I think most women grow up believing that they will find a man who will take care of the big things in life for them. A man who will blaze a trail ahead of her, a man who will provide and protect.
Now I keep seeing women reduced to tears as they realize that either they have no man to take care of them, or the man they are with is not going to take care of them. So they have to deal with a lot of messy things in life that they would rather ignore.
There are all sorts of tasks in life such as buying a car etc that the average woman does not want to do. She wants a man to look over her and to take care of her, though in today’s climate that is not politically correct to express.
Then I look at myself and see I don’t have the energy and the money and the practical know-how to always take care of my woman in this way. I guess I’m less of a man because I grew up believing that a man is someone who provides for his wife and his family.
A friend calls: I love how you robbed Dennis Prager’s moral bank account. You’ve devoted the last 13 years to writing about him and his family. You just went into his shop guns blazing. You didn’t just make a withdrawal from his moral bank account, you robbed it. It’s Point Break meets Heat meets The Chosen.
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Twice this week, people have told me that Jews and Arabs both came from Chaldea and therefore share a bloodline.
I say big deal. What matters is values not blood nor pagan origins, but the consequence of what was produced. The Bible takes pagan rites and stories and gives them a profound moral spin.
By contrast, the Seventh-Day Adventist church is an exercise in irrelevance. It is obsessed with sexual sin and theological beliefs and health rituals. If all SDAs disappeared from the world tomorrow, it would not be more affected than if all Sri Lankans or all Vietnamese disappeared tomorrow.
Nice people, many of them, but not influential as a culture.
By contrast, throughout history, and in the world today, the Jews are uniquely influential.
At a party last night, a beautiful woman with big fake breasts asked me what Judaism has to say about what happens when we die.
I told her that while Judaism has always affirmed a belief in the Afterlife, it’s primary focus is on this life. Jews focus on this life. That’s why they get so passionate about what happens in the here and now. That’s part of the reason why Jews are so successful. They’re not waiting around for the much much better world to come. They are not concerned with other people’s theological beliefs. Unlike conservative Christians, they are not obsessed with sexual purity above all other moral questions.
Monica’s “Martinis and Melodrama” cocktail party is called for 7:30 p.m.
I walk up to her door and knock at 7:30 p.m.
I’m the first guest.
Her dog Eliot Epstein barks furiously. Last time I was here, he bit me.
Monica says the right things about putting him in her car for the party but of course she does nothing of the sort and we’re treated to his annoying yaps for the rest of the evening.
I head straight for her dining table and start heaping my plate with tabuli and pasta and humus. I haven’t eaten this well since LimmudLA.
Soon Monica’s two graphic designers show up and the three girls talk about martinis for 30 minutes.
I’m going out of my mind. Boring! I hate alcohol. I hate trivial conversation. I want something meaty to sink my fangs into.
Thank God, four grad students show up (Monica knows two of them from a retreat for nerds at Cornell) and I have the privilege of engaging the short tubby one in passionate conversation about his research — race and food in the South.
“What exactly?” I ask.
Nineteenth Century Southern cookbooks. He explains to me how these books ignored the contributions of the blacks who prepared the food. How this is symptomatic of America which so often fails to give sufficient due to the contributions of blacks, women, and other minorities.
It was such a fascinating discussion. I wish I could’ve pursued it more, but I was stuck the rest of the night talking to a tall blonde shiksa who’d gone to high school with Monica. They were both cheerleaders.
While Monica no longer has her cheerleading outfit, this girl does.
I suppose certain men would find that exciting. Oh, how they’d get a charge out of dating a former cheerleader, but as any regular reader of mine knows, I am all about HaShem and his mitzvos.
So yes, the shiksa was beguiling and beautiful and charming, but the whole time I was stuck talking to her, I wished I was in shul conversing with a frizzy-haired, big-nosed, buck-toothed menopausal Jewess.
I suppose in a certain light, going to dinner with this beguiling shiksa would be fun. Sure, the conversation would flow effortlessly. Sure, she’s easy on the eyes. Sure, she’s smart, educated and accomplished. But what does she know of Torah?
I suppose a certain type of man might think, hmm, I’d love to go for a walk on the beach with this girl. I’d love to hold her hand as we skipped in and out of the waves. I’d love to sit on an isolated outcrop with her and make-out. I guess for certain men, the joining of lips with this shiksa goddess would be pleasant, the running of your hands through her long blonde hair would have an appeal, the opening up of her Disneyland resort would be worth a mass, but shoot, from where I sit, I don’t think a few decades of great sex, stimulating conversation, and beautiful children really compares to the reward that come from observing the Torah.
So the whole time I was smelling this girls’ perfume, getting lost in her blue eyes, and enjoying her reparte, I was yearning for that earlier conversation on racism in 19th Century Southern cookbooks.
I’m an intellectual. I’m a serious intellectual. I’m outraged about the patriarchy and the hegemony of white males and the denial of basic civil rights to gay Americans. I doubt that this shiksa — so beguiling — has ever picked up a book by Michel Foucault or Emmanuel Levinas.
The shiksa wonders aloud what is wrong with me. There’s something she’s missing.
