I don’t know whether I should be proud or ashamed to say this publicly. (Let me pause a moment to be sure I want to admit this.)

(Still thinking…)

(Still…)

Oh, OK. What the heck. Here goes:

I have never ever in my life heard a single song by Taylor Swift. I would not recognize a Taylor Swift melody or lyric if it hit me in the head. I would not recognize a lyric. In time, I will try to read some lyrics on one of those websites to acquaint myself with the phenomenon. But until now, I don’t know what she sounds like, and I don’t care what she, uh, thinks. I don’t care what she is wearing today or whether she will be with Kelce, or whether she will eat pizza at the Super Bowl.

A few people last the test of time. Meryl Streep. Michael Douglas. Oprah. Martin Short. Dolly Parton.

These others are flashes in the pan. They come, and they go. I have lived through my share of them. For a few years, all the media craze was Britney Spears. You couldn’t go anywhere, read anything without hearing about Britney Spears. I once was in a doctor’s waiting room, and the TV was on, and she was being interviewed: “How does it feel to be a role model for young girls?” She answered, “I don’t see myself as a role model.” I thought to myself: “Wisdom beyond her years!” Soon enough, poor thing was being admitted into UCLA Medical Center, and some hospital staffer eventually violated her privacy, broke into the computers, downloaded Britney’s records, and sold them to one of the gossip rags. Poor thing. Shoulda bin a cowgirl.

They come and go. Like seasons. Many, like Oprah, have invested wisely and now are gazillionaires who own restaurant chains or TV networks or islands or planets. Some simply were happy to leave Hollywood and the high intensity of the spotlight or the pressure to do a concert in another city every night, never able to cancel a performance, no matter how sick they got, because it would mean canceling 20,000 pre-sold and scalped tickets at hundreds of dollars each. So they take drugs to keep going. Some, like Michael Jackson and Jimi Hendrix and Prince and Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison and even the King ultimately manage to kill themselves one way or another. Shoulda bin cowboys.

Poor thing. Demi Moore? One day she is married to Bruce Willis, then to a handsome guy a hundred years younger than she. Last I remember, she was using leeches to cure someone or something. Remember all the fuss about Lindsay Lohan? Hottest person of the day. Poor thing, ended up getting caught stealing a necklace. Shoulda been a cowgirl.

One day George Reeves was Superman. I still sometimes catch an old episode on Amazon Prime. Next day he was dead by suicide, and not by Kryptonite but by deep personal issues. They come and go. The bigger the flash, the smaller the pan in which they get fried. Tonya Harding, Olympic medalist? Lance Armstrong, biking sensation? Deeply flawed media heroes. Shoulda bin cowboys.

They call themselves “stars.” But I don’t see them in any galaxy. Or R. Kelly. No one will be seeing him anywhere for a while. Or howzabout that New Jersey crowd that were all the rage? Snooki? Pauly D? Mike “The Situation”? A combined IQ of 2. How did they capture so much attention? The Situation? Really? Or, while on that level of intellect, how about Tila Tequila? And the chicken of the sea, Jessica Simpson, a nice enough person, but to be idolized?

We live in what we Orthodox rabbis call “The World of Sheker” — the world of Lies. A world in which a corrupt media that lives on promoting Fake News, corrupt morality, violence, and just unwholesome garbage dominates the minds of the masses. And they could not get away with it if the masses did not buy in. If masses did not buy tickets to those movies, did not consume those products. If.

There are others — worlds greater, true stars in a galaxy — outside the limelight, unknown. In my world, names you may not know: Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l, Rav Yosef Ber Soloveichik zt”l, Rav Ovadia Yosef zt”l. Rav Avigdor Miller zt”l. They lived into their 80s, and each impacted hundreds of thousands for half a century. Instead of fading with time, their genius and wisdom grew, as did their followings. They rarely or never made the New York Times. Just as well because, if they had, they would have been caricatured and misquoted.

I am thinking a great deal about the nature of “celebrity” today, as I read of the passing of Toby Keith at the comparatively young age of 62 of stomach cancer. He was no Rav Feinstein, Rav Soloveichik, Rav Yosef, or Rav Miller. I really cannot discuss him in the same paragraph as them. So a new paragraph:

But he was very important to me and in many ways touched my soul with his music. After 9/11, I needed to hear him sing about “The American Way” and how we would hit back hard “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” I knew then, and know now, that our America now paradoxically does not fight “The American Way.” We fight like France and Italy, unable to win, begging others to join us even when we are dealing with medieval rag-tag Houthis, and changing sides midway through wars as we did in Vietnam and again with Taiwan and now partly with Israel. We are not the America of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Truman. Of Mount Rushmore. We are the America of Obama, Biden, and Taylor Swift. Maybe we will make America great again soon. And maybe not.

It was important for me to hear real anger after 9/11. Toby Keith provided it. Darryl Worley provided it after 9/11 in “Have You Forgotten?” It is like the anger that resonates and comes now from Jason Aldean in “Try That in a Small Town.” It is the anger amid the craziness of the late 1960s that was expressed so powerfully by Merle Haggard in “The Fightin’ Side of Me” and, especially, in “Okie From Muskogee.”

Toby Keith had a wicked sense of humor, too, that spoke to me equally. I love my wife. My readers in this column know that I was married 20 years to the love of my life until glioblastoma, a form of cancer, took her in 2020. And now I am remarried, blessed with a wonderful, sweet, kind wife who literally has saved my life more than once as she dragged me to a hospital to be evaluated immediately for a lung transplant. So I love her, OK? And I loved my wife of 20 years. But Toby Keith’s “I Wanna Talk About Me” hit the mark so well that I have been humming it for the past 22 years. ’Nuff said about that.

Before I married Ellen of blessed memory, I had been through a tough 25-year marriage and then a deeply painful, though not litigated, divorce. For the first time in a quarter of a century, I was alone at home. My kids, whom I loved and still love to pieces, no longer were 5 feet away from a hug and kiss but only present half the week. It was tough. I had not yet met Ellen. And then Toby Keith came out with “How Do You Like Me Now?!” I cannot begin to describe what that song did for me at that time. I knew my best days were ahead of me.  That song pushed me forward.

Which brought me Full Toby. I am called to be a rabbi. I also am passionate about writing and teaching. I do not have the slightest interest in making money or being rich. I leave that to Tevye. My goal: just to have enough. In my first marriage, forces restrained my passions and coerced me to pursue a different path, that of lawyering. And then I would listen to “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” I know Toby did not mean it quite the way I needed to hear it. But I would be sitting in the law library at Jones Day at 3 in the morning, preparing for a deposition or drafting a legal memorandum due by 9 a.m., and I would pause to think: “I don’t want to be here. I was a practicing rabbi for 10 years. It is my calling. I have got to get back to that, somehow.” Soon, I would start singing softly to myself, with my own set of lyrics, “I Shoulda bin a Rabbi.” And unlike the singer, I was determined not just to pine but indeed to be like Gene and Roy.

I always wanted to meet Toby Keith for a “New York minute” to say thanks for how he touched my life. I feel the same about the early Garth Brooks and his “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” “The River,” “The Dance,” “Unanswered Prayers,” and “The Change.” But we shall leave that early pre–Trish Garth for another day.

With Toby Keith dying, a part of me dies with him. We will always have his music, but we will never know how much more might he have written and sung. For me, there is the similarly impactful everlasting music of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the deeply moving lyrics of Safam who dried out, and, more recently, the extraordinary songs of Israel’s Ishay Ribo.

We are left to wonder, as George Jones did, “Who’s gonna fill their shoes?”

Or his.

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