Shyne, once made famous for being a protege of Sean “P.Diddy/Puffy” Combs and for his arrest, and subsequent 8 year imprisonment for shooting in the air in a crowded Times Square night club in New York, has a new name. The former Jamaal Barrow, is now legally Moses Levi and is a practicing Orthodox Jew.
He says,
“What are the laws?” he said, explaining his decision to adhere to the Orthodox level of observance. “I want to know the laws. I don’t want to know the leniencies. I never look for the leniencies because of all of the terrible things I’ve done in my life, all of the mistakes I’ve made.”
What attracts him to Judaism is its ordering of life, its laws where as before, his life in hip hop was chaotic.
He has an album out already, and has plans for a few more.
“There’s nothing in the Chumash that says I can’t drive a Lamborghini,” and “nothing in the Halacha about driving the cars I like, about the lifestyle I live.”
What Mr. Levi does not say, as one of my friends pointed out, is the number of times that the Torah condemns the greedy or how it implores the rich to share their possessions or to treat the oppressed justly.
Well said. It is fascinating to me how many people go from a life of chaos as you said to a life of high structure.
Structure is not the problem, it can be; the problem is an overreach of structure, that laws/regulations become the end all be all.
We call this a “pendulum swing”! From one extreme to the other.
Exactly the same thing I was thinking.