RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #174 – Poems for Valentine’s Day
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a special poetical Rabbinical Reflection for Gingold Theatrical Group’s Virtual Open Mic Night on this Valentine’s Day, 2022.
You know, poetry is central to the Jewish people, from biblical psalms to Leonard Nimoy’s “Warmed by Love.” Since poetry expresses love, I wish to share with you some classic Jewish poems of romance and arousal. For example, Rabbi Tseitlin of Detroit gave us this most appetizing sonnet:
Shall I compare thee to a hot knish?
Thou art more tasty and much cuter
With boobs as plump as gefilte fish
And scrumptious nipples on each hooter.
A knish is square, but thou do curve
With far more spice than hot pastrami
Thy sexiness makes me a perv
When thou dost swallow my salami
Thou art chicken soup for my soul
and matzoh farfel for my heart
Your kugel makes me lose control
In a good way — not like when I shart
So long as Jews can shlep and kvetch and daven
I eat you up and give you all my lovin’.
Is it any wonder Rabbi Tseitlin has restraining orders in twelve different Michigan counties?
Let us consider this poem from the great Rabbi Vogel of Omsk:
Roses are red, violets are thrilling me
I love you so much,
but my prostate is killing me.
Inspired by Rabbi Vogel, I, too, have written short verse, many in the haiku form. For example, this Chanukah-ku:
Dreidels made of clay.
When they’re dry, it’s time to play.
Women? The reverse.
Of course, not all poems about love are so refined. For an earthier exploration of desire, we turn to Rebbetzin Meyrowitz, widow of the great Estonian Rabbi, Leroy. Here’s a gem from her shocking blue period, shocking because it was her first period since her thirties.
There was a young girl from Tiberias
whose horniness made her delirious
They found her in Gaza
Undressed in a plaza
Her pregnancy ain’t that mysterious
In her latter years, Rebbetzin Meyrowitz became more audacious, disgusting even, as when she wrote:
In order to brighten his sukkas
Reb Mendelsson hired three hookas
They pulled on his payess
and sat on his fayess
and jammed an etrog in his tukas.
My friends, somewhere in the Torah — I’m not sure where — it says “Love Thy Neighbor.” — not possible. But we can still aspire to love, if only as a poetic ideal.
My hope for all of you during these times is that you receive love. And when you do, may you have enough money to pay the girl and her pimp.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Happy Valentine’s Day.
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.
David Lefkowitz’s short comedy, THREE PERCENT, was performed as part of the third annual Faces of America Monologue Festival, produced virtually by The Playground Experiment live on Nov. 20, 2021.
Directed by Darpan Joshi, Three Percent stars Mischa Dani Goodman as Avery. To read the play, visit: https://wp.me/pzvIo-1V9 For more writing by David Lefkowitz: dave lefkowitz.org.
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for mid-October 2021.
It has been a sad and surreal year for fans of a little music group called The Rolling Stones. You may have heard of them. They began as a blues-rock band in the mid-60s and then, for several years, made the most compelling rock and roll in the history of ever. Then Mick Taylor quit and they vacillated between still kinda-great and name one decent album in the last 40 years.
But through it all, they were the Stones — the swagger, the sound, the mix of energy and grit — and not the kind you get from a Larabar. When Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and — oh, okay, we’ll include Ronnie Wood — when they locked in together, you knew they were still the greatest band in the world who weren’t the Beatles.
And then this August, cancer took Charlie. We all felt like we’d been kick-drummed in the stomach. But Ronnie, Mick, and Keef had already decided the show must go on. They survived Brian Jones doing the backstroke, they endured when Bill Wyman quit to concentrate on divorcing his 10-year-old wife. Jagger’s open-heart surgery? Richards’ urban-legend bloodstream? Bumps in the road; the Stones roll on, touring as we speak.
