(Almost all of the following up to 1993 was written by me in 1993. Most of the material from 1994 to 2004 was written contemporaneously.)
Where Am I Lying?
I asked Grok where I might be lying in the following essay. Grok said:
* Ford may overstate the closeness or importance of his relationship with Prager. The narrative doesn’t provide evidence that Prager reciprocated any personal regard, and Ford’s self-described “grandiose” tendencies (e.g., seeing himself as a “hero” or “truth-teller”) suggest he might inflate his role in Prager’s world.
* Ford’s transparency about his psychological struggles and motivations lends credibility to his self-reflection but raises questions about the objectivity of his account. If he was driven by a need for validation or attention, as he suggests, his portrayal of events might be colored to cast himself as a protagonist in a larger drama. For example, his claim of being a “critic” of Prager might overstate the intellectual weight of his blogging, which often focused on personal anecdotes and gossip. There’s no direct evidence of lying, but the self-aggrandizement could distort the narrative.
* Ford’s claim of being a principled journalist might be misleading if his primary goal was attention or provocation, as his past suggests. His narrative doesn’t explicitly lie about his actions, but framing them as heroic truth-telling glosses over the ethical gray areas of his reporting style.
Discovering Dennis Prager
I moved to Los Angeles in August 1988, a month before my dormitory (Rieber Hall) opened at UCLA. I was 22 years old.
I had been largely bedridden by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for six months.
I lived out of my 1968 VW Bug for that first month in LA in 1988, slept in the bushes beside a UCLA softball field near Sunset Blvd, and commuted regularly to Santa Ana, where Dr. Norman Beals, an endocrinologist, said he could help me.
An atheist, I was desperate for salvation, but not of the Christian variety offered by my father the evangelist. My life had fallen apart. Doing things my way had not worked out. There had to be something better out there.
While lying in the bushes one Sunday night, I heard Dennis Prager‘s commanding voice and intellect over KABC radio. He used words such as “evil,” that I rarely heard in academia and the media. I called his show regularly because he seemed to have answers to the great questions of life that had long puzzled me.
Dennis Prager became my dad.
Knowing that he specialized in communism in his graduate study at the Russian Institute at Columbia University, I called for the first time around January 1989:
“Good evening Dennis. I’m a 22-year-old Economics student at UCLA and I’m flirting with the doctrines of Karl Marx, who I take is one of your favorite philosophers.”
“Yeah, he’s the only man to be consistently wrong,” said Prager.
I continued: “I came out of a strict Christian upbringing. Then at 18, I looked around and saw a world that didn’t make sense. Two-thirds of its inhabitants suffered whether they lived under regimes of the right or left. You ask for an evil greater than communism [besides Nazism]. How about imperialism?
“‘White Man’s burden’ sent Europeans around the world to Christianize it. In the process, they slaughtered… millions… from my own country Australia where we slaughtered the Aborigines, to this country, where we slaughtered the Native Americans… [to]… Africa and much of Asia….”
“The moral record of imperialism is light years ahead of the moral record of Marxism,” said Prager.
“Though we have a world today where affluent western countries are richer than they need be… [while the rest of the] world is starving,” I said.
Prager: “That’s not the west’s fault.”
As I lay in bed that night listening to the rest of Prager’s show, I felt good hearing many people comment on my call. But I felt stupid when I reflected on what I had said.
The pre-colonial world was not a beautiful one. I had read enough by age eight to know that. It took going to college to learn something so stupid as the thesis that the rich countries of the northern hemisphere caused the poverty of the southern hemisphere.
Prager also hosted the “Religion on the Line” program which featured different priests, ministers, and rabbis each week. I found the rabbis most impressive, particularly a blunt Orthodox rabbi, Yitzchok Adlerstein.
After listening to a drawn-out Christian discussion on faith vs works, Rabbi Adlerstein made three sharp points that I still remember. First, that faith goes nowhere to gaining heaven. According to Judaism, each person is rewarded according to his deeds. Second, how do we know what is right and wrong? Judaism’s detailed legal code provides answers. Third, because there’s much more to this life than gaining after-life, Judaism concentrates on how to live each day, balancing the competing demands of family, work, friendship, education, play, and worship.
In reply to a Pastor’s insistence that only faith in Jesus Christ brings salvation, Rabbi Adlerstein told the story of a Protestant minister from Canada who flew to Israel to provide Adolf Eichmann (the architect of the Holocaust) with last rites. Met at the airport by reporters, the minister said that if Eichmann confessed his sins and took on Christ he would be saved. And what about Eichmann’s six million Jewish victims? If they died as Jews and without taking on Christ, could they too be saved? The minister replied with a pithy “no.”
Rabbi Adlerstein’s story made clear to me what I’d always felt – any system that makes beliefs more important than behavior will lead to evil. And he showed me a masculine approach to religion. The rabbi didn’t get angry at people’s differing theologies as much as he got angry at evil – gratuitous human cruelty.
My Rabbi
Dennis Prager was the first religious thinker I’d encountered who wasn’t horrified by pre-marital sex and pornography. He seemed to have indulged in both and yet led a holy life. He seemed like the type of bloke who still enjoyed a bit of porn now and again.
Over my year at UCLA, I came to believe in Prager’s presentation of Judaism as a humane middle road between the extremes of denial and indulgence, chastity and promiscuity, standards and compassion, freedom and community. Here was a rational religion immersed in action, with a divine mandate to transform this world.
I got many of my dorm friends to listen in to my radio debates.
“I’m going to slam-dunk Prager tonight,” I promised everybody.
Prager’s thought was getting through to me by the Spring of 1989. I still wanted, however, to test the Jewish theologian by throwing at him in a vehement tone every objection that I or my secular leftist professors could think of.
I strode up and down my dorm on Saturday and Sunday nights preparing for combat.
Then I called into the show: “Good evening Dennis. I think that we are watching events in China tonight to which the United States is irrelevant. They are a unique culture and we have no influence. They don’t want your way of life, they don’t want your system of government…. We’ve been naive about their Lady of Liberty to think that they want a U.S.-style two-party democratic system with unlimited capitalism….”
“How do you know?”
“By reading the newspapers… Many students sing “Internationale,” the communist anthem.”
Prager: “I think those students are naive because everybody who has sung that song and gotten into power has deprived people of liberty and put them in concentration camps. They’re allowed to be naive. I’ve met Vietnamese who supported the Viet Cong and then became boat people. There are many disgusting human traits but none is more pathetic than the inability of people to learn from others’ errors… They [communist dictators] all deprive people of the most fundamental desire after living – freedom…”
“I don’t know what freedom means,” I said.
Prager: “The ability to work and speak and father as you like.
“I’m surprised that you don’t know what freedom means. You seemed intelligent When you don’t have freedom you certainly know what it means. The problem is that a lot of Westerners who have it, don’t know what it means. That was a revealing statement you made.”
“Freedom to you and me…”
Prager: “Is the same to the vast majority of human beings on earth. People don’t like to be told that they won’t get rations if they don’t line up for the party.”
Several dorm friends asked my girlfriend after that call: “Is Luke ok? He got destroyed tonight.”
I walked around in shock for Daddy had spanked me hard.
Dennis Prager was a man of great dignity. Me? Not so much. When I listened to the way Dennis Prager spoke, it filled me with respect and rebellion. Much of the time, I just wanted to mock him and bait him and tear him down because he was just so damn dignified. I tended to treat myself and others like trash. I knew I had much to learn from Dennis Prager.
After a full year of testing, my doctors concluded in March 1989 through a diagnosis of exclusion that I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). I left school in June and never returned.
My diagnosis of Judaism for what ails the world came similarly through exclusion. Every religion of which I was aware made the next life more important than this life, which, while reducing pain, also reduced purpose. I had left Christianity because I didn’t see anything important in it for me to do.
Living for myself had been fine while I had my health, but now what? In whom could I believe now that I could not believe in Luke? Perhaps in the socialist vision of people organizing for the gigantic task of meeting human needs (such as CFS)? I longed to lead the workers into the promised land.
“Luke, you are a true believer,” said Prager. “Just like the Christian waiting for Jesus, and the Jew waiting for the Messiah, you wait for socialism despite all evidence to the contrary.”
I thought about what he said and on my last weekend at UCLA I asked Prager: “To what extent do you hold Karl Marx responsible for the Gulag Archipelago, that instrument of Stalinist terror which killed about twenty million people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s… who were inconvenient to the communist regime?”
“That’s a question that is more worthy to be posed to God because God has to judge motives and acts that an individual did not directly cause,” said Prager.
“I tried to talk to God but he wasn’t in, and so…”
“In that case, I’ll try to play second fiddle,” said Prager.
“Had Marx been a personally ethical type… who showed sympathy for moral values but had merely described a world in which economic equality reigned, I’d have a more sympathetic answer.
