Jews account for most of the great stand-up comics in America.
Jews tend be secure in themselves and have no problem making fun of themselves — as opposed to, for instance, Muslims who are always crying about dishonor. If you’re always worrying about dishonor, you’re probably not going to make many jokes in public about your group.
The word “Israel” means “struggle with God.” Jews since Abraham have argued with God. Jewish kids will read the Torah portion at their bar mitzvah and then spend much of their speech arguing with what they just read.
If Jews argue with God, they’re certainly not going to be easily led by some guy from Nazareth who claims to be God. Instead we’d respond, “Josh thinks he’s God. What a nut.”
The 405 North remained closed for hours so they could investigate the accident.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Why waste thousands of hours of people’s time this way? Why not just videotape the scene thoroughly, clean it up and send people on their way?
It reminds me of policeman who frequently stop their cars in traffic and tie up a lane. They have abundant parking spaces to pull over into but they instead choose to stop traffic. It’s obnoxious.
In his seventh lecture on the book of Genesis in 1992, Dennis Prager says: “Israel is where it’s at. This is what God intended for the Jews — to build a holy society. You can only build a holy society in a place. Judaism is profoundly physical. It is the most corporeal religion of the monotheist religions. It is bound to land, bound to people, bound to family, bound to law. It is not a metaphysical religion. It has metaphysical elements but the religion is uniquely physical. The mitzvot are physical. The laws of Judaism are very physical. You will take this meat and you will eat this way and you will slaughter this way and you will take this branch of palm and you will take this etrog and you will wash your hands this way. You will wear fringes on your garment. You will go three times a year up the mountain in Jerusalem to bring the sacrifices.
“It is a very physical religion and the reason is that we live in a very physical world. If you don’t invest the physical with holiness, if you separate holiness and the physical, then you will have a bad world. The purpose of Judaism is to sanctify the non-sanctified, to sanctify physical, which is not sacred. You make the land sacred. After all, the land was lived on by the Jebusites and the Peruzites and Canaanites and others and it wasn’t sacred. You make it sacred.”
I remember Conservative rabbi Harold Kushner, in a public dialogue with Dennis Prager, said that Jews had the so-called Protestant work ethic thousands of years before there were Protestants.
Is work a Jewish value?
I’m looking at the Artscroll Stone Chumash on Numbers 22:21: “Surely it was not fitting for a man of Balaam’s stature to saddle his own donkey.”
I notice that attitude a lot in rabbinic literature — that physical work is beneath a man of stature.
This is not an American attitude. Americans think work is ennobling. I remember working in construction and the multi-millionaire boss would often pitch in and get dirty working with us. That’s the American way. We don’t think it is undignified to saddle your own donkey.
Rabbi Rabbs: “America is built on the Protestant work ethic. If you want to be Godly, you have to work. That’s not necessarily the Jewish way. The Jewish way is learning all the time. Judaism doesn’t value working. You can even look at it as a distraction from learning.”
Luke: “The same commandment that says we should not work on the Sabbath says that six days a week we should work.”
A pretty woman who converted to Conservative Judaism told me once, “Jewish men don’t know their own level. Non-Jewish men know their level and they don’t approach women out of their league but every Jewish male is raised by a mom who tells him he can be president of the United States.”
In his sixth lecture on Genesis in 1992, talking about the Tower of Babel story, Dennis Prager says: “In Judaism, making a name for yourself is not considered a sin. Humility is a virtue, but modesty isn’t, which certainly Jews live up to. Jews are not the most modest ethnic group. If you compliment a Jew, they normally ask you for more. I have it from ten years of Religion on the Line. Jews have a fairly good sense of self while if I compliment a Protestant minister or Catholic priest, they’ll say, oh no, Dennis. No, Dennis. What are you talking about? They don’t want to think well of themselves. It’s the sin of pride.”
