Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Radio Show
20110413 -1 Leader Less
Prager H1: President Obama’s leadership style is not to lead, but to follow. This seems to be true even in the domestic arena… Syria is shooting Syrian soldiers for not shooting Syrians. Turkey, the showpiece of modern Islam, according to the liberal press, shows every indication of receding into a Sharia state.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Radio Show
20110413 – 2 Male/Female Hour: Baby Makes Three
Prager H2: Having a baby is a wonderful blessing. But it can wreak havoc on your marital love life or as Dennis often puts it: that which is produced by passion then kills it. Couples need to grapple with this challenge it.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Radio Show
20110413 – 3 Tax the Corporations
Prager H3: Democratic Congressman, Jerrold Nadler, doesn’t think we have any deficit problem. Our problem is that we don’t tax corporation enough. This is the standard Left position… College debt now exceeds credit card debt. Kids are leaving college deeply in the red. Is it worth it?.. Dennis talks to Lloyd Reed, spokesman for the Halftime Institute, a group that helps people who are searching for meaning find it… President Obama is suddenly interested in cutting the deficit. His innovative plan: tax the rich.
Dennis Prager writes: I guess one can say that with “Dancing With the Rabbis,” the movement toward “the rabbi is just one of us” reached its apotheosis. Our rabbis — or at least the rabbis who participated — are just one of the guys or girls. They, too, are hip. No more ivory tower rabbi. Our rabbi is so with it, he will dance with a 22-year-old swimsuit model: In the words of The Jewish Journal, the rabbi “twirls across the dance floor. His beautiful young partner reaches out her hand, and together they do a quick step and spin into each other’s arms.”
Had the rabbis danced with Jews with special needs, I could understand the message sent. But what was this message?
Though I was not present at the event, my opposition is to the concept, not the execution. I don’t think I am alone in the Los Angeles Jewish community in thinking that this was well-intended but not wise. Not only did no Orthodox rabbi participate — and not only for halachic reasons, I suspect — but some non-Orthodox rabbis also refused, and not because they were afraid to dance publicly. When I asked one of the country’s leading Reform rabbis, Rabbi David Woznica of Stephen S. Wise Temple, whether he would have participated had he been asked, he responded that he was asked, and refused.
A sell-out crowd packed the American Jewish University’s (AJU) Gindi Auditorium on April 3 and watched as Rabbi Zoë Klein of Temple Isaiah tangoed her way to the inaugural “Dancing With the Rabbis” trophy. An ecstatic Klein, cheered on by her family, wowed the audience with her passionate routine with professional partner Daniel Ponickly.
In what turned out to be an incredibly fun evening, the rabbis and their partners put on a show that had people clapping and cheering in their seats. Rabbi Mark Borovitz opened the night with a playful, jaunty cha-cha, and was followed by a game Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, who danced the fox-trot in a top hat and tux. Rabbi Nina Feinstein got deeply into the spirit, wearing glittering bell-bottoms as she danced the hustle with partner Forrest Walsh. And perhaps the sweetest moment of the evening came when Rabbi Elliot Dorff’s partner, Brittany Palmer, spoke glowingly of the respected scholar, saying that she left every rehearsal with him feeling like she’d had a great day.
Louis Van Amstel and Karina Smirnoff of ABC-TV’s “Dancing With the Stars” made a special guest appearance and tore up the stage with some truly impressive dance moves, though their last dance was so racy that it may have had more than a few members of the audience wondering whether they should clap or head home for a cold shower.
But the evening was Klein’s, and she won a generous donation for the American Jewish World Service with her dance moves. Asked what if felt like to be the rabbinic dancing champion, Klein called the experience “once in a lifetime” and said she was “so excited” that her family was there to watch her win. If the success of the inaugural event is any indication, this may not be the last that Los Angeles will see of “Dancing With the Rabbis.”
And for those wishing to get in on the act themselves, the AJU will be offering dance classes taught by the rabbis’ professional partners, so that everyone can learn to tango like a champion.
Dennis Prager writes: Given the preoccupation of the American media with the possible closing down of the American government, and the preoccupation of American and world media with Japan’s travails and the revolts in the Arab world, many Americans may have missed the news about the April 1 massacre of United Nations employees in Afghanistan.
That is unfortunate because it was as significant as it was instructive.
It began on Sunday, March 20, when a pastor named Terry Jones burned a Quran at his small church in Florida. To their credit, almost no American media covered the event, and a mere 30 people came to witness it. But Jones broadcast the offensive and asinine event on the Internet — and did so with Arabic subtitles.
