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Oct. 30, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
01:14:06
Timeless Wisdom - Why I Am A Jew
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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As I looked out there, I recalled I had spent a beautiful weekend at the synagogue a number of years ago as a scholar in residence, one Shabbat.
And it's not, in effect, I'm happy for me that you are not facing that gorgeous panorama.
You would not listen to a word.
In fact, it's hard for me to lecture.
It is just, it is so stunning.
Also, you have to understand what an appreciation I have of fall.
I was just speaking to my four and a half-year-old son in Los Angeles.
And you don't know how hard it is to explain fall in Los Angeles.
He keeps asking me, why is this any different from summer, spring, or winter?
They're not different.
You know, they're like concepts.
They're abstract concepts.
So I'm telling him the colors of the leaves, that they're actually falling.
That's how you get the name fall.
The secretary in there must have been laughing as she heard me explaining the season to my son.
She probably thought I, you know, Nebuchadnezzar, I have a very slow son.
I have to explain.
I better tell her he lives in Los Angeles.
It's a problem.
I've actually, in my ability to give this talk this morning, I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is that for me right now, it is not yet 8 o'clock.
The good news is I own no stocks.
So between the two, I probably, it's better.
Number two dwarfs number one.
Therefore, I have nothing else on my mind other than waking up and there's no financial problem because of the stocks this week.
I'm very touched at all of your large number of women who've come this morning.
And my apologies immediately to those of you who have heard me speak on why I be Jewish or why I am a Jew or why lead a Jewish life or whatever else.
You had put it beautifully, Janet.
Why lead a life commensurate with Jewish values?
I often feel when I give a speech that someone has heard like the quintessential idiot Savon, you know, the person who is brilliant in like only trigonometry, but knows nothing else in the world.
I'm so tempted to give you a talk, you know, on the use of E-flat in Mozart, just to show you there are other things that, you know, that, or at least even another Jewish subject.
But if I can only speak to a Jew once, and invariably that is what happens by and large as you go around the country, it is, thank God, a large country and a large Jewish community.
This is my first choice.
To make the case for why an intelligent, intellectual, well-educated person, which usually describes a Jew in America today without being in any way self-aggrandizing, that is the case for most of us.
Why would we affirm at the end of the 20th century in a world of so many choices, why would we affirm leading a Jewish life?
And that's the first choice I have, as I say, to speak to a Jew about.
Let me make something clear, which as I see, I look around and there is a mixture of generations in this room, which is very wonderful.
That's my favorite sort of audience where you really have a mixture of generations.
But there is one thing about this that is important to note.
I'm about to say something which will strike two groups somewhat differently.
There is, my friends, a very important generation gap in Jewish life.
One, and I think one only.
But I say the word important, meaning it's not younger is better or older is better, neither.
It's not a matter of good or bad or better or worse.
It's simply a fact that if we don't recognize Jewish life is in trouble.
And that gap is very simply this.
And I'm quite convinced of this, so convinced I'll almost date it for you.
I think that for Jews born and raised prior to World War II, there is one certain attitude towards being Jewish.
And for those of us, including myself, born after World War II, there is an utterly different perception of being Jewish.
And that is this.
For my parents' generation, if I may use that as an example of being raised before World War II, for my parents' generation, and certainly for their parents, going back thousands of years of Jews, there was no question such as the title of my lecture, Why Be Jewish?
That was not a question.
Asking why be Jewish to my parents' generation of Jews and certainly their parents would be as meaningless as asking someone today, why be a male or why be a female?
Outside of certain areas of California, nobody answers that.
You know, it's just not a question, right?
You know, you were born a woman.
How many of you walk around thinking, gee, you know, there's always that option.
You know, and how many men walk around thinking, I don't know, I was born a man, but frankly, I want to try out the other way.
It's a non-issue.
Or for that matter, being an American.
Do any of us really walk around thinking, should I be an American?
What else are you going to be?
A Belgian?
No, it's not an issue.
It's just not an issue.
That was how being Jewish was.
You were born a Jew, therefore, you knew you would marry a Jew, you would live a Jewish life, you were a Jew, and you die a Jew.
Just like you know, by and large, you'll marry an American, you'll be an American, you'll live in America and die in America.
Except with the option of aliyah, okay?
But speaking to a normal American audience, it's not a question.
Normal meaning we're not normal.
I don't know what do you want from me.
We're not normal.
For my generation, for this next generation, whatever I just said does not hold true.
I beg those of you, this is perfectly meaningful for those of my generation listening, but I beg of you, I beg those of you of the past generation to try to understand this because I can imagine how difficult it is.
I know how difficult it is.
But for us, being born a Jew for the vast majority of my generation and certainly for this next generation now in college and in high school, is an interesting fact of life.
That's all.
You ask the average Jew at UCLA where I live, and there are thousands of Jews at UCLA, what is your religion, or what are you?
And if you get any Jewish answer, it will most likely be, yeah, I was born a Jew.
In effect, yeah, I was born in Northridge, which is outside of Los Angeles.
Or, yes, I was born with brown eyes.
It's an interesting fact of life, but so what?
It doesn't determine anything.
That's my point.
It no longer determines anything.
Being born a Jew in America determines nothing.
It doesn't determine your values.
It once did.
It doesn't determine whom you'll marry.
It once did.
It doesn't determine your identity.
It once did.
That's a lot.
That is what we call a sea change.
It's as dramatic a change as it's possible to imagine.
And that is why parents didn't understand when their kids would intermarry.
It just, it didn't make sense.
It wasn't so much anger as, I can imagine for that generation, bizarre.
What do you mean?
Don't you know you're a Jew?
Jews just don't do that.
And they had no reason.
There was no real argument saying the argument, you know, the old-fashioned argument, well, in an argument, you'll see he'll turn out to be an anti-Semite.
Doesn't work.
It's not true.
In an argument, he may turn out to be the sweetest guy in the world.
Which leads me to the number one problem for American Jews.
Almost unique in Jewish history, this problem.
The Goyim are nice.
Serious, serious problem.
You see, if deep down you say, scratch a guy, you'll get an anti-Semite, we don't believe that.
I wrote a book for six years on anti-Semitism, and even I don't believe it.
How much more so your son or daughter at the University of Chicago or UCLA or wherever.
It's just not true.
You can believe it all you like, and I bet that most of you born in the 20s or 30s or raised then truly believe that deep down there's an anti-Semite lurking in almost every non-Jew.
If you want to believe that, Gazinta hate.
What can I tell you?
We don't believe that.
And since people operate on their assumptions, we no longer assume that.
That's the gulf between the generations.
To put it in the most brief way I can, concise way, my generation and all Jews in the free world born since World War II need reasons to be Jewish.