So why am I complaining? Well, because I’m Jewish. But also because Mick and Keith recently made a decision about one of their classic songs: “Brown Sugar.” What is “Brown Sugar” about? Nobody knows. Mick Jagger doesn’t know, and he wrote it. He just threw some ideas on paper about white men shtupping the hell out of black women — not an uncommon theme for the guy who wrote “Sweet Black Angel” and “Some Girls.” But because of these woke times, and because the lyrics reference slavery in a jaw-droppingly tasteless way, “Brown Sugar” is now officially retired from the Stones catalogue.
Since its 1971 debut on Sticky Fingers, “Brown Sugar” has been a radio staple and concert favorite. Fans, black and white, boogied to it, and, guess what? They did not spontaneously combust or weep indignantly at the lyrics. Granted, it’s impossible to understand the lyrics burbling out of Mick Jagger: “Old boy stagecoach hypocotyl beans” – what? But even if you have the lyric sheet, you don’t hear the song and think, “Ooh, this makes me want to take a riding crop to Harriet Tubman.” Not to mention, the narrator of “Brown Sugar” is complimenting black women on their pleasant vaginal flavor. Hey, I’ve eaten some Jewish women, and it’s like having an anchovy throw up on your teeth.
No question, “Brown Sugar” is all kinds of politically incorrect, but so are a million rap numbers that do a lot worse things to black women than tasting them. Still, what scares me about the decision by Jagger and Richards — who, as authors and performers, have every right to do as they please with their work — what scares me is precedent. If you self-censor one particularly egregious tune, how long before other Stones masterpieces fall under the same scrutiny and become cancel-culture casualties?
Feminists give “Under My Thumb” the middle finger, your local PTA is sure to ban “Little T&A,” and born-again Christians raise hell against “Sympathy for the Devil.” But sometimes the offense is more subtle. What if Al Sharpton comes out against “Paint it Black” for its negativity about that color? What if “19th Nervous Breakdown” starts giving mentally ill people their 20th? What if third-grade English teachers — already despairing over teaching this generation anything that isn’t a digital game — what if they hear “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and get pushed over the edge by the double negative? (So he can get satisfaction?) What if animal-rights activists protest “Beast of Burden” and transgender woman feel bad about “Rocks Off”? What if the makers of tampons and maxipads lobby to ban “Let it Bleed?” What if the makers of Imodium want to censor “Let it Loose?” What if deaf people say “no” to “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” blind people have a problem with “Far Away Eyes,” and hemophiliacs cringe at “Too Much Blood”? What if Catholics try to block “No Expectations” because that conflicts with their idea of the afterlife, or if Rabbis urge congregants to delete the song “Happy” because they know it’s something Jews will never be?
Instead of cancel, cancel, cancel, we need context, context, context. Whether it’s Birth of a Nation, a Statue of Thomas Jefferson, Mickey Rooney in yellowface, or Wagner at the Israel Philharmonic — explain it, debate it, keep it. At some point, we have to tell all the woke whiners, “You can’t always get what you want. Go ahead and vent at what vexes you. Give a speech before the movie, put a sign near the statue, have the deejay say, `This next song is `Brown Sugar.’ It might be about slavery, or drugs, or dessert. Either way, don’t try this at home.”
Asked about “Brown Sugar,” Jagger once said, “I would never write that now; I’d probably censor myself. I can’t just write raw like that.” That was in 1995. And Jagger had long stopped writing raw like that. You tell me if that’s a good thing.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Gimme Seltzer!
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #171 (9/14/2021): How to Fast on Yom Kippur
(Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflections air on the long-running podcast Dave’s Gone By. youtube: https://youtu.be/ZGFcUunDz38)
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for Yom Kippur, 2021.
Even non-observant Jews, who wouldn’t know a Torah from a tuba, remember that they’re Jewish on Yom Kippur. It’s the one holiday on the Hebrew calendar where everyone agrees to be depressed. We think about our sins, we promise to do better, and we hope God doesn’t hold us to that promise because, let’s face it, we’re human.
So people ask me, “Rabbi, how do I get through the day? How do I observe the Yom Kippur fast?”
Okay, so on Erev Yom Kippur, you have dinner in the evening. And when the sun goes down, you stop eating. Then, an hour later, keep not eating.
By nine, ten o’clock, when you usually have a snack. Don’t.