To the best of our knowledge, since Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 Muslims murdered 3,000 Americans, not one American out of a population of more than 300 million has publicly burned a Quran. Nevertheless, some Muslims in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) claimed that this one American and this one act, which was condemned by every prominent American of every religion and every political persuasion, was deemed worthy of retribution. And that retribution was the slaughter of as many non-Muslims as they could find.
On April 1, hundreds of enraged Afghan Muslims descended on a United Nations office building in Mazar-i-Sharif and murdered — by beating, stabbing and cutting throats four Nepalese, a Norwegian, a Swede and a Romanian.
It is worth reflecting on this massacre.
Let us remind ourselves about the mindset of those Muslims and of any Muslims who agree with them. To these people, murdering any non-Muslims they can find is a just and Islamic response to the burning of a Quran.
This is important to note because it gives one a clearer picture of the type of the person the Islamist is. We have here a level of moral primitiveness unknown elsewhere in the human race. There are bad people in every religion, in every country and in every group. But we do not know of any group, let alone millions of people, who believe that murder is a proper response to an affront to their religion (or to their country or to their ethnic group).
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Radio Show
20110412 -1 Schools for Scandals
Prager H1: Dennis talks to Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute. His new book is Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Radio Show
20110412 – 2 France and the Veil
Prager H2: The law in France banning the veil and burqa has gone into effect. Will it hold? Not being able to show your face public is degrading. Why do Western intellectuals defend it?… A major feminist spread her radical message at the YWCA Convention last week. What has happened to this organization?… Environmentalists confidently predicted disaster by 2010. It’s now 2011 and no disaster. When is the next sky-is-falling prediction coming?
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Radio Show
20110412 -3 Ultimate Issues: Raising Good Kids
Prager H3: Dennis continues with his series on raising good kids. This week his theme is character uber alles, character over everything. Would you rather your child smoke or cheat?
A man suspected in the explosion last week next to a Santa Monica synagogue was arrested in Ohio late Monday after someone noticed him at another synagogue in Cleveland Heights.
Sources told the Los Angeles Times that Ron Hirsch, 60, was arrested near a Chabad House in the Ohio city. He is accused of setting off a large explosive device at the Santa Monica Chabad House on Thursday.
The FBI said Hirsch fled Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus after the explosion. He was believed headed to New York, where he has relatives. But authorities said Hirsch may have gotten off the bus elsewhere.
On Monday afternoon, the FBI released images from a surveillance camera at a Greyhound station in Denver, which showed Hirsch walking through the building and standing at a counter.
In the large and growing Orthodox Jewish communities around New York and elsewhere, rabbinic leaders are sounding an alarm about an unexpected problem: a wave of anorexia and other eating disorders among teenage girls.
While no one knows whether such disorders are more prevalent among Orthodox Jews than in society at large, they may be more baffling to outsiders. Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size — and her mother’s — and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small.
Rabbis say the problem is especially hard to treat because of the shame that has long surrounded mental illness among Orthodox Jews.
“There is an amazing stigma attached to eating disorders — this is the real problem,” said Rabbi Saul Zucker, educational director for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, or O.U., the organization that issues the all-important kashrut stamp for food. “But hiding it is not going to make it go away. If we don’t confront it, it’s going to get worse.”
I’m no longer working with the rabbi. So I need a new partner to discuss the parasha with every week. I want someone knowledgeable in Torah. Your views on Torah don’t matter to me. I don’t care if you’re an atheist or a Hasid.
* The Torah is often not in chronological order, such as this Torah portion (parasha).
* God doesn’t talk much to Aaron. Why is God so picky about who He talks to?
* Parasha begins with God instructing Moses on strict limits for Aaron. Torah is all about setting limits and boundaries. This is something hard for me to do with other people. I tend to accommodate endlessly because I don’t like interpersonal conflict or I go to the opposite extreme and just cut people out of my life or I just create a super-defended life so that few people want to get close enough to me so that we might have conflict. I want to get stronger at setting boundaries and respecting the boundaries of other people, particularly those who I want to keep in my life.
A lot of people come up to me in an overly familiar way because I am open in my blogging, but just because I’m open in my blogging does not mean a stranger can approach me like a buddy and immediately ask intrusive questions and give unsolicited advice. If I publish a post about a sensitive area of my life, it does not mean that matter is no longer sensitive to me. It’s not cool to come up to me and start boring in on a sensitive topic. Anyone who does anything like this is such a fool that I never want to interact with them.
By contrast, I immediately accord respect to a stranger who obeys the laws of decorum and begins his communication to me with “Mr. Ford” or “Levi.” The use of my Hebrew name, “Levi”, implies that we’re mishpacha (family) and I dig that.