You didn't.
That's the difference.
We need to know why to be Jewish.
We need to know why the Jews should survive.
All past generations needed to know was how can Jews survive.
You get the difference?
And since Jewish life is dominated, understandably, by Jews of the past generation, of my parents' generation, of those pre-World War II experience, Jewish life is dedicated to answering a question that is less relevant to Jewish survival.
Namely, how can the Jew survive?
When the biggest problem in American Jewish life, and in free world Jewish life, it's also true in Brazil and Argentina and West Europe, the biggest problem is answering the question, why should we survive in the first place?
And their Jewish life offers absolutely no answers.
None.
Think about how Jewish life is organized.
First secular, then religious.
First secular.
All Jewish organizations are devoted to answering the question, how can we survive?
And God bless them.
I'm a member of most of them.
I donate.
I speak for.
None of this is a criticism.
It's a description.
But you name the organization.
From the largest, the federations, which are terrific, and under whose auspices I go around the country to a large extent speaking.
But their primary consideration, quite understandably, is how to raise funds to help poor Jews, to help needy Jews, to help Jewish families, to help Israel.
You name it.
But it's how.
Hadassah, how to raise funds to sponsor the greatest hospital in the Near East, Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.
American Jewish Committee, how to combat anti-Semitism and human rights abuses.
ADL, similarly, how to fight anti-Semitism and bigotry.
APAC, how to sponsor Israel on Capitol Hill.
They're all great.
All great.
But everything answers how.
Then you wonder why are there fewer younger faces at American Jewish Committee meetings, at Hadassah meetings.
They're not answering the question our generation is asking.
Why should I be Jewish?
Then I worry about how.
I want to know why.
That's not answered.
By the way, even religious life, which ultimately has the answer to why, is overwhelmingly how.
And I say this from a background rather deeply rooted in it.
I went to yeshiva for 15 years.
And I learned how, not why.
I learned how to keep kosher, how to keep Shabbos, how to shake alulav, how to build the sukkah.
You name it, I learned how.
Did I learn why to keep kosher?
If I'd have asked my Rebbe, Rebbe, why should I keep kosher?
It wouldn't have thrown me out of class.
There's no Jewish tradition of objecting to questions.
He just wouldn't have understood what I was asking.
Why keep kosher?
What kind of Narashkite is that?
Why keep kosher?
If he would have answered, he would have said, because the Kurdish Barotho, because God said so.
And the vishue, which sufficed for him as much as being born a Jew sufficed for secular Jews in the last generation.
You didn't ask beyond that.
The religious Jew didn't ask, why am I a Jew?
God said so.
The irreligious Jew didn't ask, why am I a Jew?
I was born so.
So that was it.
Either you were born so, no more questions, or God said so, no more questions.
Reason played no role in why one was a Jew, religious or secular.
That's the crisis.
By the way, the answer didn't exactly propel me towards Jewish life.
Even in the fourth grade, first of all, I wasn't absolutely certain there was a God.
Secondly, I wasn't absolutely certain that God prefers halibut to shrimp.
This was not a leap of faith I was prepared to make.
You know, why does the master of the universe care what you eat?
I now believe in kashrut very profoundly, and I will explain why in the course of the talk.
But I wasn't given any of those reasons and left kashrut for about 10 years.
With no reason, I'm not prepared to do anything.
I am the worst possible child a parent could have.
I am the ultimate why child.
You know, it's raining.
Why?
It's bad enough.
Why should I wear colosses?
But why is it raining?
I went beyond that.
I have never stopped with the why.
You tell me why?
Okay.
I drive them crazy on my TV show.
When there's a delay, you know, it's like the people who really run television are the cameramen.
I don't know if you know this.
The rest of us are peons.
They run everything.
And you know you never ask.
Every time there's a delay, I ask why.
And it drives them crazy.
But that is, at least it's been a blessing in my life because now that I know why on Judaism, it has rendered me a passionate Jew, and I've been able to offer those answers to other Jews who also want to know why, but haven't gone around crazy looking for the answer.
I did.
I went crazy looking for the answer.
To me, to be born a Jew was an interesting fact of life.
To be born an Orthodox Jew was an even more interesting fact of life.
But at a very early age, two things occurred to me.
One, very few Jews are Orthodox.
Two, very few people are Jewish.
To affirm being either of those, and while I no longer affirm a denomination, I obviously affirm Judaism and being a Jew.
But to affirm either of them is to affirm very, very different way of life.
Why should we be?
You know that there are more members of the Uwagadugu tribe of Upper Volta, West Africa, than there are Jews in Israel?
Think about it.
For us to affirm there are far more Sri Lankans than there are Jews.
By the way, it's never stopped us from having a colossal chutzpah.
Do you know that of every thousand people, under two are Jewish, and half of them are unhappy about it?
So out of every 1,000 people, 998 are not Jews.
And we have had the colossal tutzpah to divide the world into two groups, Jews and Gentiles.
Two and 998.
Can you imagine if another group did that?
You know, are you Albanian?
And then add some make-up a word for not all they did.
Of course, the great joke in all this is that they take it.
When I am in a southern state and a Baptist introduces himself as a Gentile, I don't know how to react.
You know, I am the tiniest of tiny groups, and he's defining himself as not being in mine.
I'm touched.
I am truly touched, I know.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Whenever they call themselves Gentile, I thank them.
Very sweet.
That's part of the riddle.
This obsession of the world, not just Jews, with what does it mean.
At any rate, that's the question.
That's my point.
Why be Jewish?
We need to give reasons.
You see, if you're not Jewish in America, you are something wonderful.
American.
And you can be an American nothing.
You could never have been a nothing.
That's important.
You always, if you stopped being a Jew, you always became something.
A Christian, a Muslim, a Marxist even.
But not a nothing.
That's modern Jewish history.
You can become nothing and be perfectly or think perfectly satisfied.
In medieval Poland, we did not have that option.
What were you going to be, a medieval Poland?
But today you can be an American.
Marry an American.
They're nice.
We're nice.
Half of them are not Christian.
America is not Jewish and Christian.
It's Jewish, Christian, and nothing.
That's very important.
That's why Jews always get a question, how come you never addressed the topic of losing Jews to Jews for Jesus?
And the reason is, we don't lose Jews to Jews for Jesus.
That's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of Jews who leave Judaism.
We lose Jews to real estate, to medicine, to law, to PhDs, to money making, to business.
Jews for real estate is the danger.
That's not Jews for Jesus.
Far more Jews have left Judaism for real estate than for Jesus.
By the way, I have nothing against real estate.
In Southern California, you can have nothing against real estate.
It is your sole equity.
But the point is, that's the issue.