Sixty to 120 more minutes will pass. During those minutes, do not eat.
Then, time to go to sleep. Unless you’re narcoleptic elephant, you don’t eat when you sleep, so you’re fine. If you get up in the middle of the night to pee, don’t pee-eat. Save that for Shavuis. Go back to sleep.
Wake up in the morning. Pee again. Brush your teeth. This is great because if you’re thirsty, you get a little water, a minty bissel flavor — but it doesn’t count as food because it’s a health thing. You can even gargle, but no fair gargling with a Starbucks latte.
Now, the fun thing about Yom Kippur is you can’t work. So lie on the couch, read a book, make up a song. And continue not eating.
Eventually, noon will roll around, and you’ll think it’s time to eat. Guess what? It’s not. Keep reading and singing.
Now it’s early afternoon and you’re getting hungry. Too bad. Don’t eat.
By three o’clock you should have a minor but persistent headache. This is all a natural part of Jewish suffering. However, it’s also a fantastic opportunity because you can take a Tylenol — and have more water. That’s two food-groups with one ailment.
Now it’s 3:30 and you’re exhausted. Go back to sleep. Try not to dream about food. Or naked women. Or anything else you’d want to eat.
After your nap, dusk should be approaching — homestretch! Just another hour, and you can stuff your face. But not yet; a little more torture never hurt anyone.
I will say, the most messed-up thing about Yom Kippur in America is that it doesn’t go 24 hours; it goes 25! The chassids invented this custom to make up for the inexactitude of when the sun officially rises and sets. They add an extra hour to be safe.
Good for them. The rest of us can look at a Timex. When you hit 24 hours and one second, the bagel can go here (points to his mouth).
Please note that if you are pregnant, or sick, or sick of being pregnant — do not fast. That’s just common sense — which you don’t find often in religion. But Rabbis agree: if you’re feeling crummy, don’t be a dummy: feed your tummy!
However, if you’re okay, you’re in the mood to detoxify, and you want to jump on the scale and see how much weight you lost just before you gain it all back, this is your chance.
It is recommended that you break the fast gently. Don’t be eating a chopped liver with sour pickles and a corned-beef chaser. Have a little soup, juice, vegetables, noodle pudding, clams casino – just kidding. Pace yourself; portion control. After a fast, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Which will scare the hell out of your optometrist.
To sum up, if you’re fasting on Yom Kippur, the important thing is: don’t eat. You might want to write that down if starvation makes you forgetful.
Otherwise, have a meaningful Yom Kippur and a fast fast.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York, giving you plenty of food . . . for thought.
(This Rabbinical Reflection first aired July 24, 2021 on the Dave’s Gone By video podcast. youtube link: https://youtu.be/2l4v4oXw2Xc)
Rabbi Sol Solomon offers his Rabbinical Reflection on a cream-curdling decision by Ben & Jerry’s.
Rabbi Sol’s Rabbinical Reflections are heard on the long-running Dave’s Gone By radio/podcast program (davesgoneby.com) and then archived as text and audio on the Rebbe’s blog, Shalomdammit.com, where a transcript of this Reflection may be read.
Rabbi Sol is also the creator of the stage show, “Shalom Dammit! An Evening with Rabbi Sol Solomon,” which played in NYC in Nov. 2011 and Aug. 2012.
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for July 24, 2021.
I scream, you scream, we all scream — at Ben and Jerry’s!
Back in the late 1970s, a couple of underachieving Jewish slobs, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, raised $12,000 to open an ice-cream store. Combining their very different skills and sensibilities — did you know Ben Cohen has no sense of smell? Finally, someone who can sit next to old men at the synagogue on Yom Kippur. But in a couple of years, Ben & Jerry’s became a serious brand and, eventually, a world-famous hoo-ha.
To their credit, these nice boychiks always tried to be socially conscious. They donated to oodles of charities and non-profits. They made their packaging more eco-friendly and objected to using growth hormones in their cows. For a while they had a policy that nobody at their company could make more than five times what the lowest-paid worker made. That didn’t last. But Ben & Jerry’s stood as a model for visionary capitalists who could create something people want, be funny and hip about it, improve the world, and still make a bundle. The most conservative, right-wing neo-fascist could sneer at Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey — but they still ate it and had to marvel at the company’s success.