“But, there’s an entire book on the racism of Karl Marx and…I’d offer you this thought:
“Any system that does not hold the individual morally accountable for his actions will breed evil. The essence of Marxism is that the individual is not morally accountable for his actions, and any notion of a [moral] system that transcends society and economics is nonsense. [Marx] destroyed the two pillars upon which goodness can prevail…
“Have you seen my book [The Nine Questions People Ask about Judaism co-written with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin]?”
“No,” I answered.
“Though the stuff on Judaism may not interest you,” said Prager, “I have a chapter comparing Marxism with Judaism… based upon an essay I wrote at Columbia University…. You might like it.”
CFS forced me to leave UCLA in June 1989, and I returned to my parent’s home (at 7955 Bullard Drive in Newcastle, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range 40 minutes drive up I-80 from Sacramento). Too sick to do anything, I sat alone in our isolated house masturbating to pornography as my friends in particular and life in general passed me by. My low state led me one day to pick up Prager’s book, hand it to my stepmother to read to me and begin my study of the Jewish religion.
I came to the Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism knowing that my present approach to life did not work and that all other approaches to life of which I was aware were inadequate. Now too sick to distract myself from the pursuit of meaning with the temporary pleasures of sex and success, I sought answers to life’s ultimate issues from the man whose kindness touched my life and opened me to his religion. Prager not only answered my calls over KABC radio but he also answered my letters and he sent me at no charge two editions of his quarterly journal Ultimate Issues.
Out of the many profound religious thinkers (generally Christians) that I’d met through a lifetime of study, I chose Prager to change my life for these reasons.
* If he was great, then I was great too for recognizing his greatness. I had a connection to the great man and therefore I was bonded to a greatness that would rub off on me and my problems would be solved.
* He had no agenda besides what works. For instance, how a person comes to ethical monotheism, be it through Christianity, Islam, Judaism, did not matter to him.
* He was real. He spoke frankly and honestly about sex and the rest of life. I felt like I knew the real Dennis Prager and that he was my friend.
* His clear definition of evil as “gratuitous human cruelty.”
* He hated evil, not people with differing theologies.
* His honesty in stating that he didn’t know why there was unjust natural suffering.
* His honesty in admitting that he didn’t know many things. He rarely spoke about economics, for example.
* His moderation.
* His openness to truth from any source.
* By staying open to many conflicting values, he struggled, and I appreciate that the point of life is not in the reward (as it was for the Apostle Paul) but in the struggle.
* His fairness, shown for example, in his comparison of Marxism with Judaism (in chapter four of The Nine Questions). After reading it, and after nearly a year of listening to Prager on the radio, I easily realized that socialism had been a substitute religion for me. In the fall of 1989, when I was 23, I decided to take real religion seriously.
Nine Questions gave no new arguments for God’s existence, but it showed me more clearly than I had seen before the stark necessity for taking the God question seriously. Without belief in God, life has no ultimate meaning and no objective standard of good and evil. If the only thing wrong with gratuitous torture was that I didn’t like it, depressed me.
I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life that in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way I wanted.
I wrote to Prager to tell him what he’d done for me and he wrote back: “I receive many letters, but few have touched me as much as yours. Get better. You are needed in the fight for good values.”
My life now had purpose even though I seemingly couldn’t do anything because I was so sick.
There was no God but God, and Dennis Prager was His prophet.
And the great man answered my letters!
Dennis Prager spoke for God and Dennis Prager spoke to me. Ergo, I was wired to greatness and the creator of the universe.
Now things would turn around for me. I would rise from my sick bed and become great.
Conversion To Judaism
In the middle of 1989, I accepted that we needed to organize to make a better world, but why should I join the Jewish organization and hold myself accountable to hundreds of painful laws? Judaism, after all, unique amongst world religions, says that it is easier to get afterlife rewards by staying outside the religion than by coming in. Judaism holds non-Jews accountable to only a few rules of basic decency (the Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah).
One strong argument for converting to Judaism was my painful awareness of how I had screwed up my life. In the years before my illness, I abandoned the Sabbath and worked and studied every spare minute to get ahead. In the process, however, I abandoned my family and friends, failed to develop myself in areas outside work and study, cut ethical corners in schoolwork and taxes, and destroyed my health.
I saw Judaism’s balanced approach to life as a combination of wife and mother and father figure to keep me on the straight and narrow path.
I spent thousands of dollars, almost all of my savings, not on getting well, but on sending Prager tapes to my friends, many of whom didn’t listen to them. They laughed at me. They thought I had lost my mind.
They were right. It was insanely important to me that I be Dennis Prager’s number-one fan. We were bonded by our shared mission of fighting evil. Nothing else worked in my life but my commitment to Dennis Prager and his teachings. I would take them to the world. I would be a Dennis Prager missionary. I’d die on a cross for Dennis!
I had to be number one at something. I had to be a legend. In my weakened condition, there weren’t many opportunities for greatness. I had to get my meaning from somewhere. So I got it from attaching to the great man, and hope that by osmosis, I’d become great too.
From June to December 1989 I lived in secular and Christian environments and they convinced me that I could not return to either approach to life.
Thus, my second and most powerful reason for converting to Judaism was that I saw no alternative.
I began observing Jewish Law in October (both the Sabbath and vegetarianism were familiar to me from my Adventist upbringing) 1989.
The third reason that propelled me to Judaism was my desire for importance. You can’t get more important than belonging to the Chosen Ones. They possess the only step-by-step detailed system for making a better world — halacha (Jewish Law).
I found solace in listening to Dennis Prager’s lectures on cassette tape. They were filled with a sense of Judaism’s mission to the world.
Sitting by the Brisbane river in early 1990, I made a tape to Dennis Prager talking about his lectures and radio show and how much they had influenced my life. I also gave him some tips on how he could improve his radio show.
For the first time when I mailed him, I did not hear back.
“Dennis doesn’t have time to listen to tapes,” said my now ex-girlfriend from UCLA.
One day I heard Prager mention my name during question time of his February 28, 1990 lecture morally comparing Liberalism with Conservatism delivered before the Beverly Hills Republican Club:
“My wife [Fran Prager] knows this example well. Some of you who’ve heard my show may recall Luke. Luke was a UCLA student from Australia. You may recall this young man with an accent. Burning, as the Yiddish say ‘fabrenta marxist’… burning, passionate Marxist… Called me and debated me for a year. Before he went home to Australia last year he sent me a long letter saying “You have changed my life. I have now decided to take religion seriously and I now realize that Marxism was my religion and I was wrong.”
The Call
I lay in bed one summer afternoon in 1990 listening to Prager’s lecture “Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism.” Jews bother the world because its the Jewish mission to bother the world and to give it no peace so long as it has not God. The Jews’ allegiance to Judaism’s trinity of Ellohim, Torah and Yisrael (God, law and peoplehood) challenges the gods, laws and national identities of the goyim (non-Jews).
“And just in case you weren’t antisemitic until now, and we didn’t challenge your values enough,” said Prager on tape, “we also believe that we are chosen by God….
“But every nation in history has believed itself chosen. Do you know what China means in Chinese? Center of the world. Would you say that’s ethnocentric? Do you know why the Japanese flag has a large red circle in it? That is the sun. The Japanese have the quaint belief that the sun rises first on Japan and then goes to the rest of the world… Americans believe in Manifest Destiny….
“How many of you want to see the Chinese exterminated because they think they are the center of the world? I suspect none of you. How many of you want to see the Japanese thrust into gas chambers because they think they’re the land of the Rising Sun? You know why you don’t care? Because you don’t believe it.
“Any do you know why they hated us for our belief in chosenness? Because they did believe it! That’s the difference. Nobody laughed about Jews being chosen. They believed it and they resented it…”My telephone rang and I switched off the tape. I heard a familiar voice on the other end of the line.
“Luke?”
“Oh my God.”
“Do you know who this is from one word?”
“Oh my God. It’s Dennis Prager,” I said.
“You’ve called me many times,” said Prager. “So I thought it was time I called you.”
I told Prager that I now lived for God and he told me to be moderate. “There’s no need to enter a monastery.”
Prager invited me to sit in on his radio show when I’m next in Los Angeles.
Around this time, I started telling people that Dennis Prager was the most important intellectual of the 20th Century and the most important Jewish thinker since Maimonides.
I yearned for him to run for president of the United States.
I had left for UCLA with high regard for my father, the Christian evangelist. Even though I was putatively an atheist and Marxist, I knew that there was much magnificence in my father’s approach to life and that I would return to something like it. If I heard any criticisms of my dad, I would instinctively react by defending him.
Then I started listening to Dennis Prager and started realizing all the ways my father didn’t match up. My dad called himself a Bible scholar (and published a commentary on the Book of Daniel) but he couldn’t read the Bible in its original languages. Dennis did not call himself a Bible scholar but was as fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic as he was in English.
