All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 6, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
01:32:26
Timeless Wisdom - Why I Revere Judaism: Ten Reasons
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
November is National Family Caregivers Month.
One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
Working families can't afford to wait.
It's time to care for America's caregivers.
Learn more at AARP.org slash care for caregivers.
Paid for by AARP.
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
I've never given this talk before.
It's a rare, rare thing for me.
I've given a lot of talks.
This is actually a, it's related, obviously, to so many things that I have talked about in my life.
But I've never been so brazen as to title a talk because I never, I don't emote publicly.
That's just my style.
Pardon me while I tie this around.
So I would never really give a talk why I love Judaism.
It's just not my sort of thing.
And it won't be the sort of thing where I will gush forth with all this love talk.
It's not my style.
But it is true that I love Judaism.
I might add that as with all deep love, there is also elements of every other emotion.
Anger, disappointment.
You can't just love something or someone.
It doesn't make sense.
There is no person you feel that way towards.
And why could it possibly be towards Judaism?
I don't even feel that way towards God, and God is higher than Judaism.
I have highly ambivalent feelings frequently with regard to God.
Though I am a very, very deep affirmer of God's existence, ironically, unlike most people, my brain affirms God's existence, and my heart has the problems.
For many people, their heart is at peace with God, but their brain has problems.
Well, how can you believe in God?
Look at evolution.
This and this.
But to me, just the human being and so much else is too much evidence of a God.
Anyway, I will offer you tonight, in my fashion of speaking, 10 reasons.
I had a book, Nine Questions.
Now I have a talk, 10 reasons, that I wrote up for why I love Judaism.
You will find, though, that a more literally correct title would have been, Why I So Deeply Revere Judaism.
But for me, love and respect are very intertwined, and so the title will stand, but you will understand as I speak that it has a great deal to do with reverence, with respect, as well as it does with love.
And I just want to again emphasize that if Judaism is a living and breathing organism, you have to have sometimes other feelings too.
And I do.
And while that is not the topic of the talk, I want you to understand that a lot of you may have a sense of religious people generally in Judaism, Christianity, or elsewhere, which involves their leaving the real life and becoming unreal.
If there's anything about religious people that the non-religious often feel, it's that they don't live in this world.
And you know what?
A lot of times you're right.
It is my single biggest argument with many religious people, that they have left the world and entered a world of religion.
And I'm reminded at times of what a Protestant thinker once said, God is interested in other things in addition to religion.
And it's an important thing to remember.
Having said that, however, I want just to put that perspective, because I do want to emphasize the positive, though I don't want you to walk away thinking, well, this man is just, you know, his views are so worked out and he has such perfect feelings towards Judaism that it just isn't real.
I want you to fight with it, and in fact, that will be my tenth reason, as you will understand when I come to it.
All right.
Let me begin with reason number one.
They are not in order of importance.
They are in order of the way they came to me writing my notes.
All right?
Number one came to me when writing my notes is number one for a very simple reason.
It is what most animates me personally as a human, as a Jew.
And that is that Judaism is filled with moral passion.
And I'm filled with moral passion.
I hate evil.
Judaism hates evil.
And I think that part of my hatred of evil, if not the vast majority of it, comes very deeply from immersion in Judaism from the earliest times of my life.
Let me give you a living example, because I never talk only in theory.
I'm very concrete and real life-oriented.
Thank God, and if God does intervene in the life of the individual, and I hear my heart and my mind are the opposite.
My heart believes yes, and my mind has questions.
But if God has intervened in my life, and I tend to think that there has been, I think that one of the things he did was give me the luck of being the moderator of Religion on the Line on KABC Radio.
Now that may sound odd, why I would say God would give a man a radio show.
It's not, you know, like God doesn't have more important things to do.
I don't think God intervened to give me my own show because while I hope to have done a lot of good with it, it didn't affect me much.
The purpose of my own show is to affect others.
But religion on the line has deeply, deeply affected me.
How could it not?
I have for nearly nine years, every Sunday night for two hours, talked with a rabbi, a priest, and a minister about the greatest issues of life that I care about.
Can you imagine if you had that in your house?
Forget that it's on radio.
Let's just say it happened in your dining room every week for nine years.
Different rabbis, different priests, different ministers, and Muslims and Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists and Quakers would show up and talk to you about the most important things in your life.
It has an effect.
One of the effects has been, there have been a number.
One day I'd like to just write on that effect.
Certainly one has been a deep, deep caring for many Christians that have come on.
There's no question about that.
But one of them has also been to appreciate where Judaism differs.
After all, if it's the same, except that ours is in Hebrew and theirs is in Latin or the vernacular, then it's not much of a difference.
And many of the values are shared, but not all and not identically, which is just fine, by the way, and it's certainly fine to Judaism.
But let me tell you one of them in regard to this concept of moral passion.
It concerns the Central Park, Central Park rapists.
You all know the story of the horrible rape and beating virtually to death of the Central Park jogger in New York.
A woman left her dead who lost most of her blood after horrible beating and multiple rapes.
Well, I hate what they did.
And I will go so far as to say I hate them.
Okay?
I hate them for what they do.
Maybe one day I will be more saintly and only hate what they did and not them.
But until then, right now, I hate them both.
What they did and them.
Well, as it happens, the Archbishop of New York City, Archbishop O'Connor, visited the rapists in prison.
And you probably know that as well.
And this is not from just media reports.
It's from his own journal, Catholic New York.
He felt the need to go to these people, these young people, and tell them one thing.
And I emphasize one thing.
He did not go to say many things.
He wanted the world to know he came to tell them one thing.
God loves you.
That that was the entirety of his message.
Well, any of you who may recall, and I certainly don't expect that of you, but if you recall, I was incensed.
And I don't think that there was a period of time that I attacked a religious figure as consistently, and it wasn't because he was Catholic.
Any of you who heard me on Mayor Kahana know that I can give it to a Jew too.
But I just did week after week a commentary of how could a man of God come and say as his only message this.
In fact, I said frequently, I wanted to write an article, and the article would have been titled as follows.
How to get visited by the Archbishop.
I said on the air week after week, I thought of all these beautiful Catholic lay people in New York, people who devote their lives to the homeless, to the poor, to the sick, who get no credit for it, who to have a visit from Archbishop O'Connor literally would have been the highest moment of their lives.
And instead, who gets it?
The lowest form of behavior that the human being can indulge in.
They get the visit.
Why couldn't the parish priest go?
Why did the archbishop have to go?
The only possible answer is, because that's what he believes is the message of his religion.
To tell those who do the most cruel things in the world that God loves them.
To verify this, to verify this, and to verify that my reactions were not just Dennis.
Because it's hard for me to know where does Dennis begin in Judaism begin?
Where does Dennis end in Judaism begin and vice versa?
So I was curious to know, was my anger, my reaction, Dennis, human, or and or quintessentially Jewish.
So I decided for three weeks in a row to ask the different rabbi, the different priests, the different minister each week a question.
If you had to visit the joggers, excuse me, the rapists, what would you tell them?
And what do you think of what the Archbishop said?
Well, it's on tape, folks.
Week after week, you basically get the following.
The priest would fundamentally agree with the archbishop.
That is the Roman Catholic priest.
The Protestant minister would fundamentally agree and maybe add words about penitence.
And the rabbi would disagree.
Didn't matter if the rabbi was conservative, reform, orthodox, just disagreed.
The third week, I never know who's coming on religion on the line.
Okay?
