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Dave’s Gone By Skit: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #113 (12/21/2014): LITTLE YOMO AND THE CORNED BEEF SANDWICH 

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #113 (12/21/2014): Little Yomo and the Corned Beef Sandwich

aired Dec. 20, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/kCMSKATJsJMs

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of December 21, 2014.

Happy Chanukah, everybody; happy festival of lights, latkes and love. It’s the next best thing to Christmas, and at least when we go to shul, we don’t have to look at a statue of a guy bleeding to death and ruining our appetite.

Speaking of appetite, in honor of this joyful week, I am going to regale you with a story, a fabulous fable for the holiday. So children, gather `round. Or don’t, I don’t really care. Either way, I am going to relate to you the story of “Little Yomo and the Corned Beef Sandwich.”

The story is called, “Little Yomo and the Corned Beef Sandwich,” copyright 2014 by Rabbi Sol Solomon, all rights reserved. Use of this material in any form, written, digital or audio is prohibited by law and punishable by…I dunno…a year in Gitmo or something.

Little Yomo and the Corned Beef Sandwich.

Once upon a time, there was ten-year-old boy named – you guessed it — Little Yomo. He was a good little boy living in Boston with his mama, his papa, his know-it-all older sister, and the family cat, Noosh-Noosh. Little Yomo loved the Jewish holidays – or certain aspects of them. Finding the Afikomen on Passover, dressing up as a Ninja Turtle on Purim, dancing and gorging himself with candy on Simchas Torah. But most of all, Yomo loved Chanukah. The colorful candles on the menorah, the fun songs to sing, beating his sister seven times out of ten at dreidel and taking all her pocket change.

Little Yomo also loved seeing his family on Chanukah. Cousins and other relatives from miles around would come visit on the first and second nights to partake in the festivities around the front window. They would bring him presents or sweets, and they’d talk with him just like he was a grownup. He loved gramma and grampa, Cousin Ida and her boyfriend, Aunt Evelyn and her twins — who were two years younger than Yomo and great to play hide-and-seek with. Honest to gosh, there was nothing about Chanukah Little Yomo didn’t like . . . except Uncle Victor.

Uncle Victor. Respected in the garment district. Loved by his own grown children. Kindly if noticeably obese, Uncle Victor. Victor would always come both nights on Chanukah, and he always did the same thing to Little Yomo. He’d hold the boy by his shoulders and say, “Ooh, you’re getting so big. Pretty soon you’ll be bigger than me! Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.” So funny.

And then Uncle Victor, reeking of aftershave, would reach into his back pocket and give Little Yomo the special gift that every child loves on Chanukah: gelt. Not real money, that would be amazing. But holiday money made of chocolate. Small gold coins – or, more precisely, golden foil wrappers covering chocolate disks made to look like coinage of old. Few gifts are so perfectly presented. It starts with the visual appeal of the golden-yellow bag of loot. Then, you cut the thin strings and hold your first coin, shiny and delicate yet so solid. And then peeling off the top wrapper, pulling it back to reveal a perfectly round circle of milk chocolate. And the final joy: hooking your fingernail under the lower foil to free the confection from its condom and taste the cocoa-ey bliss within.

Now, you might be asking, why would Little Yomo despise his Uncle Victor if the man was giving him delicious candy money twice a year? The reason was that Uncle Victor, as we’ve said, was a big fat man. A man who drove two hours from Pennsylvania to come visit Yomo’s family. And since Boston is freezing cold in the middle of December, Uncle Victor would roll up the window of his Buick Skylark and put the heat on, full blast, for the entire trip. All of this was fine for Uncle Victor, but by the time he would get in the house and greet little Yomo in his hilarious way, he was a cloud of sweat, body odor and Walgreens aftershave. Worst of all, when he’d reach in his back pocket to produce the Chanukah gelt, what would emerge was a bag of melted, crushed foil, covered with brown goo and smelling like horrible Uncle Victor.

As his mama and papa pointed out again and again, it would be rude of Little Yomo to turn down a gift brought by a family member. So the poor child had to hold out his hand, smile his biggest, toothiest grin, and thank his uncle with a big a hug. And then, to prove how excited he was to receive this thoughtful gift, Yomo had to open the bag and eat three coins, while Uncle Victor beamed and pointed and watched. “Look at him,” Victor would say. “I know it’s spoiling his dinner, but he loves it so much.” Meanwhile, it was all Yomo could do to keep from vomiting against his teeth.

This ritual had gone on for years and years, since Yomo could remember, and probably even before then. Ten-year-old Yomo, however, had endured enough. It was Chanukah time once more, and not-so-little Yomo dreaded encountering Uncle Victor and his smell, his chocolate, his whole nightmarish persona.

So Little Yomo decided to do something about it. “I’m going to beat him at his own game,” the little boy told himself, in the way little boys tell themselves things. Three weeks before Chanukah, Little Yomo started saving up his allowance. He needed fourteen dollars. Oops – plus tax; fifteen, just to be safe. I’ll explain. Little Yomo set aside four dollars a week of his allowance for the Unkie Fund. He needed three more dollars, but it was no problem beating his sister at dreidel and getting the extra dough. Once he had it, the day before the first night of Chanukah, little Yomo took his bundle and walked – almost ran – the four blocks from his apartment to the Kosher delicatessen on Pelham Street.

“Shalom, Little Yomo,” called the owner. “Did your mama send you on a grocery run?”

“No Mr. Hersh,” replied the boy. “This is special. I’m getting a sandwich for my Uncle Victor.”

“Well, I’ve never met your Uncle Victor, but I’m sure he’s a terrific guy, and I’m gonna make him a beautiful sandwich. What would he like?”

“Corned beef,” said Little Yomo. “On rye with two pickles and Russian dressing on the side.”

“Your wish is my command,” laughed Mr. Hersh, impressed with Yomo’s gravitas.

Two minutes later, the deli man was handing Little Yomo a bulging bag and his change. And a free hot dog to go. “Yomo,” he said, “have a great Chanukah!”

“You too,” Little Yomo called back, skipping out of the store and eager to get home and continue his plan.

The corned beef sandwich, fresh and juicy, smelled so good in the brown paper bag, but Yomo resisted having a bite. He was saving every crumb for Unkie Victor. And when the boy got home, he ran to the kitchen, but his mother was there starting to fry that evening’s latkes.

“What’s that?” asked his mama.

“Oh, just something for Chanukah,” said the little man. “It’s for daddy’s brother.”

“Awww…Victor? I swear to HaShem, you are the sweetest boy.” Mrs. Birmbaum hugged and kissed her son, which made the boy blush and grimace at the same time and squirm to get away. “I’m gonna go up and do my homework,” said Yomo slipping out of his mommy’s reach.