It's Jews for nothing, not Jews for Jesus, that's the problem.
So then why be Jewish?
I want to offer you four answers.
The four answers are based on the three components of Judaism.
I'm about to tell you something.
It'll sound dramatic.
It's not meant to be.
I wish we would think in these terms.
It would be a healthier Jewish life.
We Jews have a Trinity just like Christians do.
Christians have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, or Holy Spirit.
We have God, Torah, Israel.
Whether you're Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox.
And by the way, I just want to add something.
To the best of my knowledge, whatever I will say, unless I specifically specify otherwise, whatever I will say will be true for normative Orthodox Reform and Conservative Judaism.
What Jews don't realize often is that the differences in Jewish life are not primarily Reform, conservative, Orthodox.
They are primarily those who take Jews seriously and those who don't take Judaism seriously.
That's the major division in Jewish life.
Not Reform, conservative, Orthodox.
Okay?
That's very, very important.
I'll never forget, so help me God this occurred.
I don't recall where, which is just as well, but it was at a Reform temple I was speaking at one weekend.
And I mentioned God Torah Israel.
And at the end of my talk during the question period, a gentleman stood up in this beautiful sanctuary of stained glass windows.
And he said to me, I object this God Torah Israel.
That's not Reform Judaism.
You're talking orthodoxy or maybe even conservative, but not reform.
I give you my word as I stand in a synagogue.
The man asking the question was standing in front of stained glass, beautiful stained glass windows of a Reformed temple that said in Hebrew, Elohim Torah Yisrael.
God Torah Israel.
The windows of his own temple were saying that, and he thought I was speaking non-reform.
Please understand that's the issue today.
Do you take Judaism seriously, and I don't care what the adjective before your Jew or your synagogue is.
And in my generation, overwhelmingly, nobody cares.
What counts is, do you want to take it seriously?
Do you grapple with Judaism?
Or are you by habit?
Are you Orthodox by habit, or are you reformed by habit?
The orthodox by habit keeps kosher because he always kept kosher.
No questions, no thought, no meaning.
The reform by habit doesn't keep kosher because he never kept kosher.
No thought, no questions, no meaning.
I have a very good litigus test to know whether you're a serious Jew in this definition I'm giving.
Can you answer the questions, why do you do what you do Jewishly, and why don't you do what you don't do Jewishly?
I don't care where you end up.
I care whether you're struggling to get anywhere.
That's the question of whether you're a serious Jew.
Much more than how many next vote you practice.
But why don't you practice what you don't practice?
Or are we all creatures of habit with thought a non-issue?
Based on God, law, and peoplehood, the three components, I want to give you the four reasons.
Number one is God, and it's the toughest, so I always begin with it.
I figure if I don't lose the audience after this, the rest is smooth sailing.
First of all, God is the issue.
As Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, if God is not, what is it?
If God is not the issue, then God is not an issue.
God must be the issue.
It's not a peripheral subject in one's Jewish life.
God, by the way, has not been faring well among the people who brought him into the world.
We introduced God into the world, but we're doing a very good job of trying to remove him from the world.
First of all, Jews are disproportionately active in every movement to secularize America, which disturbs me greatly.
Disturbs me greatly.
We think we are doing a service, perhaps.
We are not doing a service to America or to ourselves.
I am profoundly for the separation of church and state, but I am profoundly opposed to a secular society.
They're not the same thing.
You can have a secular government and a religious society, which is my ideal, by the way, for Israel as well as America.
So we are in the vanguard of removing what we brought into the world, namely God.
And even, I must say, equally, one finds this, to a large extent, in the synagogues.
This is not a criticism.
Again, it's descriptive.
But primarily, and I deal, thank God, with among my favorite groups in America, rabbis.
I have an extremely warm relationship with rabbis.
I have been overwhelmingly impressed with rabbis as individuals.
Okay, I'll say that straight out.
I'm not brought here by a rabbi.
I'm not hired by rabbis.
I like rabbis.
Okay, as a rule.
No, as a rule, because every group, I mean, you know, you have bad apples, but by and large, and people, Jews feel that.
That's why we are so disappointed when they don't turn out what we want, because we have such high expectations.
We don't have that of other groups like that.
It is still a label of great respect in Jewish life.
Having said that, I have one problem, and that is that God is a non-issue, by and large, for most rabbis of all three major denominations.
The Orthodox rabbi is most likely to address his sermon to the issue of observance.
The Reform rabbi is most likely to give his sermon to the issue of social justice, social ethics.
And the conservative rabbi is most likely to address both.
Who addresses God?
I am in dialogue with rabbis, priests, and ministers every single week.
I have been for over five years, two hours every Sunday night on radio.
And I ask them all the time, what was your sermon?
And the rabbis is just not on God.
God is a non-issue.
God is a non-issue with our Hebrew schools.
You can go through seven, eight years of Hebrew school and not seriously consider God.
But if God isn't the issue, what are we doing here?
Why be a Jew after Auschwitz if God isn't behind Jewish history?
I wouldn't.
I'm not in it for ethnic folkways.
You can eat kefilta fish today and not be Jewish.
You must understand that.
You no longer need to be Jewish to enjoy Jewish ethnicity.
At the deli near my house in Los Angeles, I'll never forget the sight of seeing a black waitress explain to a Japanese woman what matzah balls were.
Of course.
Exactly.
You have a Korean waitress ask me if I want krepla.
That is exactly what happens.
Remember the old man in New York?
You don't have to be Jewish to love Levi's Jewish rye.
It was profundity in that.
They didn't mean it to be.
They just wanted to sell rye bread.
But there was profundity.
You don't have to be Jewish to embrace Jewish ethnicity.
Johnny Carson will use Yiddish.
So who has to be Jewish anymore if the issue is ethnic?
What is their ethnic?
I need a Jewish community center?
I must play racquetball with Jews?
That was also generational.
Everything had to be with Jews.
I like playing racquetball with Italians.
You know, what's the difference who I play racquetball with, or if the diving board is near a mezuzah?
Who cares?
Who cares?
That is not the need any longer.
I'm happy to deal with non-Jews.
And so are the rest of Americans, and so are all of you.
You didn't move to live with Jews, did you?
You didn't move to Israel.
Jewish state is resurrected after 2,000 years, and you prefer Glencoe.
Just remember that.
And I prefer L.A., okay?
There's no holier than now.
But let's be honest about what we've chosen.
You could live among Jews and you decided to live among Goimen.
Just remember that.
That's how highly we think of them.
That's how much we love it here.
And for most Jewish parents, tragically, if their child made aliyah, it would be a family tragedy.
Which is very sad.
That's very sad.
So, God is the issue.
Why is God the issue?
And this is the essence of reason number one.