It's just because I don't invite, and it's purposefully done that way.
So I don't know who's going to show up.
The third week, the most liberal rabbi on earth, not in Southern California, not in America, on this planet, was the rabbi that evening.
He is left-wing reform.
Not only that, but as you would expect from someone in that arena of theology, he always speaks about love and love and love and brotherhood and so on.
And here I was about to ask the question again.
I had announced I'd ask it.
I see him walk in and my heart falls into my chair.
Everything that I have been saying about Judaism differing is going to be blown sky-high this evening.
But what am I going to do?
Say I'm canceling the question because the wrong rabbi showed up.
So here we go, and I am sweating bullets as I go around the table.
Pastor, how do you feel about what the Archbishop did?
Well, that is the message.
Christ was with the downtrodden and the prisoners.
Okay, well, I'm saying to myself, well, at least you gave what I expected.
The priest, fundamentally, the same thing.
And then I go, okay, Rabbi, how do you feel?
And he said basically as follows.
I would visit them and I would say, You are the scum of the earth.
I must tell you that was by far the happiest moment on radio that I had in eight and a half years.
After the show, I hugged him, and he had no idea why.
In fact, I really ought to send him this tape so he'll know what...
It doesn't matter what he'll say for the rest of his appearances on Religion on the Line.
Who kana et olamo, as they say.
As we learned in Yeshiva, he bought, he earned the hereafter just through that.
That is the point here.
The point is liberal to conservative, orthodox to reform.
Anybody immersed in Judaism, unless one just simply misses the essence of it, will hate evil.
And hating evil is a quintessentially Jewish message.
I quote the psalmist, Oh Have Adonai Sin Ura, Those of you who love God hate evil.
I once gave a talk only once in my life.
Said there was a mitzvah to hate.
And it really upset a lot of people because we live in a love-intoxicated society.
America is the only country that has a love postage stamp.
It is.
Think about it.
It's the only stamp I refuse to use.
I'll use a Christmas stamp.
I have no problem.
I just don't have it in me to send an envelope with a love postage.
You know, if it's one of our kids' weddings, all right, I'll put on a love postage stamp.
I just, I don't get into it.
And by the way, again, again, think this way.
Can you imagine if Israel had a postage stamp to print?
Can you imagine them doing an Ahaba postage stamp?
Israelis would laugh it out of the post office.
As they delivered the stamps, Israelis would be laughing.
It's just not their type of thing.
Not that love is terrible.
Love is beautiful.
But love isn't everything.
And what happens when love becomes everything is that subsumed underneath love becomes morality.
Love becomes higher than justice.
If Israel were to produce a postage stamp with one word that meant a lot to Jews, it would be tzedek.
Either tzedek or tzedaka.
Justice or tzedaka, which is really justice in the feminine, which is translated as charity.
But in Hebrew, charity is not correct.
Charity is simply a mistranslation.
That idea that you have to fight evil and that we are on this earth to see goodness triumph over evil is Jewish.
And that, I must say, of all the ten, is reason number one why I love Judaism.
Because that is what it insists upon.
That is why Judaism, fairly unique among religions, says that God judges people of other religions by their ethics, not by their faith.
That is why Judaism doesn't have an interest in converting a Christian or a Muslim.
You're a monotheist, fine, no problem.
Just how did you treat your fellow human being?
This is what God wants to know.
Not whether you had the right faith, did you have the right actions?
That emphasis is profound and important and must be maintained.
Number two, I love Judaism because it is the most this world-oriented of religions.
There is a belief, let me make this clear at the outset, there is a belief in Judaism in the afterlife.
A Jew who says Judaism does not believe in the afterlife is not telling you the truth.
A Jew may say, I don't believe in the afterlife.
That's fine.
I will have no argument with that Jew.
But a Jew cannot say Judaism doesn't believe in it.
If you'd like an interesting confirmation of this, pick up the Encyclopedia Judaica, which is a secular Jewish effort.
It's not a religious Jewish effort.
It is also a massively wonderful Jewish effort.
Printed by great, usually Israeli scholars.
Look in the first volume, A, Afterlife, and you will find it begins as follows.
Judaism has always affirmed a belief in an afterlife.
Having said that, let me now say that it is just not something that Jews ought to be preoccupied with, and they are not.
By the way, to the extent that Jews do become preoccupied with eschatology, as it is called, with the hereafter, with messianic ages, we've always gotten into trouble whenever Jews started dabbling in those areas.
Judaism's forte is to say to the Jew as follows: I have put before you life and death, choose life, as the Torah says in God's name.
I have put before you today life and death, choose life.
Who chooses death?
Forget the evil.
Let's talk about the religious for a moment.
You remember that Arab girl who took an oath to tie bombs around her in order to kill Israelis?
That girl chose death.
How come we have fanatics too?
We Jews have fanatics, just as fanatic as that girl, but they don't tie dynamite to themselves.
Why, with all the Jewish responses, with all of our most radical right-wing crackpots, and we have them.
Jews have crackpots too.
Why don't any of them tie dynamite to themselves and blow up Arabs?
How come?
Why is it just so inconceivable, even to the wildest, most true-believing fanatic Jew?
Because there's no place in Judaism for it.
Because there is no rabbi who would countenance such an act.
But this girl was told by Muslim leaders that she will have the finest, most beautiful hereafter.
That she will bask in the greatest joy of the Muslim heaven for killing herself, basically for no reason.
It doesn't do anything.
All it does is inflict pain on Israeli families.
It's not going to get Israel out of anywhere.
Nobody rationally believed that.
All it does is kill.
And it doesn't matter whom.
And part of the reason, ladies and gentlemen, I am reading through the entire Quran.
And there is more talk on any given page of the Quran about the hereafter than in the entire Hebrew Bible from Genesis to the last prophets to the last writings.
A lot of people say, look, the Torah doesn't mention the hereafter.
How could you believe in it?
It is one of Judaism's prides and joys that the Torah doesn't mention it specifically.
It is to me one of the reasons I love it.
Couldn't it Torah easily have said, Jews, don't worry about anything.
There's a beautiful hereafter.
Just as the Quran says, and it describes it, with there will be beautiful valleys and beautiful plants and beautiful vineyards and so on, and it will be gorgeous for you.
And there are paintings in all of Muslim history of heaven.
I don't have to tell you about Christianity.
You live among Christians.
About the preoccupation, generally speaking, in classical Christianity with salvation.
What is the salvation for?
The next life.
If the preoccupation is salvation, the next life becomes fundamental.
In Judaism, this life is fundamental.
And it is no coincidence that the greatest Jewish thinker in history, Maimonides, was a doctor.
Why?
What does one have to do with the other?
Because Judaism is so this world-oriented, Jews have been preoccupied with making this world more pleasant.
It is no coincidence that the salt vaccine and so many vaccines were discovered by Jews.
Secular Jews frequently carry with them Jewish values from generations of Jews.
They may be the last generation to carry it, but they do.
The idea that it is wrong, you have polio?
That's wrong.
In the world, that is not the view.
This will shock many of the Jews in this room.
The view that if you have polio, you shouldn't have polio is a Jewish view.
It is not a normative view.
It's not the Buddhist view.
The Buddhist view is some things live, some things die, things die, things come back, things live and die.
The Buddhist, I asked a Buddhist on my show once, I said to him, do I understand Buddhism correctly?
That, and this was a Buddhist monk, do I understand Buddhism correctly that ideally, if a beloved relative of mine, my brother or sister dies, I should ideally feel no pain?