* Lev. 16: 1 says that Nadav and Avihu died when they approached HaShem. Democracy is a beautiful political system but it is not necessarily the best moral system to apply to all forms of human interaction.
The more traditional you go in Jewish life, the more hierarchical. Those with Torah learning are accorded great respect and those who don’t know Torah know they’re ignorant. An ignoramus does not go up to a great sage and start spouting his opinions just as on a movie or TV set, the extras are often admonished to not even look at the stars. You have to earn the right to approach some people. This is understood in traditional life across many cultures but it is frequently not understood in secular Western life — that there are great people and you don’t speak to them as you would to an ordinary person.
* The sin of Nadav and Avihu appears, at least in part, to be going where they shouldn’t. Not all of the world is open to everyone. Not every role in a synagogue or a Jewish community is equally open to everyone. I would never presume to go up front to lead the davening. I never ask for any synagogue honors, even though my therapist once pushed me to. I was feeling insecure that I hadn’t been asked to the Torah in many months. My therapist wanted me to ask. I preferred to wait.
If I had a rich home in Bel Air, I would not want a subway going close to me. If you don’t have a car, you shouldn’t come wandering around my neighborhood. This is not an area for everyone.
A lot of stores and neighborhoods don’t want single young black men around because they fear their high crime rate. There’s no parallel to this in America. This fear is not just ethnic bigotry because even many black people have this fear (Jesse Jackson, Juan Williams).
* The death of the righteous atone (according to the tradition, Nadav and Avihu were righteous and their death atoned for Israel’s sins). Sounds Christian.
* I will explain why I don’t like to clarify for people when I am being sarcastic. I’ve found that when people push me to reveal if I’m kidding, the person will be a never-ending source of more requests for clarifications and it is not worth my time. Those who get my sarcasm get my sarcasm and need no explanation. Those who don’t get my sarcasm will be a never-ending source of frustration for me to interact with and it is generally best to refuse to answer them and to set up boundaries that say, I’m not into explaining.
People who don’t get sarcasm are not inherently bad or dumb. They’re just an energy drain for me and I don’t need it.
For similar reasons, I rarely answer emails that are consistently misspelled and badly punctuated and I don’t give charity to people who ask for it.
I had a crazy black man collar me at the laundromat this afternoon asking for money. He said he was liable to seizures. I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying.
After I told him no, he kept hectoring me. Finally he resorted to, “Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?”
Homeless people set on Orthodox Jews because they know we are religiously obliged to give charity. They think we’re a soft touch.
The more you give to people, whether it is charity or explanations, the more you encourage them to continue said behavior.
I’m fine with giving charity if you know the person or the institution. I think giving charity randomly to whoever asks 99% of the time only encourages bad behavior.
I remember Rabbi Muskin in 2001 getting tired of constantly having to be the bad guy at YICC to remove a very nasty man who came around seeking charity. The rabbi told us not to give to him. That he verbally abused the shul’s secretary. The rabbi asked for our help. It’s easy to wimp out with the nasty characters who come seeking charity and think, “Let somebody else be the tough guy and eject him.”
I remember a lot of jerks who’ve come around shuls for charity and verbally abusing those who didn’t give to him sufficiently.
Love and compassion and charity are not always right.
I remember one Shabbos morning at Stephen S. Wise temple seeing Dennis Prager helping out someone claiming to be Jewish. Dennis made an announcement to the minyan to help out the man.
The guy turned out to be a jerk who verbally abused the rabbi.
“All of the worst things I’ve done have come out of a desire to do good,” Dennis told a friend at the time.
* The only person I ever want to spend time with working on the relationship will be my wife. As for anyone else, if we have to spend time working on the relationship it’s not worth having the relationship. With all of my best friends for all of my life, there was no time spent working on the friendship. By contrast, all the friendships I had where I had to spend time working on the friendship were doomed.
* I’m ambivalent about unmarried people getting therapy for their relationship. If you’re already having problems this severe, you probably shouldn’t get married. If you’re not enjoying each other without “working on the relationship”, then seek out someone you can enjoy without therapy and without “working on the relationship.”
Once my previous relationships needed therapy (I can think of just one where we visited the shrink together), we were already doomed.
* I’m on good terms with most of my ex-girlfriends but some of them I will not be friends with on Facebook because if I let them in my lives, they create chaos. They’re too needy and reactive and don’t read social cues.
* Human relationships run on bids. We made bids for others’ attention. If they ignore us, we very quickly get the message and stop bidding for their attention. A bid may be a look or a phone call or an email or a smile. If you don’t pick up on other’s bids for your attention, you’re going to be alone. It’s fine to reject the bids of people you don’t want in your life but don’t be careless with the bids of those who are important to you. It’s better to say no than to ignore.