“Wait, don’t you wanna put that in the fridge?” his mother called.

“I have to put the card with it first!” Yomo called back as he headed towards the sun room.

But Little Yomo had no Hallmark on his mind. Instead, when he was sure no one was around, and the sound of frying oil would mask the sound of his crinkly paper bag, he took out the corned beef sandwich and held it delicately between his fingers. Carefully, he lifted the slice of rye bread off the top. He then knelt down in front of what the family called Noosh-Noosh corner. That was just a nice way of saying the cat’s litter box. Little Yomo placed the rye slice face down on the litter and the rest of the sandwich in a heap at the corner of the box. He then sprinkled a light layer of clay dust over both and called the cat over from across the room. “Noosh-Noosh! Hey kitty! Come see.”

Noosh-Noosh swished her tail and hesitated, looking disinterested, as cats do, but eventually made her way over to her corner. Sniffing at the litter-littered sandwich, Noosh-Noosh gave a low purr, then lifted her tail, and her leg . . . and did her kitty-cat business. “Good girl, Noosh-Noosh,” exulted Yomo. “Okay, shoo!”

Little Yomo whisked the cat away and then, with the tips of his fingers, lifted the soggy sandwich out of the box with one hand and the top slice with his other. Once the delicacy was put back together, Little Yomo wrapped it, stuffed it back in the paper bag, and deposited said bag in the fridge. Washing his hands thoroughly – which, for a little boy, is about four seconds with an eye-dropper’s worth of soap – Little Yomo ran upstairs to do homework . . . and wait.

The hours crawled until, finally, the sun set, and guests began arriving. There was Aunt Evelyn and her girls. There was Cousin Ida, talking a little weird because she’d had a stroke that August. And the neighbors from down the street. And Mr. Claremont, the token goy, from dad’s office. But no Uncle Victor. Not when Yomo’s sister was going around serving appetizers. Not when the family sat around the big-screen TV watching a rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Not even when the assembled gathered by the living-room window, and said the special prayers. Not even when mama lit the shamash and handed the big candle to Yomo and warned him, as always, “tilt it, so the wax doesn’t drip down your hand.”

Yomo obeyed and began lighting the first candle of Chanukah. Just then everyone heard the squeak and clatter of the screen door. “Did I miss the latkes?” came the familiar voice. “Uncle Victor!” shouted Yomo. And then, Ow!”, for, not paying attention, Yomo held the shamash vertically and let a teardrop of blue wax drizzle down his finger.

With barely contained excitement, Yomo placed the candle back in the menorah and ran to greet his Unkie Victor. “Sorry, everybody! Traffic was insane,” Victor sighed.

“You should’ve taken Horseneck Beach,” cousin Avrum said. “I-91 is a disaster at rush hour.”

“I know, I know,” said Victor, grabbing his beloved Yomo by the shoulders. “How’s my favorite nephew? Ooh, you’re getting so big! Next year, you’ll be bigger than me! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha!” So funny.

“I think you know what I have for you,” grinned Unkie Vic. “Lemme just reach. . .”

“No, wait!” cried Yomo. “Stay right there!”

Uncle Victor made an astonished face and shrugged at the family. “You’re not the only one who can give gifts,” laughed Mrs. Birnbaum. “Yomo has a surprise for you.”

“Ooh, I love surprises!” Victor yelled, loud enough for Yomo to hear.

“Be right there!” Yomo called from the kitchen, where he had opened the refrigerator, dumped out the sandwich, unwrapped it, slapped it with Russian dressing, and shoved it into the microwave for 55 seconds. “Come on, come on!” squealed the boy, hopping back and forth on the balls of his feet.

At last, Yomo heard the familiar ding. He popped the door open and reached for the sandwich, burning his fingers slightly in the process. He placed the corned-beef edible on a plate and scurried back to the living room where the grownups were already talking grown-up stuff.

“Uncle Victor!” shouted Yomo, louder than he wanted to. “Happy Chanukah!”

“Oh, my goodness!” responded the man, feigning amazement but also honestly thrilled to see a corned-beef sandwich presented before him. “Thank you, Yomo! Much as I love your roast turkey, Susan, a corned-beef sandwich is from another planet,” kvelled Uncle Victor.

“Enjoy,” beamed Mrs. Birnbaum. “Yomo was so excited to get it for you.”

Uncle Victor held the plate with the warm sandwich. He sniffed and smiled in ecstasy, smelling only the juicy Kosher beef, sliced thick and liberally drizzled with Russian dressing. Perhaps a thinner man without asthma would have noticed a faint uremic stench to the sandwich, but not Unkie Victor. With his meaty paw, he lifted half the sandwich off the plate and brought it to his wet, porcine lips.

“Don’t you dare!” came the voice. Ah, that voice. The voice of Aunt Dora, Victor’s wife of 38 long, long years. “If it’s a heart attack you want, go ahead, eat the sandwich. But personally, I’d rather see you live a few years longer.”

“But darling,” Uncle Victor sighed. “It’s Chanukah. And the boy — ”

“Yomo is an angel,” Aunt Dora nodded, grinning at the crestfallen child, “but what does he know from cholesterol and prediabetes?”

“But I’ve been so good,” whined Unkie Victor. “What’s half a sandwich? Two bites!”

“You’d better listen to her,” said Mr. Birnbaum. “You know your wife won’t let you live it down till next Shavuos.”

Panicking, Little Yomo piped up, “But it’s just bread and meat. It’s not bad like candy or soda. Can’t Uncle Victor have just a little, pleeeease?”

“I’m sorry, darling,” Aunt Dora said, kneeling in front of Yomo. “When you’re older, you’ll understand that I’m doing what’s best for your daddy’s brother. I your Uncle Victor to live a long, long time.”

“Sure, so she can torture me for years to come,” sighed Victor, surrendering the plate to his sister-in-law while looking, with just a hint of affection, at his martinet wife. “But I am so appreciative, Little Yomo, that you thought of me. Ooh, what a beautiful gesture, am I right?” called Uncle Victor, looking around at the assembled.

“I think,” said Mrs. Birnbaum, “that Yomo deserves a reward. A tasty reward.”

“Oh, the gelt, of course,” said Victor, reaching for his back pocket.

“No,” Yomo’s mother responded. “Our Little Yomo loves corned beef almost as much as you do. Let him eat it the sandwich.”

“Don’t you think that’ll ruin his dinner?” asked Aunt Dora, concerned.