Messrs. Cohen and Greenfield sold Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever two decades ago. it is said that they have no connection to the company beyond their first names still being on the buckets. So the horrible things I’m about to say are, I assume, not directed at them. But they certainly are to current CEO, Matthew McCarthy. Well, he can kiss the blarney stone’s tuchas for his leftist, radical, stupid decision-making. He wants gender equity in the workplace? Fantastic. He wants to give black people reparations for slavery? He’s welcome to write a check. But his decision to stop selling ice cream in East Jerusalem and the settlements in the West Bank is more “half-baked” than their most popular flavor.
In a statement last week, Ben & Jerry’s said that selling their product in the “occupied” West Bank was, quote, “inconsistent with our values.” So boycotting a country that annexed land it won in a war against perpetual enemies and then building citizens’ houses on that land, is inconsistent with the values of making people obese and giving them heart disease?
In response to Ben & Jerry’s BDS bullshit, the Israeli government is very likely to do what all Jewish people do when threatened — call their lawyers. They did it three years ago when airbnb, the company for people who don’t think they’re good enough to stay in hotels, airbnb banned listing properties in the territories. Benjy Netanyahu got on the phone to Moskowitz, Moskowitz, Moskowitz, and Flywheel. They put up a flurry of lawsuits, and airbnb reversed its policy. To save face — well, one of their faces — airbnb promised to take any money coming in from those properties and funnel it to humanitarian aid. I just hope the CEO of airbnb gets AIDS.
But I digress. In current times, when even ice cream is politicized, Ben & Jerry’s is facing a backlash over its anti-Zionist actions. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called them “the anti-Israel ice cream.” South Florida politician Lavern Spicer tweeted, “I will never buy Ben & Jerry’s again. They might as well change their name to Hamas and Adolf’s.” A little hyperbolic Lavern, but appreciated nonetheless.
The BabylonBee satire magazine created a new Ben & Jerry’s flavor: Push the Jewish into the Sea Salt and Caramel. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has as much reason to eat his feelings as anyone, says he’s reluctantly giving up Cherry Garcia. And right here on Long Island, Town of Hempstead Supervisor Don Clavin bashed Unilever in a speech. He vowed to remove every Lipton teabag and Hellman’s mayonnaise jar from government offices. And let’s not forget Breyer’s ice cream, which is for people who don’t think they’re good enough to eat Super Fudge Chunk.
Uniloser has opened up a pint of worms with its decision to punish Israel simply for treating land in Israel like Israeli land. It’s time for Unilever, airbnb, and all these suddenly “woke” enterprises, that have no trouble doing business in China, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia; it’s time for them to think real hard about who the good guys and the bad guys really are in this world. Until then, it’s up to us reasonable people to boycott them. Ben & Jerry’s go peddle your lumpy shit-cream elsewhere. We won’t buy it, we won’t eat it, and we’ll make sure your economic future hits a very rocky road.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Whatever happened to Sealtest?
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for April 30, 2021.
Happy Lag B’Omer everybody! And if you’ve ever had your Omer logged, you know just how delightful that can be.
Lag B’Omer is a relatively minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, but our people appreciate it because it is a happy one. Well, not completely happy. God won’t let a Jewish holiday be completely happy. And this festival, in particular, is about putting a bookend on a time of gloom.
Some say Lag B’Omer is celebrated because that day marked the end of a terrible plague in the Jewish community. No, not bad drivers. Rabbi Akiva, who was a great sage — and a mediocre parsley — had a lot of disciples who started dropping dead between Passover and Shavuoth. Somehow, on this date, they stopped dying. Maybe it was Pfizer, maybe Moderna — whatever. Suddenly it was time to rejoice.