I believe that the Jewish people has a mission.
Our mission is to bring the world to the only ideal that will ultimately make truly a better world.
That is what I believe.
That is what I believe Judaism believes.
And it's called ethical monotheism.
The term, not the idea, the idea is as old as Judaism.
The term ethical monotheism was, as it happens, coined by reformed Jews, Abraham Geiger in particular.
What it means is, very simply this.
Monotheism is one God.
Ethics, you know, how you treat your fellow human being.
We are to teach the world two lessons.
Number one, that there is a God, and that God's primary demand is ethical behavior.
Isn't that simple?
It is.
It's staggeringly simple.
And what is complex is how to apply it to any given issue.
But that's what we are here to teach.
That there is a God whose primary demand is ethics.
Because when you do not tie ethics with God and God with ethics, you end up with evil.
Let me explain.
Number one, we have to teach the religious world, whether it is Jewish or Muslim or Christian or whatever, any doctrine of God that holds that God considers anything other than ethics most important will lead to evil.
Let me explain that.
If you hold that God teaches anything other than ethical behavior is most important, for example, what is the best example and most common?
Faith.
There are Christians who hold that God's primary demand is faith in Christ, not good behavior.
That is why it is possible to be a good person who believes in God but not Christ and go to hell.
Okay?
Because God's primary demand is right faith, not right action.
Khomeini is like that.
God's primary demand is Shiite Islam, not decent behavior.
Okay?
Kahana is like that.
I've debated him.
I published a debate.
I'll be more than happy to share it with you.
In other words, it is possible to stray from ethical monotheism in Jewish life too, where you teach that God's primary demand is something other than ethics.
If a Jew would teach God's primary demand is ritual behavior, not ethical behavior, that Jew would be violating ethical monotheism.
What I have just told you is like bringing coals to Newcastle, however.
Every one of you knows that it is possible to be religious and be disgusting.
Every one of you knows, right, how much evil is done in the name of God.
Every one of you can recite this by heart.
Okay, good.
But that's only 50% of our message.
That teaching about God without ethics as primary demand will lead to evil.
The other 50% Jews fail at 100%.
And that is that just as God without ethics leads to evil, ethics without God leads to evil.
That we don't teach.
That's the greatest Jewish tragedy of our time.
That we teach the opposite.
That it is possible to make a good world and a good society without any reference to God as the source of thou shalt not murder.
You all know about Khomeini and the Crusaders.
You all know about evil done by religious people in God's name.
What about all the evil done by those who speak in man's name?
By those who speak against God and religion, communists and Nazis, who have killed and tortured more people than all religions in all of human history to a factor of ten.
Why isn't that a lesson to Jews?
To have doubts about God after Auschwitz, that's normal and Jewish.
But to have doubts about belief in humanity after Auschwitz, that you can't do.
That's their document.
That's prohibited in Jewish life.
So it's okay to be a humanist after Auschwitz, but not a theist.
Why?
Who built the gas chambers, God or man?
You don't want to believe in God after Auschwitz?
It's your prerogative.
I see no rational basis for that conclusion, but that's your prerogative.
But don't tell me then you believe in humanity.
Tell me you believe in nothing.
That I respect.
You're a nihilist.
You believe in nothing and no values.
Life is a big, bad joke.
I respect that.
That's Richard Rubinstein's thinking.
I respect it.
I do not respect the Jew's thinking who says, after Auschwitz, I don't believe in God, but I still believe in man.
That's morally and intellectually bankrupt.
If there is no God, ladies, if there is no God, there is no good in evil.
There are only personal preferences.
I like building hospitals.
Eiffemann likes building gas chambers.
It's his preference versus my preference.
I will challenge you, and I will stay here all day, until I have every one of you at least strongly questioning or finally convinced on the issue that if there is no God, Auschwitz was not wrong.
Torturing children is not wrong if there is no God.
I state that literally and not to cause some effect in you.
I mean it literally.
All you can say is, if there is no God, I don't like torturing children.
What makes it wrong if there is no God?
That's not rhetorical.
Answer me in the question period.
What is wrong with torturing children?
I took the most obvious evil I could think of, if there is no God.
And the answer is, as I understand it, and as logic dictates, nothing.
All you can say is, I prefer not to.
But Aztecs preferred to.
They constantly tortured and sacrificed children, and so did the Mayans, and so did the Ostrogoths, and so did almost every ancient people whose civilization we have studied.
The Jews entered the world and said, God said child sacrifice is wrong.
Not Moses, not reason.
Reason doesn't say it's wrong.
Reason doesn't say the Holocaust is wrong.
Reason doesn't say killing every person on welfare in America is wrong.
Reason says it's right.
It would help the economy, be a boon, lower crime.
Right?
Just as reason says, if you missed your condom, get rid of the kid.
Right?
Let's be honest.
Judaism doesn't say that, but reason does.
As reason said to the ancient Greeks, reason said to the ancient Greeks, if a child is born deformed or ugly, you expose them to die.
That's why they had a very handsome race of people.
Well, why was that wrong?
What did the child know?
You don't really suffer that much at a day old.
You're just out there and you die.
Died pretty quickly, at one day of age exposed.
Jews didn't.
What's wrong with gladiator races, or gladiator fights?
What was wrong?
Why would reason suggest it's wrong?
If you're the victorious, what makes it wrong?
Why empathize with the poor?
Why empathize with the suffering?
These are all radical innovations, overwhelmingly owing to the idea that there is a God who says so.
If there is no God, there is no evil.
There is only something you don't prefer.
And yet we Jews think that teaching this relativism, the secular relativism, is almost a mitzvah.
That's why we're so committed to public schools without values.
Secular schools without values.
Right?
That's the best thing for our child, so that he or she spends most waking hours in an environment that is value-free.
All of a sudden, that is the Jewish ideal.
You are in the distinct minority if you send your child to a Jewish day school because you think studying Judaism and values is even more important than chemistry and grammar.
Not that you don't learn chemistry and grammar in a day school.
I went to day school and my grammar is very good.
My chemistry stinks.
But my brother's a doctor, so between the two of us, we somehow made up for it.
That's part of the issue.
But as far as God is concerned, we have a mission to the world, to teach that God without ethics and ethics without God lead to evil.
Reason number two.
If I ask a Jew, are people basically good?
Invariably I get the answer, yes.
Many Jews, most Jews believe that people are basically good.
As it happens, Judaism doesn't.
And I will put out the challenge to you that I have made repeatedly.
You find me a single statement in 4,000 years of normative Judaism.
That's a lot.
We've written a lot that says people are basically good.
I'll fly you out to Los Angeles for all expenses paid vacation in my city.
And you can choose the date depending on the earthquake factor.
