On Why I No Longer Do Speaking Engagements

"Hello.  I'm Rabbi Gershom, and I'm autistic..."

This is how I often introduce myself to a group nowadays, because I find that being upfront about my autism helps people get beyond my personal quirks.  Those of you who dislike labels should try being me without any kind of explanation.  Believe me, owning the label is much better.

Back in 1992, when my first book, Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust came out, I did not yet have a diagnosis.  Asperger's Syndrome (now considered a form of autism) wasn't even on the radar yet.  I was aware of my lifelong struggle with clumsy social skills, but nothing could have prepared me for the humiliating experiences I had on the speaking circuit.  Once the book came out, everybody and anybody wanted to meet the author -- and were deeply disappointed that a jabbering nerd like me was the guy who wrote it.

Within the Jewish community, I had functioned reasonably well, since we tend to be intense debaters who sway a lot and wave our hands around when we talk.  During worship we pace, shout, rock to our own inner rhythms -- what autistic people now call "stimming."  I have often joked that if  an uninformed person walked into an Orthodox study group, he or she might mistake it for a support group for autistic adults.  Which is probably another reason why my own autism went undiagnosed for so long.  In Jewish culture, rocking and swaying are considered normal.

And it was in a Jewish context that the book was written, where I was seen as a Jewish teacher talking about Jewish kabbalah.  Most of the reincarnation interviews were done one-on-one, which I'm good at.  Some people sent me written stories of their past-life memories, too, or copies of their past-life regression tapes.  Plus there were many phone interviews, also one-on-one.  From this material and my own academic research, the book Beyond the Ashes was born.

But when the book came out in 1992, everything changed  People read books in their own inner voice.  They form an idea of what the author is like, based on their own feelings and impressions.  This image becomes a sort of idol that they expect the author to live up to.  When it comes to spirituality, the New Age image is one of a calm mellow, laid-back personality, a sort of guru sitting cross-legged on a pillow, chanting "Om."  Google "spirituality images" and you get this:

An image that I do not fit at all.  Not one photo in there of Orthodox Jews dancing, swaying, rocking back and forth in ecstasy.  Which is why I was mostly a one-gig speaker.  A guy who disappointed his audience and was rarely invited back.

At one workshop, a participant flat out told me that if he had known I was a "typical New York Jew," he would never have signed up.  (I am not from New York. And yes, I do see the antisemitism in this attitude, but that's a whole other story.)  At another workshop, my bluntness was seen as insensitivity.  In Germany, where my book had just been translated, my mannerisms were mistaken for nervousness.  As for the written feedback forms...  I could go on and on, but you get the point.

 There were times when I regretted writing Beyond the Ashes, this book that took over my life and typecast me so completely that nobody wanted to hear about anything else.  Yes, it helped many people, but it also left me tired and drained.  I came to understand why Leonard Nimoy wrote I Am Not Spock after the original Star Trek series ended.  I began to see myself as something separate from the "Rabbi Gershom" who wrote about Holocaust reincarnations.  He became a role I was playing -- not very healthy, to be sure.  I was disassociating from myself as author of the book.

The final straw came in the late 1990s, when I was castigated in front of the audience by a program organizer for not being "spiritual enough," and for going "off topic" on a question that didn't have to do with reincarnation per se, but which was relevant to explaining the Jewish worldview.   He actually said, "This is not what we hired you to talk about."  All they wanted to hear was Holocaust reincarnation stories, without much Jewish context. I came home from that gig emotionally drained and vowing never to do that again.  Dayenu!  Enough already!

The diagnosis changes everything...

It was during the 1990s, in the middle of all this chaos, at the age of 54, that I was diagnosed, first with ADHD, and later Asperger's (which I now believe can overlap each other.)  Suddenly a light went on in my head.  Things began falling into place.  I went online and read everything I could find on autism, joined numerous discussion groups and began putting my life back together.   Had I known more about my autism during those years on the speaking circuit, had I been able to give a name to the mannerisms that the audience found so uncomfortable, things might have gone differently.  Heck, if I had known about it in childhood, my whole life might have been different.  But that is, as they say, water under the bridge.

