Timeless Wisdom: The Need for Heroes and Why We Have Too Few
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
It's now the traditional time for the rabbi's sermon, and we will be traditional in two ways.
One, it will be a sermon, but in one way, it's not, I'm not a rabbi, but I'm worse.
I speak longer than rabbis do.
People ask me often when they book me to speak, so how long do you speak?
And I have this stock answer for about 30 years.
I studied speaking under Fidel Castro.
If you're not aware of why that's funny, Castro speaks for about three hours, and if you don't applaud, you die.
I don't speak for three hours, and if you don't applaud, you don't die.
I die, but you don't die.
No, no, no.
And the truth is, I don't want applause.
It's a shule, and it's not a place for applause.
But in any event, I have a lot to share.
I work hard on the Roshashana Yom Kippur sermons.
In fact, the one I gave last year is one that really even stuck with me, if I may say that in an odd way.
I spoke on honoring the commandment to honor your parents.
And it was particularly, I didn't know when I was writing it that it would be so appropriate given my mother's last day on earth when I gave it.
But it was powerful.
And I just want to say one thing from that, that given that our parents obviously should precede us, my mother always, that was one of her lines.
Parents should die before their children.
And since in most cases that is what happens, if you have a difficulty with a parent, and that's not uncommon on planet Earth, you never know when you'll get a chance or better, you won't know when you won't get a chance to reconcile.
So just something to keep in mind.
I want to talk to you about a subject I've actually never addressed in a speech, and that is the subject of heroes, of people that we put up and in a certain sense,
not in a certain sense, and we hold to be heroic, we hold to be better than most of us, and that society announces that we hold these people in awe.
And I do so for a lot of reasons.
I'll explain why, but I want to tie it in for a moment just into what spurred this.
It was actually I was reading, as usual, the Jewish liturgy, and we honor Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, right?
Our patriarchs.
And I always remember thinking, even when I was a kid in yeshiva, what's so special about them?
You know, all right, Abraham, father of monotheism, okay.
That's pretty big.
But Isaac, can you name anything particularly impressive about Isaac?
I can't, personally, I must say.
Jacob?
Well, you know, cheated his, well, if not cheated his brother out of a birthright, certainly didn't do him exact justice.
Fooled his father as to who would get the blessing.
Did not raise his children well at all.
He spoiled Benjamin.
He spoiled Joseph.
Caused terrible dysfunction.
By the way, I always tell people one of the great gifts of the book of Genesis is if you think your family is dysfunctional, it is downright healthy compared to the families of Genesis.
Did any of your children throw one of your other children into slavery?
I don't think so.
I mean, it is just endless.
You know, Cain and Abel, the first two brothers in history, one murders the other.
It's a gift.
I really do believe.
I'm not kidding.
I believe that Genesis in this way is a gift because it's so easy to assume that everybody else is doing it great and we screwed up when, in fact, everybody, to a certain extent, if you will, has screwed up and some have minimally.
By the way, there's a very powerful thing on family life, you should know.
It says that when Elijah the prophet, who will announce the arrival of the Mashiach, when Elijah comes, the first thing he will do is he will return the hearts of children to their fathers and the hearts of fathers to their children.
That's how long-standing parental child tension is and family problems are.
Anyway, so what does this have to do with heroes?
So why do we make these Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then the four mothers?
I mean, they're not, you know, they have their difficulties as well.
Why are they held up?
And then I realized this is a genius thing in Judaism that it held as heroes imperfect people.
And that's what I want to try to explain why it's important to have heroes, why we don't have them today, more or less, and what we can do about it.
So let me begin with why it's important.
Number one, how else do we know how to lead a good life?
It's not enough to have a rule book on how to do good.
Somebody has to do good.
We need people to be examples of goodness, to know how to be good.
Without real human examples, it doesn't work.
How do you know?
It's true for anything.
How do you know how to pitch a ball without a pitcher teaching you?
Pitchers don't learn from manuals.
