"When you're pointing one finger at me, three more are pointing back at you"

Did you ever notice that the very people who are always harping on what others wrong have an awful lot going on in their lives?  

This Rabbi Barry Freundel, of Kesher Israel Congregation in Georgetown, D.C, is the latest in a long line of folks who were caught with their panting down.  D.C. police are working an investigation about a camera, or several cameras, placed in the mikvah.  A mikvah is used by Orthodox Jewish women, who do not touch their husbands while menstruating.  They must immerse in a mikvah before resuming sexual relations, according to doctrine.   DC police say they found video recording equipment in the mikvah, and the police at Towson University over here in Baltimore, where Rabbi Freundel is a tenured associate professor, also report that a search of his office at the college turned up the box for a tiny keychain camera, along with flash drives and enough memory cards to holding more than 200,000 images and 25,000 hours of video...and a picture of nude women and handwritten lists of names.

I don't know what if he's guilty.  I don't know anything about mikvahs or Orthodox Judaism.  But my eyebrows get raised when I hear anyone say, as Rabbi Grendel said last month: “The lack of sexual morality that pervades this society is all over the place...and it creates terrible problems. Pornography and its accessibility is wrecking marriages. It’s two keystrokes away. You get on the computer, you hit the button twice and you’re there. I have not counseled a couple in any level of relationship in the last five years where pornography hasn’t been an issue.” 

I just got on the computer, hit "the button" twice, and wound up with some sort of picture that set forth the proposition that excess belly fat can be wiped out with "this weird trick that has doctors enraged!"

The Swaggart confession

While I was hitting buttons, I looked up "Jimmy Swaggart quotes" and found that the pentecostal preacher and cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis is fond of gay-bashing ("I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry") and of himself ("If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell") but not at all fond of other people knowing anything ("Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest").  But Rev. Swaggart is most famous for saying "I have sinned against You, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgiveness" after that incident in New Orleans where he was caught in a motel room with a prostitute.  I can't remember what sort of self-serving homily he spouted three years later, when he was caught in a limousine with another hooker in Indio, CA.  Swaggart has a lot to say about how unholy everyone else is.  You know who "everyone else" is...people who are home with their families while the preacher cruises for streetwalkers.

Time after time, less famous but not less hypocritical people we all know rant and rave about others cheating, running around, doing the devil's work, and time after time, they're the ones getting busy with a little piece of chicken on the side.  A more moderate person with nothing on his or her conscience doesn't worry about what others are up to when they get down.