.
- I'm trying.
3. The Elohim And Unaccountable Evil
- You have to make your peace with Saturn.
- How do you suggest I do that?
- You must become prosperous. Have you read Manley Palmer Hall? He was a 33 degree Freemason, an outright genius. He knew how to deal with the Elohim.
- The Elohim? The gods?
- The gods who have to be appeased.
- I'm prosperous in my own way.
- You have to do it their way.
- Make money.
- Yes.
- Sorry, can't oblige the gods. You know, my father was a Freemason, 32nd degree.
- Impressive.
- But he destroyed himself.
- He tried to outrun the Elohim and they caught up with him. Families can be totally dominated by a single planet.
- I never thought of it like that, but I like the idea. It would explain how my whole family turned evil. I'd kept a distance from my family for most of my life, then suddenly one by one they declared war on me. It came out of nowhere.
- Nothing comes out of nowhere.
- Of course not. I don't believe or disbelieve in what you've been telling me, astro-numerology, the planet Saturn, the Elohim. I take it as an allusive sets of symbols, aids to imagination. But maybe there's something to my father's membership in the Freemasons. He got rich very quickly around the time he joined. Later he suddenly shut down his business, moved from L.A. to San Diego, and there, on his second wife's instruction, forbade me to visit my three half brothers. I was declared a bad influence. Then he went off to Thailand with wife and sons and disappeared, cutting off all contact.
- He angered the Elohim.
- But where did all this come from? My two brothers soon also declared me a bad influence on their children, they took control of all family assets, and worse, much worse followed. Can astro-numerology explain this? Was it some revenge of the Freemasons for my father breaking one of their commandments?
- Possibly. As I said, families can be totally dominated by a single planet. You were the exception, and by your opposition strengthened the planet's influence.
- So when my father broke some occult deal with the Freemasons, my brothers, even my mother became by influence rule breakers too? Why would they? They weren't Freemasons.
- Because of the power of order on people who are without order. The Elohim were restraining the influence of Saturn.
- And without that restraint, the planetary influence broke out on them? Then I am caught up in this cosmic accounting, with the Elohim pursuing my entire family, who are pursuing me?
- Yes.
- Wild.
- Don't you wonder about our meeting tonight? I've been two weeks wandering from place to place. You have been....?
- Two weeks since I arrived from Tel Aviv.
- And we meet at Starbucks right before closing, both on our way to this all night restaurant.
- Are the Elohim after you too?
- No. I have several things to work out in my life, and this is what I needed.
- I don't need this. But I can take it.
- Good for you. That's all that matters. Make your peace.
- But how?
- Be prosperous. Do your work. Get out of your situation.
- Tell me how. I have no idea.
- What are you doing?
- Nothing! I write my stories and wait for good luck.
- Do you think that is enough?
- Do you have a better idea?
- Make money.
- How?
- It will come to you.
- I'll ask the Elohim. Next time I see them.
4. Fighters And Rabbis
- One thing I don't like is they're racist.
- "It's in the genes of Arabs to be killers."
- Yeah. That's what the rabbi said. But I like coming here. And I'm out of money. Though they really make you work for the food. They can pray and sing twenty four hours a day.
- You heard though what the rabbi said at the end of the sermon? It's a mistake to run from, you should run to.
- What does it mean?
- It means don't be afraid or angry, hate or despair, don't run from. Go get what you want, run to it.
- That's good. Do you like the rabbis?
- The rabbi went on about how their movement reformed Judaism, got rid of the empty practice of rituals, traded it for true spirituality, spirituality so powerful a spiritual person could recognize a spiritual person at first sight.
- And what do you think?
- They transmit a tradition they don't understand. They're not spiritual. They worship money and prosperity. You remember how when we came in, you said this was a nice house they have?
- Yes.
- The rabbi said they've got half this block in Beverly Hills, and God willing they'll have the whole block, the whole city soon. They think I'm evil because I don't have money.
- And they think they're good because they do.
- And they'll be better when they have more.
- Some spirituality. What are you doing later?
- Nothing. Go to the cafe and write down a story. I came here from the lawyers of the Beverly Hills doctor my wife married without divorcing me who now wants to divorce her without paying her anything.
- What did you tell them?
- Before he married my wife I went to the doctor's office. He wouldn't see me, so I left a note saying as far as I knew I was still married.
- He married her anyway?
- Yes. My message to the lawyers was this: my whole life was tied up in my marriage. In practical terms, the doctor caused me great harm. If he wanted to make good on that, we had a shared interest in dissolving his relation to my wife. But I wouldn't help someone who'd harmed me.
- What did they say?
- They'd pass on the message to the doctor.
- What do you think will happen?
- No idea. If you've had enough of the rabbi's food, we can go.
- Come with me to the TV studio and watch the fight.
- So it's something like the original Harvard Facebook. Except it is not still images of two girls you have to rate better or worse, but two live video feeds of people competing for your vote. You've been on yourself?
- Yeah. Between eight and ten they pay ten dollars a minute.
- You stay on extra minutes as long as you win?
- Yeah. I've made over eight hundred dollars so far. But it's making me paranoid.
- Why?
- Hackers found out where I live, that I'm Jewish. They found me on social media. Neo-Nazis are writing to me.
- They know your address?
- No. Beverly Hills.
- How did they find out you are Jewish?
- I wore a yarmulke.
- Why did you do that?
- It's show business.
- It's a night of moving from one ridiculous evil to another.
- Neo-Nazis going after me is no joke.
- They don't know anything important about you. This fight here tonight is fake, right?
- My fight wasn't fake.
- You went to the fight like you went to the rabbis thinking what they offered was real, but it's not.
- Being hit in the face was real.
- The rabbi's food was real too. I mean it isn't about what it seems to be about. The fight was about selling ads on broadcast TV, the sermons and prayers are about acquiring wealth, power. Look at these guys. The host is half the weight of the professional fighter he is up against, he's so thin his pants are falling off and he's wearing a low cut pink t-shirt and you take this seriously? You said it yourself, it's show business. Show business is about mass approval. Mass approval is about money. Money is about power. There's nothing good for the spirit here.
- I like it. I've made me a lot of money the last two weeks.
- From tonight turn your back on it.
- The rabbis are racist and money crazy, but I met you there.
- Not everything is fake.
5. BattleCam Kid
- I can't rely on my family. If I die, I've lived a full life, even though I'm only 22 years old. I've managed a medical marijuana dispensary, I've fought off gangsters. I've traveled to 20 countries, I've hung around millionaires until I got tired of them, I've been a regular on broadcast TV.
- That's all?
- How many kids my age can say the same?
- You haven't done anything. You're a Beverly Hills kid.
- And what are you? I don't even know where you are really from. Where are you from? See that hole in the wall? I did that with my head when I was dared to on Battlecam. I don't care if my mother loses her deposit on the apartment.
- You don't respect your mother.
- Why should I? She sent me to the psych. ward.
- You threatened to kill her.
- No I didn't.
- Yes you did.
- Ok, maybe when I was drunk. I was under stress. You stole from me.
- I did not.
- Yes you did. My iphone disappeared when you were here. My guitar disappeared another time when you were here. Things disappear when you are here.
- You left the door open. Anyone could come in. I'm hungry. Do have any money to buy a cup of noodles? I could get two.
- My mom pays 1400 dollars a month for this place, but I'm broke.
- Do you have a couple of dollars?
- Yes. Here.
- I'm going then to the market.
- If you can't find the noodles, call me.
- Do you remember when you went for Chimichungas and couldn't find them?
- Yeah. You told me one aisle, then said another. I gave up.
- Ok, see you when you get back.
6. The Rabbi Works His Magic
- I'll make a deal with you. You let me keep my books here and you can wrap your strings around my arm.
- O.K.
- What do you get out of this?
- Good will come.
- Magically.
- Yes. You don't believe?
- That God likes my arm wrapped up in strings while I repeat words in a language I don't understand?
- Yes.
- The magic is supposed to be for you anyway, not me. It was like you sending me to stay with the Beverly Hills kid. God rewarded you for it, but not me.
- How was it?
- That kid! He and his medical marijuana sleepover friend. Every night they say they have no money, they're hungry, they haven't eaten all day, would I buy them food? This in their fourteen hundred dollars a month apartment.