They learn from pitching coaches.
They learn from watching great pitchers.
Hitters learn from watching great hitters.
Musicians learn from watching great musicians.
That's how it works.
I'm particularly into music and I know that the great composers they all learn from each other.
It's just the way it worked.
Haydn learned from Bach and Mozart learned from Haydn and Beethoven learned from Haydn and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Brahms took from all of them.
I mean it's just the way it works.
You don't come out of nowhere.
You need a model of something.
You can outdo the model perhaps, but you need a model.
So we need this.
We need to say this is a model.
Number two, how else can a young person know what to aspire to be, how to grow up to be a civilized adult?
And this is particularly true for boys.
I know people often hate any distinction between the sexes, but they are different to sexes and they have somewhat different needs.
Boys in particular, girls need female models, it's obvious.
But boys in particular, boys without male models grow up to be very large animals.
I mean, let's be honest.
And I can say this because I'm male.
I mean, any of you who had a boy probably have noted that at times the distinction between them and an animal was minimal.
You know, I remember my boys would stand in the middle of the living room, not all the time, but at different points in their young life, and would flatulate and think it was the funniest thing that they had ever heard in their lives.
Girls don't yell, don't do this.
I mean, you don't have to do that, Cynthia.
It's just very few girls will do that in the middle of the living room and think it's hilarious.
If they did it in the middle of the living room, they would be terribly embarrassed.
It would have been unintentional and they would have run out of the room in most cases.
Girls are generally born more civilized than boys.
Girls have other issues, but civilization is not one of them.
We males are closer to the animal kingdom.
By the way, I got that from Genesis too.
We are, we males, are created chronologically closer to the animals than the female.
The female is the last creation.
And since creation goes upward, in the sense of being further from animals, females are further from animals.
So I got that both from raising boys and from Genesis.
So boys unbelievably need men provide boys a model of how to be civilized and male at the same time.
Keep your malehood, keep your masculinity, but be civilized.
This is how to do it.
We can't do it without models.
It's not possible.
A girl can grow up relatively civilized, even if she doesn't have the greatest of female models for it.
She may need female models for other things, but boys particularly need it.
I know this from my radio show.
It's been very touching to me.
And forgive me for saying this, believe me, it is not a self-aggrandizing.
I'm just being very open with you.
A lot of, very often, well, not very often, often enough, young men will call up my show and say, Dennis, I just want you to know you're a hero of mine.
You and my dad, or you and my professor, or you and my uncle, or whatever it would be.
And I want you to know what I always say.
I say thank you, and I would like to be.
I want to be a hero to boys.
I want every male in this room to want to be a hero to boys.
That's our male task, is to be a hero to boys.
We don't think about that because too many men don't want to grow up.
Too many women don't want to grow up.
This is a society in which Peter Pan is often the ideal of not growing up.
Because the moment you say that you want to be a hero to a boy, you are acknowledging you are older.
You are acknowledging you are not a boy anymore.
You are now taking on that role.
But that's the way men always saw themselves, not just to their own boys.
Maybe they didn't even have boys.
They didn't have any children or they only had daughters.
It was always assumed that a man is to be a hero.
The next-door neighbor, the uncle, whoever it would be to a boy.
And not enough men have that because not enough males want to be that.
But that's why I answer them that way.
I don't say, oh, come on, come on, not me.
No, I want to be.
Imperfect me would like to be that, and every male should want to be that.
Number three, we need heroes for another reason.
This is how society rewards its best.
It says, we honor so-and-so.
It's good.
It is a good thing.
Now, often they honor the wrong people.
That's a bad thing.
But it is a good idea.
Society says this is who we hold to be a standard of a good life.
That is good for society to have heroes.
Number four, this is how a society announces what its real values are.
You want to judge a society?
See who its heroes are.
You want to judge a culture?
See who its heroes are.
Let me give you examples here because I truly believe that this is the watermark by which you can judge often a society.
