My Brother Kanye

The Heart Breaks the Hardest for the Ones it Loves the Most

It’s getting hard preaching the gospel to the slums lately,
So I had to put the gospel on the Drums Baby.

To say that Kanye West was my favorite artist would be an almost preposterous understatement.

Kanye was not my favorite artist – he was my hero.

He was not just a musician – he was my north star, the light that shone brightest when I was surrounded by darkness.

His music was more than just excellent – it was real.

It spoke to me; it spoke to my soul.

I will never forget, sitting in Madrid, in the Plaza Mayor, way past midnight, shaking with so much anguish that I couldn’t even roll a cigarette, quietly singing the lyrics of Street Lights to myself:

Seems like, street lights, glowing – happen to be
Just like moments, passing, in front of me
So I hopped in, the cab and I paid my fare
See I know my destination, but I'm just not there…

Whenever I was surrounded by darkness, I always had his words to shine a light into my life.

And I never let the darkness consume me.

But the darkness consumed him, long ago.

And I have been without my brother of godly lyrics ever since.

You see, he was the first person, maybe the only person, who ever talked about mental illness as something other than a disability, something other than a blemish to be ashamed of.

His words hit me because they were real, they were honest – they were true.

There was a time in my life when I knew his entire discography – every album, every single, every word.

I could find a Kanye lyric for any moment.

And I have lost that.

Because the man who once shined like the north star, a light to the world of the mentally anguished, has become consumed by his own mental anguish, and he has become a servant of the very same demons he once fought.

Fighting.

The mentally anguished are fighting, every moment of every day, just to keep going.

Only those who have known the pain of true mental anguish can truly know what it means to fight something so constantly.

It is exhausting.

And I have nothing but the utmost respect for the mentally anguished.

Because they are fighters, and because they refuse to succumb to the suffering that surrounds them.

That’s why it’s so heartbreaking to watch someone who has fought for so long become an agent of the darkness they once fought.

Kanye is Bipolar, and he is antisemitic, and they are both forms of mental illness.

But one is much more socially acceptable than the other.

Antisemitism is, fundamentally, the mental delusion that causes a person to believe that their life and well-being is under direct assault by an external conspiracy, a conspiracy of the Jews.

And it is the most pervasive mental illness in the world.

If we replaced the word “Jew” with any other noun, we would hear how absolutely schizophrenic and paranoid antisemitism truly is.

“My neighbors control the banks. They control the media. They control the government.”

But antisemitism is so pervasive that these things slip right under our noses.

We know that Kanye is mentally ill, so it is easy enough to identify his antisemitism with mental illness, but he is far from alone.

Wholesale societies can and have become infected with paranoid antisemitism without ever realizing it.

Just as Kanye has destroyed his career and his reputation, nations have destroyed their people, their prospects, and their culture, all for the sake of their paranoid delusions.

I have spent a lot of time working with the mentally ill, and I have seen people, in real time, become consumed by the very demons they had struggled against for so long.

And it is heartbreaking.

But this essay is actually not about Kanye – it’s about me.

It’s about the pain that I feel every time I pass by a store and hear a Kanye song playing.

It’s about the complicated guilt I feel when I put on one of his songs myself, torn between my love of his music and my hatred of what he has become.

And it’s about the pain that comes from knowing that no one will ever truly understand what exactly it is that I have lost.

Because it’s more than music.

It’s like I’ve lost a brother.

I am a champion of two things in this world – the Jewish faith and the mentally ill.

Everything I do is either for G-d, his Torah, his people, or his children who suffer from invisible illness that plague them in the night.

And, for so many years, I felt like Kanye and I were fighting side by side, back to back, him in the black community and me in the Jewish.

And then he turned traitor and stabbed me in the back.

No – he didn’t stab me in the back – he stabbed me in the heart.

It has been many years since the betrayal.

October 9th, 2022, if memory serves.

I must have written this piece five times since then, trying to find the right words.

But there are no words for this – just heartbreak.

There are hundreds of artists who have turned on the Jewish people. Hundreds of artists who let us down when they take the side of our oppressors, when they stay silent about their fans who were raped and kidnapped by the monsters of Molech, when they cancel tours to Israel and yell “Free Palestine” at their concerts.

But Kanye is different – Kanye took the hatred to a new level.

In Judaism, there is the concept of a “Hilhul HaShem,” a desecration of G-d’s name.

It is the highest form of sin a person can commit.

And Kanye not only desecrated G-d’s name by invoking it in his hatred of His chosen people, but he desecrated the movement for the mentally ill as well.

He has gone from championing the cause to turning it into a mockery. He has made mental illness synonymous with bigotry.

And he has broken my heart.

I am a man of deep faith, and I do not believe that anyone can go so far that they cannot come back home to G-d again, but they can never get there if they do not first turn around and seek forgiveness for what they have done.

In Judaism, we call this “Teshuvah.”

I do pray that one day Kanye will do Teshuvah and seek forgiveness.

But, until then, I will pick up the torch and shine a light into this world that is besieged by darkness.

I will speak into the void, loudly enough so that anyone who is cowering in the dark can hear.

I will continue to praise G-d and His endless power to heal the soul, no matter how unpopular that opinion may be.

And I will not turn my back on anyone who cries out in need of comfort – I will give them a helping hand, a loving heart, and a warm embrace.

Because I know what it is like to be besieged by the dark, and I know how desperately we all need light.

Kanye has brought great darkness into the world. I hope this piece may find its way to him to help him find his way back.

But if darkness be the order of the day, 
Then I shall be the light. 

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai