Hawthorne periodically mutters aloud the descriptions blaring from his police radio. I dutifully transcribe everything he says onto my handy-dandy notepad.
“White male. Killed his girlfriend. Wearing a black sweatshirt. Black baseball cap,” he says, each description repeated in shorthand. “Driving a white Geo Prizm, two-door.”
It is only then that the sirens resonate. Hawthorne makes another abrupt U-turn, stopping a white car he deems suspicious. Later, I will wonder where the murderer would sit had Hawthorne actually tracked him down. But for now, I just sit and watch, unabashed in my excitement. Adrenaline pulses through my veins.
But the driver in the gray shirt doesn’t match the description. Hawthorne eyes the guy, really looks him over, and then, after an extraordinary long moment, lets him go. Traffic resumes to normal. I breathe a sigh of relief.
“248 Hart Avenue,” a female voice says, emanating from the radio. That’s the address of the murdered girlfriend, Hawthorne tells me. “I’ll take you there,” he promises.
Murders in the 120th Precinct are a relative rarity; in 2005, nine people were killed. I struck the lottery, so to speak, as morbid as that sounds.
* * *
The next day, my classmates’ eyes widen with jealousy-tinged awe as I tell them about my adventurous ride in the cop car. Many of their own cop rides, I later learn, were rather boring – marked by routine ticketing and the requisite stop at the corner coffee shop. Somehow I had managed to snag my first juicy story – a bloody homicide.
“That’s great,” says my professor.
Almost immediately, she quantifies her previous uttering. “I mean, it’s horrible,” she says. “But a great story.”
* * *
In the weeks that follow, I’ve found myself walking that same, slippery tightrope as I go about my reporting.
The great stories, the articles that unearth the core issues by presenting them within a totally new context, are often stories that chronicle the most terrible of circumstances. They are marked by distasteful details, a smattering of poor choices and plenty of greed.
The best stories, it seems, are also the worst stories. Think of the typical scandalous fare: corruption, murder, tax evasion. Add to that the constant social issues: poverty, unaffordable health insurance, disease. None of these topics scream “fun.”
As a journalist, locating that perfectly impoverished Mexican single mother of two to interview is a cause for celebration; now the anecdotal lead on my poverty story will have just the right shade of “color.”
But as a frum Jew, it bothers me to take pleasure – even minimally – in other people’s pain. It even hurts me, at least to some extent.
By nature, I tend to seek out the positive. I’m always searching for that ray of sunshine hidden just beneath the clouds.
And so I am left to wonder: Is my positive attitude hurting my reporting?
Yes, and no. (The typical Jewish response, no doubt).
Yes, I need to be hard-hitting, incisive and cut-throat, even in my unrelentless search for truth.
But I’m not yet ready to drown out that compassionate voice. The voice that urges me to view the interviewee as more than just a captivating lede. The voice that beckons me to probe further, only this time with warm eyes, true concern and a real desire to understand as best I can the sort of emotional roller coaster that the person in front of me is riding.
It’s a balancing act, one I’m struggling to master.
Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald put it best. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” he wrote.
The same principle applies to first-rate journalism, I believe. And it also applies to first-rate Judaism, true Avodas 
HaShem.
Basically, as a rav I truly respect taught me at Michlalah, hypocrisy can be good for you. In order to continue to grow spiritually, a person needs to constantly reset the bar, placing it higher than the level he is currently at. Striving for something – be it spiritual or not – requires that a person recognize that optimally, he should be a few rungs higher on the ladder of spiritual achievements. Yet he’s currently standing on a lower rung, staring curiously at the goal he hopes to accomplish and wondering if he’s being hypocritical.
As long as he’s climbing (no matter how slowly), then the hypocrisy is good. It motivates him to continue that climb, to channel that unsettling in his gut, to allow his discomfort to propel him to do more, to strain himself just a bit longer.
It is stagnation one should be wary of, not hypocrisy.
For the content person, someone who is satisfied with his current state of spiritual affairs will never grow.
“Complacency is death in this business,” my feature story professor once said. Complacency, I’ll add, is also the death of the business of life, of fulfilling dreams.
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How "hypocrisy" can be an integral part of spiritual growth.