In the year 2000, as my millennium resolution, I pulled out of the spirituality workshop circuit altogether.  I had given 20+ years of my life to this
topic and it was time to move on.  There were now plenty of therapists and psychiatrists who were getting paid way more than me to do this Holocaust reincarnation stuff.  So let them have it. My book opened the door. Others walked through.  My role was over. And I was, quite frankly, tired of being typecast as “The Holocaust reincarnation rabbi.” I was tired of getting calls in the middle of the night from people who wanted free counseling and did not bother to check time zones. It was time to pass the torch to the next generation and begin a new chapter in my own life. So I did.

What is "spirituality" anyway? 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "spirituality as "The quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things."  There is nothing in that sentence about body language, eye contact, voice inflections -- all of which are, after all, the very "physical things" that spirituality is supposed to leave behind.  So why judge me for not fitting into the New Age stereotype?

Nevertheless, that's what happened.  It traumatized me to the point that I no longer want to do workshops and have pretty much become a recluse, living with my wife and my animals in northern Minnesota.  What I have to say, I communicate through my writing.  It was, after all, a book that originally started all this, and, if I may say so myself, I'm a darned good writer.  Let people read in their own inner voice, without the distraction of my autistic personality.  Maybe in that way, I can get something of my true spirituality across.

There are probably readers out there now thinking to themselves, "Well, he can't be much of a spiritual guide if he can't even handle a little criticism."  First of all, I never claimed to be some sort of guru.  And second of all, there is no reason I should have to put up with emotional abuse.  Constructive criticism of my work I can take, but all this personal rejection did very little for my self-esteem.  If anyone is being "unspiritual," it's those people who insist on projecting their own expectations on me.

Today, I find myself wondering how many other autistic people have been rejected because of New Age stereotypes about what it means to be spiritual. We are frequently misread as "having no empathy" or being "unable to love" because we don't look people in the eye or enjoy being spontaneously hugged.  Many of us are unable to sit still without fidgeting, which pretty much rules out Zen meditation.  I was also seen as "unsocial" at all those speaking events because I didn't hang around the hotel bar to chitchat afterward.  After the intensity of doing a speech and/or leading a workshop, I need solitude to recharge.  The last thing I need is to be surrounded by the audio-visual chaos of a party.

I  puzzled for years over why God would have chosen me to be the person to write Beyond the Ashes.   I finally came to the conclusion that God did not want this thing to turn into a cult.  So he chose an autistic nerd with zero charisma, a guy with a memory for details who could put it all together with a certain amount of emotional detachment, but not become a cult leader.  The Aspie tendency to hyper-focus on one topic at the exclusion of all other interests served me well in making Beyond the Ashes a useful book that remained in print for 18 years.

Not many people get to "write the book" on a topic.  I did exactly that, not only opening the door to talk about Holocaust reincarnations, but also, as so many people have told me, opening up Jewish spirituality.  At the time Beyond the Ashes first came out, there was very little available in English about Jewish reincarnation teachings. This made it a groundbreaking work in the spirituality field. The book has had a profound and positive effect on how people in the New Age and past-life therapy communities are now interpreting the “karma” of the Holocaust.  Today it is a classic.

Yes, I can see the irony in that.  "Autistic nerd writes major book on spirituality."  If I were a true New Ager, I would claim that I channeled it, that some other entity besides Yonassan Gershom is the true author.  But I know differently.  The book happened precisely because of my autism, which provided a perfect storm of just the right abilities at just the right time.  That is my genius.

I defeated the bullies: RabbiGershom.com is mine again!

As I wrote in a previous article, I have been getting cyber-bullied around the Net for various stances I have taken on controversial issues.  One of these attacks consisted of some jerks putting up a bogus website under "rabbigershom.com," which was the URL of an old website I had that went defunct.  My alerts told me this week that this URL was now available, so I bought it.  Apparently my posting of a Ripoff Report, writing the blog post, and posting a notice on every one of my profiles that this was NOT me worked -- the bullies gave it up.