But it's not a very risky deal on my part because it's not findable.
Judaism does not hold we're basically good.
Now, it's interesting.
If Judaism doesn't hold that, how come most Jews do?
Well, one of it is because most Jews are utterly ignorant of Judaism.
But there's another reason.
The other reason is Jews believe that Judaism is whatever Christianity isn't.
You ask most Jews what does Judaism believe?
They'll say we don't believe in Jesus.
As if that tells you what Judaism is.
We also don't believe in unicorns or ET.
That doesn't mean that that makes it Jewish.
What do we believe?
Since Jews know that Christianity believes in original sin, therefore Jews conclude Judaism believes in original goodness.
Not true.
We don't believe in original sin, and we don't believe in original goodness.
We also don't believe in original evil.
We believe.
And look it up, Genesis 8, 21.
We'll be reading it this week in any synagogue you attend.
The will of man's heart is towards evil from his youth, meaning we start out neither good nor bad, but it's a lot easier to do bad than good.
Now, isn't that sober, unromantic?
And if it's unromantic, people don't like to believe it.
It's much nicer to believe that we're really wonderful inside and that we got screwed up by parents, by socioeconomics, by Richard Nixon, by something, right?
I'm okay, you're okay, and then you fill in the blank to what screwed us up.
That's contemporary secular thinking.
That's what it is.
We are wonderful.
We're terrific.
Look for the socio-economic source of why we do bad.
Judaism holds that the source of evil is people.
It's people.
That's one of the big things on the nuclear debate.
There are those of us who believe that it's the Soviets who are the threat.
There are others who believe that it is weapons that are the threat.
But if weapons are the threat, how come nobody clamors about the British being able to blow up the world?
How come?
I never heard that we have to negotiate with the British.
Maybe it's because we trust their values.
It's values of people that cause evil.
People.
The average Israeli home has a submachine gun.
Yet the number of murders with guns in Israel is probably lower than the number of murders with tree leaves in America.
It's not guns that kill.
I'm sorry.
And I don't even know how to use a gun.
And I can't stand a National Rifle Association.
People kill!
That is true.
That is not Raganism.
That is Judaism.
People do evil.
People, not death chambers, do evil.
God, it is amazing to me that Jews would echo sentiments that are so not Jewish.
So not a recognition of good and evil.
People are the source of evil.
But it's easy to blame God, and it's easy to blame your parents, and it's easy to blame society, and it's easy to blame economics.
It's very tough to look in the mirror and say, you're the problem.
On my radio show in Los Angeles one night, I asked the listeners, call in and tell me if you think you're a good person.
That was it.
I didn't open up with a commentary, nothing.
Just call in.
Two hours, every single caller from all over Southern California said, I'm a good person.
I think I'm a good person.
Well, there are a number of conclusions one can draw from that program.
One, it was a fluke.
That's possible.
And the other night it would have been a mixture.
I doubt it.
I did it again.
Two, everyone in Southern California is good.
Possible.
It's possible.
I doubt it.
Three, everybody who listens to my show is good.
Possible?
Also doubt it.
Four, everybody thinks he's good.
That's it.
That's the one.
Everybody thinks he or she is a good person.
It's one of the great revelations of my life in the last few years.
Now, however, my friends, we have a serious problem here.
Because on the one hand, everybody thinks he or she is a good person, but on the other hand, there's a lot of evil in the world.
Now, unless you believe it's created by Satan, which is not a Jewish belief, where then does all this evil come from if everybody is a good person?
So the answer is, everybody does think he or she is a good person, including Dr. Mengele.
I don't only mean my California listeners, I mean Dr. Mengele, the archetypical evil human being.
He thought he was a good person.
I have this in writing, not a letter that I wrote to him, but the man was cited.
He has been misunderstood.
History will exonerate me, he has always said.
The Jews are out to get me.
I meant well.
I meant well.
How often do we all say that?
How often have we been told that by someone who's hurt us?
Gee, I didn't mean to.
And it's true.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says, how can I hurt Sylvia?
It just doesn't happen.
Gee, I want to be evil today.
So then, how do we, the riddle remains, how do we then explain, or do we reconcile evil with everyone thinking he's good?
It's a very simple answer.
People judge themselves by their motives, not by their actions.
That's the reason.
That's very important.
Secondly, we feel accountable to ourselves rather than to something beyond us.
That is why I always answer the argument, I don't believe in organized religion, I can pray alone, by saying the purpose of organized religion is not to have you pray alone or pray together, excuse me.
Its purpose is to give you accountability.
You are accountable to God and to a community if you're an organized religion.
That's why people hate it.
That's why most academics hate it.
They want to be accountable to no one to themselves.
That's easy.
That's why there's no hypocrisy outside of religion.
Right?
Jim Baker, he was a hypocrite, right, for sleeping with Jessica Hahn.
How come Hugh Hechner is not a hypocrite for sleeping with all these young girls and twisting their lives?
He can't be a hypocrite.
Definitionally, Hugh Hechner can't be a hypocrite.
No secular person could be a hypocrite.
That's the beauty of being irreligious.
How can I be a hypocrite?
There's no standard that I advocate.
Therefore, I can't violate one.
Therefore, I'm never a hypocrite.
I love hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy means there are standards you violated.
God bless hypocrisy.
Was Hitler a hypocrite?
No.
Isn't that interesting?
Jim Baker stuck with one girl.
He's a massive hypocrite.
Adolf Hitler murdered six million Jews.
He's not a hypocrite.
Right?
You can say everything about Adolf Hitler, but not that he was a hypocrite.
I like hypocrisy.
I like organized religion.
It gives standards and accountability.
I do not trust people who are only accountable to themselves.
I trust people who ultimately know what is on the over-the-art of most synagogues in America.
Dalikne Miya Taome.
Know before whom you stand.
This Prager guy is going to have to answer to God.
I believe that.
It's a big difference if you believe you have to answer for what you do to God or you only have to answer to yourself.
You know there's a big difference with all your lines.
Oh,
we all know all these disgusting religious people.
But I do have this question.
One night you are walking in downtown Chicago in a miserable neighborhood, 2 a.m. alone.
Ten men are walking towards you.
Would you or would you not be relieved to know that they had just attended a Bible session?
Okay?
Ask that to yourself next time you come out with the old nonsense cliché religion doesn't make people better.
Okay?
People aren't basically good.
By the way, I get arguments on that one.
People tell me, look at babies.
They're beautiful, adorable, innocent.
Which is true.
Babies are beautiful, adorable, and innocent, but they're not good.
In fact, they are the quintessence of selfishness.
I want mommy, I want Nipple, I want to be hell, I want to be comfortable, I want to be played with.