“He can have leftovers tomorrow,” laughed Yomo’s father, not noticing the increasingly pale young man to his left. “A hot corned beef sandwich is not to be denied – even for my wife’s turkey.”

“But dad, it’s okay. We can leave it for tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” boomed Uncle Victor. “In fact, I would take it as a personal insult if you didn’t gobble down every morsel of that juicy, spicy, fragrant, magnificent sandwich.”

“Victor, take your pills,” said Dora.

“Go ahead, Yomo,” said Mrs. Birnbaum. “We don’t want to be rude.”

“Yes, mom,” gulped Little Yomo. “Oh boy. Corned beef.”

With trembling hands, Little Yomo approached the plate that his father had put on the coffee table. Holding the sandwich and his breath, Little Yomo took a big bite, and then another, and another. Finishing half a sandwich as quickly as he could.

“Look at him go!” announced Mr. Claremont. “He eats like a big boy.”

With further familial encouragement, Little Yomo wolfed down the remaining section of the corned beef sandwich. His eyes watering, his gag reflex tested to the hilt, Yomo took a bow and made his way to the kitchen, where he poured and emptied three glasses of Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda in quick succession.

The rest of the evening passed without incident as Yomo joined the family in holiday festivities. However, the next morning, poor Yomo was not feeling so well. He felt even worse by the afternoon, and worse still when his mother left the second Chanukah party to rush the boy to urgent care.

Not wanting to admit his deception, Little Yomo left the doctors guessing, which only made his treatment more difficult. The next day he was hospitalized, and on the fourth night of Chanukah, Little Yomo, emaciated, green and septic, slowly closed his deep brown eyes and died.

Two days later, all the family wept at his funeral. The Rabbi spoke and said God has His reasons for pulling little boys up to heaven decades before their time. Uncle Victor began a short speech but found himself too overcome with emotion to continue.

Eventually, the whole mishpocheh braved the frigid winter weather to gather at the cemetery. The Rabbi sang prayers in Hebrew and continued extolling the virtues of this tragic young mensch. When it was time, he handed a heavy steel shovel to Yomo’s father. The distraught Mr. Birnbaum stood for a long minute before willing his wobbly legs to the foot of the grave.

“Wait,” called Uncle Victor, his face blurry with tears. “Ooh, to go with him. Something he always loved.”

The assembled shivered in silence and then shuddered each time at the sound: plink, plink, plink – the sound of rock-hard, frozen chocolate coins hitting the lid of a small pine box. The end.

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

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27472

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #111 (11/23/2014): Murder in Jerusalem

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #111 (11/23/2014): Murder in Jerusalem

aired Nov. 23, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/Nko93BwJGS0

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of November 23, 2014.

And here I was, all set to do a gentle sermon about Thanksgiving. How grateful we should all be for friends and co-workers and family — well, maybe not family — but for all the loving, helpful people in our lives. How we must be thankful to HaShem if we still have good health, functioning limbs, working brain cells, food on the table, a roof overhead — preferably one with a fiddler on it — a decent job, a couple of hobbies, a warm winter coat and a not-bad summer vacation.

Saying grace after every meal has never been my thing. What, I should sit there thanking God for his bounties, and by the time I’m finished, the food gets cold? No wonder goyim are so skinny; by the time they finish praying, their entrees are back in the microwave. Nevertheless, a couple of times a year, it’s good to remember that everything comes to us by the courtesy of God above and the hard work of our peers and forebears.

How lovely to offer a Rabbinical Reflection on such a spiritual and fraternal topic. However, the news this week forbids me from doing such a gentle, joyful sermon. I am, once again, detoured from being my usual snuggly marshmallow of delight into sounding like a vindictive, vituperative expounder of hate and revenge. Last Tuesday, two Palestinians armed with guns and meat cleavers burst into a Jerusalem synagogue and began firing and chopping. They murdered five people, including a policeman, three American Rabbis and an Orthodox Jewish Brit. For their troubles, the assassins, Ghassan Abu Jamal and his cousin, Oday Abu Jamal, were sent to martyrdom and their 72 ugly-ass virgins in the sky.

As an extra-punitive measure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then ordered that the killers’ houses be demolished. Honestly, I don’t know how upsetting that is to a dead terrorist. What’s he gonna say? “Aww, I was gonna make hummus tonight. No wait, I’m being shoveled into an unmarked grave. Gee, I’m gonna miss the sun room.”

Still, hurrah for any action by the Israeli government that warns Arabs we will not stand for such horrors as violence, murder and television programs featuring Jane Velez Mitchell. Let there be no doubt: bloodthirsty Palestinians may not storm into a temple in Yerushalayim and start executing people. Not unless it’s the high holy days and they bought a ticket.

Seriously, do you know why these terrorists embarked upon their rampage? Was it eye-for-an-eye revenge? Were they mad about Jews who went on a killing spree in the local Falafel Mart? No, because that didn’t happen. The Palestinians were irate because Jews have been visiting a holy site on the Temple Mount that the Arabs think should be off-limits to Hebrews. Doesn’t matter that Arabs in East Jerusalem can go anywhere they damn well please; Jews are forbidden from going where the Arabs don’t want them. Apparently, the penalty for trespassing in the Arab world is being hacked to death. Which makes sense, since the penalty for stealing is cutting off a hand, and the penalty for adultery is, well, let’s just call it extreme circumcision and leave it at that.

Following the synagogue attack, lame-duck President Obama is calling for peace and restraint on both sides, downplaying the savagery of the event and, as usual, doing nothing. Hey Barry! We had three Americans murdered by agents of a foreign regime. Isn’t that like, war, or something? I know the dead Rabbis weren’t black, but you could at least raise an eyebrow.

In the weeks ahead, you can bet your burqa Israel will do a lot more than snivel and call for moderation. There’ll be raids, roundups, demolitions and, alas, probably some vigilantism, too. I won’t deny that there’s a back-and-forth, you-did-this-so-I-do-that element to Israeli/Arab conflagrations. Remember last time? They killed those hitchhikers, so some misguided, hyped-up Israelis murdered some soccer-playing kids. Much as I hate the radical Arabs, killing innocent people is never an answer to anything. In fact, that’s what got us here. If the Palestinians would stop being terrorists, we’d stop being enemies. And if we stop being enemies, they can visit our synagogues, and we can be tourists at their shrines. And we’ll talk, and we’ll laugh, and we’ll bitch about the government, and we’ll share music and art and sports and do business deals, and food! We’ll sit down together with pastrami and goat and borscht and eggplant and kugel and yogurt, and we’ll watch TV, and we’ll fall asleep, and you know what we’ll call it? Thanksgiving.