For now the URL is simply parked, I'm not sure what, if anything, i will do with it in the future.  But at least searches for my site will no longer take people to some phony escort service I was never, ever connected with.  Thank you to everyone who wrote protest letters and otherwise supported me in this!

Oy vey! I'm being cyber-bullied by IDIOTS!

In the last few months I seem to have picked up some "followers" who think it is fun to track me around the net, posting libelous insults.  At first I just ignored them, but with all the talk about bullying lately, I finally decided to confront these people and bring their stupidity out into the open.

The childish vandal(s) on Wikipedia

A lot of the bullying has been rather juvenile, such as the anonymous vandal who changed "Jewish Vegetarians of North America" to "Jewish Cannibals of North Africa" on the Wikipedia page about me.  (Whether that was intended to be anti-vegetarian or simply racist is anybody's guess.)  The bogus edit was quickly caught by a page-watcher and reverted.  The same bully made a few more equally inane edits before disappearing into the void.  Somebody else added a claim that I "wrote manuals" for NAMBLA (a pedophile/pederasty group that I have never, ever had any contact with, and I certainly would not write anything for them, not even on contract as an editor.)  This was libelous but easily removed, since anybody can edit on Wikipedia.

My reaction to such childish graffiti is to say, "Get off your mother's computer before she comes home and grounds you for life."  I mean, who in their right mind would really believe that Adolf Hitler is my "hero and inspiration"?  (Yes, some dumbkopf really did put that on the Wikipedia page.)  Luckily, Wikipedians are very vigilant about such vandalism and have reverted the page back to the original -- numerous times.

The YouTube stalker

A lot more nasty was the jerk called "mosesmaimon1" on YouTube, who certainly was no Moses Maimonides.  He started out by posting this bully-flame on all my YouTube videos:

"Yonassan Gershom is a complete and total fraud. he is no rabbi at all. rather, he is a self-hating Jew, a left wing liberal lunatic marxist islamofascist loving gay homosexual. and those are his good points."

Apparently this ridiculous contradictory diatribe was supposed to deter people from watching my videos on Judaism and vegetarianism, since that's where he put it. "Self-hating Jew" has become a catch-all in the Jewish community for belittling anybody you don't agree with.  Similarly, "Islamofascist" is now a buzzword for anybody who dialogues with Muslims or writes anything positive about Islam -- which I have done, both in a chapter about Islamophobia in Professor Richard Schwartz's book, Who Stole My Religion?  and in several book reviews on Amazon.  Dialogue, tolerance, and understanding are not words in this bully's vocabulary. 

When I deleted the comments and blocked him, he proceeded to follow me everywhere on the YouTube site, posting this same junk after every comment I had made -- even the one on the video tour of the handicapped-accessible shuttle bus at Como Park.  Go figure.  Clearly he was not watching anything I "liked" or wrote, just searching my name to spam it with insults.

Given the references to liberalism, I expected to find a lot of militant ultra-religious right-wing videos linked to his YouTube channel.  But when I went there, all I found was secular stuff, most of it meaningless drivel.  So does this guy even know enough about Judaism to understand what my books and videos are about?  Be that as it may, getting rid of this guy was easy:  I reported him to YouTube and he disappeared from my life -- and apparently off the site itself, since a search for his name today brought up nothing.

"Four legs good, two legs bad"? 

It appears these attacks are reactions to my stances on politics, vegetarianism, and, most recently, my opposition to using live chickens for kapporos ceremonies.  It saddens me to see that Judaism, once a bastion of debate and diverse opinion, has, for some people, now become an Orwellian "four legs good, two legs bad" haven for bullies with atrophied brains.  This is especially true of any criticism concerning policies in Israel.  It has gotten to the point that a Jew can say "I don't believe in God" and nobody bats an eye, but criticize Israel and they will burn you at the cyber-stake.   When I was growing up, I was taught that worshipping the state -- any state -- is idolatry.  And isn't democracy all about the right to criticize the government?  Apparently not for these guys.

