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Feb. 3, 2026 - Dennis Prager Show
36:45
Timeless Wisdom: Ultimate Issues Hour - Why Faith Matters
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Looking for God's Wisdom 00:11:33
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.
Or not to be.
That is the question.
Where was God?
Isn't God supposed to be good?
Isn't he supposed to love us?
Does God want us to suffer?
Ten years, you're not finished yet.
Marty!
Why did you do this to me?
Who are you?
Bruce.
I'm God.
Bingo, Yahtzee.
Is that your final answer?
Our service is God.
Bing, ding, bing, ding, Well, it was nice to meet you, God.
Thank you for the Grand Canyon, and good luck with the apocalypse.
And welcome to the Dennis Prager Show, the Ultimate Issues Hour.
Every week at this time, I devote the hour to some great ultimate issue.
I am very lucky.
First, I'm lucky to have the guests that we have, but what I was thinking of originally is I'm very lucky that at a very early age, I realized that the most important question in life is, is there a God?
Everything flows from that.
You talk about ultimate issues, there is ultimate issues, and then there is the ultimate issue.
It's the ultimate, including atheists who are honest, acknowledge this.
They have concluded there is no God, but that's the ultimate question.
If there is no God, then this is all a happenstance.
We are as irrelevant to the universe as the pebbles in a canyon.
And that's it.
And yet, if there is a God, then everything matters, and then there's preciousness to human life, etc., etc.
So this is the ultimate issue, and I can't think of anybody better.
There might be people tied with him, but I can't think of anybody better to talk to about this than one of the most prominent rabbis in the United States.
In fact, he was named number one pulpit rabbi in America in Newsweek.
And he is David Walpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, teaches modern Jewish religious thought at UCLA.
And he is quite well known to those who follow religious thought today.
He has a new book out, Why Faith Matters.
And you know, it passes the Prager test on many grounds, the first one being it's under 200 pages.
My theory, Rabbi Wolpe, is if you can't say it in under 200 pages, I mean, look at the creation story, will you?
There you go.
Yes, I agree with you.
Exactly.
You're not allowed to recommend long books.
It's not fair to people.
It isn't fair.
That's right.
Unless they need a doorstopper.
Right, exactly.
You know, it's true, these new biographies, I mean, they tell you what the man had for lunch on April 7th, 1856.
I don't care.
I agree.
So, anyway, you will not find in that book what God had for lunch on April 7th.
I just want to put that out there.
Excellent.
The book, again, is Why Faith Matters.
Why did you title it that?
Why not why I believe in God or something like that?
Because I wanted to make both the case for God, along with science and so on.
But a lot of it is why faith mattered to me personally through various things that I've gone through, and also why faith matters to society.
And not just why I believe in God, but what difference that makes to the world if people do believe in God and if people believe in religion, because I'm not only pro-faith, but pro-religion.
If you had been asked to write this book 20 years ago, would it have been different?
20 years ago, so I have to do the math in my head.
It wouldn't, yes, because if 30 years old.
Well, if 30, I would have said there's no God.
That's why I said that.
Oh, that's exactly what I'm saying.
20 years ago, it would have been similar.
30 years ago, it would have been completely different.
All right, that's good to know.
Okay, really?
Tell us about it.
I was when I was in high school.
What happened was when I was 12 years old, I saw a movie called Night and Fog about the Holocaust.
And I tell this story in the book, and that was it for me.
It drained the world of all color.
I was convinced that God didn't exist.
And then I spent my teenage years reading Bertrand Russell, who was a British philosopher and, for my money, still the best atheist writing.
I mean, Hitchens and Harris and Dawkins and Dennett, they're good, but Russell, I believe, outdoes them all, both in prose style and in argument.
And so for at least a decade, I was convinced there was no God.
So I would have written a very different book.
What happened?
I wish I could tell you a single thing happened, but I actually think what happened primarily was I got old enough to distrust my own omniscience.
I mean, I assumed, like a lot of teenagers, I think, that everybody who didn't believe what I did was weak or thoughtless or irrational.
Russell told me that.
You know, if you believed in this stuff, it's because there wasn't enough reason in your mind or in the world.
And I started to see that even the strongest people were sometimes weak, and the smartest were sometimes not so bright.
And I even read something of Russell's life because the truth is, he wrote as though his life was perfectly rational and reasonable, but his life was a mess.