So that is correct.
That is the ideal.
Now, it's not human not to, he said it's understandable if you do, but the Buddhist ideal is to just understand everything dies and everything comes back, and it's a great cyclical view of life.
Judaism says if you die, it's painful.
If you're sick, it's painful.
That's why Jews complain a lot.
I'm serious.
That is exactly why the biggest complainers around are Jewish.
Remember something.
For every good trait in both your own personal life and in any religion's life, whatever your greatest positive trait is, I promise you it comes with a big price.
All right, let's say you're very meticulous.
Believe me, ask people who live with you whether that meticulousness is always a joy.
Whatever trait a person has that is a blessing is also a curse.
That is true for Judaism.
It is true for people.
Judaism's obsession with making this world better and not accepting the bad has a bad price.
Jews ketch.
Jews complain.
I remember years ago, like 15 years ago, I had a very close friend who was a flight attendant on the late National Airlines.
One of the reasons it is the late National Airlines is because it flew Jews mostly.
The major service on national airlines was New York, Miami, which basically had a quota of non-Jews on each flight.
And on national airlines, on national airlines, you would have overwhelmingly Jews.
And this woman told me, who was not Jewish, but very pro-Jewish, a Semitophile, as we say, said it actually made some of the stewardesses anti-Semitic to fly that route all the time.
Because, well, look, let me ask any Jew here, if you had to be a flight attendant, would you rather have the New York to Miami route or the Des Moines?
Okay?
Now let's be honest.
Now, part of the reason is, because any flight from Des Moines is primarily going to be Midwestern Protestants who are the antithesis of Jews in this characteristic.
They never complain.
And part of that emanates from the religiosity that their Protestantism has given them.
It is a certain peace with suffering.
It is a certain peace with a fallen world.
The second coming will make it better.
Not to say, God forbid, that Protestants have not founded hospitals and done beautiful things.
Of course they have.
Among other things, they founded the United States of America.
Not a bad achievement.
But I want to explain, though, how rooted this is, this Jewish value.
Fix it.
And again, what happens to secular Jews who retain the fix it, fix it, fix it, is that you get radical secular fixing like Marxism.
Founded by a Jew, the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis.
Marxism says fix it now.
The word now is not Jewish.
Fix it is Jewish.
No, that's very important.
That's very important.
Fix it is radical.
Fix it is revolution.
Excuse me, now is revolution.
Now is radical.
Anything that you say now, it's bad news.
You need patience.
And it's a tension.
The tension between, oh, well, the world has lapsed.
What can you do?
There's evil.
And on the other hand, the tension, there was so much evil.
Let's fix it immediately.
Let us make a perfect world now.
Whoever tries to make a perfect world in their generation will produce hell.
The best example being known as the Gulag Archipelago.
That was the result of trying to fix the world immediately.
Judaism in this regard is evolutionary, not revolutionary, but it won't accept evil and it won't accept gratuitous pain.
I like that.
Number three, Judaism's view of the human being I revere, I love, I have adopted, and it is a very good one.
It is again a balanced view.
It is balanced between those who believe that the human being is born into sin, is born guilty, and those on the other hand who hold that we are born basically good.
Neither of those is a Jewish view.
The Jewish view is that we're neither born guilty nor good.
We are born with the possibility of doing good or evil.
I see this now.
It is interesting to me to watch my young son as he is learning this stuff in Jewish day school and he already knows he is seven and he talks about his Yitzer Hara and his Yitzer Hatov, which is the single healthiest way to see yourself as a child or adult.
To know that you have a Yitzer Hara, a will to do bad, and a Yitzer Tov, a will to do good.
That is the best way to understand yourself.
I wish that the professors at UCLA had the same view of human nature.
They view evil, generally speaking, as coming from outside of people, socio-economic forces.
Judaism understands that evil comes from people.
Sure, it comes sometimes from outside.
But who made the outside forces?
Tulips?
Obviously, people did.
People have a propensity to evil.
Men don't rape because they were raised in homes that said, yay, rape, rape is beautiful.
They rape because they haven't had the values instilled in them not to rape.
Therefore, when a Jew understanding Judaism sees rape, knows about rape, he doesn't ask, gee, what made those men do it?
That's what the secular professor asks, gee, what made those men do it?
Because they view us as basically good, and if you rape, something went wrong.
But Judaism understands that that is part of male nature.
It has to be suppressed, or better, channeled.
You channel the Yitzher Hara.
You channel it into doing good.
You channel it into being a strong male, but you don't rape.
This notion that people have the proclivity towards both is quintessentially Jewish and quintessentially healthy.
It is one of the things that if I could speak to the world, I would say on behalf of Judaism, that is the best way to see human nature.
And I'll tell you another reason why it's the best way.
It allows you to make peace with your evil thoughts.
One of the things I have realized in doing my radio shows is how many people are guilty over bad thoughts, over bad fantasies, bad imagination.
Now, Judaism doesn't say wallow in bad thoughts.
It's a mitzvah to have disgusting thoughts, okay?
Don't get me wrong.
But that is not how you are judged.
What you are to be preoccupied with is your actions.
Therefore, again, let me give you an example, vis-a-vis Christianity, which I'm not using, God forbid, as a whipping boy.
I have said frequently that I frequently have more in common with a religious Christian than many Jews that I know.
So please understand that the purpose is educational, not to dump on another religion.
But when Jesus is quoted in Matthew was saying, if a man lusts for another woman, it is as if he has committed adultery with his heart.
Then you understand part of the difference.
In Judaism, you don't commit adultery with your heart.
You can only commit adultery with one organ.
And it is not that one.
It is very important.
It is the act that is involved.
Is it a mitzvah to lust after other women?
Of course not.
But that's a problem between you and you and you and God.
What we in society have to deal with is how you act upon your lusts.
How you act upon your Yitzh Hara.
Your Yitzhara wishes that you would take from the office all the pencils and pens and God knows what else?
Okay, that's unfortunate, but it's not a sin.
Making peace with the lower parts of you is a very beautiful part of the upshot of all of this.
That's why Freud had to be a Jew.
Psychoanalysis had to be developed by Jews because Jews had already thousands of years ago made peace with the fact that we have a miserable interior.
But wherein in Christianity, for example, there is so much working, it's a sin to lust.
It's a sin to have these bad thoughts.
You're not going to have people developing psychoanalysis from that tradition.
That's exactly why it would be a Jew.
Now, on the other hand, again, everything comes with a price.
Secularized Jews have no sense of the holy, and they say, let all our ugly things come out publicly, like the Mapplethorpe photos, and don't bother us.
So that there is, again, there is a price that could be paid.
And who tends to lead the fight in the society for retention of the holy?
Religious Christians.
And I give them credit for that.
I wish religious Jews were far more active in society, but that is another issue for another time.
But this notion that you have in you the will to do good, the will to do bad, a higher self and a lower self, let's this Jew always, from my earliest childhood, I mean, I can't be graphic with you, but it was so helpful to me in my growing up because I would read all these pristine thoughts about behavior in Judaism in my yeshiva, and then I know what was going on inside of me, but there was no conflict.
That was the beauty.
I could have been deeply conflicted had I been told, and if you think this way, it's a sin.
It was never suggested.
Just don't act on it.
Very big difference.
Man called my radio show.
Some of you may have heard it, not on Religion On the Line, my show, said that he wishes that his elderly mother would die because she wants the inheritance.
Should he feel guilty?