The identity thief:  "rabbigershom.com" is NOT ME!

UPDATE:  I got the URL back -- and it is mine again.  So the bogus site described below is gone, gone, GONE!  But for the record, I'm leaving the story up here as a warning:  Don't mess with me, because I will fight back!

All of this could be written off as life on the Web, which is what I did for a long time.  I've been deleting hate mail for years.  But the most recent attack is an actual case of identity theft, using an old website address (that I no longer own) to create a bogus site advertising some escort service in London, which probably doesn't even exist, given that the owner of the URL lives in Russia.  The purpose of the site is to hijack searches for my name and misdirect them, apparently to discredit me.

For the record:  There once was a website called "rabbigershom.com" but it no longer exists.  I took it down when the Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring all online "nexus" corporations to collect state sales tax if they had representatives in the state -- and that includes Associates accounts.  Amazon responded by shutting down all their Minnesota Associates accounts, including mine.  Since I had literally hundreds of Amazon book links embedded on over a hundred website pages, and since I was no longer getting paid for these referrals, I retaliated by taking the whole site down.  (It was outdated anyway, but that's another issue.)

When the time came to renew the domain name, I didn't bother, since the site no longer existed and I was now using JewishThoreau.com for my blog.  Never in a million years did I dream that some sleezeball would come along and buy "rabbigershom.com" and turn it into a page for an escort service.  But that's what happened.

In the beginning, they actually had my full name and title -- "Rabbi Yonassan Gershom" -- in the title of their homepage (which tells me that it really is an attack on me, not just some other guy named Gershom.)   I cried "Fraud!" and got that removed, but there is not much I can do about them using the domain name itself, since there are hundreds of people named Gershom and some of them are rabbis.  It would be like trying to copyright "Doctor Smith."  Hindsight is always 20/20, they say, and I probably should have kept the URL in my name even if I did not use it.  But such things cost money and they probably would have just gone to using dot-net or some such.  I can't afford to protect every variation of my name.

Raise your voice and stand by me!

Unfortunately, since I've been on the Web since the 1980s, there are still tons of links on various websites that supposedly go to the old homepage but now point to the bogus one instead.  I'm still getting notifications about this from intelligent readers who can see plainly what is happening.  If you find one of these phishing links, please notify the webmaster that I'm not that guy, and ask for it to point to my blog at JewishThoreau.com instead. (If you need proof of your claim, just point them to this blog post.)  And if you want to go further, go to the rabbigershom.com page and spam their contact email with protests.  (Update: Not necessary anymore, because I got the URL back and it now points here. But it was a good tactic.)  Stand up to the bullies!

I will not be intimidated!

The motivation behind all of this cyber-bullying seems to be to try to shut me up by intimidating me and/or smearing my reputation.  It is significant that none of these people actually debate issues with me or have even met me.    I highly doubt they have actually read any of my books, or if they are even educated enough to understand them.   As far as I know, none of them have ever come to this blog to discuss the things I wrote here. Of course not -- to do so would mean being confronted by people who actually read the blog, and these cockroaches can't take that kind of daylight.  So they just scurry around the Web, posting canned insults and hiding behind their computer screens like the cowards they are.   Apparently, when God was handing out morals, these people thought He said "laurels" so now they think they are some kind of heroes.  Not!

It is also interesting how many of these libels center on sexuality -- from the accusation that I'm a homosexual (not true, I've been married to my female wife, Caryl since 1980, although I do support gay rights as human rights and have done so since the 1970s), to the escort site phishing off my name and a claim that I promote polygamy (also not true, probably another slur on my dialogues with Muslims, or maybe somebody was dumb enough to actually believe the escort site was real.)

If you can't debate, just post some hate?