Let me tell you, I studied particularly the Soviet Union.
That was my field of study.
And I studied it rather in depth.
And of course, who were the heroes in the Soviet Union?
And by the way, that is a title they had.
Geroi Sovyetskova Sayuza, right?
Where are you, Marina, right?
Hero of the Soviet Union.
And of course, Stalin was a hero of the Soviet Union and Lenin.
Two butchers.
Immediately you have an idea this is not a great society when Lenin and Stalin are heroes of your culture.
But I want to tell you of a hero you probably don't know about, Pavlik Morozov.
Pavlik Morozov was a boy of about 12.
And you may and you should know, I wish it were better known, because we should not only know about the Holocaust, we should know about others' massive sufferings as well.
The Ukrainians went through their version of a Holocaust, and I don't use that word easily at all.
They were starved to death in the millions.
The number is between four and seven million.
We probably can never know the exact number.
Deliberately starved to death by Stalin because he wanted to crush.
The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe.
And he wanted to crush all individual ownership of land and put everybody onto a khalchaz, into a commune.
So he starved Ukrainians to death.
And if you hoarded any wheat, you were told in class, you snitch on your parent if they are hiding any grain.
Pavlik Morozov snitched on his father.
His father was executed, and Pavlik Morozov was held to be a hero of the Soviet Union for reporting on his father, for keeping some food to feed his family, after all.
And murdered, and the child, they made a postage stamp of this child.
They made big pictures and posters and named communes after him.
So that tells you a little about the Soviet Union, who the heroes were there.
Read The Closed Circle by David Price Jones, generally regarded as one of the most insightful books on the Arab world today.
And Price Jones makes the point that in the Arab world, the hero today is the strongest man.
It's very sad to say I say this with no joy, and I certainly don't say this because I support Israel.
There's nothing would give me more pleasure than to see the Arab world advance.
But the Arab world is in real trouble, and its heroes are the strongest.
Two that you will know of.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dictator of Egypt in the Six-Day War era, and Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein was beloved by Arabs.
Beloved.
He slaughtered Arabs, and he was beloved by Arabs because he was the strongest horse.
And that's how it works.
The strongest one is the hero.
So it gives you an idea of a certain pathology within the Arab world at this time.
Our heroes, Jews' heroes, just to give examples, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then the four mothers, then Moses.
The daughter of Pharaoh is a hero.
By the way, I regard that as one of the great stories of our Torah.
That the Torah said that the one who saved Moses was A, a woman, and B, a non-Jew, and C, the daughter of the person who wished to commit genocide on the Jews.
That's one of the reasons.
That's reason number 317.
I believe the Torah is divine.
The story of the daughter of Pharaoh, that she is the heroine of that.
If it weren't for her, there would be no Exodus.
It's an astonishing story unto itself.
Non-Jewish rescuers of Jews in the Holocaust would be Jewish heroes.
Golden Meir was a Jewish hero.
So I'm giving you some examples.
I think that speaks about Jews.
The Jewish heroes.
American heroes, past or present.
Christopher Columbus, we had until recently Columbus Day celebrated.
There was when I was a kid.
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the rescuers of 9-11, the four chaplains.
I wonder how many of you know about that story.
Four chaplains who gave up their lives when their ship was torpedoed in World War II.
They gave up their vests to sailors and volunteered to die in the sinking of the ship.
Two Protestant pastors, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi.
Those four, by the way, are on my favorite stamp ever issued in the United States.
This beautiful stamp of the four chaplains.
And it's the only rabbi that I know of who was, at least until very recently, on an American stamp, was the rabbi who, along with the other three clergy, gave their life vests and then died on that ship.
And that tells you, or these things tell you, and then Martin Luther King Jr., Superman, and teachers and clergy.
I picked random heroes that I think most of you would acknowledge were or are, some aren't anymore, heroes in American life.
I think that heroes tell you more about a country in a nutshell than almost anything else.
Who are the country's heroes?
