{"id":60932,"date":"2018-11-07T13:38:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T18:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=60932"},"modified":"2018-11-08T17:14:33","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T22:14:33","slug":"justin-biebers-burrito-much-ado-about-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/justin-biebers-burrito-much-ado-about-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"Justin Bieber’s Burrito: Much Ado About Nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:
Photo: Yes Theory<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was the biggest non-story of our time: ostensibly, music superstar Justin Bieber was seen on the street eating a burrito. But rather than eating it from the end like a hot dog, as a normal person would, he was eating it from the center like an ear of corn. This is something that would only be done by an alien from another galaxy, completely unfamiliar with the concepts of Earth, food, mouths and burritos.<\/p>\n

This \u201cstory,\u201d which started on Reddit, went viral on social media and was picked up by a number of news and entertainment outlets, including Vanity Fair<\/em>, Cosmopolitan<\/em>, and even the BBC. Jezebel<\/em> wrote that Bieber ate a burrito \u201cmuch like a demon might eat a small child.\u201d USA Today<\/em> questioned whether the offender in the photo was in fact even Justin Bieber. (Good call, USA Today<\/em>!)<\/p>\n

Allie Conti, a writer on the web site Vice, attempted to replicate Bieber\u2019s sideways burrito-eating style. She wrote, \u201cIs it possible that someone worth $265 million, who has a house in LA, and has vacationed (albeit disastrously) in Tulum, has never actually eaten a burrito? Or does the globe-trotting 24-year-old simply know something the rest of us do not?\u201d To use Conti\u2019s phrase \u201calbeit disastrously,\u201d that\u2019s how her experiment ended up. She concluded that \u201cBeing too famous to enjoy a solitary meal in public is the absolute only reason someone would choose to desecrate a perfect food item in such a way. \u2026 [T]his is no way to eat a burrito. And anyone who does so is stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astute readers will pick up from my use of the word \u201costensibly\u201d and praise for USA Today\u2019s<\/em> skepticism that it was not in fact Justin Bieber desecrating the poor burrito in the photo. Nor was it a random lookalike. Rather, the entire \u201cstory\u201d was fabricated by a YouTube channel called Yes Theory. \u201cBieber\u201d (again with the scare quotes!) was in reality the pop star\u2019s doppelg\u00e4nger, Brad Sousa. The shocking \u2013 shocking!<\/em> \u2013 photo was contrived as an Internet hoax.<\/p>\n

What struck me about this entire incident was that the Yes Theory team invested a lot of effort into this prank \u2013 getting the Bieber impersonator, staging the photo shoot, disseminating the photo, etc. \u2013 all confident that people would actually care enough to make it go viral<\/em>. And they were right.<\/p>\n

So Yes Theory wasted everybody\u2019s time \u2013 sharing, commenting, writing and posting articles \u2013 all on an event that didn\u2019t actually happen. But let\u2019s say that it had been Bieber. Would that have made the \u201cnews\u201d any less nonsensical? True or false, investment in this non-story seems to be an equally big waste of time.<\/p>\n

We see from the tochacha<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (the \u201crebuke\u201d in parshas Ki Savo) that having our time wasted is a curse. Among the punishments for spurning God, we are told that \u201cYou will betroth a wife but another man will (marry) her; you will build a house and not dwell in it; you will plant a vineyard and not use its fruit\u201d (Deuteronomy 28:30) and \u201cThe fruit of your land, and all your labors, a foreign nation will consume\u201d (ibid., verse 30).<\/p>\n

Conversely, the prophet Isaiah tells us that one of the blessings of the messianic era is that our time will not be wasted<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThey will not build for another to inhabit; they will not plant for another to eat\u2026They will not toil in vain or produce futilely\u201d (Isaiah 65:22-23). This verse is paraphrased in the prayer U\u2019va L\u2019Tziyon<\/em>, in the line that starts Hu yiftach libeinu<\/em>: \u201cMay He open our hearts through His Torah\u2026so that we do not toil in vain or produce futilely.\u201d<\/p>\n

We pray every day not to have our time wasted but how much of it do we just throw away? Throughout the book of Koheles<\/em> (Ecclesiastes), King Solomon tells us that human activities are temporal, fleeting and ultimately inconsequential (or, as he concisely puts it, hevel<\/em>). Therefore, we should do everything in our power to make our time count<\/strong><\/a>. Yes Theory didn\u2019t waste our time by hoaxing us; we wasted our own time by investing any thought whatsoever into how Canadian pop stars eat Mexican food.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a sentiment I never thought I\u2019d express: You know who I really respect in this whole incident? Justin Bieber. Throughout the whole embarrassing flap, Bieber never stepped forward to comment that it wasn\u2019t him. If anyone in the world had a reason to care about this, it was him. If he couldn\u2019t be bothered with such nonsense, why should we?<\/p>\n

Time is a precious gift as well as a limited resource. God gives us a certain amount with which to do our best. Most of us are not on so lofty a level that we won\u2019t waste some of it. If this incident teaches us anything, it\u2019s that \u2013 real or fake \u2013 we should be discriminating about the things we let eat up those ticking seconds.<\/p>\n

Bieber Counter<\/span>
\n<\/strong>\u00a0Number of times the word “Bieber” appears in this article: 13<\/small><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Rabbi Jack Abramowitz is Torah Content Editor at the Orthodox Union. He is the author of six books, including\u00a0The Tzniyus Book<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Taryag Companion<\/a>. His latest work,\u00a0The God Book<\/a>, is available from\u00a0OU Press<\/a>\u00a0as well as on\u00a0Amazon<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was the biggest non-story of our time: ostensibly, music superstar Justin Bieber was seen on the street eating a burrito. But rather than eating it from the end like a hot dog, as a normal person would, he was eating it from the center like an ear of corn. This is something that would<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":60933,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\nJustin Bieber's Burrito: Much Ado About Nothing - OU Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/justin-biebers-burrito-much-ado-about-nothing\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Justin Bieber's Burrito: Much Ado About Nothing - OU Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It was the biggest non-story of our time: ostensibly, music superstar Justin Bieber was seen on the street eating a burrito. 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