- His mother pays.
- Yeah, and when finally I'd had enough and wouldn't pay he told me to go, and next thing I know he's coming back from the store with a bag full of groceries.
- What does he do with the money his mother gives him?
- What else? Buys drugs.
- I feel bad for him.
- Why do you care? He's the usual drug addict.
- His father died, his mother was sick. It's not his fault.
- Nothing is anyone's fault. Anyway the magic you want to work on him is supposed to do you good, not him. The strings go from you to me to him.
- I would like to help him.
- He's just someone in trouble you can work your magic on when he comes for a free meal. Are we through? The stings are very tight.
- All done.
7. Genius And The Gods
- Where are you coming from?
- I was talking with your double at the cafe.
- My double?
- He does numerology, studies the Kabbala, relates symbols, demons, angels, gods from every religion, considers himself a spiritual force. The last thing he said was pretty funny.
- What?
- That when people called him a genius he protests, "Don't insult me. I'm god. I create geniuses."
- Was he serious?
- I think he was. But he calls his Facebook page "The Church Of Comedy". He knows his claims aren't getting him anywhere so he exaggerates for comic effect. He says he's the best musician, as good or better than Mozart, the best filmmaker but is being kept out by the powers that be. He says he will be the world's first Trillioniare. Every one of the best movies of the past 20 years stole their ideas from his life. His family were the most important people in all professions. I could be his assistant if I wanted. One day soon we'd go to Hawaii where his 84 year old mother lived with his two young children, and once there we'd start filming the story of his life.
- The world is filled with all kinds.
- You don't think he's the same kind as you?
- I study computers too. Does he?
- He says his brain is better than any computer invented.
- Where is he now?
- I refused his job offer and told him to go home to his kids.
- What did he say?
- He got angry. Said I was a bum. He helped people wherever he went, films had been made about him. He'd go home, but had important things to do first.
- Who's to say? Maybe he does.
- No, he doesn't. Like money has to increase for the banker, for him ideas have to show profit by leading to other ideas. The banker and corporations don't know what to do with the money itself, and he doesn't have a clue what use to put ideas to. What about you? What use do you put your ideas to? I'd like to hear you talk about yourself, what happened with your family. Where are they?
- In my heart.
- Yesterday you said you'd go make some money, but here you are.
- You're here too. What about the woman you met?
- The one who filled her apartment with hundreds of objects she found on the street? She offered me a nap on her couch. Today I met another woman on the way to the market. She advised me to become an apartment manager. When had a long talk, I told her a lot of stories, and when we were saying goodbye she turned her head to look directly in my eyes and asked me if I had seen her 2nd bag, the one with a gun in it.
- Was she crazy?
- I don't think so. I don't know how to make money. I don't claim my ability to make connections puts me in touch with gods. But you said you knew how to make money.
- I went to the Chancellor's office today.
- For money? Did you see him?
- I talked to the secretary and got tired of waiting.
- What did you want?
- I said I deserved a meal ticket. I was a UCLA graduate and one day I would make the school famous.
- What did she say? Are you going to the diner? Let's walk. Socrates said he deserved a meal ticket too, when the court found him guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens and worshiping false gods and asked him to name the punishment he deserved. Do you want to hear something else?
- What?
- A couple years ago, when I first tried to return for good to L.A. and was with my wife, I went to the Chancellor's office with a request too and ended up talking with his secretary.
- What did you ask for?
- I'd applied to study philosophy and had been rejected. I asked why, and the department head said it was because they saw philosophical problems as confusions caused by misuse of language, but I wanted to work out the problems by telling stories of how people actually lived. He suggested I study literature instead. I wrote to all the University administrators, Chancellor included, saying something like:
The University was acting like the corporation bosses who managed it who must legally disregard all human concerns in their pursuit of making profits. The philosophy department looked for efficiency of language like the corporations looked for efficiency of money making, both at the expense of understanding or respecting anything about human life.- What did they answer?
- That I had no right to tell the department what to do. I said I did. That the University was acting for the interests of bankers and corporations, concerned only with the mindless application of technique. But it was a public institution and was obligated to respect also the other aspects of human life.
- That's it?