And I said, well, how do you treat your mother?
Said he calls her every week, treats her beautifully, etc., etc.
Said, look, this was a very long discussion, but I said, look, those are not good thoughts.
And to the extent that you can work on them, it's worth working on them.
But I don't want you to walk around feeling guilty if you are acting beautifully to your mother.
Ladies and gentlemen, can we ever know how much of the good we do may not in fact result from a certain unhappiness with how we feel?
How do I know that if he didn't have these thoughts about his mother, he'd stop calling entirely?
Maybe the reason he calls so much is because he has these miserable thoughts about his mother.
You see what I'm saying?
And that is why I like behavioral Judaism.
This is how you act.
It says in the Ten Commandments, honor your father and mother.
It doesn't say love your father and mother.
Isn't that interesting?
It says in the Torah, love the stranger.
Love the stranger.
Love your neighbor.
Love God.
Never tells you to love your parent.
Thank God.
And I don't mean that for me.
But I mean thank God because it's very complex.
And it's helpful for parents raising children to know that.
I tell my child how, I tell our children, I love you.
But I don't expect them to tell me we love you.
I don't expect it.
If it happens, it happens.
That's not what I am here for.
The love goes downward, not upward.
My parents love me, and I'll love my kids, and they'll love their kids.
That's how they'll repay the love, by loving their kids.
Honor me?
Yes.
You don't talk back to me, that's true.
Answer, I don't want you to be automaton's kids, but I'm your father, not your pal.
Okay, it helps me, therefore, to understand my parental role, just as it helped me as a child to know that when I had ambivalent feelings towards my parents, I had to show respect.
They're my parents, but I didn't have to walk around thinking I love them all the time.
These are very liberating things in Judaism when done correctly.
This emphasis on understanding that it is behavior and understanding that you have a will to do bad and a will to do good.
Number four, I adore Judaism because it is the only religion that I know of, and I've studied religion my whole life, that has canonized its critics.
We are the only religion that put its critics in its Bible.
I read the New Testament.
I am almost finished with the Quran.
I have been through parts of the Bhagavad Gita.
I have been through the holy works of a number of religions.
I am unaware of a page, of one page, let alone books upon books of moral critique of their own religion in their Bible.
I don't see in the New Testament Christian prophets yelling at Christians over their morality.
I don't see Muslim prophets in the Quran yelling at Muslims over their immoral behavior.
I don't see Hindus yelling at Hindus in the Bhagavad Gita, you're not nice enough to the poor, you're not kind enough.
The only Bible I know of on earth that has made the holy works of its critics, a part of it, is the Jewish Bible.
For which, ironically, we have been frequently hated.
Look at how miserable the Jews were.
Read what Isaiah said about them.
The idiots who could make such a point, idiots, it is like saying, oh, look at how bad America must be, because it's filled with all the self-criticism.
On the other hand, Russia for 50 years was great.
There was no self-criticism.
Pravda said Russia was utopia.
The New York Times said America's filled with problems.
So what do you learn from it?
That Russia is a utopia and America's miserable?
Or that American values were infinitely higher than Soviet values because we publish our criticisms?
That is remarkable to me, that you read in your synagogue every Sabbath, Jews, you're not acting right.
Now, most Jews talk during the Huftorah.
That's a problem.
Or it's read by a kid who doesn't understand a single word to an audience that also doesn't understand a single word, and they're crying for Nachas.
That's a problem.
But that is a problem that is a problem in the way we live Judaism.
And there are many problems in the way Jews live Judaism, but that is not my subject for tonight.
My subject is for tonight: the Judaism that I love, which I think is Judaism.
Number five: The Jews have had a role since Sinai, since Mount Sinai, to bring the world to Mount Sinai.
This role makes me love Judaism because it is the most noble role that I can think of in the world to bring the world to the God of Mount Sinai who gives the Ten Commandments to the world.
And of course, that is why we Jews have been hated.
This is not my theory.
This is both Judaism's self-understanding and it is the understanding of great scholars, including non-Jews.
Ladies and gentlemen, one of the finest books ever written on the Jews in Judaism was by a non-Jew named Ernest Vandenhag, who wrote The Jewish Mystique.
I truly, truly urge you to read it.
You will understand this idea in the simplest English.
He writes so clearly.
And he writes about the Jews bringing in a moral God to the world.
First, an invisible God, then an only God, and then a moral God.
No wonder they got hated.
And that is exactly right, ladies and gentlemen.
That is what the Jews brought into the world.
Better, that is what Judaism did.
One moment, please.
In the Talmud, or in the Midrash, we have a Midrash, that God held Mount Sinai over the heads of the Jews and threatened to drop it on them if they didn't take the Torah.
It is one of the few midrashim that I truly believe literally.
Ladies and gentlemen, at Mount Sinai, the Jews had two choices.
One was bring to the world the ideal of a one God.
All other gods are false.
Smash all those false gods and tell the world that this one God is invisible, unknowable, but that this God demands moral conduct before anything.
The other choice was an orgy.
Which would you have taken?
It makes perfect sense to me that there would have to have been some sort of, if not threat, something so overwhelming, I say to people who were thoroughly skeptical, I say, tell me, you really believe nothing happened at Sinai?
You know, if you have to say to me, as I asked recently, a Catholic friend, said, What are your irreducible beliefs?
Because I was thinking recently, what are my irreducible Jewish beliefs?
One of them is something happened at Sinai.
A people does not leave Sinai, making up an experience like this and having this last this long.
Something overwhelming must have happened to take pagans, pure pagans, and mold them into people who took to the world ethical monotheism.
I can't begin to tell you how impossible that would be if nothing happened at Sinai other than Moses' charisma.
And by the way, Moses apparently had very little charisma.
It's so interesting how the Bible goes out of its way to tell you that he had a speech impediment.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, you can do many things with a speech impediment, but one thing you can't do is be charismatic.
All right?
If I started to lisp and stutter, I would have very effective content, so I'd resort to writing.
But I'd lose my radio show, and I suspect you wouldn't all be here for the talk.
That's the way, that is the way it is.
It's like a flat piano.
It doesn't work.
And it goes out of its way to tell you it's not his charisma.
It also goes out of its way, Judaism, to say he died, and we don't know where he's buried.
Isn't that something?
He didn't ascend to heaven, and he didn't become a god.
He died.
Not only that, he died somewhat depressed, just like you will.
Isn't that great?
Do you know that Moses gives me a great deal of comfort?
I have all these dreams about what I'll do with my life, and then I think Moses had one goal.
One, wanted to get into Israel and didn't get it.
And on the way, he was flying national airlines the whole time.
That is the whole point.
Look at who he's with.
If already I got to be stuck with a national airlines crowd, all these Jews complaining the entire time, at least get me into Israel.
And by the way, again, the rabbis double it.
Triple it.
They have a midrash where he says, okay, wait a minute.
If I can't get in as Moses, can I get in as a cow?
A cow?
And God says, no.
What a lesson.
What a lesson.
The Talmud says there is no man who dies with half his desires fulfilled.
It's true.
It's true.
And that's comforting.
Hey, if Moses didn't get in, Prager probably won't either.
All right?
That is how I see it, and it works.
It's a very helpful thing.
This Jewish role to bring the world to Sinai, I live with every day.
I wish more Jews understood this and lived with it.
That's another subject for another time.
Number six, Jewish practices, when done correctly, a massive, massive proviso when done correctly.
Because they can be easily done incorrectly, bring much, much beauty to a Jew's life.