My father’s sermons were filled with clever lines he’d read but he rarely attributed these zingers to their sources. By contrast, Dennis Prager strove to attribute everything he said to its source.
My father talked like an expert about many things he didn’t know much about, while Dennis Prager was quick to say, “I do not know.”
It was obvious on Prager’s show that he listened to people in a deep way but my father rarely could do this.
My father used many rhetorical tricks and delighted in cutting people down. Dennis never went for cheap shots and rhetorical tricks.
As Dennis Prager became a hero to me, my father fell in my esteem. I wanted to become like Dennis and flee from my father. I embraced Judaism and welcomed its contrasts with Christianity. As I studied Jewish history, I became angry at Christianity. I was glad I had good reasons to hate Christianity, and by extension, to much of my father’s preaching (and everything I hated about my childhood). I could reject my past and I could reject my unwanted self. When I emerged from the mikveh upon my conversion to Judaism, I would be born again.
I felt guilty about my continuing relationship with Tien* (my girlfriend at UCLA). I did not want to marry her, but I did not want to leave her alone either. She taped Dennis Prager’s radio show for me and showered me with phone calls, letters and other expressions of love.
Rabbi M. told me to cut off our relationship and so I did a couple of days later.
As a parting gift, I sent Tien a two-year gift subscription to Prager’s quarterly journal Ultimate Issues and over 20 Prager tapes.
I looked around to meet Jews. I was staying with my parents at the time in Newcastle, CA, about a 45-minutes drive north of Sacramento.
There weren’t many Jews around.
I Meet Jews
My Christian stepmother assisted my search by asking people randomly “Do you know any Jews?” One lady said yes. She had once considered converting to Judaism. She knew several Jews in Grass Valley, including the lay leader Michal Kohane. I phoned Michal in the summer of 1991 and we talked for an hour. She found my interest in Judaism strange but agreed to write in the Nevada County Jewish Community Center (N.C.J.C.C.) newsletter a few paragraphs about me and my desire to make Jewish friends. About 100 families received the newsletter and the only person who called me was a non-Jewish Unitarian.
Michal Kohane and her husband Mark Taylor visited me in March 1991 for the first time. I lent them three Prager tapes and Michal loved them. I lent her more. And more.
I helped ignite Michal’s and later Mark’s enthusiasm for Judaism and they in turn encouraged mine. I grew a beard and earlocks and wore the yarmulka they gave me.
A Jewish friend, whom I’ll call The Enforcer, reproved me: “Such adornments (as a yarmulka, payos (earlocks) and tzitzit) come after full observance, not before. If illness did not confine you to your house, I’d cut off your earlocks.”
The Enforcer agonized for weeks before he wore a kipa (skull cap) in public. “It’s the awesome responsibility of representing Judaism to the world,” he said. “Can I now eat in restaurants or enter a video store?”
My Dennis Prager tapes ignited an enthusiasm for Judaism in Michal, Mark and two other Jews in their circle. Over the next two years, they became Orthodox and moved to within walking distance of a shul.
In 1992, Michal got a letter back from Dennis Prager. He wrote to her: “Anyone who is a friend of Luke Ford’s is a friend of mine.”
On the downside, when I misbehaved, people started saying to me, “What would Dennis Prager say about that?”
When I sent a sexually suggestive cassette tape to a young lady named Robyn, she responded: “What would Dennis Prager think if I sent him a copy of this tape? Or that rabbi who performed your penis-puncturing ceremony?”
I Come Down With The Doubts
One day in 1992, I was seized by a strong yearning to be Dennis Prager’s best friend and simultaneously I knew that I would never be one of Dennis Prager’s friends because I was way too screwed up. I felt bad about myself and I felt ashamed that I was jealous of the people around Dennis Prager. He was such a good man and his social circle must be the same way and I could never hang with such people. My unwelcome feelings diminished after a few hours and I resolved to never let anyone know about them. For the first time, I now knew without a doubt that there was something pathological in my Prager fixation, and worse, there was something so deeply messed up about me that converting to Judaism wasn’t going to solve it. There was no action I could take that would solve my neediness, jealousy and pettiness. I was in the grip of forces beyond my control and they wanted to kill me. I hoped nobody detected the madness in my soul.
So I read and reread all of Dennis Prager’s essays in the back issues of his quarterly journal Ultimate Issues.
In the Spring 1988 edition, he wrote about pornography:
One of the most widely held anti-pornography arguments is that it demeans women — those who pose for it, as well as women generally.
This is not a strong argument.First, it is not fully accurate to speak of people being demeaned — and it is even more difficult to speak of them as being exploited — when they freely choose to do what they do, when they are well compensated for their posing, and when they have the choice to earn a living through other means. Most important, in America today, posing nude is not widely considered demeaning. Indeed, many women pose for pornographic pictures in the belief — which is quite rational, unfortunately — that it will actually help their careers. When Playboy magazine’s “Playmate of the Year” is an honored guest on the “Tonight” show, the most popular talk show in America, one cannot honestly speak of pornography as demeaning.
In a society where posing nude is more a stepping stone than an obstacle to success, the argument that pornography demeans women holds little water.
…The other dominant concern — pornography as a cause of violence — the subject of a United States government (the Meese Commission) report — is an even more misdirected line of inquiry. Neither common sense nor data suggest that pornography leads to violence. Millions of men buy pornography, yet only an infinitessimally small percentage of them engages in violence. And of that tiny fraction, how many do so as a result of pornography? The answer is probably unknowable, and probably negligible.
As for violent pornography leading to violence, why single out violence in pornography? Presumably, any graphic depiction of violence causes some viewers to commit violent acts. Yet, there is good reason to be highly skeptical about a relationship between viewing violence and committing it. Millions of people, myself included, have viewed thousands of murders on television and in movie theaters, yet we are no less sensitive to real violence.
Moreover, what about societies without pornography or even television violence? Presumably these societies should be far less violent.
It is not difficult to test this thesis — we can identify the most violent society of the past decade. In the late 1970s, Cambodians murdered and tortured about one out of every three of their fellow citizens. Cambodia was a society immersed in an orgy of violence and sadism. And the word orgy is relevant here, since much of the torture was sex related, with rape and mutilation for sadistic sexual gratification commonplace.Now, to the best of our knowledge, there was no pornography in Cambodia. In fact, nearly all communist states — many of which are the most militarized and aggressive in the world — forbid it. The same holds true for the Muslim world, which is second to the communists in violence. It, too, is pornography free. In fact, if exposure to female flesh leads to violence, Muslim countries like Iran, which ban the public exposure of women’s knees or elbows, should be among the most peaceful places on earth.
Now, let us examine countries that are relatively free of violence. Take Japan, a country that has among the lowest crime rates in the world. Japan not only allows pornography but specializes in bondage pornography, and it even features striptease acts on its state run television.
What does all of this mean? Am I implying that pornography is good, that it decreases violence or performs a public service? Not at all. There are some powerful arguments to be made against pornography. That it leads to violence, however, is not one of them.
In various lectures (including ones on Genesis) and on his radio show, I heard Dennis Prager repeatedly cite the work of the late UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller. In particular, Dennis cited Dr. Stoller’s book Sexual Excitement. I made a note in my mind to read this book.
In the April – June 1990 issue of his quarterly journal of thought, Ultimate Issues, Dennis wrote: “Generally speaking, I do not concern myself with the actions of consenting adults in the privacy of their homes, and I certainly oppose government involvement with what consenting adults do in private.”
In a 1992 lecture on Genesis 12-15, Dennis Prager says: “Sometimes we invest more in the sex act morally than it deserves.”
Under the guidance of Pragerism, I felt happy that I did not have to give up pre-marital sex to be a religious Jew.
After three years of study and practice, I converted to Judaism through a Reform rabbi in early 1993 (and through an Orthodox Beit Din in 2009).
My inherited religious extremism survived my 1993 Reform conversion. I wore a yarmulke, sidelocks and scraggly beard around my parents’ home and answered the phone “Shalom.” Like fervently Orthodox Jews, I refused to shake hands with the opposite sex. In fits of zealotry, I sold my rock ‘n’ roll CDs and burned the pornographic novel I wrote in 1988 (before I ever had sex) and my Penthouse magazine collection.
It’s A Sin
My commitment to purity lasted until the Spring of 1993 when I met Diana (a 22-year-old with E-cup natural breasts) through her mother’s singles ad in the San Francisco Jewish weekly.
Aug. 5, 1993: To fulfill my promise, I call Diana to tell her I’ve met someone else and been intimate with her. Diana tells me that Dennis Prager phoned her this morning replying to her FAX of a couple weeks ago complaining about me. Prager counseled her about me and recommended a couple of movies we should see.
