Month: December 2021

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #173 (12/31/2021): 2021 Farewell

aired Dec. 25, 2021 on Dave’s Gone By. Watch on youtube: https://youtu.be/FnMeyeZ9K3Q

Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon, founder and spiritual leader of Temple Sons of Bitches, with a Rabbinical Reflection for the end of the year 2021 AD — After Delta. 

Well, we’re not really “after delta,” of course. We’re just discussing it less because another variant of the coronavirus came along to goose up the news cycle. Honestly, I think the whole Omicron thing was started by Hilaria Baldwin just to get her husband’s name off the front page. 

But my friends, it’s certainly been a year. Again. You know, there’s something to be said for pessimism; at least you’re not disappointed when everything goes to shit. So in 2020, we made it through the first wave of the pandemic: the triage tents, the refrigerator trucks, the zoom fatigue, the hidden charges for InstaCart deliveries. And with 2020 hindsight, the vaccines came — hallelujah! The government went to Big Pharma with a blank check and said, “Do something.” And they did! By new year’s, all these old people who were dying of Covid in nursing homes could get vaxxed and go back to dying of the flu. 

We all breathed a sigh of relief when, only months after the explosion of COVID, Pfizer, Moderna, and one-shot/blood-clot Johnson & Johnson proved that modern medicine could change the game. Unfortunately, viruses are like robocallers. If you block your number in the morning, they just find another sequence of digits to call you again at dinner. So Covid morphed into Delta, which spun into the more contagious but milder Omicron. By the time we get to Upsilon, everyone will have it, but it’ll just be constipation and hangnail.

Still, we must be careful — no matter how careful we are! Double-masked, tripled-vaxxed, quadruple-sanitized — the CDC messaging is still: go on with your normal life, but don’t do anything normal. As we end the annum, Broadway shows are closing, sports are canceling, hospitals are filling… The Rockettes even postponed their Christmas show till after Christmas. Now it’ll be the Lent Spectacular. 

So 2021 was really the year to get our hopes down. In New York we looked to the Cuomo Brothers for inspirational pep talks, which was like asking the New York Jets for tips on scoring touchdowns. We looked to reunions of Friends and Sex and the City for nostalgia, only to realize that women who are no longer cute are immediately irritating, and that “just like that,” Chris Noth is a rapist. 

We heard right-wing Republicans decrying vaccine mandates because the government has no right to tell them what medicine to put in their bodies. Sounds reasonable…until you remember these same people want to tell women what to do with their bodies. And now with the homemaker harpy, the college rapist, and the pubic-hair schvartze leading the Supreme Court, they may get their chance.

Not that America needs even more polarization. On January 6th, we realized half the country still believes Donald Trump won the election, that COVID is just the flu, and that country music is listenable. As scary as it was to see white people rioting, it was even creepier to see a guy painted blue and wearing a viking helmet storming the halls of Congress. Doesn’t he know the clowns in Congress don’t need makeup? 

So we distracted ourselves from the yecch of the year by watching unbelievably rich entrepreneurs…and William Shatner…go into space. They didn’t visit the moon or anything, they just went up in the air. Big whoop. That’s like going to a multiplex and telling the ticket guy, “No, thanks. I’m just here to enjoy the lobby.” 

At least people started going to the movies again — well, superhero movies; the rest they’re watching on TV because that’s the only pastime people can afford.  Between health insurance and home prices, you either have to sell an organ to buy a house or sell a house to buy an organ. And then you have to rent the organ out just to buy groceries.

But at least 2021 was instructional; we learned something. We learned that just because you get rid of a bad president doesn’t mean the next president will be good. Joe Biden, who always looks one step away from competence and two steps away from assisted living, has a knack for finding the failure in success. He pulls us out of Afghanistan — and we look like the Keystone Kops in the process. Biden signs a trillion-dollar bill to revamp America’s infrastructure, but his two-trillion-dollar domestic bill gets torpedoed by one centrist Democrat. Biden tries to reverse Trump’s anti-immigration policies, and so — big shock — thousands of illegals we can’t handle swarm to the border. 

President Biden did keep the economy going during COVID with numbers for both Wall Street and unemployment remarkably good. But that’s because people are working to shell out four dollars for gas and ten dollars for bread. And that’s if the bread makes it to the supermarket in the first place. Turns out a supply chain is only as good as its weakest link, and this year that link was the Suez Canal, where the good ship Ever Given got stuck like an impacted bowel movement. 

The whole year 2021 felt like the Ever Given; each time we’d pivot with hope to a different direction, we’d hit another sandbar. Tokyo held an Olympics…that nobody went to, apart from a couple of US athletes who got the twisties and tanked. Radical Democrats called for defunding the police — and then backtracked when rampant crime made their cities more dangerous than a Travis Scott concert. R. Kelly went to prison, presumably filling the space just vacated by Bill Cosby. Britney Spears finally became a legal adult — just in time to join AARP. 

And then race. You had black people getting angry because the jury found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty — for killing two white guys. And when policeman Derek Chauvin was found guilty for suffocating George Floyd, all America heaved a sigh of relief. They even put up a statue of Floyd in a Manhattan Park, and it was quickly defaced by an unemployed actor. Sorry, that was redundant; an actor. But how dare he? After all, if we’re pulling down monuments of Civil War Generals and Founding-Father slaveholders, why not replace them with a counterfeiting drug addict whose biggest life accomplishment was holding a pistol to a woman’s stomach during a home invasion? Then again, when you come right down to it: whether the statue in the park is of Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee, it’s still just a pigeon toilet.

But before we flush this year down the crapper, we should take a moment to remember some of the people we wish were still afloat in 2022:

Farewell Willard Scott — whose hundredth won’t be sponsored by Smuckers

And bell hooks and Anne Rice, you fine literary motherfuckers

We’ll miss Charlie Watts and his incredible drumming

Mort Sahl and Norm Macdonald, who kept the comedy coming

Goodbye Cicely Tyson, God finally took her

And old Cloris Leachman — you know: Frau Blucher.

We lost Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind

And also Don Everly, who never left his brother’s behind

Melvin Van Peebles made films that were funky

Mike Nesmith brought street cred to being a Monkee

Leon Spinks and Marvin Hagler, who never took a dive

And broadcaster Larry King — Not Live 

Farewell Roger Mudd, and thanks for the news

And Shalom, Ed Asner — you were good for the Jews

We lost Mod Squad’s Link, and that’s a stone bummer

And God roto-rooted old Christopher Plummer

Farewell Nanci Griffith who sang with her soul

And two decent statesmen, Mondale and Dole

Shalom, Jackie Mason, and thanks for the funny

Bye bye Bernie Madoff: shtup you and your money

Phil Spector’s bad deeds are interred with his bones

And Tawny Kitaen — I wish she had clones

We lost Ned Beatty, who, like a pig, did squeal

And how about a Mister Mic-drop for Ron Popeil?

And last but not least, Stephen Sondheim made his mark

with Gypsy and Sweeney and Sunday in the Park  

But just when these deaths make it seem dark as night

Remember with joy: there’s still Betty White!

And so my friends, my enemies, as we shuffle off the mortal coil of Covicious 2021 into Omicrazy 2022, I can only wish you all healthier, happier times; hope when things seem hopeless, and hot pastrami because…well, it’s hot pastrami.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York. Shana Tovah, be glad this one’s ovah.

(c)2021 David Lefkowitz & Rabbi Sol Solomon