He married numerous women, had endless numbers of affairs, was estranged from his children.
And I was actually looking advocated that an Adam bomb be dropped on Moscow.
On Moscow, right, exactly.
I was actually looking, and yet was a pacifist.
He became afterwards.
He went from one extreme to the other.
And I was looking for wisdom in life.
I was looking for a guide.
I was looking for exactly what you asked at the very beginning, which is why does faith matter?
Because faith is more than an abstract proposition.
It's how to live your life.
And I was looking for a guide on how to live.
And Russell sounded like he was a guide, but he wasn't.
So it was an evolution.
It was an evolution.
It was gradual.
You have, like just about everybody, been tested by life.
Yes.
You want to speak about any of those?
Sure.
Just to talk about my immediate family, right after my daughter was born, my wife had cancer, which leaves us with one child.
She was unable to have more children, although she's considered cured.
A few years after that, I had a brain tumor and neurosurgery.
And a couple years ago, I came down with lymphoma and had chemotherapy.
And the lymphoma, I'm in remission, but I'm not cured, and they can't cure it at this stage of medical knowledge.
What I tell my congregation is that we're all in remission, only I know it.
So through all of that, you know, you ask yourself all the normal questions.
And as you know, some people come out with their faith deepened.
Some people come out with their faith broken or shattered.
But I really do think that the people, by and large, who come out of difficult circumstances with their faith broken are sort of victims of bad theology.
They went in with a faith that wasn't the kind of faith I believe we're taught at religion's best.
They went in with a sort of magical faith, like if you just pray hard enough or do this right, everything will be fine.
And I don't believe God set up the world that way and don't believe that faithful people should assume that the world is that way.
So that's directly involved with the question of God's intervention in individuals' lives.
Al, that's a tough one.
It is a tough one.
Well, first of all, I want to say something first, which is, you know, as a rabbi, I have people come into my office all the time and say, why me?
Something bad happens and they say, why me?
And what I've noticed about that question is it's very rare for someone to come into my office and say, you know, I was born in the richest country in the world and I've never gone hungry.
Why me?
Or I have loving parents.
Why me?
So part of it was that I felt it's not like I've gotten a rough deal in the world.
For all the challenges that we've had, we've also had great blessings.
And if you're going to give God discredit, so to speak, for the bad stuff, then first you have to give God enormous thanks and gratitude and benefit for all the other stuff.
But the second part is that I don't think there's any one-on-one correspondence.
I heard you asking Dinesh D'Souza yesterday, I think it was, about prayer and whether God intervenes.
And does he pray for specific intervention?
And I was thinking at the time of something that a 17th century rabbi said, that if you saw a man pulling his boat to shore, you might think if you were mistaken about mechanics and motion that he was really pulling the shore to his boat.
And that's what it's like in prayer, that you think you're pulling God to you, but if you pray well, what you're doing is pulling yourself to God.
And I have to say for myself, as I was getting chemo, I didn't assume that if I prayed hard enough, God would cure me.
But I did believe I could pray for intimacy and for closeness, and that that prayer is granted.
And it was?
Yes, I didn't feel alone.
And that's, I thought, as much as I could really ask of God.
I wanted more, but really what I wanted to be sure of was that whatever happened, it would be okay.
When you prayed, was it the formal prayers of the Jewish faith or was it spontaneous statements of your own?
It was both.
It was both my own prayer and also formulated prayer.
What happens in such circumstances is you find that the formulated prayers are deeper than you ever imagined.
There's one paragraph for your Jewish listeners in the Amidah, which is the central prayer of Judaism, called the Modim Prayer, the Thanks Prayer.
And I found that one enormously and enduringly powerful.
But I also just prayed that the people in my life whom I love would have the strength to see this through whatever happened.
So, you know, and that's just...
Are you more at peace now than when you were in high school?
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
The book is Why Faith Matters, a truly significant and easily read book.
We'll be back in a moment.
I'm Dennis Prager.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
Only the Father said to God.
Prager, it is, and it's the ultimate issues hour on the Dennis Prager Show every week at this time.
Jewish Faith and Afterlife 00:12:49
Some great issue.
There's no greater issue than this, obviously, God's existence, faith.
One of the greatest thinkers and writers on this is one of the most prominent rabbis in the U.S., David Wolpe.