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

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27484

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #110 (11/16/2014): Christmas in November

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #110 (11/16/2014): Christmas in November

aired Nov. 15, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugLGtx38doQ

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of November 17, 2014.

Merry Christmas, non-Jewish listeners! A very merry Christmas and Yuletide to all the goyim within the sound of my strident voice! Jingle bells, glad tidings, joyeux Noel – whatever the hell that means — Merry Chris — wait, what? You mean it’s not Christmas? You mean it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, and Christmas is a month and a half away?

Well, you wouldn’t know it. Not from the TV commercials. Not from the music they play in the department stores. Not from the displays in Walgreens and Walmart and K-Mart and K.Y. and why is it Christmas already when it isn’t December 25th for another 35 days?

We all know why, of course. It’s because America needs to sell you crap as much and as often as possible. The home shopping networks and the mall shopping outlets want to get you in the money-spending spirit as soon as they can. If they could start next year’s holiday sales on December 26th at midnight, they would. In fact, they already almost do. In the middle of July, QVC and HLN and the CIA are doing infomercials for ornaments. “Make sure you order them now, people, so they arrive by August — just in time for Christmas.”

As a Jew, but not just as a Jew, but mainly as a Jew, I object to all this haranguing, day after day after day over a holiday I do not believe in and couldn’t care less about. You wanna put up some lights on the weekend before Christmas, and maybe start the Ruh-puh-pum-pum on your drum a week or two before the holiday? Be my guest, and buy me something nice. But stop with the Yuletide cheer when I haven’t even gotten all the matzoh out of my colon from Passover yet!

I have spoken before and elsewhere about the pressure Jews feel to morph Chanukah into a Yuletide-like holiday…Chrismakkah…a concept which fills me with enough loathing to stuff a Santa suit. They are not similar holidays; they are not equivalent holidays. And yet, because they fall at the same time of year, Yiddlach feel compelled to match their neighbors gift for gift, light for light, stupid singalong for stupid singalong. The only thing that keeps me from jamming hot knitting needles through my eardrums this time of year is Adam Sandler, and even that song wears out its welcome by its third spin. Try playing “Here Comes Chanukah” as often as Rite Aid plays “The Christmas Song,” and you’ll want to open every bottle in the pharmacy and swallow till the pain stops.

Holiday overkill is bad enough two or three weeks out of the year, but a whole month? You got radio stations that play only Christmas music. Some stores block off entire sections for stocking stuffers the day after Labor Day. Just stop it! Stop it! Nobody’s roasting chestnuts on an open anything. If grandma’s getting run over, it’s by grandpa’s Rascal, not a reindeer.

And I know Christmas is an excuse for people to do nice things and feel good about themselves. Soldiers stuck in a sandpit in Trashcanistan have a chance to come home and see their families because it’s Christmas. Why the army can’t do that on Groundhog Day just the same is beyond me, but okay. It’s like supermarkets that give the destitute free turkey on Thanksgiving. Fantastic — homeless people have a dozen meal options on Thanksgiving Day. The day after Thanksgiving? Pfftth. Back to 99-cent pizza and Spaghettios.

Still, if we use the holiday as an impetus to be better humans and do more good, even the cranky, miserable misanthrope in me cannot object to that. But the time leading up to the holiday is about nothing more than marketing and selling and forced, fake, phony good cheer. It’s all too much, too soon, and if I sound like the Grinch, so be it. Especially since I’m not trying to steal Christmas. I just want to hide it for awhile, like the Afikomen, so that, as an accountant would say, the interest appreciates.

No Marine comes home on special leave November 8th. Nobody’s donating cans to the food bank on December 12th. We’re subjected to the hype but not the help. I say, if big business must turn Christmas into a season-long capitalist orgy, at least give out condoms of compassion to go with it.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Ooh, only 288 shopping days until Simchas Torah!

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27488

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #087 (11/12/2014): Duck Amuck

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #087 (1/12/2014): Duck Amuck

aired Jan. 11, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/yqw7B8Z50Mo

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of January 12th, 2014.

Where does free speech cross into hate speech? This is an issue I deal with all the time, or at least other people tell me I do. At what point does expressing an unpopular opinion become something you have to censor and censure?

The question has been bedeviling the whimsically named Arts & Entertainment Network owing to their smash-hit program, “Duck Dynasty.” It’s all about this Louisiana backwoods family that has spent the past 25 years hand-making products for duck hunters. They apparently created the world’s most effective bird call, the so-called “duck commander” – and from this, they got rich. But they didn’t let money go their heads; they still live like Swamp Thing. But thanks to the reality show, these hirsute hillbillies are squatting on an $80 million empire.

Everywhere you go, there’s “Duck Dynasty” t-shirts, Halloween masks, posters, body spray – and more power to them. If you can just be your crazy self and get the whole world to watch, that’s the secret to fame in the 21st Century. If you’re lucky and have huge tits, you’re Kim Kardashian; if you not so lucky and have a penis, you’re Jon Gosselin. If you have huge tits AND a penis, you’re Big Ang.

Essentially, the Robertson family is a hick version of “Jersey Shore.” Instead of Italian goombas who do Gym/Tan/Laundry, you got smelly Bayou bozos who do Guns/Tattoos/Lard. And all of this was adorable in a post-Civil War, “let’s-make-fun-of-the-South” kind of way, until the patriarch of the clan, Phil Robertson, turned his private prejudice into public pronouncements. In an interview with GQ Magazine – because, of course, the Robertson clan are everyone’s idea of GQ material – grampa Phil Robertson shared his religious thoughts on sin. Without much prompting, foolish Phil said, quote, “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” etcetera.

Phil Robertson parroted the same drivel spouted by every religious homophobe with just enough literacy to read the King James Bible. Leviticus says, “It’s an abomination when two men shtup each other.” Oddly enough, the bible says nothing about two women shtupping each other. This proves God is merciful because it spares us from having to edit out the fourth scene in every good porno movie.

But I digress. Phil Robertson views queerness as a disgusting sin – something even more loathsome to him than bathing or shaving. In his defense, grumpy grampy says he doesn’t advocate hatred or hate crimes against gays. Just being repulsed by them is enough. As Jesus says, turn the other cheek, just don’t spread those cheeks for a hunky apostle.

Faced with these comments in GQ and mounting pressure from gay groups – and if you’ve ever felt mounting pressure from gays, you know how painful that can be – A&E, which broadcasts Douche Dinosaurs, had to make a decision: Cancel the show? Keep the show but jettison its most popular star? Do nothing and just hold out until the next Miley Cyrus controversy takes everyone’s mind off things?