And finally, reason number five: some people really do do good.
And they need to be honored.
It's very important.
It inspires us.
Great people inspire us.
I want to know that there are better people than me.
I can't tell you, I think I would just melt in depression if I thought I was the best there is.
It's such a painful idea to me that I pray that there are oodles of people better than me.
So the idea that anybody should resent that somebody is held up, I mean, unless it's just a foolish choice, it's a wonderful thing to have great people held up.
We need them.
It's inspiring to us.
It gives us something to shoot for, to aim for.
Okay, now, what's happened?
That's why it's important.
What's happened?
We live in an age of few heroes.
If you ask young people who their heroes are, many will say my parents, which is great.
But beyond that, they don't have any.
They don't have any.
If you would have asked me as a kid, I would have said George Washington.
I would have said Abraham Lincoln, the usual slew of people.
I would have said Nathan Hale.
I wonder how many, if there's 10 kids in America who know Nathan Hale was.
And when I was a kid, everybody knew his quote.
When he was hanged by the British, I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
And I'll bet you all those of you my age, 90% of you around my age, remember that quote if you grew up in the United States and studied in an American school.
How many kids today know of Nathan Hale?
I suspect it's close to zero.
It's very different.
It's very different.
That inspired me as a kid.
So did Washington and so did Lincoln.
It inspired me a great deal.
Now we have President's Day.
Talk about that in a moment.
We don't have that.
So we live in an age with few or perhaps no heroes.
Let me go down the American list.
Columbus is no longer a hero.
He killed Indians.
George Washington is no longer a hero.
He had slaves.
Abraham Lincoln is no longer a hero.
He said some very racist things about blacks.
And there are those who say he didn't have this.
He didn't fight the Civil War to liberate slaves.
He fought the Civil War just to keep the Union together.
And well, what could he do without southern ports?
We'd have no economy.
You just go down with anybody.
Nobody remembers the four chaplains.
Oh, Martin Luther King Jr., I've heard this often.
No hero.
He got a number of extramarital affairs.
Superman, man's dead.
Kryptonite finally got him.
By the way, I loved Superman.
I loved the idea that there was a guy with supernatural powers who fought bad guys.
You know, I have to say, parenthetically, this notion about, oh, we don't want any violence in our comic books or cartoons.
There's good violence and bad violence.
When you are a kid, you don't care about whether or not there's violence in a cartoon.
You care whether the bad guys are beaten or not.
Because if the bad guys aren't defeated, you feel very insecure as a child.
What should matter is not whether kids see violence, but what is it for?
If it's where the good guys are whipping the bad guys, that's a great thing for children.
Read fairy tales, they're filled with violence.
Read the Torah, it's filled with violence.
Not violence is not the problem.
The problem is what is it used for?
What are the ends of it?
So Superman is dead, and anyway, he would be laughed at today in any event.
Remember the motto, a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.
And we are so cynical, which I'll come to in a moment, that people would have dismissed Superman and would dismiss Superman today as just silly, if not worse.
As for Jews, similarly, there's something you can dismiss.
Abraham, what's so heroic about him?
He tried to kill his child.
Isaac didn't do anything.
Jacob cheated.
Moses, I've got to admit, is still venerated.
And so, again, it's the list.
The list has just been depleted.
Heroes are gone.
And remember, you know, schools have renamed themselves.
Jefferson School is renamed because he had slaves.
Washington High School is renamed because he had slaves.
What happens, of course, when you do this is you end up saying to people, there's nobody to emulate.
There were no good people before you lived.
You're the greatest.
There's a certain arrogance in doing this to the past.
Maybe they'll do this to us for being meat eaters.
What if vegetarian becomes universal 100 years from now?
And so, oh no, we've got no more schools named after anybody who lived in the 20th century.
They all ate meat.
I'm serious.
How do you know that won't happen?
But that would be as foolish as, well, they had slaves.
Of course, it's wrong to have slaves.