And his book is Why Faith Matters, under 200 pages, and it's for people of every faith, which leads to a question, a sensitive question I'd like to pose to you.
It is posed to me by listeners constantly because they know that I am a practicing Jew, and they wonder, and I, of course, give them my answer, but I want obviously your answer here.
Why are so many Jews so non-religious?
Well, I think that there are at least two very powerful reasons why that is so.
One is that I really do think the shocks of history took their toll.
I think that the Holocaust dealt a body blow to Jewish religiosity, both demographically, that is, it wiped out the most religious portion of Jews who were the ones who stayed in Eastern Europe.
So, first of all, it did it demographically, and second, theologically, it was very hard for many Jews to come to grips with such, I mean, the world Jewish population still has not recovered.
It's still not at pre-Holocaust levels.
A third of all Jews were killed, and that's very difficult.
And then the second part of it was that for lots of reasons that we don't have to go into, Jews raced towards modernity.
And the modern world, to some extent, jettisoned religion.
And the more modern you were, the less religious you were.
And this was a common ground where everybody could meet.
You know, it was hard.
If you felt like an outsider, as long as you stayed Jewish, you were still an outsider.
But if you said, well, everybody should just forget their religion and meet in the common ground of liberty, humanity, so on and so forth, then there's no distinctions between us anymore.
I think that it was, as I'm sure you do, a historical mistake.
And I also think that the coalition of people who are tolerantly but deeply religious is the coalition.
I don't want to overstate this, but that's the coalition that will save the world.
I think that it's the most desperately needed position in the world, which is why I'm so glad that I have Rick Warren's name on the cover of the book and that he wrote a preface to it, because I do think that faith should cross denominations.
If I can tell you a quick story, in one of my debates with Christopher Hitchens, and I know that you've debated him as well, he said to me, okay, a child is born today in Saudi Arabia.
Do you want him to be a Muslim or an atheist?
And he was sure that I would say an atheist, but I said I wanted to be a Muslim, but I want him to be a tolerant, pluralistic Muslim so that he could influence other Muslims in that country to enact the best of what faith is.
And that's where hope lies.
That is where hope lies, but his question was a powerful one.
Yes.
Because the odds are that in Saudi Arabia, he's not going to grow up to be a tolerant person.
Right, but I got to choose.
Well, you did, but I know.
All right.
Look, for me to defend Hitchens on religious matters is a rare moment.
But I understand what you're saying.
I mean, that's also.
Do you feel that Christianity has been given a bad rap given how antagonistic the intellectual class is and its history?
Maybe it's, in other words, one could say, no, it wasn't given a bad rap, but it's terrific today.
So I'm not moving you toward any answer.
Well, I have a chapter on religion and violence, and I'm going to abbreviate it very much to say, and it's basically a defense of Christianity's historical record.
And I say, if you want to know whether religion causes violence, you have to look before the monotheistic faiths and after.
And before, I mean, Rome, Babylon, Assyria, Greece, the historical record is abominable.
It's much more savage than even the Middle Ages.
And after, as you know, from the Enlightenment on, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, World War I, World War II, Nazism, Communism, I'm sure for your listeners, I don't have to retail all the horrors that happened.
When you drain sanctity from the world, it doesn't make the world better.
And so I actually think that Christianity, there are many sins, and this is coming obviously from a Jew.
There are many sins in the Christian record.
But has Christianity made the world better?
I think it is unquestionable that it has made the world better and that today continues to do so.
And I think that it's a shame that that isn't better understood not only among non-Christians, but even among Christians.
Well, for that alone, I know many people will want to read this book because no Jew can challenge your bona fides as a committed Jew.
And of course I agree with you, and it is very worrisome to me, very worrisome, the de-religionization of America.
Does that worry you?
Yeah, it worries me for one reason is the reason that, of course, you speak about, which is the moral component.
But also because I actually see, to some extent, the lack of religion as a cutting off from the past.
And, you know, Cicero said, one who doesn't know the past remains forever a child.
And the truth is, this is our past.
This is our collective past.
And not only is there a lack of belief, there's a lack of knowledge and a lack of interest.
And the great religious heritage, that's our reservoir of culture.
And it seems to me a shame, not only from a moral point of view, but just from the point of view of the richness of life, to lose everything that brought us to this moment to sort of kick the ladder out from under us in the assumption that we can still move higher.