Now, a completely different explanation for Lag B’Omer involves one of Ravi Akiva’s disciples, Shimon bar Yochai. Lag B’Omer is the day he kicked the b’ucket. So who celebrates a death? Well, this Yochai guy was something of a mystic. By writing the Zohar, he started the Kabbalah ball rolling. He told his followers, now that I’m leaving my body, all my teachings and good deeds belong to the universe. So don’t mourn; go have a wedding, do a dance, get a fun haircut, light a bonfire because of all the light I’ve brought into the world. And marshmallows.
So that’s what Jews have been doing — taking a break during a somber time on the calendar, when everyone’s worried about the harvest, and having a party. And if you happen to be in Israel, you can go visit the tomb of Shimon bar Yochai, which happens to be in a town called Meron. I think you know where I’m going with this.
Year after year, hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews make a pilgrimage to Meron for feasting and fun. It’s like Woodstock — only Jews don’t take acid; we get acid reflux. The Yidlach gather for this festival — sometimes 400,000 people show up for this Lag B’orgy.
April 2021, because of COVID, only 100,000 came. Easy-peasy, right? Except, a few people slipped, folks behind them couldn’t go backwards — voila! Stampede. 45 people crushed to death like grapes in a Manischewitz pulper. 150 more wounded. It’s the worst peacetime disaster in the history of Eretz Yisroel. I know you’re waiting for a joke but no…that’s the emmes.
Who’s to blame? Everybody, of course. First of all, you have the insular Orthodox, who don’t think the greater community’s rules apply to them. We saw this with the Haredis in Brooklyn, who were holding massive, unmasked weddings and funerals when the governor was begging everyone: don’t even hold small unmasked weddings and funerals. Were Cuomo’s restrictions draconian? Did the Orthodox exacerbate a health crisis? Or vice versa: by disregarding protocols, did they prove that, at least for people under 60, we’ve all been going overboard with a punishment that’s worse than the disease?
Even if that were true, and Governor Cuomo was erring on the side of caution — well, not with his schmeckel but with everything else — what the Haredi were doing was unbelievably selfish and thoughtless. “We follow American laws to the letter…up until the moment we don’t happen to agree with them. Who needs police? We police ourselves.” So elected officials who crave the Orthodox vote look the other way when rules are bent.
Sometimes that’s fine — sometimes it enables catastrophe. Wifebeaters and child molesters keep on beating wifes and molesting childs while the Rabbis try to fix things behind the scenes. Ask the Catholic church how well that works. And it’s this entitled arrogance of the Haredi attitude that tells Bibi Netanyahu, “We’re gonna put a hundred thousand people on a road meant for 30,000. HaShem will be our crowd control.” But they forget: God likes crushing things. Look what He did to Samson.
Jews have good reason for being wary of outsiders. From Roman soldiers to Spanish inquisitors to Cossacks — if a goy was on your doorstep, he wasn’t holding a check from Publishers Clearing House. However, when it comes to legitimate concerns about public safety — whether you’re spitting corona droplets on your cousin or getting pushed so close to a stranger your quarter shoes land on his forehead — it would be nice if my brethren would show a little consideration for the bigger picture.
Besides, what’s so wrong with a few more weeks of distancing? We’re Jewish. We shouldn’t be going to mass.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches.
MCC Theater held a virtual open call for submissions to their “Miscast” benefit, in which singers perform theater songs that they wouldn’t ordinarily get to sing. Rabbi Sol Solomon chose this number from the Melvin Van Peebles concept album-turned-Broadway musical, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death.
(Rabbi Sol’s Rabbinical Reflections air on the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By. Watch on youtube: https://youtu.be/BZO2xOs8pPs)
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for April 10, 2021.
What do we want? Normalcy! When do we want it? Soon. Please!
In case you didn’t know, since March 2020, America has been in various modes of lockdown, quarantine, and stasis, owing to the coronavirus pandemic. This was a sensibly safe response to a disease that swept through the world killing hundreds of thousands of people and putting millions of others in grave danger — and in danger of the grave. Each time we thought we’d seen the worst of it, another wave would come along and submerge us in fear. It’s like listening to an Oasis album. Every time a six-minute anthem finally ends, you’re like, “Ooh, silence. Beautiful quiet.” And then another fucking Oasis song starts.