And if you do not do all of these things immediately, I will ruin your life.
Always goes over with women's groups better than men's groups.
Right?
Ain't that the truth?
That's goodness.
Babies are good.
Give me a break.
They're good when they sleep.
Now, I did not say babies are evil.
I never saw a baby's picture up in the post office.
I never heard of a baby embezzler or a baby rapist.
This is all true.
They're not good.
Now we have kids.
There are those who say, I never met a bad kid.
These people, that's right.
Well, that ends that.
I really don't need any proof.
These people generally don't work with kids because as I can tell from your reaction, you know, as I do, that with a number of exceptions, notwithstanding, by and large, kids stink.
Including you and me.
And if you want a very quick proof to that, there's a very simple, empirical way of doing this.
Just visit any summer camp this coming summer.
Go to a boy's bunk of 12, 13-year-olds, especially if in that bunk one of the boys is particularly short or particularly fat or inept in some emotional or psychological or intellectual way, and you will see the most despicable, cruel, Nazi-like behavior.
I directed camps for years.
It was unbelievable how they treated each other.
Now, I would invite you to go to a girl's bunk of 12-year-olds, but it would just take a week because their slimy way of dealing with other kids is slimier.
Boys punch you, kick you, urinate on you.
They do.
That is exactly why I'm telling you stories, real stories from Ken.
Girls don't do that.
They ruin your life verbally.
That's all.
It's just a different Nazi-like way, that's all.
Same effect, you're ruined.
You're ruined.
Making a good person is very difficult.
You know, one of the great lessons we should teach the world from Judaism is that making a good person is the most important thing in life, and that making a good person is much harder than making a good surgeon.
But we don't teach that.
And we don't live that.
And we get greater notice from a good surgeon than from a good person.
And that's the saddest statement I can make of Jewish life.
That's the single saddest statement of Jewish life.
To say my son the surgeon is greater notis than my son the mensch or my son the Jew.
And now my daughter as well.
Mashiach will come when Jewish parents have more notice saying, my son, who lives a good, ethical life and is a warm, passionate Jew, than my son who is on the Yale laureate.
That's Mashiach time.
But that's not what we convey to our children.
I was at a table of Jewish mothers at a conference in Los Angeles, and they were talking about two girls at a private high school who had been thrown out for cheating, and these mothers were furious at the school.
At the school.
Not at the girls.
Because the school ruined their chances of getting into a good university.
So what?
Like if they go to Cal State Northridge, their lives are ruined?
What's wrong with Cal State Northridge?
I went to Brooklyn College.
Big deal.
Thank God I did.
I didn't think the world of myself like my friends who were at Princeton.
It's a much better place to go.
There's much less self-deification.
It's healthier.
So that was the tragedy.
That was the tragedy.
That's where that's what happened.
The daughters couldn't get into Cornell.
That's not this in Jewish life.
My daughter is at Cornell.
If a parent would describe their child in terms of goodness, the other parent, the other Jew, would think, never.
Never.
She has a loser.
A loser.
Your child goes into Jewish education.
It's clear that there was no chance to make a bundle.
And this was the last choice.
And then we wonder, why don't we have better teachers?
Do we want our children to be those teachers?
Is there notice in my son who teaches in a Jewish school?
Or my son who's in a Jewish federation?
It's a little more notice to be in Jewish Federation for the Son than in Jewish school.
I'll admit that.
But not like lawyer, doctor, or professor of medieval Bulgarian literature.
That's not this for a Jewish parent.
How come it's not not this for a Bulgarian parent that they can teach Jewish literature?
God, people not basically good.
Next, how do you make good people?
Remember I told you we all think we're good?
I love when people say to me, I don't need Jewish law, Jewish values.
Who needs to observe?
I'm good.
I believe I'm a good person.
People always tell me that.
I believe I'm a good person.
I don't mean Jewish law.
I try to live by Jewish ethics.
Ladies and gentlemen, please understand something.
The statement, I don't need to observe Jewish law, I believe in Jewish values, is Christianity par excellence.
The only difference between that view and Christianity itself is Christ.
Period.
The view, I believe in Jewish values, I don't need Jewish law, is the essence of Christianity.
Jewish values without Jewish laws.
That is exactly how Christianity was founded.
That is Paul's basic statement.
You don't need the law.
You do need the law.
It is God or Israel.
You cannot keep one component and say that you are authentically Jewish.
You're a Jew no matter what.
I don't disqualify any Jew.
I don't have the flutzburg or the ability.
You are a Jew if you're a fascist, if you're a communist, if you're a moron, if you're a traitor, if you're for Jesus.
You're a Jew in God's eyes, no matter what you do or believe.
End of issue.
Question is, are you authentically fulfilling what Judaism demands?
Now, let me make something clear.
When I advocate Jewish laws, I am not standing up here advocating orthodoxy.
It is an insult to reform and conservative Judaism if you think that a Jew who advocates Jewish observance is ipso facto orthodox.
It's an insult to reform and conservative Judaism if that's what you believe.
Oh, he's observant.
He must be orthodox.
What a statement.
Are the more than half of the reform rabbis ordained in the last 20 years who keep kosher, are they orthodox?
Or are they reformed Jews who understand that reform does not mean drop?
Reform Jews have to understand that.
Reform is reform, and I'm all for reforming Jewish law, not for dropping.
Sometimes we should add.
I think there should be kosher pocketbooks and kosher shoes.
I mean it.
How did the animal get killed?
Why is it only relevant for food and not for pocketbooks?
And what sort of animal?
In other words, there's also adding, reform doesn't only mean drug.
Reform might mean add and rub.
I don't believe in kosher wine.
Christians in America are not using it for pagan sacrifices.
Oh, I'm very consistent.
I haven't provided kosher wine for kiddoshin to help Israel, but I drink wine outside anywhere I want.
So I'm not advocating here a denomination.
I'm advocating that if you don't take Jewish law seriously, you're not a serious Jew, definitionally.
Not by my standards.
Jewish law is there to make you primarily a good person.
I say primarily because it's not its only purpose.
It's to bring you closer to God too, which is something we could use.
But it's unfortunately something that transcends the particular talk I'm giving.
Invite me for a second talk.
I'm dying to give part two.
I give part one all over the country.
I just want to talk one day on getting closer to God.
I would just love to, you know, experiment.
Come to my house, I'll give it to you for free.
Just come.
But anyway, I have to dwell on this part.
Here's an example.
Here is an example of how Jewish law operates to have you do good.
It says in the Torah, give 10% of your income to Tzadakh.
Right?
By the way, you'll be happy to know, it is on adjusted gross.
Rashi points that out.
Anyway, it is actually unadjusted gross.
I'm not kidding.
Providing you gave him the right figures.