Diana sent a long letter to my mother telling her about all the places around the house where we had sex, including in my father’s room. She tells them about all sorts of things I did against their wishes, including using Dad’s computer to write this.
My parents are distraught by my fornicating. They feel betrayed. They don’t recognize the monster named Luke Carey Ford. They don’t want to believe that I’m evil, so they conclude I’m sick.
“Somebody should warn Dennis Prager about you,” says my mom. “I guess he’ll find out eventually.”
“Please, God, no,” I think. “Don’t let me ever do anything to betray Dennis Prager. I owe him my life. He’s helped me turn things around. Don’t let me ever hurt him or disappoint him.”
Yet I walked around fearing that my parents were right — I am a Judas.I profess religious values, yet I fornicate like a dog. I revere Dennis Prager, yet do I live in a way that would make him proud?
I have this deep fear that I am a dangerous person. I’m not physically dangerous, but at my core I’m a writer who likes to tell a story, and these stories will always be messy because life is messy. What’s that saying about once there’s a writer in the family, the family is finished?
Aug. 25, 1993: At the tender age of 27, I run away from home to live in Orlando with the a woman eleven years my senior (T.) who has a great psychiatrist who might make me well.
Sept. 15, 1993:
T. had a bad night. She listened to Dennis Prager’s tapes on relationships and they irritated her. She told me this morning that Prager and I are biased against women.
Prager says that what a man most wants in a romantic relationship is femininity, and that he is the most important thing in the woman’s life. What women want, however, is more complex – that the man be ambitious, assertive, aggressive, driven, and successful while at the same time being intimately involved in her life and that of the children, friends, and community. Women want men who are highly sexed, but monogamous…Sensitive but not weak…
“I understand that Prager must speak in generalities,” said T. this morning, “but I don’t think his views on men and women are any more valid than any other person’s views… I understand that you are a child in your Judaism and that Prager is a father to you, but I hope that soon you’ll look for other mentors.
“We should admit that we have a strong need to feel superior to people…We like to flaunt our intelligence…Speak down to people… We resent it when anyone speaks down to us…Call us anything – mean, awkward, socially retarded…but don’t call us stupid.”
I move out from T. in early November 1993 to a home next door to my Conservative synagogue Ohev Shalom. I will always be grateful to T. for introducing me to her psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Golwyn, who puts me on the medication Nardil, which helps me make a partial recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
I Meet Dennis
I drove to Tampa Bay this afternoon with my new girlfriend Paula, a shiksa, to hear Dennis Prager lecture twice each at a Conservative and a Reform synagogue over the weekend.
After years of reading and listening to my hero, I set eyes on Prager for the first time at 7:45 PM, Friday, January 28, 1994. I introduced myself and the 6’4 240-pound Prager asked me to repeat my name and then he beamed and hugged me. We talked for ten minutes and he appeared thrilled about the progress in my health. I told him that his pro-medication attitude persuaded me (along with the good advice of Prager’s right-wing Orthodox friend Rabbi Yitzhok Adlerstein) to try anti-depressants. After a year of mixed success, I found help from Nardil, recommended by my ex-girlfriend’s doctor Daniel Golwyn.
“You owe her your life,” Prager told me, referring to T.
“Didn’t anyone recommend Nardil to you earlier?” asked Prager.
“Not that I remember,” I replied. “But because I come from a Seventh-Day Adventist background that discourages the use of mind-altering medication, I resisted for years trying anti-depressants. Also, I never thought that I had a depression problem. I believed that I had a physical problem.
“Nardil’s great. It blunts my sex drive so that I’m more in control of myself. Nardil gives me energy and improves my self-confidence. I am returning to how I felt before my illness.”
“That’s right,” said Prager. “There’s a great misconception about anti-depressants that they give you self-confidence, etc…. Nardil has simply brought your brain chemistry back to normal.”
Prager told me he received a letter from my worried mother six months ago. People who cannot change me frequently write to people in my life who can change me, such as Dennis Prager and my best friend between 1988 and 1994, UCLA guidance counselor Jules Zentner.
“Your parents must be glad about your recovery in health,” said Prager Friday night before his lecture.
“I also heard from your ex-girlfriend,” said Prager.
“Which one?” I asked.
We established that it was Diana who grew so discouraged by my failure to take her out that she faxed Prager complaining about me. Prager phoned her back a few minutes after Diana heard from me that I had gone off with another woman.
I appreciated the time that Prager has spent replying to the letters of my friends and family. I was embarrassed that they took his valuable time. I limited my own correspondence to Prager because I knew that he gets hundreds of letters a week, and that he tries to reply to all the serious ones.
I frequently told my Christian friend Joanne, who most encouraged me to see my hero in person, that I did not feel that I had much to contribute to Prager. Yet Friday night and throughout the weekend, Prager seemed interested in me. He wanted to read my book on my conversion to Judaism. I felt I had nothing to say that was as significant as what Prager could read in other books.
I alternated between self-loathing and self-aggrandizement.
In his Friday night lecture, Prager referred to me. Then during question time, we had a 10-minute dialogue.
I addressed my hero through the public microphone. “You want people to take Judaism seriously. I think you would agree that an excellent way to begin is with the study of Judaism’s sacred texts. I’m a pisher (boy) in Judaism, but I bet that the majority of people who immerse themselves in text think that your thought is bizarre.”
Prager to the audience: “Did most of you hear the question?”
Audience: “No.”
Prager: “Good!”
Everyone laughs.
Prager said that I asked an excellent question. He admitted that Orthodox Jews are ambivalent about him.
Prager quoted a prominent Chabad rabbi in Los Angeles who said that Prager had brought more people to Orthodox Judaism than anyone else (aside from the entire Lubavitch movement).
Prager regularly speaks for Chabad, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish sect. And he says he has the private encouragement of many Orthodox rabbis.
“But those are rabbis that deal with reality rather than study of sacred text all day,” I interjected. Prager agreed with me.
Prager said that many Orthodox scholars dislike his thought, but my hero pointed out that the passionate sects often hate those who differ only slightly.
“But if all I knew about a Conservative rabbi was that he’d spent a life studying text, I would bet that he would think you nuts,” I said.
“Give me an example,” replied Prager and we discussed the Jewish mission to bring the world to ethical monotheism.
Prager said that the Conservative movement is growing more insular.
“I love your ideas,” I told Prager, “but when I discuss them with scholars of Judaism, they cut me to pieces. You use human logic outside of traditional Jewish thought. You are human first, Jew second. What helps make you great is that you left Judaism for years and then came back in…. [You see Jewish things inside out.]
“You are unlike every major thinker in the rabbinic tradition… unlike Joseph Karo (who compiled the most authoritative code of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch), unlike the Vilna Gaon (who studied 16 hours a day.”
“The Vilna Gaon said that you should study Talmud rather than talk with your wife,” said Prager.
Later, I reflected that the Vilna Gaon had much basis in the rabbinic tradition for his statement.
Prager said that it did not personally upset him that so many Jewish scholars thought him nuts, but he did feel for people like me – people who came to Judaism to touch the world with ethical monotheism and found that those who most knew Judaism seemed to occupy themselves with trivia.
I appreciated Prager’s kind words but I did not mind a fight, even if it was with people who knew much more than I do.
After I stopped arguing with Prager during Friday night’s question period, he told my story to the audience and allowed me to plug my book.
Afterwards, during schmoozing and eating time, I met two interesting Jewish men in their late 30s – Michael and Lance. Along with Paula, we hung out at a jazz club for an hour after services.
When Prager’s second talk finished early Saturday afternoon, I asked him how much energy I should use to combat congregational rabbis who deny the God of Judaism. Dennis said we must be respectful. We agreed that God matters and that reconstructionist Judaism deserves our opposition.
I asked Prager for his latest list of favorite Jewish thinkers alive today, and he did not have any. All his favorite thinkers are non-Jews.
“Who are those thinkers?” a man asked, and Prager allowed me to answer for him. I had heard most of Prager’s lecture tapes and radio shows, and I had read most of the important things he had published. I could be Dennis Prager’s mouthpiece!
I had heard recordings of every lecture that Prager gave that weekend, but he threw in 20% new material.
Saturday afternoon, January 29, 1994, we talked privately for ten minutes. Dennis said it gave him great comfort that if anything happened to him, I was there to carry on the battle for good values. I felt overwhelmed.
At the beginning of Prager’s Saturday night and his Sunday morning lectures, my hero had me hand around papers for people to sign up for his $25 a year quarterly journal Ultimate Issues.
Before I gave Prager his papers back Saturday night, I demanded that he answer another question of mine – If I had a girlfriend that I was 95% sure I wouldn’t marry, did I have to tell her that?