I wrote in the latest issue of my journal, Ultimate Issues, about little events that changed my thinking.
Let me tell you about one of them.
I was raised with Jewish practices, and in my late teens and early 20s, I dropped virtually all of them.
I was not prepared to live as an observant Jew or as an identifying Jew solely because I was born one.
The motto of my radio show is think a second time.
I tried to live by my own motto.
Well, anyway, in my 20th year, I was traveling a great deal.
By great luck, given a big award to study in England, and I used all the award money to travel.
I was going to stay in Leeds the whole year, like you want to, I don't know what.
So I just traveled whenever I could, and I ended up going from the Arctic to North Africa.
Well, on my way down from the Arctic in Lapland in Finland, I'd been traveling for weeks, and I arrived at Helsinki by train, Helsinki, the capital of Finland, at about 11 o'clock at night.
And I really remember this vividly, and it's written up more eloquently than I can tell you in the latest issue.
And I remember well, very well, That all of a sudden it hit me that it was Friday night.
And I got depressed.
Depressed is me, I don't mean clinically depressed, but I got very sad because I had lost a sense of days.
It seemed that it didn't matter whether it was Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday, Sunday, Saturday, or Friday, or Thursday or Wednesday or Tuesday.
What I had been raised with was a sense that somehow time had been given meaning and structure by every seventh day having a day to pause to figure out what you are about.
Just to pause.
You just pause.
You just don't do that.
You don't work for a living.
You don't watch television.
You don't leave the world.
And I hadn't had that.
Friday night became repetitious and the days just started going on.
It didn't matter what day it was.
That's when I said, I want to have Shabbat back.
That was when I understood that this ideal of one day a week of something holy, in the best sense of the word holy, as distinctive as uplifting, I didn't want to live without.
And I see it now when I am able to shut off the TV on a Dodger game right before Shabbat begins and even have my seven-year-old big baseball fan shut it off.
That's the point that I realize.
That's when I realized that one of the reasons that I probably didn't become a sports fanatic and therefore end up having a wife who would become a baseball or football widow is because we didn't watch sports on TV on Shabbat.
My home in Brooklyn were big Brooklyn Dodger fans, really big.
But they never watched a Friday night game or a Saturday game on TV because of Shabbat.
And therefore something was said to us, and my parents are not theologians.
They never said it in words.
But I realized later what I had been taught.
Something's higher than the Dodgers.
You tell that to the average Los Angeles kid.
Something's higher than the Lakers?
You mean I won't go out Friday night to a Laker game?
I'll stay home for a Shabbat?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
But what is the lesson being taught there?
Phenomenal values are involved here.
Judaism tries to concretize values.
It doesn't just say, isn't it nice that sports is not as holy as God?
So you'll say sports are not as holy as God, and then go to the Dodger game.
Here it says don't watch it.
Big difference, and it works when done correctly.
Kashrut.
The idea that you're eating meat and not a McDonald's burger.
That you're not eating a Big Mac, you're eating a bull or a cow.
That's important.
Kashrut reminds the Jew that an animal was killed.
Do most Jews who keep kosher think about this?
The answer, unfortunately, is no.
For many Jews, Judaism is pure habit.
I'm sorry about that.
But I'm not here to defend Jews.
I'm here to defend Judaism.
I have massive critiques about the way Jews live Judaism.
You can see that too in my ultimate issues.
But the notion that we have to be careful about killing an animal and that a Jew can't kill every animal he or she wants, that's what kosher is about.
You can't kill every animal, end of issue, just like you can hunt.
You just can't.
Animals have, I don't want to use the term rights because then we get into an area where I disagree with.
But we have obligations to animals for our own character development.
And then there's my favorite law in the Talmud.
A Jew who walks into a store is not permitted to ask the storekeeper of an item if he knows he won't buy it.
Because you're not allowed to raise the hopes of the storekeeper for no reason.
That's quite a law, isn't it?
Do you know when I wrote it up in my Ultimate Issues journal, a Mormon reader wrote in to me, said he's starting to observe it.
Said it's too beautiful.
I want to observe it.
My reaction frequently is, it's too beautiful if only people would understand it, including the Jews who observe it and so often hide the ethical pristine essence of it.
But look at that law.
Isn't that incredible?
Who would have thought of that?
And do you know that it is so pertinent to today?
Especially the Jews for whom there is an unwritten law, thou shalt not buy retail.
I mean, if there's any group that should really live by this law, it's Jews.
So it's a mitzvah not to pay full price in a regular retail store, right?
But how do you find out what you want to buy?
You go into a retail store, take up the shopkeeper's time, and then order it by mail.
That's forbidden.
Absolutely forbidden.
I've learned this law now.
20 years I learned it from Rabbi Joseph Talushkin, my dear friend and co-author.
I hate him for teaching me that law.
He has made shopping very difficult.
But I tell you, it is so part of me now, and that is the point.
It is just so part of me.
I'll tell you what I do.
Tell you what I do in photography.
That's one of my hobbies.
I have 37 hobbies.
One of them is photography.
Now, everybody in photography knows that the cheapest prices in the world, cheaper than Hong Kong, let alone Japan, are in New York City by mail order.
Okay?
And you can see their ads in any photographic magazine.
So what do a lot of people do?
Everywhere from LA to anywhere else.
They go into a store, they check out all the cameras, thank the salesman, and then order it from New York.
It's disgusting.
It's disgusting.
So this is what you can do a number of things if you want to be honest.
Number one, you can come in and say, sir, I want to see all the cameras you have here.
But I do have to tell you at the outset that whichever one I decide to buy, I will not buy here.
So then, then you are not violating the law.
You see?
Then you are announcing at the outset, I am going to abuse you.
And please know that at the outset.
Tell you what I do.
I go into the store and I say, look, I want to give you the business.
I want to give you my business.
You're local.
I want you to stay in business.
I don't want to order by mail.
This is the price in popular photography.
Can you come anywhere near it?
In all my years of doing this, they have never failed to come within $50 of it.
For $50, am I not going to do it on a $500 item, whatever it might be, and proportionately less?
I'm not going to do it to keep a store in LA in business for $50 miserable dollars.
And that way, you get all the better.
You pay less than the listed price at his store, and you get to give him business, see the cameras before you, and do a mitzvah.
That's what it's about.
That is what it is about.
It's forgotten, but that's what it's about.
Number seven: Judaism gave the world the holy.
The concept of the holy was unknown prior to Judaism.
As one Jewish historian put it beautifully, the difference between the Jews and the ancient Greeks was as follows: To the ancient Greeks, the beautiful was holy.
To the Jews, the holy was beautiful.
Give you an example.
In ancient Greece, elevated ancient Greece, the Greece of Aristotle and Plato, they would expose ugly children on mountaintops to die.
They only kept the good-looking children alive.
And they thought the Jews were barbaric for keeping every child alive.
The ugly, the deformed, the sick, the malnourished, we kept every one of our kids alive.
They loved the beautiful.
We said life is holy, even in an ugly body.
It's still, as it were, a beautiful Jew in an ugly body, a beautiful soul.
That was a big difference.
And the world of Aristotle and Plato was taken over by the daughter of Judaism, Christianity.
Ancient Greece is gone, and Judaism continues to teach.
Not enough, not always correctly, but again, that's another issue for another time.
But this is what Judaism taught.
Judaism taught the holy.
And you know what the holy means?
That you are not an animal.
That's really, that's a one-sentence definition.
You are not an animal.