In the end, Arts & Entertainment Network – which in recent years has become as artful and entertaining as a children’s party clown performing knee surgery – A&E did a little of everything. They suspended Robertson, then they immediately reinstated him. They apologized for grampa’s stupidity, but then said, “Hey, he’s family. What can you do?” You can be richer than Croesus and still be a cretin.

And A&E has a point. We’re talking about “Duck Dynasty” not “Malcolm Gladwell Presents.” Just like the Jersey Shore kids and the Honey Boo-Boo brood, we’re watching a clan who, combined, don’t have sufficient I.Q. to spell “I.Q.” We expect the Phil Robertsons of this world to say off-the-wall things, and we’d get bored if he didn’t. We expect his thoughts to be either dead wrong or right but expressed in a goofy way.

All these reality shows are sort of the opposite of Fox News. Fox is dangerous because the hosts express themselves beautifully and are thus able to spin partisan factoids into a credible semblance of reality. “Duck Dynasty” is about folks who could star in the sequel to “Deliverance.” That the Robertsons can form sentences at all marks astonishing progress up the evolutionary ladder.

The point is, you can’t make a silk purse out of a duck’s ass. If we put someone on TV for being a laughable putz, we shouldn’t be shocked when he goes medieval on our ears. And if we penalize grandpa Phil for expressing his honest feelings about fags, what do we do when Jay Leno makes an Asian joke about North Korea? What do we do when a celebrity who’s had lipo makes fat people feel bad? As with so many things, there’s a slippery slope. And a fat person on a slippery slope is quite hilarious to watch.

Double standard? Perhaps. Do we go easy on Phil Robertson because he merely picked on gays – as opposed to saying that Jews killed Jesus or Negroes were more fun when they were slaves? But even then…we’re talking about a man who spent his life figuring out how to make noises that sexually arouse ducks. Let’s all be clear about that. And let’s keep Phil Robertson on “Duck Dynasty” until we either get bored with him – which should should come in another two minutes out of his allotted 15 – or viewers simply realize, “Hey, television doesn’t always have to be this shitty.” In the meantime, all A&E has to do is put up a disclaimer: “The views expressed in the following program do not represent the opinions of this network, this station, or this century. If Phil Robertson uses the bible to say something offensive and ignorant, well, just look at him. What the duck did you expect?”

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

—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-28X

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27900

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #112 (12/7/2014): Cos

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #112 (12/7/2014): Cos

aired Dec. 6, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/MaWHy74ejho

Hey Hey Hey! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of December 7, 2014.

How much smoke does there have to be before we cannot deny that there is fire? Well, when my wife is cooking, that’s almost every meal. But in the case of crime and accusation, at what point do look at hearsay and more hearsay and still more hearsay, and think, “It would be nice to have proof, but it’s time to presume the guy’s guilty until proven innocent.” Sounds ridiculous, but there is a logic to it. Does anybody in the world believe O.J. Simpson refrained from chopping up his ex-wife and her boyfriend the way Ted Nugent slices a deer? Can you hear the name Michael Jackson and not think, “He was bad. He was bad. Sham-on. You know.”

And now another black celebrity – well, Michael Jackson wasn’t exactly black, but be that as it may – Bill Cosby, beloved comedian Bill Cosby, has gone from “I Started Out as a Child” to finishing up in various teenagers. For years, Cos has been the cause of whispers, accusations, unsavory speculations and sub rosa scuttlebutt. There was even a civil suit – to continue the alliterations — but it was settled out of court, because a man of Cosby’s wealth could pay families off and leave the world guessing at his motives. After all, even if he was 100% innocent – which he may well be – he’d still have to hire a team of lawyers and endure his name being dragged for months through courts and headlines. And if he’s fully exonerated, the muttering won’t stop: “Oh, he probably did it. Those famous people get away with everything.”

At the same time, so many women, so many similar incidents, so many pointing fingers. Or something stubby pointing at their fingers. Janice Dickinson may be out of her mind, but was her night with Fat Albert what drove her there? And what about Judy Huth, the first accuser to actually subpoena his penis? Last week, Huth filed a lawsuit against the “I Spy” guy for drugging and raping her when she was 15. Too many years have passed for a criminal trial, but at least she’ll have her day in court — though it will still be a case of “he said, she said, he said, she said, he said, she couldn’t say because her mouth was full.”

Cosby is counter-suing, possibly because at this point, he realizes that “no comment” and “I didn’t do it…that time, or that time, or that time” won’t be enough to convince a cynical public – or all the movie and TV people he’s trying to make deals with. They’re all pulling out. Okay, you have five seconds to make your own joke about that, but seriously, Bill Cosby obviously had enough cash, power and influence in the last 40 years to make evil deeds go away. But did he? The burden of proof belongs to the accusers. It’s a little too late for DNA, hotel registries and presidential dry-cleaning bills, so their memories of couches, beds, baths and beyonds better be unimpeachable.

And by the way, I’m really not one of those people who blames the victims – or alleged victims – in rape or sexual-assault cases. But this woman who’ll be suing Cosby four decades after the fact… She was 15 years old when she met 40-year-old Cosby in the park. He took her and her friend to a tennis club where he bought them drinks – and I don’t mean Gatorade; more like a Get-`er Aid – and then he asked them back with him to the Playboy Mansion. I don’t care how naïve girls were back then, if you’re a teenager, and a guy your dad’s age asks you back to the Grotto, what the hell do you think is gonna happen? You think he wants to hear how you’re doing on the debate team? Well, in this case, yes! She helped him master-debate. Supposedly against her will. And against his willy.

And people scratch their heads. “If even half the allegations from different women are true,” we think, “how’d he get away with it? How did he get to be Cliff Huxtable instead of Inmate #42837?” But then again, look at Jimmy Savile over in England, and Rolf Harris in Australia. Beloved entertainers who did more – and worse – than Cosby, and didn’t hit the skids until years after their indiscretions. So, alas, there is precedent for extreme crime and delayed punishment.

What a rotten year it has been for comedians. David Brenner dead from cancer. John Pinette dead from weight issues. Joan Rivers killed by minor surgery. Robin Williams going through a period of belt tightening. Carlos Mencia…still not funny. And now, one of the top five greatest comedians of all time, Bill Cosby, not exactly having the last laugh.

I still hope none of this is true, and these are just gold-diggers or mass hysterics or bitter has-beens who never got the ingénue roles and music careers they wanted. But the realist in me realizes that the star of “Mother, Jugs and Speed” was a mugger with drugs and spooge. I know you were in “Let’s Do it Again” – but did you have to do it again and again and again? Oh Bill, how could you disappoint us this way? After all, it takes a special kind of genius to do something even more vile, even more unspeakable and horrible than “Leonard Part 6.” And no, I won’t be giving my children your chocolate pudding pops.