Prager said yes and cited the shopkeeper law – “You may not ask a shopkeeper the price of an item that you know you will not buy, because it would raise the hopes of the storekeeper for no reason.” (Talmud)
Before Prager drove off Saturday night, he told me again how happy he was to see me. “If I die now,” he said to me, “I will die happy and in large part it will be due to you.” Prager told the people gathered around us how well I knew his thought.
“If I die tonight,” he said to me, “you will have a heavy responsibility to carry on.”
During Sunday morning’s lecture on how to raise a Jewish child in a secular society, Dennis Prager lost his train of thought. But I yelled a few words up to him and they enabled him to continue.
“I told you that he was good,” Prager said to the audience of 500 people.
Prager hugged me again before he drove away and told me to stay in touch. If I return to Los Angeles, he said that he might have work for me.
Tears welled up in my eyes.
Dennis Prager drove away to catch a flight for Miami where he’d record the first of his guaranteed 39 weekly half-hour national TV shows. His show would be produced by the makers of the “Rush Limbaugh program” and Prager’s TV show will follow Rush in most cities. If Prager’s TV show got good ratings, Prager’s radio show should at long last go national.
I reminded Prager Saturday night that he had said that he’d never do a TV show unless he got his way in almost everything. Prager said that he had on this new show.
People gathered around me all weekend. I enjoyed being the center of attention. They wanted my address and phone number. They wanted to read my book. They wanted me to come speak for them. They liked me. They really liked me. I was home.
One lady said, “So, you’re the pisher (boy).”
“In my Judaism,” I replied. “My Hebrew is weak.”
“Most Jews in America do not know Hebrew,” she replied. “I am impressed by how much Judaism you do know.”
“In comparison to a scholar, I’m a pisher,” I replied. “But in comparison to the average Jew, I am the Messiah.”
Los Angeles
I arrived March 31, 1994, and a week later I had a job interview with Prager’s executive Mark Wilcox.
I spent almost two hours talking to Mark. He was totally cool. I felt like we hit it off. I was wrong.
A few years before, Dennis Prager said I could call him up when I got to LA and he’d invite me to sit in on his radio show.
A few weeks into my return to LA, I asked Mark Wilcox about this and he said he didn’t know anything. I pushed him and he said he didn’t have time.
I was becoming known and it wasn’t good.
I talked to a girl I was seeing, Debbie, about my hopes for working for Dennis Prager. The weeks were going by and I wasn’t hearing anything back. So she took action and called the office. The next day I got a letter in the mail saying they had no position for me.
The rejection stung.
Dennis later told me that he had unbelievable health insurance costs for his employees and that’s why he couldn’t give me work. When I brought up sitting in on his radio show, he arranged it right away.
I showed up to KABC 20 minutes early — there was no parking nearby to sit and wait and I didn’t want to take the chance on traffic making me late. I figured it was best to be a little early and that I’d sit in the waiting room until the time came. Unfortunately, I was ushered in to the studio immediately and it made me look overly eager.
“You’re 20 minutes early,” said Dennis.
“Should I leave?” I asked.
“No,” said Dennis. “Just noting that you are 20 minutes early.”
It was fun to sit in the studio for 80 minutes to watch Dennis do his show. His personal assistant Laurie Zimmet bustled in and out. Part of me wanted her job but part of me knew I was not suited to serve people. I had main character energy. I was going to be a star. A big bright shining star.
I build my new family at Dennis Prager’s Mountaintop Minyan at Stephen S. Wise temple. I could not have asked for better friends. They read my 100-page autobiography that I hand around. They share a copy with Fran Prager. They know who I am and they love me anyway.
Basic Instinct
I worked up the courage and mailed Dennis a letter asking him to write a forward for my autobiography. He replied that he did not have the time.
I felt stupid. I knew he didn’t have time. I dreaded becoming the type of friend who asked more from Dennis Prager than he could give. I didn’t want to be a pest, but I had just acted like a pest. My needs piss out over everyone I love.
As the years went by, my character flaws became more apparent to Dennis Prager and I felt him distancing himself. This hurt. I knew why he was distancing. Because I wasn’t acting like a mentch. I was banging everything female that moved and gave me a go. I wasn’t a nice person to myself or others. I needed to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, the Torah at every minyan. I manipulated everyone for attention, exhausting myself and others. I had converted to Judaism to get rid of an unwanted self, but that unwanted self was back and he was bigger and badder than ever, only now he wore a yarmulke and yammered on about ethical monotheism.
One Sunday in 1994, I attended a seminar on sexuality at Young Israel of Century City (YICC). Without fear, I marched right up to its rabbi, Elazar Muskin, and told him that the featured speaker, Dennis Prager, was the inspiration for my conversion to Judaism.
YICC used to be Prager’s home until he could stand its rote prayers and claustrophobic community (in his view) no more and drove off in 1992 to the Reform temple Stephen S. Wise with its guitar-strumming female cantor.
Rabbi Muskin took heat from his most conservative congregants for inviting Prager that day to deliver his comparatively liberal views on sex (that masturbation is OK and pre-marital sex within a committed relationship is not a big deal) in the Orthodox shul.
After Prager’s speech, Rabbi Muskin mentioned my story from the pulpit as a way of defending himself. Rabbi Muskin said that while Prager may be outside the boundaries of Orthodox Judaism, he brings many people like me to a life of Torah.
Outside the shul, Prager thanked me. “I know it was you the rabbi was talking about.”
Ironically, Rabbi Muskin did not particularly want converts and baalei teshuva (penitents) at his shul because he’d learned through bitter experience how unbalanced we were. He shipped off potential converts to Orthodox Judaism to the RCC, where almost all (more than 95%) are rejected. I know of only one convert who has davened at YICC for years (an Asian woman).
In my first 18 months in Los Angeles (half of which I spent homeless and sleeping in my car), I went to a lot of synagogues and I slept with a lot of women (about 20, half of whom I met in shul).
A couple of my acting auditions called for me to kiss a guy. The idea creeped me out and I refused. I talked to Dennis at Stephen S. Wise temple one Sabbath morning and asked him what I should do. He said to avoid such contact.
Relieved, I followed his advice. No man kissing for me!
What Women Want
One time after services on Sabbath morning, I interrupted Dennis’s enjoyment of the singing to ask him about a documentary I was working on. Tentatively titled “What Women Want,” I was interviewing young women about what they seek in a man.
I asked Dennis for recommended questions. He said to wait for the end of a particular song and then he told me that I should ask them about the importance of a man’s earning potential.
I felt bad for impinging on his Sabbath. I was overreaching. I was violating Prager’s maxim, “Never ask for more from a friendship than it can provide.”
I was way too needy.
My documentary project did not pan out. The sound quality was lousy. My shoddy side bit me in the butt again. I lack consideration for myself, for others, and for my work.
I had to look elsewhere to achieve.
Publish Or Perish
In September of 1995, I decide I must publish a book. I have to display my greatness now. That will rocket me out of the ooze of LA’s struggling actors into the stratosphere of distinguished thinkers. It will show my family that I am a scholar like my father. It will show women that I am desirable. And it will show my Jewish community that I am learned enough to apply the insights of a 4,000-year-old tradition to modernity.
But on what topic? My first inclination is to follow up my 1992 conversion to Judaism with a book on how to be a good person, developing upon the teachings of my hero Dennis Prager. I sent him a letter. Through his assistant Laurie he asks me to hold off.
Stymied, I turn to the obvious alternative for a man of my delicate sensibilities. Though I’ve seen but a handful of adult videos in my 29 years, I decided in September to write a history of sex in film. My father at this age was getting his first doctorate (Rhetoric).
How could I, a somewhat Torah Jew, even conceive of writing about pornography? After all, I attend synagogue several times a week. I believe in the divine origins of the Bible and the ideals of Judaic holiness. I practice most of the Torah’s commandments.
Here’s why. My rebbe, Dennis Prager, says Judaism is strong enough to tackle reality. I figure I’ll penetrate the most religiously-challenged corner of modernity with my newly-acquired Jewish conscience and come out the other side with insights into the human condition.
In my first year in Los Angeles, I read Robert Stoller’s book Sexual Excitement. It talked about the sex industry. I was intrigued.
I then read two books Dr. Stoller wrote on the porn industry — Porn: Myths for the Twentieth Century and Coming Attractions: The Making of an X-Rated Video.
If Dennis Prager considered Dr. Robert Stoller’s work on sexual excitement so important, which included two books on the porn industry, why could I not as a Dennis Prager disciple write my own book on this topic and also receive Dennis Prager’s approbation?
In late 1995, using my adopted Hebrew name of Levi Ben Avraham, I make a dozen trips to schmooze pornographer Yosef Shemesh of Factory Home Video, taking the 405 freeway from my guesthouse in Beverly Hills to the San Fernando Valley, where the wide open spaces provide the anonymity necessary for a pornography industry, and the freedom I desire to create my own life.