 This seems to be the mindset lately:  If you can't intelligently refute somebody's stance on an issue, just make up some sleeze or circulate lies and hate mail to try and take them down in the public eye.  This has become so common that there is actually a service called  Reputation.com where you can hire people to watch out for (and refute) attacks on the Web.  I can't afford that service, but I'm thankful I've got a lot of loyal readers who are doing the same thing.

As an old man in my 70s, I can often laugh at all this, but bullying is really no laughing matter.  Even at my age, it hurts, but I've lived long enough to deal with it.  However, when it happens to vulnerable teenagers, it can lead to nervous breakdowns or even suicide -- which has actually happened.  Thus my decision to come out and confront this issue, to tell these stories and reveal these lies for what they are.  Bullies are bullies, no matter where, why, or whom they attack.

* * * UPDATES * * *

See also: What does Judaism say about bullying? -- a good collection of statements by rabbis from various backgrounds and denominations, on The Free Library site.

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A ripoff report has been filed in reference to the bogus use of rabbigershom.com described in this article.  Feel free to read and respond to it.

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A number of insulting and libelous comments were also written as "reviews" of my books on  Amazon.com.  Amazon graciously removed them, as they violated their reviews policy.

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Rabbigershom.org is not me, either -- but it flips over to a website called B'chol Loshon ("in every tongue") which is a legitimate site promoting diversity within the Jewish community.  Their "Rabbi Gershom" is Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the leader of the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda, and the first black rabbi from sub-Saharan Africa to be ordained at an American rabbinic school.

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A reader emailed me to point out that the slur referring to Hitler might have been connected to the persistent claim that Hitler was a vegetarian.  (This is a myth.  Although Hitler did sometimes refrain from eating meat for health and hygienic reasons, he also regularly ate meat and was fond of sausage and liver dumplings.  Read more...)  People who use this argument against vegetarianism base it on the classic false logic of:  "Hitler was a vegetarian.  Hitler was evil.  Therefore all vegetarians are evil."  But as Peter Singer once said, Hitler had a nose, but that does not mean everybody should cut off their noses.

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February 26, 2014:  Now that I've written this protest, Google's stupid robot is flagging the insult I quoted above in searches for my name.  By defending myself, I'm spreading the libel.  Can't win for losing.  I suppose this is happening because this is a new post that is getting a lot of traffic -- and it's on a Google blog, so of course the Google search engine plays favorites with its own apps.  (A Bing search did not bring up that quote.)  But since the link brings people to this page where people can read the truth, maybe that's not so bad.  Make lemonade out of lemons...

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June 20, 2014:  Absurd as it may seem, some of this bullying may really be directed at my vegetarianism!   Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, a rosh yeshiva (head of a Jewish seminary) in Israel, has gone on a  vehement campaign against the entire vegetarian movement.  He believes that teaching vegetarianism leads to terrorism and cruelty to people.  Yes, I know that is bizarre, and I have written a challenge to  it on this blog:  Vegetarianism leads to Terrorism, says Rabbi Eliezer Melamed,  in which I analyze and refute that stance. His real agenda comes out of Israeli politics and the right-wing settler movement (which he supports.)   I doubt that Rabbi Eliezer himself is bullying me but, given the vehemence of his rhetoric, I would not put it past his followers.

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March 19, 2015:  The latest bully is a guy who goes by "Jacob" on Amazon and has demanded that I remove "rabbi" from my profile there and -- get this -- he also suggested I remove my photo!   He thinks my appearance misleads people because, in his words, I am "fringe beyond fringe" and not a "mainstream Orthodox rabbi."  (Whatever that is.  Orthodoxy is so splintered into different groups that everybody is "fringe" to somebody somewhere.)   Exactly what would he suggest I put up there instead of my own face?  At least I'm honest enough to be myself and not some troll named "Jacob" who could be anybody -- he has no photo or other info on his profile page.