Whenever I hear the charge of “racism” these days, I’m immediately suspicious because I’m so used to the accusation being tossed around without evidence.
I’m also tired of Jews using their putative Orthodox status to lobby for non-Orthodox positions.
I’m really tired of liberal Jews such as Brad Hirschfield waving their Orthodox rabbinic semicha (ordination) around like a bloody flag while yelling that the normally Orthodox are racists.
If Brad Hirschfield could not call himself an “Orthodox rabbi”, then he’d be just another lefty Jew calling for tolerance. What makes him special is his Orthodox ordination. Everything else appears cliche.
I want you to understand the kind of person Brad Hirschfield is (and I read his book on tolerance and thought it was fine so I had nothing against the guy until tonight when I read his latest blog post).
Here’s the first paragraph of Rabbi Hirschfield’s lengthy and laudatory self-description at the aptly named BradHirschfield.com: “An acclaimed author, lecturer, rabbi, and commentator on religion, society and pop culture, Brad Hirschfield offers a unique perspective on the American spiritual landscape and political and social trends to audiences nationwide.”
What kind of rabbi writes about himself like that? He calls himself “acclaimed.” Why not leave that to others?
Later on in his self-description, we learn that he is a “leader for pluralism and interfaith dialogue.”
If you find yourself getting dumped a lot, it’s probably because you’re dating out of your league. If you do the dumping most of the time, it’s probably because you’re dating beneath you.
Reba urges people to rate themselves honestly on face, body, personality and life position and to then seek out partners in their ball park. A fat ugly smelly loser, for instance, should not try to date a socially successful ten.
The women I fall in love with tend to be out of my league.
They don’t mind getting together with me at the hovel for Torah talk, but they don’t want to be seen in public with me.
Ouch! It’s like I’m some chick who’s 50 pounds overweight but gives great blowjobs. You’re happy for the highs I give you in private but you don’t want to introduce me to your friends.
Luke: “Did you sense the holiness of the land of Israel when you were there?”
Rabbs: “Yes! The kedusha (holiness) of eretz Yisrael (land of Israel)! When I got off the plane, it was the first time I had been there, oh my G-d, it’s the Holy Land. I kissed the ground. I said shehecheyanu. Blessed are you L-rd, our G-d, Ruler of the Universe, who has given us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.
“The first six months, it was like a honeymoon. I was going to all these holy places.
“After six months, it turned into just another country. It was the secular state of Israel. The kedusha (holiness) of eretz Yisrael dissipates. You’re on this fantasy high. The you realize you’re in this secular third-world backward country and this is probably not the best place to be. That was probably the time to leave but I was too stupid to leave after six months. I stayed for two years. I never left.”
Luke: “Have you been back since?”
Rabbs: “No. I’m never going back. I hate that country. It’s not a country for a Jew. The state of Israel is no place for a Jew.”
Luke: “Why is there so much trash lying around? It’s the trashiest place I’ve been to in the first world.”
Matot, Mattot, Mattoth, or Matos (מטות — Hebrew for “tribes,” the fifth word, and the first distinctive word, in the parshah) is the 42nd weekly Torah portion (parshah) in the annual Jewish cycle of Torah reading and the ninth in the book of Numbers. It constitutes Numbers 30:2–32:42.Jews in the Diaspora generally read it in July or early August.
I’m normally a very strong man, but there’s just something about Midianite girls that puts the lead in my pencil.
I remember meeting this Christian woman at a party one Sunday night in 1994. We were in an acting group together. We had a nice talk. We hugged.
Even though she believed that a carpenter from Nazareth was God and Messiah, I invited her back to my place.
My place at the time was a 1979 Toyota stationwagon. I’d been living it out of it for a few months while I pursued my acting career. I figured a job would only hold me back from achieving my dreams.
We were standing beside my wagon and I was trying to hold her hand and she was pushing me away. So I invited her inside so that we could be on our own and not let secular morality impinge upon our feelings.