In January 1996, Yosef gives me a $4,000 check made out to my DBA (Doing Business As) Ford Publications (not to be confused with Desmond Ford Publications, my father’s publishing entity) to make a porn movie.
I decided to title it “What Women Want” — inspired by Dennis Prager’s lectures on the differences between men and women.
I know that directing porn isn’t the Torah’s way, but after six years on the sick bed, and with a haunting fear that my CFS could return any time, I will risk heavenly reward for earthly pleasure. I will sacrifice my honor for knowledge. I will surrender my social standing to merge with my subjects. From here on, I can have no illusion that I’m better than those I write about.
Some questions haunt me:
What’s wrong with promiscuous sex?
What’s wrong with sex as art?
Does illicit sex tend to lead to personal destruction?
Does sleeping around harm your soul?
Does it eat away at your moral character, even if it is all consensual and there’s no deceit?
My moral guidelines come from on high, KABC radio talk show host Dennis Prager. He says that pornography is a simple reflection of the male imagination. If models choose to do something for which they are paid, how can you call them exploited? If porn leads to violence, why are the most violent places (Arab, Islamic and communist countries) devoid of porn while the most peaceful ones (Japan, Scandinavia) are saturated with it?
Consensual sex between unmarried adults, on or off videotape, is not immoral, only unholy.
I agree. Who wants to be holy seven days a week? I will be holy six days a week, and on the Seventh Day fornicate. I’ll be ‘modern Orthodox,’ i.e., Orthodox one day a week (the Sabbath) and modern (everything’s OK so long as you don’t hurt anyone) the other six. I will be religious and real.
What Women Want
On January 23rd, 1996, I scribble notes, put on my white shul suit, and drive to Hollywood and Vine Boulevards in Hollywood, and take an elevator up several floors to the headquarters of JT Video, where I direct my porn movie.
The five male performers arrive on time but Kimberly Kummings, the rebellious daughter of a millionaire business executive, shows up an hour late.
She eyes me with surprise. “You’re way too clean-cut for this business.”
“I’m a nice Jewish boy.”
Kimberly smiles. “I need a nice Jewish boy in my life. My boyfriend beats the shit out of me. I once talked to the University of Judaism about conversion classes.”
“You should do it. I converted. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
“Then what are you doing in this business?”
“I’m not in the business. I’m just making one movie as research for my book. I have traditional values.”
This should be the most exciting things I’ve ever done, but as Kimberly performs for my camera, my hands grow cold, as I realize I am in moral free-fall.
How did I get into this position? How did a sincere convert to Judaism, my new law-giving father, end up making porn, and making it badly?
I lack bonds. My isolation has paved the way for me to slide into the sewer.
Living off my credit cards (profligacy in my dad’s ethic), I begin my academic research on porn with Dennis Prager’s recommendation of Dr. Robert Stoller, who argued that sexual excitement, as exemplified by pornography, demands the desire to sin.
Through Dr. Stoller’s writings, I understand the erotic devils that drive me. As a child, I experienced frustration at the hands of those I turned to for love and protection. As I grew up, I constructed erotic scripts to convert my earlier painful experiences into fantasized triumphs, finding relief from the humiliation that real life delivers through the imagined revenge of porn.
To become aroused, I reduce women to less than they are. By dehumanizing the opposite sex, by treating them as a means to an end, I undo my sense of victimhood vis-a-vis those I desire most.
At Aish Ha Torah, I can’t tell anyone about what I’ve done but at the Reform temple Stephen S. Wise (which has more members than any other synagogue in the world), where religion revolves around taste, joy and choice as opposed to Orthodoxy’s unswerving emphasis on observing God’s Law, I tell all of my friends.
One day, Dennis Prager (who lent me $30 in 1995 when I was broke) introduced me to the hired help as “the most religious member of his profession.”
Dennis enjoys teasing. Once he told me with a straight face, “I heard you were bisexual.”
I give it right back to him. Knowing his opposition to corporal punishment, I tell him, “I was smacked around all the time as a kid, and look how I turned out.”
He rolls his eyes and keeps silent.
“Everything I am today is because of you, Dennis,” I say.
This bait is too juicy and he must respond.
‘It’s too much,’ he smiles. ‘I’m not worthy of so much credit.’
“I want to dedicate my first book to you,” I say.
“Let’s wait for the one you write on the Baal Shem Tov [founder of Hasidic Judaism].”
I’ve put Prager in an impossible position. Though he is liberal on porn, he can’t endorse what I do. He wants me to succeed as a writer and as a man, but he also wants me to be holy.
Leading Grace After Meals, Dennis looks at me while reciting the prayer that God “help us earn an honorable livelihood.” While playing the piano, he gives me a penetrating gaze. “What are you doing?” it says. “I thought you were a genuine convert? Haven’t you been listening to me for a decade? Don’t you know that what you are doing is wrong? You’re shaming me. I told people that anyone who’s a friend of yours is a friend of mine. You made friends with my friends. But now you’ve made friends with pornographers. You’re on a path that can only end in tragedy.”
The Crackup
I sense Dennis Prager and the other Godly people in my life distancing themselves from me as they learn what I do for a living. Porn spills out of my conversations and jars sensibilities. Boundaries have never been my strong point. Ignoring my better judgment, I pass out rough drafts of my book to folks at the temple (including the Persian father of this woman I love). They are aghast. The woman and her sister never let me forget what I’ve done.
Torah is not helping. Dennis Prager’s teachings are not helping. They just remind me of what a bad man I am.
After lunch, I share my hate mail with my closest friends and play them a tape of death threats from the Editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide, Mike Albo. Into the shocked silence, I giggle. My friends are appalled.
“Have you gone to the police?” asks Chris Donald.
“Yes. They said to call back if Mike comes to my door.”
“Then what are you going to do? What have you done to attract such hatred? Jesus, Luke. You’ve got to get out of that world. It’s evil. You’ll get yourself killed.”
Laurie Zimmet says: “If Aish HaTorah finds out, they will throw you out. They’re not Modern Orthodox like Beth Jacob. They’re charedi (fervently Orthodox). They won’t play around.”
My friends say they’ve had it with me and porn. If I don’t leave it, they will leave me. They look at me as though I’m an addict, not so much to porn but to attention.
In December 1996, I made a post on a talk radio usenet group that Dennis Prager’s radio show has become repetitive. More repetitive than normal. I don’t like the new format of only one topic per hour.
My post gets me into trouble with my friends. I emailed Dennis an apology. He accepts it. He says it is tiring enough fighting for his values in the public square. He doesn’t want to deal with public criticism from people he thought were friends. He says his show topics are more varied than I posted.
“I’m thinking of going in a new direction,” I say a couple of weeks later, as Chris Donald and I sit in Laurie Zimmet’s car on Christmas Day, 1997, immersed in a three-hour conversation about the direction of my life. They brighten until I deliver the sentence that ends our friendship. “I want to write a biography of Dennis Prager.”
“Don’t do that,” Laurie says. “If you do, Dennis will never talk to you again. I will never talk to you again. The friends you have in common with Dennis will never talk to you again. You are not the one to write that biography.”
(I did not make these private conversations public. My friends did in their Usenet posts blasting me. After they put it all out there, I’ve tried to be fair to all concerned.)
In the last days of 1997, I start blogging about Dennis’s radio show. In writing lies my redemption. God spoke the world into being in Genesis and I’m going to speak my best self into being in the ordinary world somehow I have to find.
Happiness Is A Serious Problem
January 15, 1998
On a cold and rainy night, I walk into the Barnes and Noble store in Westwood for a signing of Dennis Prager’s new book, Happiness is a Serious Problem. The crowd of over 100 is largely old men.
Dennis sprawls on a chair behind a small table, shaking hands, laughing, and autographing books with a favorite fountain pen.
Laurie blows in. She gives me a quick hug and kiss. “No time to talk,” she says.
I’m no blessing to her life. To Chris’s life. To Dennis’s life. To anyone’s life.
I buy a book and line up to get my first autograph as an adult. When my turn comes, Prager greets me with a big smile and some ribbing, “Well, Luke, I didn’t know you could afford this.” He introduces me to the people around him. “Do you know what this guy does for a living? He makes porn films. He probably spent his last dollar to buy my book.”
I look into their stunned faces and feel humiliated. Dennis surely did not humiliate me intentionally. He must’ve thought I was proud of my choices.
Dennis signs, “For Luke Ford, No comment but warm wishes.”
My face burning, I force a smile, a nod, a “Thank you,” and walk into the rain. I shiver. My world will be colder without Dennis, Laurie and Chris.
Every bit of goodwill I earned, I destroyed. Everything I built, I destroyed. Everything I touched, I destroyed.
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Exile
On April 13, 1998, everyone in my YICC Talmud class (I’ve been attending daily for about four months) gave me the evil eye when I entered the room. I immediately realize what happened. They know who I am and what I do.