They may conclude it is wrong to eat meat.
And I'm not comparing the two, believe me, but I'm just saying that that may be the issue.
There were great men who also had slaves.
It's not right.
It's not good.
We all know slavery is wrong.
They knew slavery was wrong.
They set up a country that ultimately abolished it, obviously.
So that's what has happened, and kids don't have this anymore.
And as I say, we've even abolished Washington's and Lincoln's birthday.
I don't think there's a kid in this room who could tell you the birth dates of Washington and Lincoln.
Again, every one of you my age can.
February 12th, February 22.
We all knew that because we celebrated Washington's birthday on his birthday, not on a Monday to give you an extra day, but actually on his birthday.
And the same thing with Lincoln.
And if they fell on a Sunday, tough.
You didn't get an extra day off.
And now we have President's Day, which means nothing.
Presidents of what?
The country?
What?
We're celebrating Millard Fillmore?
What is it even?
It doesn't mean anything.
President's Day.
It's a day where Best Buy has its best sale.
That's what it's come to mean.
When I was a kid, I remember we put on, and I went to a Jewish, I went to a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish school, and we had George Washington plays, and we had Abraham Lincoln plays, let alone at a regular American public high school.
So the question is, if it's so important and we don't have them anymore, part three, why?
Why no heroes?
Why have we knocked down everybody?
This is the most important part, I think, of the talk.
And you may agree, you may disagree, but you would have to provide other reasons if you think my reasons are not valid.
Number one, we live in an age of cynicism.
We're above having heroes because, hey, we're so aware, we know everybody's corrupt.
Right?
It's like all politicians are corrupt.
It's not true.
All politicians are not corrupt.
Some are, maybe many are, but not all are.
But if you are very with it and very sophisticated, then you don't have heroes.
The more sophisticated you are, the less likely you are to believe in this thing because you know that everybody has skeletons in his or her closet.
Which is true, of course it's true.
That's the whole point.
Everybody does have skeletons.
But so what?
Why does that mean you're not a hero?
Which I will come to.
So, by the way, there's a great definition, I'm sure many of you know it, of a cynic.
The cynic is the person who knows the price of everything, but the worth of nothing.
That's what a cynic is.
And that's how it happens.
I mean, when I hear from some people, Martin Luther King's no hero, the guy had extramaro affairs, it's one of the only times I want to punch a caller.
What are you talking about?
The guy may have saved this country from violent civil war thanks to his nonviolent resistance to segregation.
You should put a picture of this guy up in your living room and bow down to it three times a day, Minchamara and Shakri.
And I don't add that part, but most of my listeners didn't go to yeshiva.
But I mean, that's just absurd.
You get it from the left, you get it from the right, this notion, well, I know the flaws of X, therefore they can't be heroic.
Then nobody is.
That ends it.
King David is the progenitor of the Messiah in Jewish life.
It's the guy not flawed, sends a man to die so he could sleep with his wife, right?
This is a very flawed man.
But Judaism or the Jewish tradition is understood.
God will deal with that.
And God did deal with that, as it happens.
That terrible, terrible sin.
But still, he is considered to have been a great leader and a great king.
And that's much worse than adultery.
That's murder, or at least arranging the death of the man to sleep with the wife.
So we have this age of cynicism.
Number two, it's an age of little wisdom.
We confuse hero with perfection.
Every hero is imperfect.
Every.
From Moses to anyone.
You can't be here if you're perfect.
What's the big deal in being a hero?
I mean, you're not human.
And by the way, it's an interesting thing, and I talk to my Christian friends about this because they hold that Jesus is perfect, but of course, Jesus is divine.
So he has an excuse for being perfect.
But if you're not divine, you can't be perfect.
And that's just the way it is.
We confuse greatness and perfection.
We confuse heroic and perfect.
Very big mistake.
The brilliance, again, of the Jewish tradition was to give us heroes, but imperfect, but spell out their imperfections at the very same time.