- You know, the Athenian court didn't give Socrates his meal ticket. They executed him.
8. The Care And Feeding Of Vampires And Zombies
- Excuse me. We were making a bet. Are you a writer or an actor?
- What did you say?
- Writer. Because of the pen.
- If I have something so inefficient to write with I must be doing something more important than being useful. You win.
- What do you write? Really important things?
- Stories from my life.
- How is your life important?
- Well, you got it right from the start: because it is useless.
- Your life is useless? Nothing happens?
- No, a lot happens. For example last week I visited a law office at that high rise building over there. I'd gotten an email a month before from a L.A. video journalist saying she was writing a book on dangerous woman and wanted to make my wife its centerpiece. She proceeded to ask me if I had documents about my marriage, wedding certificate, was I still married or divorced, would I testify in court, were the stories I'd written about my wife truth or fiction? I replied she sounded more like a private detective than a journalist, and asked how she heard of me. She knew a girl from her new age church who knew the Beverly Hills doctor who married my wife and now wanted to divorce her.
- Your wife married another man without divorcing you?
- See? Things happen in my life. I wrote the journalist a couple weeks ago that if she would like to meet I had arrived back in L.A. from Israel. The next day I received an email from the doctor, my first contact from him. And the following day his law firm wrote me, asking if I would visit them.
- What did they want?
- Help them prove my wife was not legally married to the doctor so he would not have to pay a divorce settlement.
- What did you say?
- I didn't see how I could help the doctor. I didn't like the idea of helping people who harmed me. If he was willing to do something about the disruption his arrival in my life had caused, we could talk.
- Did you mean money?
- Yes. Or something else. I like stories to continue.
- What did the lawyers say?
- They'd ask their client.
- And then?
- The doctor never answered.
- Why?
- Because I'm a useless sort of person when everyone is expected to be useful. I was writing with my inefficient pen about vampires and zombies. Want to hear?
- Everyone likes vampires and zombies.
- Of course they do. We live doing things without end, accumulating more and more things done, each for its own sake. Instead we might have been working towards finding friends, falling in love, making life beautiful and fair. Working towards being able to stop working. A vampire can't stop seducing his victims. It's his work. He doesn't want their love, their beautiful society. The union he seeks isn't mental. He physically incorporates his victims into his own body by drinking their blood, and by the death of his victims he excludes the possibility of resting even for a moment in a new society. He must go on, always go on, finding new victims, always doing without rest. That is what makes him a symbol of our times.
- But you do things too, like what you did with the lawyers.
- Useless things. Ridiculous things that don't lend themselves to infinite accumulation. Vampires and zombies both are creatures who do things without rest. Doing without rest, they might as well be dead. A life of restless activity is equivalent to death because it excludes the good of life. Zombies are flesh eating corpses animated against their will by a magician, whereas vampires are corpses animated by the blood of their deliberately sought victims.
- And what are you, vampire or zombie?
- Resisting being either. The doctor and lawyers are vampires who'd like to drink my blood.
- What about your wife?
- Vampire.
- Vampires want to make you into a vampire too.
- That was the 19th century, the new, self conscious consolidation of the murderous doers without end into a social class. Since the 20th century we have zombies. Zombies express the idea that society itself has become a machine for making masses of individuals into doers without end against their will.
- Why does society create zombies?
- Because society has come to be based on doing without end.
- Don't think me a child asking why over and over, but why is society based on doing without end?
- Once it begins, it increases. People only doing understand and cooperate better with people doing the same kind of thing. This translates into monopolies, which, disrupting society, force even more attention to doing. History draws this fatality out of human nature.
- From everyone's except yours?
- A writer wants to write beautiful stories, and when done rest in the beauty created. A mother like you wants to live in the midst of the love of her family, not accumulate children.
- If useless people, as you call us, exist the whole society is not vampires and zombies.
- No. But our flesh and blood is their food and drink.
- Will you write this down in a story?
- Sure. I don't think anyone can use it for anything.
- How do you make money?
- I don't make money.
- How do you live?
- It surprises me that I do. I'm turning into a new kind of monster, a combination zombie forced to go without sleep and vampire squeezing out stories from the lives of the useful.
9. Seducers
- Who gave you my phone number?