I shrink down in my chair and wait for the storm.
At the end of the lesson, I asked the rabbi a question about profiting from the sale of non-kosher goods. I’m interrupted by Mark, a strictly observant father of seven boys. He knows exactly what I’m driving at and he delivers a stern answer: “You can’t profit from porn banner ads on your Web site.”
I look around to see everyone glaring at me.
Humiliated, I walk out the door and determine that it will be a long time before I return. I drive down the street to Aish HaTorah and go into a private meeting with Rabbi Moshe Cohen. He leaves me for a minute, walks to a filing cabinet in a back room and returns with a thick folder, which he drops on the desk in front of me.
“This is the Luke Ford file,” he says.
I’m rattled as I imagine what it must contain.
Rabbi Cohen gives me a searching glance and then offers an empathetic smile.
“You didn’t know we kept files? It seems sneaky?”
I shake my head. He sits down beside me and pulls out my post from three days ago to SCJ (soc-culture-Jewish). “Did you write that?”
“I did. It’s satirical. It was a way of me making fun of my situation.”
“This is very serious. To use a term from law school, it shows bad faith. You’re going to have to make a decision. You can either have nothing to do with porn or you will have to stay away from the synagogue. I thought you were leaving porn?”
“I was, but I just got a great offer to make $3,000 a month from my column.”
“You’re a smart guy. You can figure out other ways to make a living.”
Rabbi Cohen digs into the Luke Ford folder and comes out with a letter from Prager’s assistant, Laurie Zimmet, denouncing my unauthorized writings on her boss. He reads it to me and I respond.
He thinks for a few seconds and then shrugs. “I don’t care what you do to Dennis,” he says. “What does he call his newsletter?”
“Ultimate Issues.”
“Ultimate Issues,” repeats Rabbi Cohen, a look of distaste passing over his face.
“It sounds arrogant.
“Dennis is not a part of our community. It’s not important what you write about him. But pornography is very serious. You must choose. No Orthodox synagogue will allow you to write on porn. It’s…”
He casts about for the right word to use for the distasteful subject and settles on the Hebrew category “Tame.” He grimaces. “Impure. Unclean. I’m sure it’s very academic as you say but we still can’t have that in our community.”
I hold my head in my hands. “My father had a similar choice before he was kicked out of the Adventist ministry. Talk about visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons for three generations.”
“That’s only if the son continues in the sins of the father,” Rabbi Cohen says quietly. “What’s your decision?”
“I will stay away from the synagogue until I have nothing to do with porn.”
He looks into my soul. “OK, then.”
We shake hands and I slump back to my hovel. I close the blinds and lock the door, but I can’t get away from the feeling that the community watches me and fears me. I’ve sacrificed my dearest friends at shul for becoming famous on the Internet.
In the Spring of 1998, I show my writing on Dennis to the woman I am dating. She breaks into tears. Upon catching her breath, she says, “This is how you treat the person you admire more than anyone in the world?”
Now it’s my time to gulp for air. My actions make sense to me but to nobody else. It’s hard to hold on to my story when nobody buys it.
This sucks, but this will pass. I was never going to be a fan of anyone for long. I have promises to keep. And pages to write before I sleep.
The Break
On Sunday morning, May 17, 1998, I play touch football with my temple. I rush the quarterback. Blocked unexpectedly from the side by sisters, I crash to the ground, breaking my left wrist.
Later, I walk three miles to the Century City Hospital where I go under general anesthesia for three hours while a doctor fastens steel bolts into my wrist to hold everything together.
Upon waking, I feel alone. As my stretcher is wheeled into the elevator, I feel every bump and I know that if I were to fall, there would be no one to catch me. As I slide into bed, I reflect on all my fractured friendships. As I sip coffee, and I never drink coffee, I recall my past hyperbole. How funny it seemed at the time but now I want to salve the wounds of those I’ve infuriated so they won’t hurt me. A parade of angry faces marches through my head.
My friends despise me for writing about Dennis Prager. I am alone. I am lost. I vomit. The hospital keeps me in overnight. They want to discharge me to a friend, but I don’t have friends. I take a cab home the next afternoon and listen to Dennis Prager’s radio show. With my one good hand, I post that I find his words a comfort.
The Gypsy
I stagger to the drugstore, my left arm in a cast, to pick up my pain medication. A middle-aged woman approaches me. “I’m getting a special feeling about you,” she says and hands me her card. She’s a psychic. “You should come see me soon. I’ll give you a special rate.”
I don’t believe in psychics but I visit her anyway. Her office on Pico and Robertson Blvd. is close to my former shuls. As I walk over, I look around to make sure no Orthodox Jew can see how low I’ve fallen.
I have my tarot cards read ($30) and they seem to unveil my life. Moved, I pour out my problems.
She asks me what it is that I want most. ‘To hear from Dennis Prager,’ I say.
She assures me that something will happen in the next 24 hours.
Returning home, I find an email from Prager, my first in months. He quotes from my recent post of appreciation and adds, “You should remember that the next time, for whatever reason, you want to hurt me.”
That my hero still reads me, that I still appear on his radar screen, shows that all hope is not lost. I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to talk to him and talk about him.
A believer, I now visit the gypsy regularly and eventually drop a total of $1200. But there are no more emails from Dennis.
Rebel Without A Shul
Friday night, I put on my best suit and wander the streets of my Pico-Robertson community. I pass Orthodox Jews returning home from shul. They seem to take over the neighborhood, marching in groups down the middle of the street, pushing strollers. Is there room enough for me?
It’s dark now. I recognize people from Aish but they don’t recognize me. At one time, they made me feel whole. But with their great love came great demands, and when sacrifice was required of me, I fled.
The air is fragrant with home cooking. I hear the chanting of Hebrew, the blessings on the Sabbath, the woman of the house leading the meal, the adoring children, the wine, the washing of hands, the bread. I glance in windows and imagine myself as an honored guest rather than the polluting outsider.
I’m always the observer rather than the participant, a dreamer rather than a doer, a watcher rather than an actor. I live in my head rather than in life.
I long to cuddle with the Sabbath bride. I long to cuddle with Kimberly Kummings. I long to fill the hole in my soul by filling the hole in a young woman’s body.
I cross Robertson Boulevard and head west to Beverlywood, the affluent part of the community. I walk past former friends, past the homes of people I’ve offended, past the synagogue that ejected me. I hear Sabbath songs and eventually the Grace after Meals, the conclusion of the Sabbath evening meal. I feel a chill in the air by the Museum of Tolerance, the symbol of Orthodox success, and turn for home.
I’ve absorbed my loss of community in my body and my posture is worse than ever. Unlike my silly porn feuds, this loss is real and I am completely unprepared. By polluting the innocent, I’ve added another kink to my back. I walk slumped over, my shoulders sagging under the weight of my sins.
I set out to be the great man and I ended up the bad man.
Just before Rosh Hashanah 1998, I email an apology to Dennis Prager for republishing some of his essays without permission on my website.
A Therapeutic Revelation
Shaken by the loss of all my friends in Los Angeles, I entered twice-weekly psychotherapy in May of 1998.
After a year of talking on and off about the loss of my friends, I said one day, “I’m mad at Dennis.”
Therapist: “You’re mad at Dennis? Most people would think that Dennis should be mad at you. You betrayed him big time. You want to know what I think?”
Luke: “Yes.”
Therapist: “You learned so much from Dennis and through your blogging, you want him to learn something from you. Dennis affected your life and you want to show him that you can affect his life.”
“Yes!” I said.
After that insight, I lost all desire to talk about Dennis Prager in therapy and out of therapy, to others and to myself.
I saw that Dennis Prager was just another guy who found an earner doing good and making good.
Like my dad.
The rhetoric is different, but the messianic energy is the same.
Mother. Father. Here is your son.
It is finished.
My Dennis Prager fixation is finished.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
In March 2000, my family pays for me to fly to Brisbane, Australia, to see doctors of their choice. I meet for three hours with a psychiatrist who gives the following notes to my sister:
Luke is not suffering the effects of a head injury. He has a personality disorder of the histrionic/narcissistic type. Luke is very dependent upon other people for his identity as a person.
He has poor identity integration and poor self-esteem. Accordingly, Luke is always looking for mirroring’it’s called ‘narcissistic supply.’ That is to say that Luke is always looking for external validation of himself as a person (i.e., he needs other people to tell him who he is). Because it is not possible for people to mirror him all the time, he gets disappointed and this can turn to envy.
Luke may not be conscious of the fact that he is envious of his family, as they seem to have things he would like to have but does not have. This leads to him fluctuating between, on the one hand, devaluing people such as the family (putting them down) and on the other, idealization of people’such as Dennis Prager.