Let me give you an example that's really powerful.
Is Oscar Schindler of Schindler's list a hero?
Yes, of course.
The man was a serial adulterer.
Serial adulterer.
And here is a man we consider rightly to be a hero.
So, how do you reconcile?
That is the whole point.
You do reconcile.
You don't excuse the imperfections, but you weigh the person in balance.
In balance, he was one of a handful of German officials to save a lot of Jews.
That's pretty heroic.
And I'm sure that there were faithful Nazis who were killing Jews.
Not that fidelity is not important, but just to understand where it is not the only determinant of the worth of a human being.
Oh, I'll tell you the one I really love.
It's the ones that say President Obama smokes.
This one drives me the nuttiest of all, I have to say.
So what?
Those are two of the most powerful words in the English language.
So what?
I mean, people say it as if it is some flaw that if it were better known, it would just, he would devolve in people's eyes.
I find that unbelievable.
The man smokes.
That's it.
Anybody whose biggest flaw is smoking is the best man ever made.
There's no competition.
Number three, why there are no heroes.
We know too many details about public figures' lives.
We just do.
I mean, the classic example is poor President Clinton.
And I mean that.
Guy has an affair with one woman in eight years in office.
That was a, you know, that was a day's worth of work for JFK.
JFK, who was my hero as a kid.
But if the press report, the press knew what was going on in the White House, not just outside of the White House, in the White House.
Men had dozens and dozens of affairs with dozens and dozens of different women.
But it was hidden because the press felt it's like another age.
It's almost like the dinosaur age.
They felt that it didn't matter, which I agree, it doesn't.
I was so angry when the Monica Lewinsky affair came out.
I was angry.
I did not want to know.
And it turned out to, indeed, I turned out to be right.
It ended up preoccupying a country, and kids had to hear about stained dresses on the 7 o'clock news.
All because the press believes that you need to know everything.
The Chicago Tribune published, in an act of evil, published the divorce records of the candidate for governor of Illinois.
And he stepped down afterwards because anybody's divorce records in a disputed divorce is not going to be pretty.
And I remember I wrote about this in my column.
I have a weekly column.
And I remember writing at the time, why don't we have the divorce records of the editors of the Chicago Tribune?
You notice, by the way, the press never reports on the press.
You know nothing about the editors of the New York Times.
Nothing.
They may molest children and you wouldn't know it.
But for public figures that they report on, every possible detail from any time in their life.
Why is it that we knew about the cross-dressing habit of a sportscaster?
I'm not going to mention his name because I don't believe in humiliating anyone.
I'm very strict on that rule on the radio and anywhere else.
But you may remember, the man wasn't even in politics.
Why did, I remember I was then on ABC radio, and at the top of the hour, ABC National News came on and reported that so-and-so, his ex-girlfriend reported that he would like to cross-dress in the bedroom.
I don't know if there's any more humiliating thing that could be reported about a public figure.
And I remember saying, if ABC fires me, they will fire me.
I am disgusted at what my employer just reported on the national news.
Why do I need to know what a guy who broadcasts basketball games does in his bedroom?
And the answer, because they can report it.
They do it because they can do it and it gives them a sense of omnipotence.
No one has ruined the possibility of heroes like the media in the Western world have.
No one.
If I meet someone in the news media, they are guilty until they prove themselves innocent to me.
That is my anger at what the media have done to individuals for no good reason.
You want to know why there are no heroes?
One of the biggest reasons is because we know everything.
Now, I still think you can be a hero because I don't care about those things.
But it does bring people down.
It does.
Number four or number five, I lost count here of the reasons that we don't have heroes is another one.
We not only associate perfect with heroic, which is wrong, we also use the word hypocrite too often, and that brings people down.
So let me address the issue of hypocrisy.
Forgive me.
We confuse inconsistency with hypocrisy.
Let me give you a Jewish example.
I have gotten this question in Jewish during Jewish speeches since I began lecturing many decades ago.