* Many details on proper dress in this parasha. A Torah personality takes care with his dress. This does not come naturally to me. While I prefer to be around people who dress well, I don’t tend to dress well.
* I told my therapist that I expected him to consistently dress better than me. That he appear neat and professional is important to me. I would not want a therapist (or any professional) who dressed like a slob. When I become an Alexander Technique teacher, I will have to start dressing better than I currently do as a student and blogger. When I worked for a newspaper or a radio station or almost anyone, I dressed better than I do as a self-employed blogger.
* Yesterday marked the seventh year of the rabbi’s unemployment. We’ll discuss what happens when he applies for work. The toll unemployment has taken on him. I find unemployment devastating. It’s hard for me to interact normally with the world when this part of my life is missing. I lack confidence. I feel like a loser. I want to hide and cry.
* The United States is the only western country where able-bodied men can not get the dole. Is this good or bad? I think it is good. It encourages people to build strong relationships to family, friends and to community. It encourages joining — religious institutions such as shuls, ethnic and professional clubs, and the like. These institutions in turn look out for their members when they fall on tough times. Dennis Prager tells the story of a high school math teacher in his childhood shul who went blind in a car accident. I guess there was no safety net aka disability aka workmen’s compensation for this at the time. So the shul met at Prager’s parents house (circa 1960) and everyone made a financial commitment so this guy could get by. And the shul community took care of this man for the rest of his life.
If the government takes over this, then groups won’t and people will take less care with each other. The welfare state destroys character. It enables me to live on their own without forming bonds. Unions also destroy character. Employees become militant about their break times and work rules rather than serving the customer and growing the business. Only once did I work for a union — for Kmart in Australia in 1984. I had to join the union to work and the company deducted my union dues every paycheck. I hated it.
* Marcus Freed writes on his FB: on stage in Long Beach introducing cool Israeli/Ethiopian rapper Kalkidan for Jewlicious Festivals campus tour. I asked him to freestyle in English and he dropped 50 F-bombs in 60 seconds. Whooooooooooooooooooooops….
* Chicago school bans lunches brought from home. The over-bearing female principal says homemade lunches are not healthy enough. No male principal would do this unless he was an Al Gore type.
Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.
“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”
Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring “bottles of soda and flaming hot chips” on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.
A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said she could not say how many schools prohibit packed lunches and that decision is left to the judgment of the principals.
Khunrum emails: It appears to me that Luke has written the perfect movie with a Jewish twist. All we need are some middle aged Jewish players (no sex) to play the various parents, friends and therapists who can’t stand Luke and don’t want their daughters marrying a guy who is jobless and has nowhere to sleep when his car is in the shop. I say one plumb role should go to our very own Fred Nek. Chaim Amalek for a therapist and although I’m not Jewish, I’ll fly out to play the mechanic who tells Luke he can’t have his Datsun back unless he pays in full…no checks. btw it appears that there is an automotive link throughout Luke’s adult life. First he was sleeping in a car and now he’s sleeping in a garage. Luke, have you ever considered a position at Ford Motors.
Chaim Amalek emails: Why not try your hand at a horror movie? You meet a nice Jewish Girl, fall in love with her, marry (“Honestly Levi, I am wayyy into older guys”), and then…..she converts to Seventh Day Adventism. After telling you she is pregnant. She begins eating pork in front of you. She decides to raise the kid as a Christian. She starts blogging about your Jewish eccentricities. But you cannot leave her because she makes big bucks and besides, AT has merged with Scientology, and the rabbis forbid it to you.
Monday, April 11, 2011 Radio Show
20110411 – 1 Political Neurosis
Prager H1: The Republicans and Democrats settled the budget crisis over the weekend. In the space of a few hours, President Obama transformed himself into a deficit cutter… Paul Krugman is very upset with President Obama. That means Republicans made a good budget deal… The Dodgers will flood Dodger stadium with blue, not Dodger blue, police blue, following the beating of a San Francisco fan ten days ago.
Monday, April 11, 2011 Radio Show
20110411 – 2 Buttons
Prager H2: What really gets the Left upset are the environment and inequality. A statement by Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, the MSNBC morning show is a great example… President Obama is now a debt cutting champion. What a difference a weekend makes… A Chicago school won’t let its students eat food from home…
Monday, April 11, 2011 Radio Show
20110411 – 3 Big Cheese
Prager H3: Dennis talks to Charlie Sykes, radio talk show host at WTMJ in Milwaukee, about the latest news from Wisconsin, specifically the Supreme Court judge race… Dennis returns to the issue of the budget… Dennis talks to his good friend, Bruce Herschensohn, senior fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, about some of the hot spots around the world.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