You know, that's very important too.
God knows the real thing is.
Now, the very first time I mentioned this law, that you have to give 10%, it's a mitzvah to give 10% of your income to Tzadaka, I remember the very first time I taught it.
Many years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, to a student group, a Jewish student group.
Young woman got up and she said, I don't like that law, as if I like it.
And I'm in love with it.
I love giving my money away.
I don't like that law, she said.
A person should give to the poor from his heart, not because of some law, which was again echoing exactly Christianity.
It's the law of the heart now, not the law.
That's why charity is karitas, heart.
So I said to her, I said, you know what?
Let me make the point to you.
Let me give you the following scenario.
Imagine, I said to the girl in the group, imagine two equally wealthy Jewish men.
They are equally wealthy in every way.
Same income, same overhead, same number of dependents.
And each is approached by a woman whose daughter has cancer.
The daughter and the mother, they need money for the daughter's surgery.
No surgery, the daughter will die.
One of these Jews, I said to the girl in the group, began to cry.
Hearing this woman's story, he began to cry, and in the midst of his tears, he gave the woman a dollar.
The other Jew wasn't as disturbed.
In fact, he couldn't even stay to hear the whole story.
He had to rush to an appointment.
But as he tries to live by the Jewish law of Tzadakah, he gave the woman $50.
Who, I asked the girl in the group, thinking I had made the point clear, did a better thing.
To which she responded, and so did the others.
The man who gave the dollar, because he gave it from his heart, he felt.
To which I responded then and explain to you now, Judaism would love you to give a tenth of your income each year to the poor from your heart.
It suspects, however, that in a rather large majority of cases, were we to wait for your heart to prompt you to give a tenth of your income away each year, we would be waiting a very long time.
Ergo, Judaism says, give 10%.
And if your heart catches up, terrific.
We are all thrilled that Schwartz's heart has caught up with his giving.
In the meantime, good has been done.
Judaism teaches a great lesson, the opposite of the 60s.
It is more important how you act than how you feel.
Not in every area of life.
Not in every area.
For example, in prayer to God, it is more important how you feel.
But in how you act to your fellow human being, it's more important how you act.
Better to give 10% because of the law than 1% out of your heart.
Ask any poor person if you don't believe.
The only people who ever vote for the dollar were never poor.
Just remember that.
Judaism teaches goodness as a recipe.
It's called Jewish law.
We all think we're so good without necessity of these laws.
Here's another one.
It's in the Talmud.
Binding Mishnah law.
A Jew who enters a store is not permitted to ask a storekeeper the price of an item if he knows he will not buy it.
Because you're not allowed to raise the hopes of the storekeeper for no reason.
You can comparison shop, but you can't mudnik storekeepers when you know you won't buy it.
You can't test drive a car that you know you won't buy unless you say at the outset, Sir, I will not buy this car.
May I test drive it?
Okay?
Secular law can never tell you how to treat a storekeeper.
Remember the big difference between Jewish law and secular law.
Secular law can only prohibit you from being evil.
Only Jewish law or religious law generally can insist that you be good.
There isn't a single law of goodness in the United States legal code.
They're only laws of desisting from criminality.
But not being a criminal doesn't make you kind or nice or good or generous.
That's the difference.
You can live by every American law and be a disgusting human being.
That is not possible by Jewish law.
Now, having said that, let me give you one more example.
I'll go to my fourth reason and we're finished.
Let me give you one more example of Jewish law making a better person.
I have learned, to my somewhat, I guess, deep chagrin, but by now I'm used to it, that most Jews believe that at Mount Sinai, the Jewish people received not a moral code, but a health code.
For example, most Jews tell me that the purpose of kashrut is to prevent shrichinosis, keep you healthy.
Purpose of the Sabbath, keep you well-rested and healthy.
Purpose of circumcision, I have been told by many Jews, to prevent venereal disease.
I'm sure that there must be many Jews who believe that the original purpose of tefillin was to check blood pressure.
Well, you wrap it around.
That's the health code theory of Judaism.
That's not the case.
There may be health benefits to Jewish laws, but that's not their purpose.
Let me show you in one area, and this is why I came to keeping kosher.
By the way, by keeping kosher, again, it doesn't mean I'm Orthodox.
For example, I am invited many times to people's homes as I travel, and they will say, We know you keep kosher, we don't, but we'll have kosher food for you.
But will you eat at our home?
The dishes aren't kosher.
To which I have always responded, that's quite all right.
I never eat dishes.
There are many, many levels of kashrut.
But the Torah, which I take rather seriously, has certain basic laws, which I commend to you for their character building, their Jewishness, and their ethical...
inherent ethical nature.
Again, this is a talk I would love to give.
I'd love to speak for an hour on kashrut.
It is not possible that half of you would not begin the road to leaving certain things out of your diet if I gave you an hour on kashrut.
It is so beautiful, it is so Jewish, and so profound.
Let me just touch at an outline.
Do you know the basic purpose of kashrut?
The basic purpose is as a compromise on Judaism's ideal of vegetarianism.
The Jewish ideal is vegetarian, Orthodox, Reform, Conservative.
That's the Jewish ideal.
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were instructed deliberately not to eat animals, only to eat of the fruit and the vegetables.
And the greatest chief rabbi that we ever had, Roth Kook, may he rest in peace, was a vegetarian.
It is increasingly common for observant Jews to be vegetarian.
However, Judaism did not legislate vegetarianism.
It's the ideal, but it's not the law, which is understandable.
The Torah says, if you lust for meat, Then the following animals you may eat.
We are limited.
We cannot kill and eat every fish, every fowl, every land animal.
That's the essence of kosher.
That's the essence of it.
A Jew cannot kill and eat everything he wants.
Why is that not so obvious in its ethical import in the development of the character of the self?
My son and I often eat in restaurants.
And it is so beautiful for me to see this four and a half year old asking, is this kosher, is that kosher?
Sometimes it's a little embarrassing.
We passed a woman in a restaurant the other day, and he points to her bacon and he goes, Daddy, is this kosher?
Thank God it was a Christian.
Imagine a Jewish woman sitting there being announced like that.
It would have been slightly sensitive.
Be that as it may, that is the essence.
Judaism tells you which are permitted and which are not permitted, very simply by signs.
Land animals must have split hooves and chew their cud.
Others are not permitted.
Fish must have fins and scales.
Others are not permitted, such as shellfish.
And birds must not be birds of prey.
Others are permitted.
Okay.
Must not be birds of prey, right?
Others are not permitted.
Birds of prey are not permitted.
To which you might ask, of course, why those signs are not, for example, the other way around.
To which I would respond in good Jewish fashion with a question.