I had the back seat down and all my possessions piled up in cardboard boxes along the sides. In the middle was my comfy duve and two pillows.
) If a girl living in her father’s household made a vow to God or assumed an obligation, and her father learned of it and did not object, her vow would stand. (
Matot, Mattot, Mattoth, or Matos (מטות — Hebrew for “tribes,” the fifth word, and the first distinctive word, in the parshah) is the 42nd weekly Torah portion (parshah) in the annual Jewish cycle of Torah reading and the ninth in the book of Numbers. It constitutes Numbers 30:2–32:42.Jews in the Diaspora generally read it in July or early August.
The lunisolarHebrew calendar contains up to 55 weeks, the exact number varying between 50 in common years and 54 or 55 in leap years. In leap years (for example, 2011 and 2014), parshah Matot is read separately. In common years (for example, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018), parshah Matot is combined with the next parshah, Masei, to help achieve the number of weekly readings needed.
In his 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 14, Dennis Prager says:
“Nine eleven changed Jewish life… The things that I can say in lectures to Jews now that do not elicit hoots and boos and derision is unbelievable. I could not talk about Jewish choseness before 9/11. Nowhere do Jewish audiences now find this bizarre. Real evil has confronted them. The centrality of Jew hatred in the world has made it evident that there may be some truth that Jews walk a different path. Any Jew with any Jewish identity is now prepared to hear this without laughing or bouncing the lecture fee. I am stunned. I speak more now in Jewish life than ever before. Sixty two Jewish communities last year and I don’t take all the ones I’m invited to. I can’t obviously.
“I say this almost all the time and it’s unbelievable to me. I’m pinching myself. They’re not yelling at me? They are giving this a standing ovation in Dallas? The largest group of Jews ever to convene in Texas I spoke to last year and I spoke about [Jewish choseness]. There is no other way to understand Israel and the centrality of Jews in the world and the hatred? I believe America is hated because it is the one society in history to affirm Jewish choseness. It is the one Judeo-Christian society in history… You latch on to the Jews, and you get the blessings and the hatred of a lot of people.”
Question: Why did 9/11 have this affect on Jews and not the Holocaust?
Dennis: “The Holocaust was so overwhelming that the only effect it had on Jews was to depress them. The evil was too great.”
In his 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 14, Dennis Prager says: “There’s a tacit agreement in Jewish life between the observant and the non-observant — we both agree that the laws have no meaning.”
“It is a pain in my life because I so believe in Judaism and in the Torah that Judaism has become in certain areas so irrational.”
“The priests are in charge of the temple. They are the priests of Israel. You can’t qualify for it. You have to be born into it. It’s a terrific thing or otherwise there would be bribery and who knows what. There’s no politics. You can’t run for priest.”
Jacob Milgrom: “As God has restricted his choice of the nations to Israel, so must Israel restrict its choice of edible animals to the few sanctioned by God.”
Dennis: “Democracy is good for running a nation, but God does not run the world by democracy.”
“Sports matter,” they write in the book’s first sentence. “They hold a singular position among leisure time activities and have an unparalleled impact on the everyday lives of billions of people.” (Pg. 1)
Says Bill Shankly, the long-time manager of the Liverpool soccer club: “Some people think football is a matter of life or death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more important than that.” (Pg. 15)
Great players change society. Jackie Robinson, for instance, the first black in Major League Baseball, influenced America as much as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. “They lead to an enlightening,” says Dr. Markovits, “precisely because they are the best of the best at what they do.”
Sports are languages. While Americans speak football, basketball, baseball and hockey, the world primarily speaks soccer. The 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy, for instance, drew approximately two billion viewers. By comparison, the Super Bowl is seen by only 160 million people around the world.
Unlike the William Blakes, Mohandas Gandhis, Huston Smiths, and Karen Armstrongs of the world, Dr. Prothero says that the essence of each religion is profoundly different.