“Is he a serial killer?” she asks Monica. “He’s good at pulling people in but there’s probably a dead girl in his freezer.”
“He’s actually not good at pulling people in,” says Monica. “He’s better at repelling them. But yeah, he is like a serial killer. The first time we went out, he took me to Lag B’Omer at Chabad, and then to Porn Star Karaoke.”
Judy, a Jew, launches into a discussion about how Jews are smarter and better than non-Jews. “Whatever religion you belong to, we have seniority,” she says. “We’re like old money.”
Sex:
Male
Current City:
New York, NY
Birthday:
February 29, 1944
Hometown:
Upper West Side, New York, NY
Relationship Status:
Single
Interested In:
Women
Looking For:
Dating
Political Views:
I despise most politicians
Religious Views:
Lutherian Torah Judaism
College:
* CUNY City
* This and that
High School:
* Elisabeth Irwin High School ’62
*
Employer:
None
Position:
unemployed file clerk.
Location:
New York, NY
Description:
I was the man with the cart, moving files to and fro.
Activities:
I am fairly inert these days, a consequence of a lifetime of too many plates of kishka and cookies. I know I weigh more than I should but hope to be back below 350 pounds by year’s end.
Interests:
Zabars, social justice, and mites.
Favorite Music:
Music plays no role in my life.
Favorite TV Shows:
Dragnet, the Milton Berle Show, Felix the Cat
Favorite Movies:
The Searchers, The Jazz Singer, Gone with the Wind
Favorite Books:
Who has time to read?
Favorite Quotations:
Not now.
About Me:
I’m poor, obese, old, and looking for a hot young shiksa to be my lover and pay my rent and bear my children and cook for me. I’m not looking for anyone shallow.
I just found this online: “Dr. Marc Gafni holds his doctorate from Oxford University. He is a rabbi and an iconoclastic teacher of Kabbalah and World Spirituality. He is the director with Ken Wilber, Sally Kempton and Diane Hamilton of the Integral Life Spiritual Center and core founder and faculty member of iEvolve Global Practice Community. He has written seven books, including the national bestseller Soul Prints, and The Mystery of Love, a exploration of the relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the sacred. Gafni
Why would clergy, of all people, want to go public with their sexual preferences?
I am a humble blogger. I have no responsibilities. But you don’t see me tearing up the blogosphere talking about my sexual orientation. You don’t read long horny blog posts from me discussing what it was like to be a hound dog in Seventh-Adventism, Judaism and the academy.
No, sirree, I believe these matters should be private.
Why would one want to talk to the world about one’s sexual tastes?
This seems particularly inappropriate for clergy. For bloggers and novelists and actors and musicians, fine. But people who are supposed to be moral leaders?
Why would morally serious people want to identify themselves to the world by their taste in sex? So you’re a bloke who likes to bugger other blokes, why preach that from the pulpit?
Everyone I know has particular sexual preferences. Some like to be spanked. Some like it in the context of adultery. Some can’t get excited unless there’s pain. But these people don’t identify themselves to the world by what they like in the bedroom.
So why do so many homosexuals lead with “I’m gay!”
I have some particular sexual identities too but I don’t go introducing myself by them. I don’t go up to women in shul and say, “Hi, I really dig chicks in high-powered office wear.” Instead, I talk about the parsha.
I think we need a public discussion about what it is like to be gay and in the pulpit as much as we need a public discussion about what it is like to love porn and yet be in the pulpit, or to love spanking and yet be in the pulpit.
By participating in this forum, these gay clergy are asking to be identified primarily by the way they use their genitals. If you want people to respect your private sexual choices, then keep them private.
I’m sorry but I’m all cried out over gays who want to go public with their sexual orientation and then make a dramatic play for your compassion.
I have a very definite sexual orientation too, much of it out of the norm, and yet you don’t see me writing op/eds about it.
I just suffer in silence. I wait for marriage and for the blessing of God, Torah and state.
Most of the time, I’m the happy-go-lucky moral leader you all love and enjoy.
A moral leader for the whole family!
I strike dramatic poses. I say dramatic things. I get into dramatic conflicts. I write out my dramatic feelings.
Oh, it is all such fun. So grand! So childish.
And then the loss comes rolling in. I’ll be silly on my blog, I’ll be clowning on my live cam, and then I realize that I am 43, never married, no children, tenuated ties to others, little community. And that feeling of loss keeps expanding until it weighs down my heart and I just feel hollow inside.
From page 178: The pattern of startle (which has been studied by high-speed photography) is remarkably regular. It begins with an eye-blink; the head is then thrust forward; the shoulders are raised and the arms stiffened; abdominal muscles shorten; breathing stops and the knees are flexed.
The startle pattern is a model of other slower response patterns: fear, anxiety, fatigue and pain all show postural changes from the norm which are similar to those that are seen in startle. In all of them there is a shortening of neck muscles which displaces the head, and which is usually followed by some kind of flexion response, so that the body is drawn into a slightly smaller space. As in startle these postural responses cannot take place without the prior displacement of the head and the shortening of neck muscles.
"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)