You and I both live in Los Angeles County, and I led a and ultimately and ultimately failed at the battle to keep the little, little cross in the county seal of Los Angeles County.
And my argument to the Board of Supervisors, the five-person board, was not religious.
It was exactly yours.
It was historical.
It's Los Angeles, the city, or the county of angels.
It's not Los Seculoristos.
If it was founded by Wiccans, I'd expect a broom.
You are erasing our history by erasing that cross.
And, you know, it's not as though we don't have some sense of what a secular society would be without serious religious commitment.
We see it in America.
It's called Hollywood.
There are enclaves of our society that feel as though classical religion is anathema, that they dislike it and they reject it.
And I don't see that it's creating any soaring culture or deep moral imperatives.
It's just, it's very hard to take a tradition of thousands of years and replace it overnight.
Main by Newsweek, the number one pulpit rabbi in America, his book, Why Faith Matters, Rabbi David Walpe, W-O-L-P-E.
It's up at PragerRadio.com.
We'll take your calls and I continue.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
The name of the book is Why Faith Matters.
And it's a wonderful thing when it's a Jew who writes such a book because so often we think it's Christians writing on faith.
And so many Jews have been secularized.
And I thought the rabbi came up with about as concise and excellent an explanation for that phenomenon as one could have.
It's something I think I'll devote an hour to once.
Actually, we had a series of shows explaining Jews, but in any event, that's one worth returning to.
The book is Why Faith Matters, David Wolpe, one of the most prominent rabbis in America, W-O-L-P.
It's up at PragerRadio.com at the blog area.
And of course, it's available anywhere you get your books, but it's convenient for you through Prager Radio at the blog area of it.
Let me take some of your calls.
1-8-Prager776, which is 877-243-77776.
And Jared in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Jared, Dennis Prager, and Rabbi David Wolpe.
Hi, this is a question that's bothered me for a few months now.
Would you say it's more important that God does exist, or is it more important that people believe that God exists?
Because if God exists, but people are atheists, that would have a more destructive effect than if God didn't exist, but people believed that he did.
You're a real thinker, Jared.
All right, so I don't know how Dennis would answer this question, but I'll tell you what I think.
I think in this world, given that it's already here, it's more important that people believe God exists.
If there's a world after this one, it's more important that God exists, or that world wouldn't be.
That would be my offhand thought, but I think it's a great question, Jared, and I'd have to give it more thought.
Okay.
All right, wonderful.
Thank you.
It's an excellent answer, actually.
Talking about that, what is your take on the afterlife?
I'm all for it.
Well, you know, this was, I think that the afterlife is a sort of assumption that you make if you really do believe in a God of love.
I don't understand how you can believe in such a God and assume that God abandons us the moment we die.
And in some ways, what's hard for people about faith is faith in the eternity of human beings as opposed to faith in the reality of God.
But for me, when I look into someone's eyes, when I really get to know someone, that's part of what convinces me that we're not just accidents of ancient chemistry, that we're something greater than that and deeper than that.
And so I really do believe that we live on, although I have no idea in what way.
Part of what makes the afterlife seem silly at times is that people assume they know what it's going to be like, even though they couldn't know this world before they came into it, right?
And, you know, Mark Twain in Letters from Earth, he says, people think they're going to lie on greenfields and listen to harp music.
They wouldn't want to do it for five minutes while they're alive, but they think they're going to be happy for the rest of eternity.
He's a genius.
That is so funny.
It's true.
But so many of you.
You know what?
That reminds me, by the way, you will love this as a rabbi.
You will totally relate to this.
When I was in yeshiva, which is, for my listeners who don't know, an intense religious Jewish education, half your day is Jewish studies and half the day secular studies.
So I was a kid and I was about, no, no, actually, it was in high school, in fact.
And I remember the rabbi and somebody asked him about the afterlife.
And he said, I think it was in Hebrew, and he said to boys, just want you to know, or actually boys and girls, he said, in the afterlife, we learn Torah all the time.
And I remember thinking, I don't want to go there.
I don't want to go.
And I teach the Torah now and I love it, but the thought of eternity.
And I thought of it in particular, of studying with him.
I have him for each other.
Twins in the Womb 00:03:08
It's okay as long as you're not there.
