“I have battled fear all my life,” said Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, about what inspired him to write his latest book, “Face Your Fear: Living with Courage in an Age of Caution” (St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, $23.95).
Boteach discussed his book a week before his visit to Milwaukee on Monday, Nov. 8, as the featured speaker at the Milwaukee Jewish Federations Major Gifts Dinner for members of the King David, Presidents and Ben-Gurion Societies.
Boteach, author of several best-selling books, such as “Kosher Sex” and “Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments,” says many people “live artificial lives” because they allow themselves to be “governed by fear.”
These fears include fear of humiliation, injury, death, and feelings of insignificance. “Unless you conquer fear,” Boteach writes, “it will conquer you.”
Boteach said that he wrote the book because it is “my firm conviction that purging ourselves of fear allows us to experience our full humanity. I just believe in being courageous. You need to run to the light instead of to the darkness.”
In the book, Boteach offers “22 strategies to banish fear by connecting to what is rock-solid and eternal.” They include “believing in your destiny,” “embracing the super-rational,” “keeping hope alive” and “raising fearless children.”
Boteach aims “ to look at the root cause of fear. I am teaching people to identify that root cause. Fear is a disease that needs to be cured. Anything it leads us to achieve can be achieved through positive means. That will guarantee that we will enjoy the journey.”
Boteach used his own personal “fear of insignificance” as an example.
In 2000, Boteach, according to his web site, “ran a one-year initiative” with singer Michael Jackson, “promoting parents spending more time with their children.”
“When someone famous likes you, that makes you feel significant,” Boteach said. But that friendship ended when Boteach felt “he could no longer positively influence [Jackson].”
It is difficult, he said, “not to remedy a relationship with someone” who doesn’t stand with “what you represent,” Boteach said.
Boteach also discussed his opinions on the role of fear as used by the presidential candidates throughout the campaign.
Boteach, who is a “big supporter of Bush,” said that he was “critical of Bush for going down the route of fear. I was never impressed with Kerry, so I wasn’t unimpressed when he used it.”
At the same time, Boteach said, “What made Bush so beloved after 9/11 is that he taught Americans not to be afraid, to be liberated from fear.”
Boteach first became well known as the founder of the L’Chaim Society, an organization at Oxford University in England of students, at which he served as rabbi for 11 years.
He is also a nationally syndicated talk show host of “Passions,” which airs daily, and a syndicated columnist, with a weekly column in the Jerusalem Post, and articles appearing on Worldnetdaily.com and Beliefnet.com.
Boteach is currently working on another book, due for publication in Spring 2005, titled “Hating Women: The New Racisim and the Scandal of Feminist Indifference.”
In the book, Boteach identifies “four exceptionally foul stereotypes paraded in culture,” and how men learn these stereotypes and then learn to disrespect women.
For his presentation at the MJF Major Gifts dinner, Boteach will speak on “Reality TV: The Conflict Between Celebrity and Dignity in the Modern World,” a topic taken from his recent book, “The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age.”
Boteach said that it disturbs him that today’s “heroes are people like Eminem. It’s an amazing thing. A hero should be made through dignity.”
With role models like that, said the father of seven, “you are not going to raise a great generation.”
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