Viewing my autism as a gift, not a curse

When I was a child back in the 1950s, neither ADHD nor Asperger's (both of which I have) were even on the radar.  Because I had good verbal and reading skills, nobody ever saw me as 'disabled' or 'special' -- just a problem child who "does not work or play well with others."  (How many times was THAT on my report card?)  I was, they often said, "too smart for my own good" -- probably because I was talking by nine months, reading by the time I went to kindergarten, and into college material by 5th grade.  My family nicknames were "Chatterbox" and "Professor." A neighbor once told my mother not to let me come over there anymore, because I "made her feel stupid."

On the other hand, I was (and still am) socially inept, because I don't read body language or facial expressions very well, and I often fail to pick up nonverbal cues.   Throughout grade school I was the butt of ridicule and bullying by my peers ("Why do you always look at the ceiling?" they jeered), so that by the time I reached high school, I had pretty much withdrawn from all activities and almost flunked out.  The only reason I got into college at all was because I had really high SAT scores.   Eventually I got tracked into being a rabbi because I am a good scholar but, alas, most American Jews don't really want scholars, they want "schmoozy" social directors.  And that is something I am unable to do very well.  So, I ended up as a freelance writer.

Given all of this, how could I possibly believe, as the title of this post suggests, that my autism is a gift?   As a child, I did not believe that.  Well into adulthood, I thought I was cursed.   I spent years of loneliness trying to figure out why I could not fit in anywhere.  But recently I have come to realize how being an Aspie gives me a unique and different perspective on the world, and that it has helped my writing immensely.   My ability to remember precise details, make fine distinctions among various categories of things, and see complex interconnections all give my writing a clear, fine precision.

"Big Oak 3"
by Yonassan Gershom
(An old growth oak on my land)

As many of my readers know, I literally "wrote the book" on the subject of Holocaust reincarnation cases (Beyond the Ashes, 1992), and I believe my autism made this possible.  I was able to be emotionally detached enough to sift through the material without being overwhelmed by the horror and sadness of the stories. 

I also  believe my odd personality prevented this from becoming a cult, heaven forbid.  Since I have zero charisma as a New Age guru, it was not likely that any groupies would blindly idolize me.   In fact, readers are often very disappointed to discover that the author of the book they love is a chattering Aspie nerd who does not fit their stereotype of "spiritual."  And that is for the best. 

 

Autism also influences my photography.  You have probably noticed that there are no people in my photos.  Frankly, I find pictures of people to be terminally boring.  The last publication I would ever buy is People magazine, and I have never once watched a reality show like Survivor or The Bachelor.  All babies look pretty much the same to me, and I mix up adult faces as well.   For example, I know, that William Shatner is Captain Kirk on classical Star Trek, but if I see Shatner in another role, I might not immediately recognize him.  I might not recognize you right away, either, if I see you out of your usual context (such as in the grocery instead of at work.)   Which does not make for very good personal relationships. 



"Calico Kitten"
by Yonassan Gershom

On the other hand, nature fascinates me, and my ability to hyperfocus on small details helps me see the world through a creative lens.  I have hundreds of photos of the sky and clouds, as well as landscapes, trees, flowers.  I also have a great rapport with animals, too, especially cats.  I guess you could say I'm a Cat Whisperer.  Even cats that people claim are impossible to hold or pet will come up to me, rubbing and purring.   I would not ever want to give that up in order to  be "cured" and become a Normie.

As Temple Grandin once said (and I am paraphrasing here), if the socialites had been running the world for the past few millennia, we would all be still just sitting around in caves, chatting and gossiping.   When you look at great inventors and writers, they were often oddballs who did not fit in, but they saw the world through different enough eyes to come up with original ideas. 

I'm convinced that Thomas Edison was an Aspie -- how else could he hyperfocus on a single idea so intensely that he tried a thousand ways to make a light bulb?  And Bill Gates, who was the butt of jokes for many years because of his personality, turned out to be an Aspie also.  Perhaps he was not the most sociable person on the planet, but he did invent the idea of a loadable operating system, thereby making modern computing possible.  Were it not for Aspies like Edison and Gates, you would not now be reading this blog.   Remember that next time you want to "cure" people like me.