You don't have sex like an animal.
You don't eat like an animal.
You don't live like an animal.
You raise yourself up.
Judaism was the only religion in the world, the only nation in the world, and I document this in the longest thing I wrote outside of my books.
The last issue of Ultimate Issues was all on homosexuality.
I wrote a 15,000-word essay with 100 footnotes.
I devoted nearly half a year just to researching this.
It blew my mind what I learned.
And I'll put it to you very bluntly.
Judaism alone, alone, said men must restrict their sex, their sexual activities, to a woman.
It was the only culture in the world that said that.
In every culture that we have documented, it was quite all right, generally speaking, to have sex with boys and to frequently have sex with animals.
Which is why the Torah speaks about sex with animals so often.
Why do you list it?
You only list prohibitions of things that people do a lot.
You don't prohibit things they don't do.
It doesn't say don't have sex with a wall.
Nobody was doing it.
It prohibited what people were doing.
Animals and same-sex.
Judaism said, confine your sexual activity, men, to women.
And finally, to a woman, one woman.
I submit that this was one of the geneses of Western civilization.
And it was one of the geneses of the uplifting of the role of women.
Because when men did not have to restrict their erotic attention to women, The woman was nothing in that society.
She was only there for raising children, for reproducing and raising children.
She wasn't even there for eros.
And here Judaism said, nope, it is to women alone that your erotic attention shall be paid.
Judaism gave the world the concept of the holy.
The world is rebelling against it today.
Number eight, Israel.
We are not only a religion, we are a people.
God told Israel as our trinity, and Israel is the third part.
Israel means peoplehood.
The people Israel.
And I have felt this frequently, and it has been part of the stirrings in my life as a Jew.
I always ask my Christian friends, and I have recordings of this on the radio, why aren't you Christians fighting for Soviet Christians?
They are more persecuted than Soviet Jews.
I have said that for years.
It's not true today.
Today in perestroika, thank God, that is not the case for either Jews or Christians.
But it was true for all of the years of communism.
There were far more Christians in Soviet prison camps for being Christian than Jews for being Jewish at any time since Stalin.
Any year you want to pick.
Do you know that this was news to all my Christian audiences?
But why does everybody know about Soviet Jewry?
Why did Jews yell about Soviet Jews?
And Christians were not yelling about Soviet Christians.
Not because we're better, but because we have a peoplehood component.
We are not just a religion.
I am stuck with you.
Any Jew sitting in this room, I am stuck with you and you are stuck with me.
I have to help you out, even if I can't talk your language and even if I don't like you.
Teaches a lot.
It teaches a lot.
I much rather spend my time only with people I like.
But I'm stuck with you and you're stuck with me.
And that's humbling and it's enriching.
It's also a pain and so on.
But that is what it is about.
It is a peoplehood too.
And that is why you get tears when you see Soviet Jews who share almost no characteristics with the California Jew walking down an LL ramp at Ben-Gurion Airport.
Doesn't make sense.
But you do.
Then you meet the real person and you start hating them.
Okay, all right, I don't mind that.
But you work to get him out and you're going to work to resettle him and then you'll hate each other.
That's Jewish.
That's Jewish.
But there is something about that.
And do you know it's interesting?
One of the most interesting evenings I had on Religion on the Line, I asked the clergy as the opening question of the evening, what is it you most admire about the other religions here?
And As soon as I said it, both the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister raised their hands to comment.
Rabbi looked a little troubled.
I can now testify to, which is very unfortunate.
And you shouldn't read much into it except the following, that there was an immediate reaction.
And both the minister and the priest had the exact same comment.
We very, very much admire among the Jews how much they help each other.
They can't get over it.
It is something for which Jews are known.
It's the most positive thing probably for which Jews are known.
Sand, by the way, it may elicit sometimes somewhat of an ambivalent reaction.
But not concerned with that right now, that is a fact.
That sense of obligation, how beautifully it was said.
It's rare I read something and I get the chills.
I get the chills from Mozart.
But here is something that I read and I got the chills.
William Sapphire in the New York Times a few years ago when the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel took place.
And he wrote as follows.
He said, let the world know that this is the first time in recorded history that blacks have ever gone from slavery to freedom.
Throughout their history, blacks have always been taken from Africa, but always from freedom to slavery.
The only people to have violated the rule were the Jews taking the Ethiopian Jews out of Ethiopia.
These are powerful things, ladies and gentlemen.
When I was 21 years old and on a street in Moscow singing Hevenus Shalom Alechem 20, 30, 40 times in a row, since that and David Melech Israel were the only two Hebrew songs that Soviet Jewish youth knew.
But that was their way of screaming that they had not been assimilated under communism.
That was a life-changing thing for me.
I've always said, and I did a lot for Soviet Jews from 69 on, but they did more for me.
What I saw in Russia in 69 changed my life.
And it was all through peoplehood.
When you saw kids singing that they're Jewish after the most systematic attempt to suppress Judaism in history, Hitler was the most systematic attempt to annihilate Jews, but communism was the most systematic attempt to annihilate Judaism.
And here was the third generation after Lenin singing Hevenus Shalomalechem on Achippova Street.
Number nine, Judaism gives me something that every human being needs very deeply, a sense of purpose.
And the purpose it gives me is what I believe it should give every Jew, to try to be an orderlagoyim alight unto the nations, so that people will be able to say, look, this is the way this Jew lives and breathes and acts.
That is a credit to him, his religion, and his God.
That is the ideal.
And it is therefore the ideal to bring the world to this God of Sinai, which I spoke of earlier.
And when you are infused with a sense of purpose and mission, your life is a very, very rich one, which is part of the reason I find television so obnoxious.
It's the antithesis of a sense of purpose.
I don't watch TV not because I have to suppress this great urge to watch TV, but because it takes time away from what I most want to do, and that is touch people with what this message from Sinai is about, that there is a God who demands ethics primary from everybody.
That is another speech, too, for another time.
And number 10.
Number 10, I want to thank a Muslim caller to my show one night for giving me the right of articulating reason number 10.
A Muslim woman called up and she said, Dennis, you seem to be very open-minded and no religions, so I'd like to ask you a question.
I'm a Muslim woman, and I want to know why you're not a Muslim.
Why are you a Jew and not a Muslim?
I said, I thank you for the question.
I'm honored that you would ask that.
Because it gives me the credit of choosing, though, obviously, who knows what I'd be if I were born a Muslim.
I mean, intellectual honesty demands that I confront that, and I have no answer.
But I said, I would like to answer your question.
And ironically, I can give you the answer very concisely.
And it's based upon the names of both of our religions.
I happen to know some Arabic, which I studied for three years, so I was able to say this to her.
I said, look, the name of your religion is Islam.
The name of my people, biblically, is Israel.
The word Judaism doesn't appear in the Bible, so what are we?
We're Israel.
We're Israel.
You're Islam.
Islam means, in Arabic, surrender to God.
Israel in Hebrew means fight with God, struggle with God.
Lady, I said, Miss, I much rather struggle with God than surrender to God.
That is the tenth reason I love Judaism.
It lets me struggle.
It says, Prager, you are not in this to find all the answers.
You are in this to grow and to struggle.
And I say to Jews, from Orthodox to Reformed to secular, I couldn't care less what you are, but if you don't struggle, I don't respect you.
Secular Jews, if you don't struggle with your secularism, you've got no respect for me.
Religious Jews, if you don't struggle with your religiosity, you've got no respect for me.
