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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #200 (12/31/2025): 2025 Farewell

airs Dec. 31, 2025 on Dave’s Gone By. Watch here: TBA

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the end of the year, 2025.

I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t had a cruddy year. If they’re not upset with politics and the government, they’re dealing with death, illness, financial stress, mental problems, dental problems — if you actually had a good year in 2025, please let me know your phone number so I can play it for Lotto.

But here it is, December 31st, and whaddya know? You survived. I’m not saying you thrived, but you endured. And I hope you got your jollies along the way. Not every news event was tragic, and a few sad stories had silver linings. Pope Francis died, but the new guy’s from Chicago. He’s on the conservative side, but what do you expect from a Pope, Ru Paul? And while inflation is scaring everyone who has to buy a house, a car, a health plan, or, you know, groceries, the stock market has remained a juggernaut. Therefore, if, by the time you retire, you haven’t given all your money to Aetna, you might have a few bucks left in your 401K… to spend on cat food.

Politically it was another Civil War-level year, with liberals screaming “disaster!” at Trump’s every move, and Trump often deserving the screams. Did he need to renovate the White House Ballroom and make the silverware goldenware? Did he have to put his name on the memorial Kennedy Center — I mean, Trump’s bullet missed! And did the President have to redact all those pages in the Epstein files that showed him to be almost as big a perv as Bill Clinton? Well, at least Trump is ridding the country of useless foreigners with questionable visas. Anybody seen Melania lately?

Meanwhile, antisemitism, disguised as antizionism, still gives college students and left-wing wingnuts a hard-on, but Israel and the Palestinians are holding to some kind of cease fire, while America’s been going after ISIS in Syria and Nigeria and stopping nukes in Iran. And while the mass murder at a Chanukah festival in Bondi Beach reminded us Jews are still hated, a clump of Jewish corpses granted us a day or two of sympathy before the clown cars returned with their Free Gaza circus act. God help us, New York elected a rabidly anti-Israel socialist mayor, but the good news is: Mamdani’s policies will be so ruinous, bankrupting, and unenforceable, no one’s gonna give an alqaraf what he believes!

Oh, and if it’s not already evident, let me assert that this Rabbinical Reflection was written entirely with my two little hands and my too-preoccupied brain. That is to say, any intelligence you happen to find in my prose may be unexpected but not artificial. 2025 was the year that everything on social media or the internet was suspect. From heartwarming parables about celebrities to the sloppiest slop, algorithms were telling us what to buy, how to think, and where to vent. It was the year academics gave up fighting A.I. and instead told students, “Hey, my ChatGPT wrote this exam. Have your Grammarly take it, and then my Copilot will grade it. And afterwards we can all meet on the unemployment line because nobody has to fucking know anything anymore.”

But I digress. Anger is not the endgame of my annual review of the annum gone by. Nostalgic melancholy is more the mood because now is time to remember those we lost. Musicians, authors, performers — folks who left their mark, so in poetic form, we mark their passing.

Farewell to Pope Francis, as Popes go, a goodie

Adieu, Diane Keaton, we loved you with Woody

With his gifted family, Sly Stone took us higher

And tears for Jill Sobule, who died in a fire

We lost Lalo Schiffrin and his orchestrations

Let’s hope Brian Wilson picks up good vibrations

Ace Frehley and Ozzy now sleep in the sand

And farewell Garth Hudson, the last of The Band.

We lost Malcolm-Jamal Warner when he lost his grips

Loretta Swit and Chuck Mangione have sealed their hot lips

Farewell to Rob Reiner, what great films he did!

If only Nick Reiner was Greta Thunberg’s kid.

Tom Stoppard whose plays were quite The Real Thing

Now joins Robert Redford in feeling death’s Sting

Bye bye to Hulk Hogan who wrestled with glee

And Loni Anderson, who put the T&A in KRP

Ta-ta, Charlie Kirk, whose death gave us chills

So long to George Foreman whose life gave us grills

Bill Moyers once anchored the news desk with grace

And Charles Strouse helped us put on a happy face

With David Johansen we rocked and got funky

And Jane Goodall taught us the mind of a monkey

So long, David Lynch, whose films got tongues waggin’

“Puff” went Peter Yarrow, and his magic dragon

Connie Francis could sing and Roberta Flack croon

Jules Feiffer satirized life by cartoon

Gene Hackman found dead in his run-down chalet 

Steve Cropper now dead on the dock of the bay

Val Kilmer, Diane Ladd, each one a sad loss

And Jimmy Cliff has no more rivers to cross

No love for Dick Cheney and his years of fears

But raise up a glass for George Wendt and his Cheers

And keep that toast going for loved ones departed 

We mourn them, we miss them, and though brokenhearted

We bravely go forward through kicks, sticks, and bricks

And hope for the best in 2026.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Happy Jew Year.

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