If it were the other way around, wouldn't you ask the same question?
Right?
If shellfish were a kosher and tuna weren't, you'd ask why.
The essence in Judaism is that you cannot eat it all.
Why tuna yes and why shrimp no is complex.
Very complex.
We don't know all the answers.
During the question period, I will offer you some thoughts if you ask.
I'll just tell you one thing about land animals.
This can't be coincidental.
Every kosher animal is vegetarian, and every carnivorous animal is not kosher.
That cannot possibly be coincidental.
Okay?
These are powerful little insights.
Diet is very important, as we know.
Not just for health.
It constitutes much of our lives eating.
And then for the animal's sake, after all, those were for our development.
For the animal's sake, you cannot, the following.
You cannot wound an animal.
Is that ethical or ritual?
If an animal is wounded, it's not kosher.
Did you know that?
That's the law.
Is that ethics or ritual?
The Torah law, you're not allowed to kill an animal and its child on the same day.
Is that ethics or ritual?
Is it ethics or ritual that if it takes two cuffs of the neck, the animal is in kosher?
Is it ritual or ethical that if the blade is blunt, the animal is not kosher because it suffered.
It wasn't sharp enough to immediately sever the nerves.
I mean, that's the point.
Of course, Jews can make out of anything voodoo.
And it's true, sometimes it appears that way.
Why am I angry at Jews who keep kosher meaninglessly?
That's how I began.
Why did I leave it for 10 years?
But the day you drop lobster from your diet, just lobster, I always try to explain to Jews, drop entirely this idiotic notion of all or nothing.
Drop it!
You don't believe it in American law.
Why should you believe it in Jewish law?
Would you say to somebody, you're doing 65, you might as well do 100 miles per hour.
Right?
Only a moron would say that.
Why do we say that in Judaism?
You're a hypocrite if you only keep a little kosher.
You're never a hypocrite.
You understand?
Get that in your minds.
You're not a hypocrite if you do 65 and not 100.
Because you know that there are levels, there are gradations of wrong.
So too in Judaism.
You just drop one shellfish from your diet.
You are on the road to seriousness in Judaism.
It is a major, major, major act.
That's what I invite you to do.
That's important.
And if it's lobster you drop or shellfish entirely, and then one day you go to Boston and you can't resist, so have it.
And then return to Kashmir.
What do you think?
God is saying, eh, got you on May 14th.
Forget it.
We render God an idiot when we talk like that.
If you gossip once, gossip is against Jewish law, just as much as Kashmir, as non-Kashru.
If you gossip once, does God say, well, might as well gossip all the time?
Stop gossiping that day, the next day, continue, or vice versa.
That's the point.
That's what seriousness is.
But if you stop having a shrimp cocktail, when you used to have a shrimp cocktail, and you did it because you're a Jew, you will be deeply affected.
Your friends will be deeply affected.
Your Christian friends will love and admire you.
Your Jewish friends will think you're crazy.
But you will be proud.
Finally, and I have five minutes to go.
God, people not being basically good, Jewish law to make you better, and finally, peoplehood.
Remember, it's God, Torah, Israel, God, law, peoplehood.
Peoplehood teaches a very profound thing.
I have to take care of my own.
I have to take care of my own even before I take care of the world.
Sounds wrong, doesn't it?
And yet, you know what?
If we could teach everybody that lesson, we would be doing a great service to the world.
If we could teach blacks to take care of blacks first, and Armenians to tell the world about the Armenian genocide first, and Christians to take care of Soviet Christians, we will have helped the world immensely.
People who do not take care of their own do not take care of everybody.
They take care of nobody.
Remember that.
I went to Columbia after Brooklyn.
And I was at Columbia when they were tearing down the place during the riots.
And they were mostly Jews, spoiled kids from Scarsdale.
And they loved humanity.
They all loved humanity.
They treated everybody despicably.
They were the most selfish people I ever met in my life.
And they thought that anyone who took care of other Jews was provincial.
That I was fighting for Soviet Jewry was provincial, almost fascist.
They were in love with humanity.
And then I recalled the greatest sentence of the Torah.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Why does it say love your neighbor as yourself?
Why doesn't it say love everyone or love humanity as yourself?
I think the answer is Judaism is very realistic.
It knows it's a lot easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor.
That's the point.
It's easy to love five billion people.
It's very hard to love five.
You show loving kindness to Soviet Jewry and to Arab Jewry.
And unless you're very provincial, you won't stop screaming just for Jews.
You will continue for others.
You're trained already to take care of others.
You know why the Catholic Church didn't scream for Jews in the Holocaust?
It never screams for Catholics.
I finally realized that.
The Catholics of Lebanon were butchered, and there wasn't a peep out of the Vatican.
Baptists in the Soviet Union have it worse than Jews do.
Billy Graham, the best-known Baptist in the world, visited the Soviet Union and he took the side of the Soviets.
Can you imagine a Jewish leader going to the Soviet Union, taking the Soviet side against the Jews?
I mean, it's laughable.
It's not even imaginable.
Let them scream for each other.
I don't expect them to scream for me.
Scream for you.
An Armenian called my show once and said, You Jews, you're always talking about the Holocaust.
Why don't you talk about the Armenian genocide?
So I said, Sir, with all respect, it's my obligation to speak about my people's genocide, and it's your obligation to speak about your people's genocide.
There was absolute silence on the air, and then he said, You're right.
And he hung up.
It never occurred to him that it was not the Jews' job to tell the world about the Armenians, that it was the Armenians' job.
And the irony is solely because we Jews never let the world wrestle with the Holocaust, do they even remember the Armenians?
If we didn't remind the world about Auschwitz, no one would have ever heard about the Armenians, including the Armenians' grandchildren.
Now, we should never stop with Jews.
That's provincial.
I ran, I am proud to say, the largest event for the Afghan people in the United States with Richard Dreyfus, with Terry Garr, Cliff Roberts, and the L.A. Philharmonic in Los Angeles last year.
It was a feature article in the Wall Street Journal.
I'm just telling you this so that you'll understand I try to live by not stopping with Jews.
But that's my first obligation.
First, I cry for my people.
So the kids, our sophisticated kids at the University of Chicago who are universalists and would not attend something for the Jewish people or for Israel, who do they help?
They feel good about it, you know, they'll build a shanty for against apartheid.
And then what happens later in life?
All my friends from the 60s who were universalists are stockbrokers today who don't care about anybody.
They admit it.
Well, our idealism has just evaporated.
How come mine hasn't?
How come none of my friends who were still Jewish hasn't?
How come we're still fighting and you're still caring?
That's why love your neighbor as yourself.
That's another great lesson.
And it's the third reason why this Jew loves Judaism.
Thank you very much.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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