Some young person would get up and say, you know, Mr. Prager, my parents are hypocrites.
I'd say, really?
Wow, why is that?
Well, they keep kosher inside the house, but not outside.
And I just, I feel so frustrated on behalf of the parents.
Why is that hypocrisy?
That's inconsistency.
It's not hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy would be if the parents announced to the world, we keep kosher outside the house, and if you don't, you are a great Jewish sinner.
And then go and have a cheeseburger outside the house.
That's a hypocrite.
But nobody does that.
Nobody.
You know what's actually hard to find hypocrites?
They're not common.
What is common is inconsistent people.
Those parents are inconsistent.
And you know what?
I love inconsistency.
That's much better than consistency.
Because if you said to the parents, you will have to be consistent, then they'd say, okay, we won't keep poacher at home either.
That's what consistency would have entailed.
They're not going to, for the sake of consistency now, stop eating what they were eating outside.
The people who keep a kosher home and eat anything they want or whatever they do outside, I salute them.
I salute them, and how's this?
God salutes them.
By the way, I'm not alone in this.
Chabad, ultra-Orthodox Jews say the exact same thing.
A little is better than nothing, a lot is better than a little, and so on and so forth.
But we call anybody who does anything, and especially people who advocate anything good.
Poor Bill Bennett writes a book of virtues, then it turns out he gambles.
And so, oh, he's a phony, he's a hypocrite.
Google Bill Bennett and hypocrite.
You'll probably get 50,000 hits.
Why is he a hypocrite?
Because he sinned and wrote a book of virtue.
So what is the solution?
Nobody will ever write a book of virtues.
Do you understand what you are saying then is?
No one should ever write on virtue because no one is so virtuous as to be perfectly consistent with what he wrote.
That's the end of virtue in this world if that's what we're going to do to everybody who sins.
Nobody can advocate.
That's why clergy have such a terrible, it's so hard to be a clergyman.
Oh, I get that.
I'm not a clergyman, but I get this because I do.
I, in fact, talk about, I don't use the word virtue, but I talk about moral qualities and all this stuff.
And I'll never forget.
I saw on some blog somewhere, Prager's a phony.
I saw him once go to the head of a line at a movie theater, which of course I never did.
It's ridiculous.
But even so, let's say I did.
Okay, what do I do, by the way?
Hi, I'm Dennis Prager.
I'm coming to the head of the line.
I mean, how does it work?
You know how many people selling theater tickets know who I am?
Four.
But that's it.
All of my life's work was undone because somebody reported I went to the front of a movie live.
But this is what people do this.
And it's so, of course, there's no hero.
How can there be a hero?
He smokes.
He went to the head of the line.
He gambled.
I mean, the guy gives a ton of charity.
The guy earned it perfectly.
Why is that all of a sudden such a horrific negator of everything the man stands for?
It isn't.
It's just that we're stupid.
It's the age of unwisdom where we don't realize that inconsistency is not hypocrisy.
There's a good chance you may not even know a hypocrite.
It's very rare that people scream about one specific sin and then go and do it the whole time and think that they're not sinning at the same time.
And finally, as to why the no-heroes, no, not finally.
I have two more reasons.
People don't want the burden of being a hero.
That's what I said earlier.
It's a burden.
People don't want the burden.
Hey, kid, I'm no hero.
And that gets you off the spot, then you don't have to live up to anything, right, in the kid's eyes.
And finally, we live in the age of egalitarianism.
Hey, hero means better than me.
That's inequality.
Who's to say anybody is better than anybody else?
But by God, I pray, as I said earlier, I pray to God there are hundreds of millions of people better than me.
It's not only not troubling that somebody's better than me, I welcome it with open arms.
That's the way we should all feel.
But no, nobody's better than anybody else.
And what has happened is nobody seeks to be on a higher level.
I am against, for example, teachers being called by their first names by kids in class.
I think it lowers the teacher.
And why do teachers want that?