If you're there, I don't know.
It reminds me of the Harp story, though.
That's all.
So, you know, I send out an email every week of about 200 words, just a very short, sort of inspirational email.
And I tried to encapsulate, and it's always hard to do, just the same thing that you're doing.
I try to encapsulate answers to significant questions in that.
One of the things, one of the emails that I sent out that got the most response, and I reproduced it in the book, is this idea of the twins in the womb, which is imagine that there are twins in a womb, and one believes that there's a world outside the womb and the other doesn't.
Because the one who doesn't believe it says, you know, we've never seen another world, never experienced another world.
Now imagine that the one who does believe is born.
Back in the womb, they're mourning a death, but outside, they're celebrating a birth.
Back in a moment, the book, Why Faith Matters.
Dennis Krager here, the Ultimate Issues Hour.
And I'm very open, as you folks know.
The transparency is a goal of mine, both personally and professionally.
And I have to tell you, there are times when I really don't think I deserve a salary.
Because if hard work is the definition of when you should get paid, sometimes it is such a joy and really easy, especially when you have a guest like Dr. I was.
Are you a doctor, by the way?
You know what Samfield Hirsch said?
When rabbis became doctors, Judaism became sick.
Jews got sick is the way I heard it.
Yes, yes.
That's anyway.
But I'm not.
That's just a defense that we rabbis use for not being.
No, no, no.
I love you for it.
On the contrary.
And you're not here with that anyway, but it's a Rabbi David Walpey, W-O-L-P-E, and his book is Why Faith Matters.
But talking to him, as Dinesh D'Souza, whom you mentioned earlier, is another example, certainly.
I've always felt, and this is apropos almost of nothing, but when I'm with people like D'Souza or Walpi and I and certainly others, folks that you've heard on my show, there are two types of people in a sense.
There are those who love to star and there are those who love to be on an all-star team.
It's just a temperament.
I don't say one is better than the other.
I much prefer to be a member of an all-star team.
That's my temperament.
So when I'm with such people, that's how I feel.
And it's a great feeling.
The book, again, is Why Faith Matters.
Why Faith Matters 00:09:13
And it is, of course, up at deprageradio.com.
And let's take some more of your calls that you might have.
You were mentioning, by the way, that people can get an email from you.
Is that right?
Yes, they can write to R. Bagan, that's R-B-E-G-I-N, at sinaitemple.org, R-Bagan or R-Begin at sinaitemple.org.
And I send out 200 words once a week, and you won't get anything else.
No ads, just about 200 words once a week, which seems to me about a readable, bite-sized, inspirational email.
That's right.
And they are inspirational.
I see them in various papers.
All right.
Again, let me go through some of your calls here.
Here's an interesting one.
Decatur, Georgia, and Joseph.
Hi, Joseph.
Dennis Prager and Rabbi Wolpe.
From a devout Catholic shalom from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you, sir.
God bless you.
I'm 73 years old, and I play trumpet in a concert band.
And we recently had a piece called Rhapsody for Hanukkah.
And there's four or five Jewish friends of mine, all about our same age, old duffers, and they gave me a yarmulke.
So I put it on while I played the solo, and it came out all right.
But I'd really like to know from the rabbi what I'm saying.
What do you mean came out all right?
It should have come out a little better.
Well, I'm kidding.
I'm recovering from a triple bypass, so it had a little heartache there.
Okay, so what's the question?
What is the history of the Yarmulka?
How far back did it go?
And is it okay for Christians to wear it?
It's a beautiful symbol and a very deep symbol, I believe.
Okay, I'll give you a real quick one on this.
The truth is that in the Talmud, it's not clear that people wore them, which goes back a couple thousand years.
In the Bible, there's no mention of it.
But it became a distinctive garb of Jews.
In fact, it really is only in very modern times that Jews took to wearing it all the time, which some do.
I wear mine as a sort of clerical collar.
That is some, you know, I wear it as a sort of means of identification.
People will look at me sometimes and they'll see that I have a yarmulk on my head, and they'll say, oh, you must be Rabbi Wolpe.
But there's nothing against a non-Jew wearing it.
And there's nothing, by the way, sacred about the yarmulke itself.
It's just a head covering.
The idea is this sort of reverse idea of taking your hat off when you come into church.
It's just considered a mark of respect before God.