Judaism says struggle.
It's part of what it is.
We are not here to be contented.
That is the role of an animal.
We are here to grow.
That is the role of a human.
And that is the tenth reason I love Judaism.
Thank you. I thank you very, very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd be more than happy now to take questions, comments, and alternate speeches.
The only thing that I would ask for is brevity so that anybody who would like to ask a question or make a comment will have the opportunity to do so.
One thing, though, beforehand, a major reason that I speak as much as I do is to stay in touch with people that I speak.
I strongly recommend that you be in touch with this institution, which does fine work.
And I would also trust that you would stay in touch with me.
And the way I have been doing this for nearly six years is I write a quarterly magazine on everything from happiness to struggling with God.
If you'd like to subscribe, I'm going to send around these sheets.
Can I ask, would you be so kind as to give out a few there?
Thanks, Amelia.
Good to see you.
And can I trouble someone?
Eric, you want to just give her on the outside?
Thanks a lot.
And the price is listed on there.
It's $18 for a year, and I'll send you the first issue and a bill.
Also, there are tapes outside afterwards, and now I'd be very happy to start.
Okay, let me ask for some quiet.
I'm going to call on people, and I'll repeat the questions.
Go ahead.
Shh, yeah.
You wrote the book, Why the Jews on the Internet Heaven?
And my question is, why?
You are my joy.
He's asking about the Jewish role and why are we so small and not more active in the world and so on.
That's my cry.
That is exactly my cry.
And if God gives me the health and strength, that is part of what, a big part of what my life is devoted to, is to getting the Jews out into the world.
Right now, the situation is pathetic.
The Jews who talk to the world don't know Judaism.
And the Jews who know Judaism don't talk to the world.
It is a terrible situation.
And how can we Jews think after the Holocaust that there is anything more important than touching the world with our values, with the values that I just articulated?
So, by the way, I'll just tell you an interesting thing.
This will come as a surprise to many of you, and I had to learn it myself, but it makes perfect sense to me.
It's beyond the scope of this discussion, though I'm writing this up in the next issue of my newsletter.
Judaism was much more open to seeking converts in the past than it is now.
Excuse me.
Judaism was always open.
Jews weren't.
The Talmud is filled with citations, total, positive, enthusiastic citations about converts.
To the point that one-tenth of the Roman Empire was Jewish.
A tenth of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus was Jewish.
After the Roman Empire became Christian, it was forbidden to Jews to seek converts.
And we were so persecuted, the last thing we ever thought of was seeking converts.
But we retain a lot of the I-thinking from the time of persecutions as if it's Jewish and not just historical.
We should be out there offering what we have.
Not knocking on doors and saying, if you don't come to Judaism, you're not saved.
Not bothering Christians.
They're already monotheistic.
But what about the tens upon tens of millions of unchurched?
Would you rather they come to Shirley McLean or to Maimonides?
That's what it amounts to.
And you know what I learned?
This is the part that I said will surprise you.
Do you know that there was a certain degree of animosity towards Jews for not seeking converts?
It took me years to figure this out, but I have very, very intimate relations, not to mention religion on the line with Christians.
And it finally happened in a show.
I said, please tell the truth.
You know me, and you know I'm not going to hold this against you.
Do you feel that the Jews are clannish and have a sense of innate blood-based superiority based on the fact that they never offered Judaism to Gentiles.
And they said yes.
And I knew I had hit pay dirt.
Ladies and gentlemen, I told you tonight why I love Judaism.
But you will never hear me tell you that I love Jewish blood.
I couldn't care less what your blood is.
I love Judaism.
Not genes.
Not blood.
Not ethnicity.
Not racial purity.
That stuff sickens me.
That's why I love the fact that we have black Jews.
I wish we had more black Jews.
It is one of the disgraces that the Jews who never did anything ever in history bad to blacks are today the subject of resentment by blacks.
And blacks instead take Islam, which was the basis of the slavery movement.
It was Muslim Arabs who led slavery and shipped them to the shippers to the Western world.
The word for black in Arabic is the same as the word for slave.
The same word, Abid.
So blacks who could have been brought to Judaism because they rejected Christianity, which persecuted them, instead pick Islam, which persecuted them, and then end up anti-Jewish because of the Middle East.
There's a Chabad rabbi who's black and goes around all over the East Coast speaking on behalf of Torah.
I love him.
We're too ethnic.
I'm not, I didn't give a speech about matzah balls, kefilta fish.
They don't turn me on.
I like pizza.
I do.
I like pizza.
We had a Shabbos meal with eggplant parmesan a little while back.
That's right.
Took me a while to realize that somehow or other chicken wasn't Jewish.
That's right.
A lot of Jews believe.
No, I'm serious.
There's a problem.
A lot of Jews think that Moses had kugel.
It's not true.
It's not true.
If he had anything, he had couscous.
All right, that's number one.
So you really asked my favorite question.
We must de-ethnicize and think in terms of what we're here in the world to be.
And it's not to be 0.01% of the world struggling to survive.
Cockroach's purpose is to survive.
Jewish purpose is to influence.
Yes, please.
Who feels that the way the question implies?
Don't I think the question was that by Jews living their Jewish life that they will serve as an example and touch the world.
Right?
That was your question.
No, not one whit more so than the Amish will.
The Amish are irrelevant to the world.
They live their Amish life beautifully, and they are irrelevant.
It is a romantic, and I had to disabuse myself.
I was raised that way.
We will live our life.
We will keep our Shabbat.
We will leave our beautiful Jewish life.
And then we will be models.
It's a lie.
It's nonsense.
Not a lie.
Lie is much too strong because it's not meant as, it's nonsense.
That's what I mean it is.
The Amish don't touch the world.
The people who touch the world are the people who walk into the world.
God split the sea only when one Jew went up to his head in it.
You've got to walk into it and then God acts.
Not by standing on the side of the sea and waiting for it to split.
We have to split the world.
And only when we walk into our necks will God then do anything.
Until then, we are a cult.
Yes.
I'm troubled by the difficulties that are occurring in Israel.
And I want to play a little fantasy with you.
You've just been elected the president of Israel.
What would you do to make the situation greatly moderately, greatly, enormously improved for Israel as against what's happening there now?
All right.
You asked, I'll answer.
Many of you all like my answer, or at least will certainly be startled.
I don't want to get into a long debate on it because whether you agree with me on this or not, that wasn't the issue for the evening.
But I don't recall ever saying I don't want to answer a question.
My answer to you, if our president of Israel, actually prime minister, if our prime minister of Israel, I would announce, well, forgetting the Gulf crisis, because this would play into Saddam's hands, assuming that is over, I would announce tomorrow, if not sooner, that we are giving Gaza and the West Bank complete autonomy.
Do whatever you want.
It will be demilitarized.
We will have Israelis, troops patrolling all around the borders.
We will leave Jews living there in peace as long as they want, just as there are Arabs living in Israel.
You want to set up a state, set up a state.
You want to set up four states, set up four states.
Fly any flag you want.
We're getting the hell out of here because it is a cancer in our midst.
That's what I would do.
As well, by the way, I felt that.
I'm sorry.
Two other issues.
I would happily come and just do an evening on the Middle East.
There is a mitzvah in the Torah, which says, you will love the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
I owe Arabs obligations, not because they're nice.
Any of you who saw my editorial, my piece on the opinion page of the LA Times, October 12th, where I showed that the moral gulf between Israel and its enemies is so massive as to be beyond description.