What religions do have in common is a conviction that there is something wrong with the world. For Christianity, the problem is sin. For Islam, it is pride. For Buddhism, it is suffering. For Judaism, it is evil.
Each religion offers a solution to what ails the world. In Christianity, the solution to sin is faith in Christ, which brings individual salvation to Heaven. In Islam, the solution is submission to Allah, which brings paradise. In Buddhism, the solution is awareness, which brings nirvana. In Judaism, the solution is God’s law, which brings justice in this world.
Each religion offers a technique for moving from problem to solution. In Christianity, it is faith and good works. In Islam, it is the five pillars (submission to Allah, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage). In Buddhism, it is the Noble Eightfold Path (which includes meditation and chanting). In Judaism, it is practice of God’s Law (including the laws of the Sabbath, diet, and sex).
On Dennis Prager’s radio show yesterday, relationship expert Alison Armstrong says: “Sports is one of my most favorite place to watch men. One of the things about men that women don’t know is that you are always about winning. A hundred percent of the time, men are winning at something. If you look and ask, what is he winning at now? Then you can be in sync with a man.
“Because men are all about winning, you have developed a more powerful relationship with failure than women have. To women, failure is the f-word. They don’t want fail at anything. They can’t ever say they’ve failed at something. If you want to see a group of women petrified, say, ‘You’ve failed.’
“I remember watching the Olympics in a downhill race and this man who was favored didn’t win. And he said, I didn’t ski as well as I needed to. The other guy skied better. The end.
“And he’ll go back to his cave and gather himself together and come back fine.
“In the woman’s slalom, and the woman who was favored to win didn’t win, and she said, ‘Well, it was icy out there and I don’t think my edges were waxed right…’ She couldn’t say that she failed.”
Dennis: “I have an older brother. Six years older. I was almost 13 when he left home for college. Until then, everything that occurred in the home, including cleaning the table, who can do it faster, was competition.
I’ve heard Dennis Prager say in the past to the effect that good peace-loving Muslims don’t count for much because they have no power in Islamic life. Islam today is run by bloodthirsty jihadis.
I’m sure there were a lot of nice Nazis but they didn’t run anything important.
Dennis: “Any theocratic society is totalitarian. The only ideology within religion aiming for a theocratic society today is within Islam.”
In a lecture on Deuteronomy 12 delivered in 2004, Dennis Prager says: “I was in my twenties on an airplane. I was sitting next to a woman who had a vegetarian meal. I asked her if she was a vegetarian. I asked why. She said, we humans have no right to kill animals to eat them. After all, who are we humans to think we are more valuable than animals?
“That shook me to the core. That’s when I came up with the question I thought was rhetorical. I said, You don’t really mean that. If a dog and a human were drowning, which would you save first?
“And she thought.
“I’ll never forget the silence. I said, I’m sorry, did you hear my question?
“She said, I’m thinking.
“When she said, I’m thinking, I concluded at that moment, either I’m sitting next to a nutty woman, which I did not believe, or she reflects what is happening in our secular age.”
I enjoy beauty and when I have to look at a fat slob, it bums me out.
So ladies, shape up!
Guys, shape up!
We can’t take others for granted. We owe them our best.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager relays a story about hanging out at Juniors deli in Westwood. He saw a sign advertising Playboy’s Miss May. So Dennis wanders over to meet her. There are three women sitting at the table. There are big posters featuring Miss May.
Dennis stares at the women and then asks a bloke, “Which one is Miss May?”
When actresses and models don’t have make-up on, most of the time they look ordinary.
“It is a woman’s obligation to her husband, just as men have obligations to their wives, to keep yourself as attractive as you can.”
“It is one of the ways you say to your husband, I love you and I don’t take you for granted. If you let yourself go, it’s a statement to most men that I take you for granted.”
“I will point out to my wife a woman in an ad or even in a restaurant who I think is attractive, or one of the waitresses, and my wife will be stunned because she’s so normal looking.
