c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Eli Hecht is vice president of the Rabbinical Alliance of America. He is the director of Chabad of South Bay in Lomita, Calif., and has been involved in counseling and outreach programs for more than 25 years.)

(UNDATED) Once a nice little girl had a slumber party. She was from a happy family, full of energy and friends but she lived a very short life. Her name was Polly Klaas.

Once there was a terrible person who had no real friends. He was a very unhappy person. His life was full of crime and bad things. His name is Richard Allen Davis. He killed Polly because being a bad man, he does bad things.

Now I read that Davis has been approached by”Larry King Live,””Prime Time Live,””Hard Copy”and other media outlets that want to capitalize on his heinous actions. According to his attorney, Richard Allen Davis _ kidnapper, murderer _ may be be paid as much as $40,000 to tell his story.

Mike Tyson is considered to be a great boxer. He is no stranger to violence. After serving a three-year prison sentence for a rape conviction, he’s back at work. No shame nor change in style. Recently he said,”My mode of operation, once I get a man hurt, is reckless abandon.” Mike Tyson recently made more that $15 million for a fight that lasted less than two minutes. His opponent was paid $5 million. To my mind, it was a mugging done in the name of sport.

Once there was a man named Tupac Shakur. He, too, was not a nice guy. His angry lyrics, to me, seemed to be evidence of a warped personality. Yet that self-destructive energy was rewarded by the adulation of millions of fans and many millions of dollars from the recording industry.

They say a person is known by his friends. Tupac Shakur had many friends who were thugs. When he was in a crowd, it was hard to separate the friends from the foes. It always was the wrong guy being shot, according to Shakur. Now Tupac Shakur is dead and many are mourning.

Something is very wrong here. Bad behavior keeps being rewarded. Don’t think it affects only kids from the ghetto or from the boondocks. It’s affecting people in the highest levels of government.

President Clinton’s former political adviser, Dick Morris, has money, education, political savvy and now plenty of scandal. It really takes a lot of good old-fashioned chutzpah to phone the president and have a woman of ill repute listen to the call. Having a hooker on the phone adds a new dimension to the word chutzpah _ unbridled nerve.

Roger Stone, a GOP operative and adviser to Bob Dole, is busy denying that he and his wife solicited sex partners on the Internet in a swinger’s magazine. Arthur Finkelstein, a 51-year-old active homosexual, is a legendary GOP strategist. Yet it was reported this week that Finkelstein has advised the country’s leading anti-gay rights politicians.

All these cases are evidence of moral bankruptcy. The common thread that ties all the negative behavior together is a lack of respect for decency. Too many of us have lost touch with the soul.

Recently, the world was made aware of a phenomenal episode that occurred at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, when a toddler fell into a gorilla’s pit and was knocked unconscious.

In the pit was a female gorilla, Binti-Jua, who had been orphaned shortly after her birth and had been raised by zookeepers. It took months for the zookeeper to train the baby gorilla to live like a normal gorilla. When the toddler fell into the cage, Binti-Jua picked up the toddler and carried him to the zookeeper’s door. The public was ecstatic. Imagine a gorilla acting like a human, people said. Imagine a gorilla saving an unconscious toddler from harm and bringing him to safety. How was it that an animal had learned human kindness?

When I first heard the story, I thought,”What a miracle.”Then, after a little reflection it came to me that the gorilla acted more human than many humans do these days. Let’s be honest. Just how many humans would stop what they are doing and pick up a bleeding and injured toddler. They would be scared of being sued. Who knows, maybe the bloody child has a contagious disease like AIDS?

The greatness of the gorilla was that it did not act like a human. It acted like a God-created beast _ an animal, with an animal soul, who followed an instinct of caring and helping an injured being. It is something that some of us may have forgotten.

MJP END HECHT