And there was a whole letters column attacking me by all the Arab spokesmen in the city.
So I have no delusions about the moral state of Israel's enemies, not one iota.
However, the point of being a Jew is to live by my higher values.
Otherwise, I have ceased being a Jew and I am merely an Arab who speaks Hebrew.
I don't want to be an Arab who says the Shema instead of saying Allahu Akbar while I stab people.
I want a Jewish state.
Jewish state means to me a state for Jews to be free from worrying about being stabbed at night.
It means a state where a Jew can live Judaism.
It means a state that to the best of its possibility embodies the values that I so articulated this evening.
I don't believe that that can be done if one annexes a million and a half Arabs.
Ergo, Ergo, I have felt since 1967 that the West Bank was a curse.
Prior to 1967, The Jews had an overwhelmingly Jewish state and without the West Bank in Gaza still do and always will, especially with Soviet Jewish Aliyah.
So the threat to Israel's Jewishness only comes from annexing the West Bank in Gaza, which I don't want to do.
On the other hand, I don't want to have missiles in the West Bank and Gaza either.
That is why I am for demilitarizing it and patrolling it with our troops.
One final word, ladies and gentlemen.
Whether or not Jews like it, this is going to happen anyway because it's going to be shoved down Israel's throat if Israel doesn't do it on its own.
It is infinitely better to look wonderful, to look wise, before you're shoved into it by the UN and the U.S.
So the Israeli choice is very simple.
Do something while you can determine your fate, or do something after George Bush or his successor forces you along with a subservient Europe subservient to the Arabs, does it?
That will be our choices.
Jews should live in the real world.
After the Holocaust, I do not sit back and wait for the Almighty to bail me out of errors.
I try to take it and do what we can now.
God split the sea, as I said, when they walked in.
The alternative of kicking the Arabs out, when Mayor Kahana was asked about that August 25th, 1985, Baltimore Jewish Times, he was asked the next question, what if they refuse?
To which he answered, we'll shoot them.
I ask every Jew who thinks about moving the Jews out to understand that the Jews would be called upon to commit something genocidal.
Okay.
What you failed to note was the famous Talmudic citation that a minute in this world, a minute of a mitzvah in this world, is greater than the entire hereafter put together.
So that for every citation you can offer, there is an alternate citation.
The reality of Jewish life is that we are to be this life fixated.
We are the only religion whose priests cannot even come into contact with the dead.
They have to be this life fixated.
What I have said to you is there is an extrapolation from the halacha.
The halacha is this world oriented.
We are not to think what happens then.
What religion says if the Messiah comes and you're planting a tree, finish planting the tree and then greet the Messiah?
Only Judaism says that.
That is the way we're supposed to think.
Finish planting the tree.
And whenever we have flirted with the Messiah, we got into deep trouble with Bar Kokhba, which caused horrible, horrible things to happen, so much so that the Jewish memory didn't even want to recall the Holocaust that the Jewish people went through because of the zealotry of that revolt.
He was considered by Rabbi Akiba to be the Mashiach.
I don't want to have to tell you what happened to Jews as a result of some Jews believing that Jesus of Nazareth was a Messiah.
Half the Jewish people thought that Shabtaitz V, a Turkish Jew, was the Messiah.
Didn't end up too well.
He converted to Islam.
Whenever we have messed around with this stuff, we have gotten burned.
My Misnagdish host, I suspect, will agree with me with great passion on this issue.
Yes.
Two things.
I'm going to repeat it.
Two things.
Did she infer from what I said that Judaism, or I am anti-gay?
And B, is the existence, is the existence of gay synagogues, gay rabbis, etc.
Is that anti-Jewish?
Is that correct to summarize?
Yes.
There's a white civil that's blocking the exit of Jewish.
Okay.
If you really want the answer, and I mean this from my heart, I wrote 15,000 words on it, and I have a tape on it if you prefer to hear that.
I don't like to do this, but it is so complex, I have to.
I will summarize, though, and say this.
Judaism, as I said in my talk, which is what you're asking from, did say men must confine their sex, their sexual behavior, to women and women to men.
And that it is wrong to have sex in any other way.
With the same sex, with many at once, with an animal, etc.
That is the Jewish position.
There has never been an alternative to it.
It is the reason that Judaism was known throughout its history as having the most intact family life.
The answer to your question is to deny a gay Jew's Jewishness or humanity is evil.
To say to a gay Jew, what you are doing is as wonderful as if you were married and making children or just married, period, to the opposite sex, is not true.
It's not Jewish.
That's correct.
It's not Jewish.
Can you live, can one live with that tension?
I would hope so.
If a dear friend of mine is having an affair, do I deny his humanity?
Do I deny his Jewishness?
But I can say to him, even though you have a lousy sex life at home, I understand why you're doing this.
You and your wife just have a zilch sex life.
But I cannot announce publicly, therefore adultery is okay.
I understand why a gay would do it.
And I'm not here to yell at them, but I am not going to ever, ever say that, according to Judaism, when a male inserts his member in a male, that that is a holy act in Judaism, even if it is done out of love.
Judaism holds that the sexes need each other, that men are incomplete without a woman, that women are incomplete without a man.
Those are the Jewish standards.
Is it a tragedy if one feels that he has no choice?
It's a tragedy.
Life has tragedies.
But that doesn't force me to change Judaism standards.
I can have compassion for the gay and retain my Jewish standards.
That's my position.
Compassion and standards.
Okay?
Yeah.
It's a classic example of why you should be signing up for these kenoro.
That's exactly it.
I mean, I will tell you, but you have to understand that this is a classic example of why.
Let me say something.
I would be honored and have, I speak at Orthodox Conservative Reform.
It is with great difficulty but pride that I tell you that I'm probably the only Jew today who speaks on Judaism, as opposed to, let's say, just Israel, at Reform Orthodox and Conservative institutions.
So I just want you to understand that I would be thrilled if you would study here.
And if anybody asking this, what I want to say to you is this.
A Jew cannot be an ignorant Jew and a serious Jew.
And my dream is not that Jews be Reform, conservative, or Orthodox, but serious.
You've got to know.
You reject, you reject, but know what you reject.
Judaism isn't I feel Jewish.
Judaism is, I know Jewish and I do Jewish.
What does it mean?
You've got to know.
These are critical.
So I thank you.
The fact that you're asking is the first and important sign.
Now, the Mishnah is part of the oral law.
Judaism has written an oral law.
Rabbi Adelstein, you feel free to chime in at any moment if you feel that I'm doing not a just job to this answer, but very, and I'm going to be very brief.
The Mishnah is the earlier part, the first part of the oral law.
It is the part that gives the laws themselves, whereas the Gemara, the second part of the Talmud, Talmud is composed of Mishnah and Gemara.
And in the Gemara, you will have the discussion and the questioning on the laws that are listed, generally speaking, in the Mishnah.
Is that fair?
So far.
Okay.
Well, that's so far.
What else could I do?
So far.
I like that.
So far.
Is that how we treat you at home?
Now, the Midrash is not law.
The Midrash is a compilation of, how would you try, I would translate Midrash for the Neophyte as philosophical tales.
What would you parts of the Midrash?
There is a Midrash and Allah.
The word Midrash comes from the word.
Dorash, the inquirer after deeper meanings of the past.
Fills in the holes, like it says that God told Abraham what to do.
But why did God choose Abraham?
The Torah itself is thoroughly silent.
So the Midrash fills in those holes, and that is another segment of it.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
▲
Export Selection