- Liz. You don't know her?
- No. What did she say?
- That like the rest of the people here in Beverly Hills she was too busy making money to be a human. Being human apparently is a rabbi's business so she gave me your number.
- She should give me the money to help people she sends to me.
- I'm not asking you for money.
- What are you asking?
- For you to be human, and be concerned about another human being.
- A lot of people are in difficulty.
- My difficulty is easily removed, and with mutual benefit.
- How?
- Making friends.
- The families I know all have children.
- And I am a potential child molester. I heard that already from the last rabbi. Not every stranger develops into a child molester.
- Bad things can happen.
- And no one should take any chances with strangers. No one who hasn't given his life over as hostage to the community will ever be trusted. Do you know what this reminds me of?
- No.
- Nabokov's "Lolita". Of course it does. With all this talk of wondering if I am a child molester, and the book on my mind anyway because I've got a first edition copy of it in my bag I'm going to try to sell. But it's you guys, you rabbis, I see in the role of seducer, not me. You rabbis claim to know what is good, but don't hold yourselves to practicing good with strangers. The narrator of Nabokov's novel, an English Professor, knows how to speak and see clearly, but uses his knowledge to seduce a young girl. Talking with you rabbis is like reading that book: I can't help liking your clarity and accomplishment, but your ability obviously is being used to bad purpose. It's like a train wreck you see coming and can't help watching. You don't care about me, though you are willing to practice your rituals on me, proclaim your intention to live, learn, love, improve, exactly as Nabokov's character pretends to care for the little girl he seduces and ruins.
- You said you teach English. Can you teach me?
- Yes.
- Come back tomorrow at 10.
- Tomorrow at 10 then. I'll get you to read "Lolita" out loud. Here it is, the first Israeli Edition, copy number 586, the 1958 Jerusalem printing. And here is the memory book from a teen-aged girl in Budapest, entries from 1937-1941. She was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1944.
- How do you know that?
- The Holocaust Archive Yad Vashem in Jerusalem sent me a copy of the entrance questionnaire she had to fill out at the camp. The signature is the same as on the first page of the book, here, see?
- What are you doing with the book? Have you looked for the girl? She might pay a lot to get it back.
- I couldn't find her. I found the book on the street in Budapest a few years ago. I looked into how it got there and what happened to its owner, and learned a lot of history. I learned something particularly nasty about the Jewish leadership in Hungary.
- What?
- The head of the Jewish Agency, together with the head rabbi in Budapest made a deal with the Nazi Adolf Eichmann sent to Hungary to organize the transportation to the death camps: if they could save a chosen thousand of their people, they'd pay Eichmann a thousand dollars per person, and would not disclose to the Jews boarding boxcars at a rate of more than 10,000 a day they would be executed upon arrival at in Poland, were not going for "relocation" as they were being told. Had you heard of this?
- No.
- It's not a nice story. It's just about the worst story I've every heard. I've thought a lot about it. I came to the conclusion that the Jewish leaders dismissed the poor Jews boarding the box cars to their deaths just like you rabbis here in L.A. dismiss me. I'm not really on your team. The head rabbi and head of the Jewish agency in Budapest told themselves they couldn't help the majority, they should save those they could. But deciding to save those they could, they relied on a judgement of probable outcome should informed people attempt resistance, and probable outcome of their own campaign of lying to the people. They were most likely wrong about the possibility of resistance, the probability the people they refused to help also could have lied their way to some partial escape if they'd know the true situation. The leaders saw themselves as professional liars and managers, and other people as the lied to and managed. I think you rabbis do the same with me. The words of your rituals say you care, but you don't. You say you can't help me because you don't let yourselves feel the normal urge to pull a stranger to his feet stumbling beside you on the stairs. Instead of feeling the normal urge to save, you feel the urge to act in role as liars and managers, managers of others who are not professional liars. Like the Budapest leaders you tell yourself helping me means risking harm to those closer to you. Your reasoning about probabilities is just as faulty, is a direct consequence of isolating yourself in your own group of professional liars. It's just my opinion, you understand. I'm a child molester to you, you're a hypocrite and liar to me. Fair is fair. See you tomorrow for your English lesson.