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

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #109 (10/19/2014): EBOLA

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #109 (10/19/2014): Ebola

aired Oct. 18, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmaLeEb1jhA&feature=youtu.be

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 19, 2014.

A year ago, if someone came up to me and asked, “Have you ever heard of ebola?”, I would have said, “Sure, I’ve heard of ebola. I’m ebola. I go to the alley every weekend, and my high score is 230.”

How far we have come in such a short time that ebola has mutated from an obscure, 15-year-old virus to an American panic attack. In just two months, we’ve gone from, “Oh great. Africans are dying from something besides starvation and AIDS?” to “Close the schools, block the airports, fumigate the national parks.”

On some level, all this caution is good. Perhaps we learned from the AIDS years the penalty for looking the other way when horror happens to someone else. In 1984, Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch could blink at HIV and say, “Ehh, it’s a faigeleh plague. Maybe it’ll thin the herd.” Thirty years later, we look at Africa and go, “It’s not in our backyard yet, but we live in a small neighborhood.”

So missionaries and do gooders trek to Liberia and Nigeria and Sierra Leone to help contain the contagious. Good for them. Woulda been better if they’d gone with a one-way ticket. They come back to the United States, unaware that they’re infected. See, ebola is a disease that takes a while to show how insidious it is. Like marriage.

Anyhoo, what a shock! The missionaries and nurses come back on our soil, and we get our first cases in American hospitals, where the protocols are fammished because nobody knows what we’re dealing with yet. Some genius physician says, “Let’s bring the sick people over here because we can treat them better. How do we keep a zillion other people from being exposed? We’ll work that part out later.”

The minute we started bringing carriers over here, you knew and I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody sneezes, someone else inhales, they cough on a third person, and boom, you’ve got school crossing guards in Hazmat suits. How is that I can’t even put a bandaid on myself without fainting, but I know more than The Center for Disease Control?

What I admit I don’t understand is how this disease is spreading so fast. Ebola is not a virus like the chicken pox where a four-year-old bumps into a five-year-old, and soon both of them are home with mommy allllllll day long. Instead, Ebola is like AIDS in that it takes serious physical contact to pass the pandemic from person to person. You don’t get AIDS just from holding someone’s hand. Well, unless you’re holding it halfway up your tuchas. And even then you have to have an open sore for the bad germs to climb into.

Ebola is not carried by air or water, you don’t catch it from mosquitoes—in fact, patient zero apparently got it from a bat. So, if you’re a baseball player, watch out.

We can beg the ebola victims, or anybody coming from West Africa, don’t kiss anybody, don’t shtup anyone, don’t go on the subway and wipe your boogers on the grabby pole—tempting as that is. If you’re from some country where ebola is spreading like Iggy Azalea, go directly to a hospital or, better yet, turn around and get a boarding pass for the first plane back to Lagos. By the way, you have an uncle there who left you $3 million. All you have to do is bring a thousand-dollar downpayment to this lawyer on the internet.

But I digress. President Obama has chosen an ebola czar — I think I once dated a girl named Ebola Czar — but the dawdler in chief is stopping short of a travel ban. Which basically means: Dangerously ill people, keep coming over here, we’ve got a guy with a suit and a desk. Meanwhile, Frontier Airlines is dealing with a stupid nurse who flew from Dallas to Cleveland during her incubation period, and a Dallas hospital worker who’s stuck on a ship that can’t dock because he might be a carrier. (sings) “The blood Boat.”

And yet, through all of this, getting hysterical does nobody any good. The vast majority of people don’t go around handling blood and sputum and hypodermic needles all day. Unless they’re Andy Dick. So calm down. Take your vacation, go to school, eat at the cafeteria. Be happy that some African countries are closing their borders and keeping containment, and do not allow undue worry to keep you from enjoying your day. After all, life is just a bowl o’ cherries. If cherries carried ebola, then we’d have a problem.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. (Coughs) Just a cough.

—> https://wp.me/pzvIo-22F

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #108 (9/28/2014): Opiyum

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #108 (9/28/2014): Opiyum

aired Sept. 27, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/eEhsyp6F2SQ

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 28, 2014.

You know how you can never eat only one potato chip? Or M&M? Or pound of
brisket? Well, a chef at a Chinese restaurant in China dreamed up a way to keep his customers coming back for more. And more. And more. A fella named Zhang wanted to make sure hungry diners chose his noodle shop over all the others in his province, so he did what any entrepreneurial sociopath would do: he went out and bought several pound of poppy buds. That’s the stuff you make opium with—for those of you who don’t live in California or Colorado.

Anyhoo, he pounded the poppies into a powder and sprinkled it into the flour for his noodle recipe. Since opium has a narcotic, addictive effect, Zhang figured customers would start eating his entrees, develop cravings, and return for more. Considering that Chinese food automatically makes you crave more of it an hour later, Zhang seemed to have a foolproof scheme. That is, until one of his diners decided to drive home. Police made a routine traffic stop, gave the guy a breathalyzer, and lo and behold, he was high, and he be holdin’.

The poor shlub was arrested and held in prison for two weeks. All the while, he protested, “It was the noodles! It was the noodles!” You can imagine how that went over with the warden. But the customer convinced his family to go eat at the noodle shop a couple of times. Police then agreed to test the family, and—you got it—they had more poppies in `em than Dorothy, the Tin Man and all those midget eunuchs combined!

The police—or, sorry, this is China—the po-rice, allested the lestaulaunt owner and put him in jail for two weeks. Now the driver is suing the city for wrongful arrest, and the restaurant owner is saying, hey, poppy seeds were actually common in Chinese cooking before they were banned a few years ago. I guess they were poppy-lar. Heh heh heh dammit.

What I don’t get about this story is two things: aleph: why you would buy a hundred-dollar bag of drugs to sell 24 cents worth of noodles. And beth: why any restaurateur would think you need opiates to get people hooked on noodle soup. Ask any Jewish grandmother. If you’re sick, if you’re under the weather, if you’re just plain ravenous: put a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of you, already you feel better. Just from the smell, let alone the heat, the taste, the slurpy lokshen.

Real Kosher chicken soup is its own addiction, especially with those giant matzoh balls that are heavy but light but heavy but light but heavy but light. And for those who think chicken soup is not a drug, why do you think they call it Jewish Penicillin?