Luke tends to make unreasonable demands of people who are eventually driven to setting limits on him. Luke takes this badly.
Luke needs five to ten years of insight orientation psychotherapy. It was the falling out with Dennis Prager that caused him to go to therapy. While Luke has a lot of therapy ‘speak,’ he may not really understand the concepts involved. Luke’s therapist did well to keep him in therapy for 15 months’that is unusual for someone with Luke’s condition as such people often leave off therapy when it becomes too confronting. Luke will not continue therapy that is confrontational, particularly in the early stages.
Luke will continue to do what he is doing to satisfy his needs until such times as the rewards (reinforcement) are outweighed by the negative effects of same (punishment). Then he may do something about getting his life on track and getting therapy or going back to finish his degree (which would give him some self-esteem).
The negative effects of his current behavior are that no one will have a long-term relationship with him, as people cannot live without getting something back’and Luke is always taking in without giving anything back. Second, any decent woman who looked at his Web site would be immediately repulsed.
Luke has a complicated personality. He has mood instability. Luke
becomes focused on one thing then, when he is not getting the desired
rewards, he drops it and moves on.Luke in his current state would not be successful in employment. He wants immediate results and if he does not get them, then he does not want a bar of it.
His rules are situational and he justifies things. Luke is capable of being exploitive.
Whoa! I think she understands me.
Trip To Israel July 1-15, 2000
It’s 4 a.m., and we’re flying over North Eastern Canada, 5700 miles away from our destination in Tel Aviv. I’m sick. I’m feverish. And my conscience is bothering me.
I see myself most clearly in the early morning. What I see now is what I true and I must write it down or I will deny it later.
I’m surrounded by single Jewish females and some of them like me. There’s an ordinary world somehow I have to find.
Pride’s gone out the window, crossed the rooftops, run away, left me in the vacuum of my heart.
The vacuum. It’s what my therapist calls the hole in the soul. That Aussie psychiatrist was right about me. I have a narcissistic personality disorder. It will take years of insight-oriented therapy to overcome it. Right now I’m stuck in self-defeating internal drives that I usually can’t see clearly unless it is 4 a.m. and then I usually can’t face these truths in daylight because they’re too painful and I distract myself with obsessions.
No matter how noble my goal, such as living for God and becoming a good person, I not only can’t reach my goals, I can’t help but self-destruct in everything I touch. No matter what cause I join, I self-destruct. There’s something in me that wants to recreate the most powerful experience of my childhood — rejection (growing up in foster care). To regain these intense feelings, to trigger that cascade of brain chemicals, I have to blow up my standing in every group I join.
I heard Dennis Prager say on the radio Friday that when you have sex outside of emotional intimacy, it makes emotional intimacy more difficult. Uncommitted sex makes achieving intimacy with another human being more difficult.
I make a nice living providing salacious details of the lives of porn actresses. I take a cut from whores.
I’m a whore. And when I go to Orthodox shuls, I feel like a whore in a church.
There’s an ordinary world somehow I have to find.
‘Do You Want To Commit Suicide?’
As the 2001 summer gets hotter, the Jewish calendar gets sadder. July 29 is Tisha Be’Av, the saddest day of the Jewish year.
I spend the last hours of the fast at the Orthodox synagogue Beth Jacob. I wonder if the frowns I receive grow out of the occasion or out of my website.
I walk home in plastic sandals. My telephone rings. It’s an old friend from Aish HaTorah. I haven’t talked to her since 1998.
“Do you want to commit suicide?”
“No.”
“This Jerusalem Report article is bad enough. Now the Jewish Journal is doing a cover story on you. Everyone in the community will see it and they will shun you. You do realize that?”
“Yeah.”
“You must do everything you can to stop this article. Offer them $10,000. This could kill you.”
I can’t take it anymore. When I led separate lives, I could separate my religious and secular selves. Now everything is melding together and I can’t face the consequences. I must sell Lukeford.com and quit writing on porn for the following reasons:
* Most of the people important to me are Orthodox Jews.
* I’m willing to sacrifice self-expression for community.
* Pornography has numbed me and I feel in a creative rut.
* By maintaining any connection to porn, I socially isolate myself.
* I want to marry and most women can’t handle the work I do.
May 12, 2004
Striding into the University of Judaism to debate same-sex marriage, Dennis Prager sees me. He stops, smiles, and says my name.
I walk over and shake his hand.
‘Where are you theologically?’ he asks.
‘I’m Modern Orthodox,’ I claim.
‘So you believe that is the truth?’
‘Just like baseball has rules, I accept that Orthodoxy defines the rules for Jewish life, but when you must do historical [or literary] scholarship, then you must leave religion behind and only follow the evidence. I don’t think [modern scholarship] and [Orthodox] Judaism are compatible.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he says. Wishing me well, he walks inside. A minute later, I follow him.
I was on the cover of the Jewish Journal Aug. 2, 2007:
Prager has since completely distanced himself.
“He was neither a pupil nor a friend,” Prager said in a brief interview. “I think I appealed to something good in him at some point, and I hope I did. But I don’t know.”
Amy Klein writes Sept. 7, 2008 for the New York Times “Modern Love” column:
Could I talk to anyone else Ford wrote about?
I scoured his site and found that the radio host Dennis Prager’s name kept popping up.
“Oh, he gets obsessed with people but he eventually finds someone else,” Prager told me with a hint of relief, perhaps at the fact that he was no longer Ford’s target.
July, 2012
A year into my first twelve-step program, I begin working the steps at an air conditioned Starbucks while sipping on sugar-free ice tea.
Step One. I admit that my life has become unmanageable. My addictions to fantasy, delusion and salvation destroy my access to the ordinary world.
Step Two. I accept that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.
I’ve always been in rebellion against being told what to do. Only since I realized at age 22 that my own inclinations would destroy me have I been able to accept the dictates of the transcendent. Only when I had no other choice.
Without higher purpose, my addictions just keep shifting from sex to power to attention to excitement. I’m tired of provoking people to get attention. When I deliberately offend people, I deliberately hurt people. That’s not the path to the ordinary world.
I see this problem in almost all movies and novels. When characters don’t have purpose, they destroy themselves by pursuing their own desires.
I need to keep returning to authentic human connection, the kind I had at Stephen S. Wise temple and Aish HaTorah.
Psychotherapy is helping me with connection. I see how I’ve been needlessly cutting people out of my life because I don’t like to negotiate relationships, I don’t like to reveal my emotions, I don’t like to talk things out.
So much of my life has been working at cross-purposes. The porn vs the Torah. Now everything is working together.
Step Three. I decide to turn my life and my will over to God.
This has been my biggest block to taking 12-steps seriously. Turning your life over to God? That sounds Christian. Oy vey!
But guess what? I changed religions, changed locations, changed professions, changed girlfriends, and my demons were not diminished. My addictions have so perverted my life that I have to empty myself and let go and let God, even if that sounds Christian.
It’s humbling to come back in my old age to an idea propounded throughout my childhood by my preacher daddy.
Everybody I’ve known well I’ve exploited to satisfy my addictive needs.
I look back and I see that I’m a user and a manipulator. And I can’t simply will myself to stop doing that.
It’s imprinted in me that the breast will run dry and I have to suck every drop I can get right now.
I’ve used everyone I’ve known to meet my needs.
Not because I’m bad. I just didn’t know better. I was always doing the best I could at the time with the tools I had at my disposal.
Now I have better tools.
What were my favorite ways of manipulating people? Tell them that they’ve changed my life for the good. That makes ’em want to adopt me.
Suckers! So needy to feel important!
Allow them to feel that they’ve changed my life. Then let them buy me dinner.
At age 45, after six years of therapy, I realized that psychology and religion and yoga and Alexander Technique were not enough. I needed more help. There was something pathological in me, a rage against women and authority and against anyone who reminded me of frights from my childhood. I wasn’t always relating to people and places on their own merits, rather I was reacting to what they represented to me. I step into my first 12-step meeting for sex and love addiction.
And I find a place for me.
Step Four. Big Book in hand, I make a searching and fearless moral inventory.
“We had to see that every time we played the big shot, we turned people against us.” (Big Book of AA)
My recovery takes off when I write out everyone I resent, working my way one person at a time across five columns (who I resent, why I resent, which parts of me they threatened (my social instincts or my survival needs or my love life or my self-esteem), what my role was in our conflict, and what I would do differently next time).
Dennis Prager doesn’t even make my top 40.
I see that the next eight steps follow predictably from here. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can do this. I will confess my faults to another person. I will become ready to have Power take away my defects of character. I will become willing to make amends to those I’d hurt. I make amends. I take my moral inventory on a daily basis and when I am wrong, I promptly admit it. I increase my daily contact with Reality, asking for its direction for my life. I try to be of service to others and to carry this message to other addicts.
Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?
Decoding Dennis Prager (5-29-23)