Kollel Guy Gone Wild

An ex-rosh kollel's misdeeds caused a major chillul hashem. What should we learn from it?

This week, social media is all abuzz about someone named “Kyle Deschanel”, who - spoiler alert - didn’t actually exist:

The Daily Beast reports:

Kyle Deschanel, the mysterious figure at the center of TikTok’s latest firestorm, seemed to be, by several accounts, a charismatic mainstay on the high-class East Coast party circuit with friends in high places and money to blow.

He boasted to one woman that he was related to Paul Eugène Louis Deschanel, a former President of France; to others, he said he was a descendant of the Rothschilds, the famous Ashkenazi Jewish banking dynasty. He often bragged about his connections to the government of Saudi Arabia, saying he was working on negotiating a nuclear trade deal, and claimed to be friends with A-listers like Leonardo DiCaprio and Amber Heard.

But according to three women who spoke to The Daily Beast about their experiences with Kyle Deschanel, he is a master illusionist who’s managed to dupe several women into thinking he’s someone he’s not.

Deschanel became public enemy No. 1 on TikTok when a user named Eva Evans said the following in a video posted on June 20: “I recently found out that a guy that I was dating led a double life. He had a fake identity. He had a fake name, he had a fake job, he had a fake history and he apparently had a very real wife and kid. And he didn’t just scam me, he scammed all of downtown New York City.”

Evans’ video soon went viral, prompting other New York women to come forward with their own stories of meeting “Kyle Deschanel” on various dating apps. It wasn’t long before they theorized the man they’d met wasn’t only using a false name and lying to them, but was also leaving a trail of shady, unsettling behavior in his wake.

According to a member of an Orthodox Jewish community in Lakewood, New Jersey, who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity, “Kyle Deschanel” is actually … a recently divorced rabbi and a father of one. [I’m leaving the name out - Ash].

While this story is fascinating, I am not interested in publicizing salacious stories, nor do I think this story is in any way representative of frum Jews. But I do think an important lesson can be learnt from it.

This rabbi, who happens to have been a rosh kollel as well, wrote a whole sefer on gittin that was widely lauded and praised. Yet he didn’t seem to have picked up the whole underlying reason behind the mitzva of gittin: To treat the woman with respect worthy of all human beings. In the Ancient Near East, women were treated as property. The Torah revolutionized that and treated the women with respect. A woman is a human being, Jew or non-Jew. Nobody deserves to be treat the way Kyle treated the women he led on. I imagine this rabbi was led on by his tayvos and thought he was playing a game. But he didn’t realize nor care that despite these non-Jewish women being the “other”, they are real people who did not deserve to be treated that way.

It doesn’t matter how much you learn, you need to pick up on the underlying morality behind the mitzvos as well. Mussar is just as important as your rebbe taught you it is.

I had a rebbe who spoke disparagingly on a certain chumra on Lo Suchal Lehisalem. There are those who are makpid not to carry any cash on them, less they have money and not give it out to aniyim who ask, which is violating lo suchal lehisalem. My rebbe mocked this chumra mercilessly. The whole point of this mitzva is to teach you to be sensitive to a poor person and not ignore his plight. Carrying less money so you arent oyver the technical issur COMPLETELY misses the boat - you are now MORE insensitive, not less, and now you are giving even LESS money to tzedaka. Sure, you may not have violated the issur of lo suchal lehisalem, but you did not understand what the Torah was trying to teach.

What my rebbe said sunk in.

Unfortunately, we often look at mitzvos as a video game. We try to score schar points and avoid getting out by being extra machmir. But mitzvos arent random things we can do to score points. They have lessons and morality behind it. We cant always see it, but when we can figure it out, or the Torah and our Mesorah tell us what it is, we dare not look away.

A story is told of R Moshe Feinstein who could not understand how a bochur could damage another’s tape recorder while learning bava kama. R Moshe understood that true learning comes with us absorbing its lessons.

Sometimes, when learning all day, we forget that learning isn’t just intellectual exercise, its min hashamayim and we need to learn values from it as well. Let us rise to the challenge. In an ideal world, it would be impossible for someone who has learned Hashem’s Torah to act in such a way like Kyle.

(BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: This applies even more so to the Ponzi schemers rampant in our community who probably deserve more notoriety than Kyle does. It is a horrible chillul Hashem that this can happen again and again.)