Now, let me be clear: I am against any chef or anybody tampering with food by using harmful ingredients, be it hippies sharing funny brownies at Woodstock or Monsanto shpritzing everything with growth hormones and high-fructose corn syrup. But at the same time, it’s not as if we can cast the first stone. The guy who invented Coca Cola was a morphine addict who was crushing coca leaves into his wine. In the late 1800s, a local prohibition forced him to change his recipe – not to take the cocaine out, just the alcohol. However, on his own volition, he nixed the cocaine and replaced it with syrupy sugar — which, as we know from our children, has no addictive or drug-like properties whatsoever.

Nevertheless: let the story of Zhang be a lesson to anyone who wants to turn chow mein into cow-caine: desist and resist! Or, put another way, you can use your noodle, but don’t turn us into noodle users!

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

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27556

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #107 (9/21/2014): Gwyneth

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #107 (9/21/2014): Gwyneth

aired Sept. 20, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF1GwetYq3E

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 21, 2014.

Over this summer, I had my beefs with celebrities – some Jewish, some not – and their bashing of Israel over the Gaza War. Celebrities who are either misinformed or simply too damn dumb to know who their friends are in this world, versus who the enemies are. Who is creating a climate of death and destruction versus who is just trying to live without being hit by rockets every day? So fie on Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem and Rihanna and that putz from Pink Floyd Roger Waters, and Chuck D, who’s been salting his lyrics with anti-Semitic slurs since day one. You wanna know what a Terrordome is, Chuck? Go live in Israel and be forced to live under an iron terrordome so that Hamas rockets don’t fall on your black ass. Why don’t you do that, Chuck D-spicable?

Meanwhile, other famous folk have been fabulous! Howard Stern, Bill Maher, Joan Rivers – she should rest in peace – Woody Allen, who gave a wonderful, insightful interview about the situation. He was the first one to say that if, back in 1948, the Arabs had treated Israel like a friendly neighbor instead of hornets’ nest, everything would be different. Notice: it’s all the funny people, the comedians, who see through the Palestinian PR poppycock. I guess it takes a humorist to shoot the arrows of logic through balloons filled with hot-air. Or, in the Arabs’ case, airplanes filled with terrorists. Thank God the funny people get it, because all these self-inflated “serious” actors and musical artistes – they look in the mirror and see Felix Frankfurter staring back at them – instead of the hot dogs they really are.

Even so, I come today not to vilify my enemies but to glorify my brethren and, in this case, sistren. In celebrity news last week, it was revealed that the Jewish people will be gaining a notable. The decades since World War II have seen our numbers chopped by the Holocaust, by assimilation, by intermarriage, by – you should pardon the expression – conversion (ptooey!). Now, the Orthodox are doing their best to reverse the trend. They’re shtupping and shtupping and being fruitful and multiplying, which has been heavenly to the cause, even as it’s been hell on the welfare rolls.

But we cannot rely merely on the horniness of our most devout cohorts to bolster our population. It is a delight, therefore, to report that yes, we’re getting one back. Someone who, if nothing else, raises the overall good-looks quotient of our nation by at least a percent or two.

Gwyneth Paltrow, a shikseh goddess if there ever was one – tall, blonde, willowy, pretty as a picture, and pretty in motion pictures – Gwyneth Paltrow is converting to Judaism. Now, to be clear, she’s already halfway there. Her father was television producer Bruce Paltrow, a proud member of the tribe. Her mother, however, is the lovely non-Jewish actress Blythe Danner. She’s the one on TV commercials hawking Prolia, a pharmaceutical that helps weak bones, which is ironic because you don’t get nicer bones than Blythe Danner or her kid.

Little Gwyneth was raised in a home with both religions, which she found very nice. But in recent years, she’s been studying Kabbalah, which is a weird, mystical occult offshoot of Judaism. Kind of liked dungeons and dragons, only the dungeons are synagogues and the dragons have big noses and law degrees.

But Paltrow is not just being swayed by a cultish micro-sect. She’s done her homework. In 2011, she appeared on that TV show that delves into your genealogical history. She went into the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side and looked at pictures of her father’s father’s father – a great Rabbi. And his father, also a Kabbalistic Rebbe of note. With people like that in your lineage, what are you gonna be, a Presbyterian?

And Ms. Paltrow has said that she wants to bring her children up, quote, “in a Jewish environment.” Well, she’s in Hollywood, so she’s already there. But she’s got one kid named Moses – so come on, she might as well have named him Jewy Jewberg – and the other child she famously named Apple. Well, is there a more Jewish fruit? From Eve in the garden to the treat we dip in honey for a sweet New Year, the apple is a treasured food for our people – and it doesn’t clog up your tuchas like matzoh.

And speaking of eating, Paltrow has said that she loves to cook and feed people, making her a Jewish mother, and she has amazing genes, making her a Jewish princess. And hey, considering all the macrobiotic laboratory crap she eats, she’s a Jewish doctor, too!

Now, all of this could just be a star’s fad, or Paltrow trying to find herself after consciously uncoupling from her shaygitz husband of more than a decade. Whatever the reason, I hope it takes. I hope she finds in Judaism a beautiful way of life – not from all the rules, not from the mystical narishkeit, but from fully joining a people that has survived the worst the universe can throw at them and still turn to each other and say, “Really? Those shoes with that shirt?”

Welcome, Golden Gwyneth, to the fold, and when your kids turn 12, look me up. I can have them chanting the Haftorah like Yossele Rosenblatt in three months flat, or your money back. Well, some of your money back.

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

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #106 (9/7/2014): Uzi Does It

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #106 (9/7/2014): Uzi Does It

aired Sept. 6, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM9w34BrJf8. AUDIO: https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27571

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 7, 2014.

Chuck D once rapped, “My Uzi weighs a ton.” If only Uzi submachine guns did weigh a ton, then children couldn’t pick them up and fire them. But, of course, submachine guns are made purposely to be lightweight and portable yet still cause massive damage in a brief amount of time. Like eating sugar-free Gummi Bears.

Last week near Las Vegas, a nine-year-old girl was practicing on a gun range. As Lewis Black would say, I shall repeat that. There’s an Arizona firing range, about an hour from Sin City, where tourists can go practice their marksmanship under instructional supervision. Among those tourists last week: a nine-year-old child. (Not that there are any nine-year-old grownups – unless you count kids with the aging disease that makes them look like Mr. Magoo.) This little girl was doing so well with regular weapons, that her instructor, Charles Vacca – the late Charles Vacca – said, “Oh, what the hell. Let’s give her a repeating assault weapon, and see how she does.”