And a last point, which I once heard a person in Israel say to me when someone asked him why he wears a yarmulke, he nudged me and he said, I wear a yarmulke so that I know where I stop, which I thought was a nice idea.
That is, it's a mark of humility.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Thank you.
All right.
We have listeners around the world, so we'll go to Norway and Eric in Friedrikstad, Norway.
Hello, Eric, Dennis Prager and Rabbi Wolpe.
Hi.
All right.
Thanks for taking my call.
I'm sitting here in a country that's arguably one of the most secular in the world.
And I'm constantly made aware of, I think it's a G.K. Chesterton quote: when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.
They'll believe in anything.
And right now, they're dealing with a lot of immigrants coming in from largely Muslim countries.
And I think that I wanted to get your perspective on this.
I think that perhaps a person from a religious background has a greater ability to understand both the benefits and dangers of a strong faith.
And right now, the secular Europe, I don't think, really understands these things very well.
And it feels like the U.S. is racing to catch up in that direction.
I was wondering if you had any perspective on that or any thoughts.
Thank you, Eric.
I would say this.
First of all, I really do believe that when I wrote this book, I wrote it better because there had been a long period of my life when I didn't believe in God.
So that mindset is not alien to me.
But if you've grown up either always believing or never believing, it's true that it's hard to sort of vault into the other person's mindset.
And I think that the more secular countries, although I must say that even in Sweden and Denmark, the vast majority of people still get married in churches, have their kids baptized.
So there's a sort of disconnect between people's professed disbelief and their conduct.
But in those countries, the test of their belief system will be when it comes in contact with another passionate belief system.
And I don't know.
I share your concern with how Europe is going to do over the next 50 years.
Or as I've put it, it's hard to boo.
You can't contend with those who believe in something by believing in nothing.
We return final segment with Rabbi Wolpe.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely, you are a lucky man.
If you found the reason to live on and not to die, you are a lucky man.
Preachers and poets and scholars don't know.
Dembles and statues and steeples won't show it.
If you've got the secret, just try not to throw it.
Stay a lucky man.
A lucky man.
The book is why faith matters.
It is for people of every background and no background.
Whatever your religion or no religion.
And he's very open, this distinguished Rabbi Wolpe, about his own non-belief for many years.
I'm going to ask you a question that may seem odd to some of the listeners.
I don't think it'll seem odd to you, but I'll take the risk.
Your faith in God, how much is it David the human's faith in God, and how much is it David the Jew's faith in God?
How much is Judaism a medium to that faith?
I see religions as languages.
They're the languages that we talk to God.
You know, I know that this may offend some of your Jewish listeners.
When people ask me why is Judaism better, I always tell them it's my job to argue Judaism's excellence, not its superiority.
I haven't been every religion in the world.
I've only been a Jew.
And I know that Judaism is a very powerful means of communicating with God.
I have no doubt that other religions are as well.
The fundamental reality over any religion is that God exists.
The religions are the paths by which we seek to reach towards God.
So I would say that God is prior to Judaism.
The Bible makes that clear.
Judaism doesn't come along for long after the world is created.
And I always thought that that was a wonderful thing, that what the Jewish New Year celebrates is not the beginning of Judaism.
It doesn't celebrate the new year when Abraham was born.
It celebrates the new year when the world is created.
Because fundamentally, human beings are gifted with the reality of God and given the task of reaching towards God.
They will always find different ways to do it.
But as long as their faith is enacted, that is, as long as they do goodness with their faith, because what you feel is of much less importance to me than what you do with what you feel, as long as their faith is enacted, it seems to me worth honoring and cherishing.
If you can answer this, give me and my listeners the thing that is most likely at any given moment to make you feel God-centered: a sunset, your daughter, prayer at synagogue.
What is it, if there is one?
This may sound funny.
I would say great tragedy and great joy.
In other words, the extremes of life, you know, they break open a part of you at times of great love.
And the part that's broken lets God in.
Now you know why people are reading Why Faith Matters by Rabbi Wolpe.
Rabbi, thank you so much for your time and for your book.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
And Jim and Katie and Ned and David and Rabbi Dan from Cleveland, Evelyn, I wish I could take your calls.
It's always painful, but I hope you enjoyed this Ultimate Issues Hour.
I'm Dennis Prager.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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