It's for the same reason, I'll never forget.
I mean, I see this, I'm sure many of you may do this, and I disagree with you with all respect.
When you say to a kid, call me Jerry, or you know, or call me Sean or whatever your name is.
Now, if the kid does, I'm not demanding that you say, call me Mr. or call me Ms. or call me Mrs. That's okay.
I understand that.
But where the kid, I have seen kids walk over and say, oh, Mr. Rosen, it's a pleasure to meet you.
And then Mr. Rosen says, no, no, no, no, call me Ed.
Where the parents have raised the kid to say Mr., let's honor that.
I have never told a kid to call me Dennis.
I've never told a kid who calls me Dennis call me Mr. Prager.
But I have never corrected a kid.
A kid who calls me Mr. Prager, it's good for him.
It's not good for me.
I don't care.
It's good for him.
I called all my parents' friends Mr. and Mrs., all of them, because we're not peers.
But in the age of radical egalitarianism, everybody's everybody's peer.
Nobody's higher on a higher level, not even a teacher to a student, not a clergyman.
The thought of me calling any of my rabbis at yeshiva by their first name would not have dawned on me under torture.
It was inconceivable.
Call Rabbi Fastag Phil.
It's inconceivable.
That's the way it should be.
Callers, there are callers that call me Dennis.
There are callers that call me Mr. Prager.
I never change any of it.
They do what they do.
But you know how many talk show hosts immediately correct?
It's fascinating.
Now that I pointed it out, listen to it.
How many talk shows?
No, no, no, call me and then give their first name.
I've never said that to anyone who said mister.
Finally, what are the consequences?
Well, the obvious one is there are no more models.
There are no more heroes.
There's nobody to aspire to be like.
Are we better for it?
Of course, we're not better for it.
Kids are certainly not better for it.
We have lowered standards, obviously.
Another consequence is very, very many otherwise terrific people don't enter public life because they know what the media will do to them.
Oh, isn't it true that 32 years ago you smoked marijuana?
Or God knows what?
And they have a family and children, and frankly, they just don't want to be torn to shreds for no good reason.
It's not like these are bad things, they're just humiliating.
That's all they serve to do is humiliate.
We lose out because a lot of times the very best people have big flaws.
Churchill was great, and Churchill had flaws.
Thank God for Churchill.
That's any smoked.
That's correct.
That's a very good one.
By the way, at the Churchill World War II Museum in London, they took the cigar out of the picture.
Just want you to know that.
And let me leave you with this final thought.
We have substituted a different quality for hero, and that is famous.
Famous has become significant just as heroes have become insignificant.
And what we have done is we have elevated fame to significance.
So let me leave you with this Rosh Hashanah thought that most of the time, the famous are insignificant, and the significant are not famous.
Think about that and how true that is.
About who has been significant in your life, and are they famous?
Or in your community, are they famous?
And think of the famous.
Harris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan.
I mean, giants.
Each one a bigger giant than the next.
We live in an age where people are famous for being famous.
We don't even know what they do.
They're just famous.
And you know what you say to kids?
When I do this, I have asked classes of kids, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Famous.
More than rich, famous.
Famous for what?
Doesn't matter.
They never have an answer.
See, if they'd say famous for a cure for cancer, I'd go, ooh, okay, I like the idea.
But they don't care what it's famous for.
It could be famous for going nude, which is what a handful or more are famous for.
It doesn't matter.
It's the fame that is in and of itself.
So as we have gotten rid of a truly moral category of hero, we have ended up with the amoral category of famous.
And that's who we look up to.
The famous.
Oh, to be famous.
And famous people get what the hero used to get, adulation, attention, etc.
So that's my case for the reintroduction of the hero.
And perhaps most important, that we should all in this next year want to be one.
Our kids need it, and even more than our kids, everybody else's kids need it.
So now you'll understand if you ever hear my show, and a young man calls me and says you're my hero, why I'm happy for him, much more than for me.