She did not do well. I think most parents will tell you that a nine-year-old girl can barely control her bladder, let alone a semi-automatic machine gun. Charles Vacca instructed the precocious tyke to pull the trigger and fire off one round at the target. Which she did. But you know, bullets are like potato chips; you fire one, before you know it, you’ve emptied the whole bag. The difference between a snack food and an Israeli-made weapon of mass destruction is that a can of Pringles doesn’t have a kickback. Well, unless they’re made with Olestra. A machine gun, however, in the hands of someone who weighs fifty pounds, is gonna squeeze off fifty rounds. One of those bullets managed to find its way to the middle of Charles Vacca’s forehead, which is why he had to cancel the rest of his classes through next Thursday. His return after that depends on whether Moshiach comes on Friday and revives him.

Otherwise, you’ve got a dead guy, a child who has to go through life knowing she killed him, and a gun industry saying, “Hey, freak accident. We don’t need minimum age requirements, just height and weight suggestions.” Morons.

But there is some good that can come out of this tragic incident. When this moppet murderess grows up and goes to college, she is the last chick any frat boy is gonna date rape. (“Steer clear, bro. Remember what she did to the last guy who grabbed her arm?”) Also, in the big book of karma, you gotta figure this is payback for every deer that was ever minding its own business, frolicking in the woods and suddenly, BAM!, she’s on the hood of a four-by-four. For once, Bambi’s mother gets to snicker and go, “How’s it feel, asshole?”

Lastly and bestly, this episode does serve to showcase the glorious superiority of Israeli technology. Arabs can fire a thousand rockets out of Gaza, with two or three – almost by accident – hitting targets and causing damage. But the Uzi submachine gun? You pick that up and point, and you’re looking at a Jonestown massacre in seven seconds. That’s craftsmanship!

Anyhoo, the Arizona Last Stop shooting range where all this went down, is still open, still packed with customers, still promoting, quote, “a Desert Storm” atmosphere with a base age requirement of eight. I shall repeat that: eight. Folks, I have an eight-year-old kid, and I won’t even let her use a cheese grater. Yes, I have to tolerate chunky wedges of parmesan on my linguini, but she keeps her fingers, and I keep my sanity. Well, such as it is.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, going out with a bang, from Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #104 (8/3/2014): Great Guns in Gaza

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #104 (8/3/2014): Great Guns in Gaza

aired Aug. 2, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/aNHPRoAQWFc

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of August 3rd, 2014.

If you play with fire, you’re gonna get burned. If you keep throwing gasoline on that fire, you’re gonna get burned blacker than the New York Knicks in a lunar eclipse. Or, put another way, if you beat up your wife ten times, each time she will forgive you, she’ll wear a band-aid and concealer, and she’ll live in fear until the next flare up. But on the eleventh time, if you haven’t killed her yet, she’s gonna call a friend of a friend named Nunzio, and, for a fee, he will relocate you – to the middle of the East River.

It’s the law of “enough is enough.” If you are the nation of Israel, and surrounding your borders are a people who have sworn to drive you into the sea . . . These people fire rockets, indiscriminately and daily, into your heimat. If you’re Israel, you tolerate a dozen rockets, a hundred rockets, a thousand fakakteh rockets that usually land in the middle of nowhere, thank God. But rocket number 1,001? It’s time to pull your Incredible Hulk costume out of the closet and kick some ass.

Three weeks ago, as I’m sure you recall, three innocent Jewish teenagers were slaughtered when they hitchhiked a little too far into Gaza. This was not just another act of violence – you know, like Saturday night in Chicago – this was a flashpoint. It was the moment the Israeli government could say, “You know what? We give the Palestinians the Gaza Strip in exchange for peace, and they give us our teenagers back in pieces. Enough with their rockets, enough with the terrorism, enough with the bullshit about Hamas being a legitimate political organization; it’s time to open up a can of whoop-tuchas on this enemy that means us only harm and destruction. Bring it.”

In my previous Rabbinical Reflection, which I’m sure you’ve nearly memorized and put on flash cards for easy reference, I urged the IDF to take action in Gaza. To avenge the death of those boys and give the camel jockeys payback for years of tears, fears and jeering Emirs. I am thrilled, therefore, that Benjamin Netanyahu gathered up his army into a white-and-blue fist, and they’ve been pounding the Gaza goons ever since.

Dead civilians? Unfortunate casualties? For sure, and what a shame. It’s called collateral damage, and every war has `em. And the Arab teenager that Israeli extremists abducted and killed in retaliation? No one’s proud of that. I’ll even go as far as saying that Israel hasn’t gone out of its way every single time to make sure they’re only blowing up militants and not bystanders two feet away from militants. But when did the Arabs ever make a distinction between soldiers and regular folk? Bombs on buses? Shrapnel in cafes? Mass murders of Olympic athletes and commercial airplanes slamming into the tallest buildings in New York? It’s a good thing I’m not an army General, because I’d napalm every speck of Gaza with a tent on it.

And where does American stand in all this? It’s honestly hard to tell. Barack Obama and John Kerry are talking the left-wing, liberal talk of “stop the fighting now, it’s a humanitarian crises, Israel and Hamas need to cease fire immediately and sit down at the table because there’s wrongs on both sides” – all the typical crybaby blah-blah that negates the basic fact that Israel tends to be in the right 90 percent of the time.

However, words and actions are entirely different things, especially in diplomacy. And for all the handwringing blather as a sop to the “Democracy Now” crowd, the Obama administration has, until this point, watched from the sidelines and let Israel do what it has to do. Thank you, Mr. President. If our Secretary of State wants to appease the Muslims by making noises about how Israel is being too harsh and causing too much suffering to the poor, innocent Palestinians, no problem. Just give Yisroel time to collapse the tunnels, kill the killers and drag Hamas, begging and desperate, to the outhouse of surrender. By eliminating terrorists and religious fanatics, Israel is doing America favor after favor, and I honestly believe Obama and company realize that – no matter how many times Republican bloggers call him “Hussein” and make him sound like the love child of Josef Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini.

It’s the nature of Israel that whenever we do strike back against those who oppress us, we have to apologize for killing more of them than they of us. When our missiles hit their targets, when 100 Palestinians die for every Israeli soldier, that’s unseemly somehow. It should be more balanced. We should die more just to ratchet up the sympathy vote. Sorry, Charlie. The goal is to weaken Hamas and make Israel safe from attack. If that means bombing Gaza back to the stone age, so be it. Besides, Arab children have proven quite skillful at throwing stones, so it’s right up their alley. Just don’t expect to throw stones at Jews anymore, because we will fire them right back at a hundred times the speed.

Go Israel! Go Bibi! And remember what Abba Eban said, “It is better to be disliked than pitied.” I’m both, but I’m beyond giving a crap.

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

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27580