“A man’s freedom to say this to his wife is a blessing. The definition of friend is someone you can say everything to. If a man has to bottle that up…”
Dennis Prager says in his 15th lecture on Deuteronomy (2003) that he teaches to no particular group.
“Most people who take positions have a specific group they appeal to. My appeal is to people individually than groupwise. Most people teaching Torah would teach only to Jews… It doesn’t work that way in my life. The reason is that I don’t follow any line. I teach it in a way that is universally true…without following any doctrinal positions.”
“I don’t think there is another Torah class with as mixed an audience as you are.”
There’s plenty about action in the New Testament and plenty about feeling in the Hebrew Bible but the stereotype in my headline is generally true.
When the Hebrew Bible talks about loving God, it refers primarily to action, not feelings and theology.
My mischievous side just took over and I made this Facebook update: “Luke Ford got up in shul today and talked about what God had done in his life.”
I have never heard a Jew speak this way. We don’t speak about God acting in our lives. Our religion is not feelings oriented, it is law oriented. We don’t trust feelings and we don’t trust the heart and we don’t trust people to intuit what God wants and we don’t trust people to feel their way to God and goodness.
If I did get up in shul and speak about what God had done in my life nobody would notice because I would have nothing to say. I can’t get my head around talking with assurance about God acting in your life. How do you know? How do you know it’s not just your feelings acting in you? How do you know it is not a delusion?
In his 13th lecture on Deuteronomy, Dennis Prager says: “I play a game on the radio. When a person calls, and starts talking, and all I have is a name and the city, I know nothing else about the person, I wonder if this person is married and does this person have children. Every so often, out of nowhere, I will say, are you married? I’m verifying for myself if I guessed right. I guess right about 85% of the time.
“Married people talk different. Parents talk different. I talk different since I got married and became a father. Everyone who’s gotten married knows that. You can’t even remember what it was like to be single just a year into marriage because it is so different. Especially for men. And you grow from it.”
“The Torah is profoundly opposed to incest. It disrupts the family. The family must be the one asexual place on earth. Every parent knows how uncomfortable your children are with any mention of your sex life and how uncomfortable you are as a child with any mention of your parent’s sex life. Your parents are asexual beings in your eyes. If they are sexual beings in your eyes, that is not a good sign.”
“It is not healthy to have sexual tension between family members.”
Dennis says his favorite translation of the Bible is the NIV.
The list seems silly to me. The leader of the Reform movement, Eric Yoffie, at number two? He’s retiring.
“5.David Saperstein—Having just completed his term as the only rabbi serving on President Obama’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Saperstein continues to act as a major influence in Washington in his role as director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.”
Yes, but who follows him?
“7.Irwin Kula—Kula, a bestselling author who serves as co-president of CLAL (the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership), is nationally known for his commitment to reshaping America’s spiritual landscape.”
Irwin Kula is an atheist and a chillul HaShem, taking to the media to proclaim his belief in the absence of God. I’ve never heard of anyone saying he was influenced by Irwin Kula.
If a Jew wants to be an atheist or a sodomite, that’s one thing, but stay out of the rabbinate.
“9.Robert Wexler—Wexler continues influencing generations of Jewish students and scholars as president of American Jewish University.”
As a guy, I have to go through life making the first move on a girl, asking a girl out, leaning in to kiss her for the first time, and then trying to develop a relationship.
This becomes wearing. Rejection wears one down. I’ve dated at least two dozen women in my life who I would’ve married, but none of them wanted to marry me.
Now I see some of them and they’ve hit the wall. They’re not married. They’re not cute. They’re bitter. And I’m glad. I’m glad to see the destruction of the haughty. I’m glad to see the humbling of all these chicks who thought they were so much better than me.
I’m 44. I have more choices now than ever. I date 18-year olds. I date 40-year olds. The world is my oyster.