Life has been like that for the past 13 months. We get our hopes up that the CDC and the NIH and CIA have a handle on the virus equivalent of the Gallagher brothers, and then, Boom!, there’s a holiday, families gather, people travel, and the numbers shoot back up. You could understand Dr. Fauci warning, “hold out a little bit longer. You don’t want to see your mother-in-law anyway, so stay home!” And you could sympathize with vulnerable people or those too young to qualify for the shot, saying, “Sorry, but wearing a mask is not fascism. Put it on, wash your hands, and have fun storming the capitol.”
But what a magnificent century we’re in! We can encounter a brand-new disease, get our drug companies working on it, and half a year later already have a remedy ready for launch. Thanks to President Trump, the medicine rolled out at warp speed, and thanks to President Biden, it’s being distributed as systematically as dollar bills at a farbrengen.
As of this ranting, 100 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Pfizer, Moderna, or J&J vaccine. Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population, including myself and my dear wife, Miriam Libby, and eleven of our 21 ½ children, is fully vaxxed! So why am I vexed?
The answer stems back to the most basic human idea of fairness: Patience followed by reward. Endurance rewarded with triumph. Eat your broccoli, then you can have ice cream. Unless you had steak with the broccoli, in which case you’d be mixing milchig with fleishig, so you have to eat the broccoli AND wait six hours for the ice cream, but don’t complain because some people go to bed hungry and you got to eat steak, so shut up, you kvetch.
But back to my point. We are taught that if we deny ourselves for the greater good, we’ll get some of that great good. Save your pennies for a rainy day, and you’ll have money to buy an umbrella. Since 2020, we have been denying, and forgoing, and masking, and isolating, and socially shrinking because we understood the bargain: when the vaccine comes, and the herd immunity kicks in, life will be life again. We got mad at mayors and governors who appeared to jump the gun on reopening because they valued commerce over public health. We dreaded restoring schools until we realized that juveniles may spread a ton of disease, but not to each other. We cringed at watching another press conference from Governor Cuomo because…he’s Governor Cuomo. And we waited.
So, nu? We’re getting our shots, we’re doing our best…where’s the reward? Two weeks after the second shot, we’re 90-something-percent protected against the Wuhanian flu. We’re more likely to get hepatitis from a hobo than Covid from a co-worker. And yet, the Center for Disease Control says, “Keep wearing your mask. Don’t get on a plane unless you have to. Stay six feet away from your neighbor. Don’t lick a postage stamp unless you know where it’s been.” Basically the same rules we’ve been tolerating since Alex Trebek was still hosting Jeopardy. So what was the point of the shots? Why put ourselves — or, more importantly, myself — through the inconvenience, the uncertainty, the soreness of receiving a subcutaneous Fauci ouchy, if the result is merely more of the same?
Imagine a guy going on a date with a hot girl at her place. “Now Reuven,” she says, “did you remember to bring a condom?” “I sure did!” “Did you put it on?” “Oh, yes.” “Great, now stay in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” What the hell?
Why am I shooting some profit-driven pharmaceutical company’s untested RNA into my bloodstream if I still must approach the world through solitary confinement? Why do I have to walk in a bank still looking like a bank robber? Why is it after boosting all my antibodies, all I hear about is Covid variants that can kick sand in my antibodies’ face?
You know, the Haredi community has taken a hatload of heat for their response to the pandemic. They obey their own rules, they’re careless with protocols, they hold massive weddings barely six inches apart let alone six feet. And the media has taken significant pleasure in reporting that the spread of Covid has been rampant among the Orthodox. Makes sense. Funny, but they haven’t been reporting — among all the black-hatters testing positive — how many dropped dead? Apart from a couple of decrepit rabbis, how many have kikt di emer? How many on ventilators or in hospitals? Versus…how many had two days of a bad headache and a sleepy streak? Heck, I get that just taking a poop. I’m not saying the haredi should be proud of their insular arrogance, but maybe the rest of us have over-reacted more than they under-reacted.
HaShem, if you’re listening: how about a break? Howzabout acknowledging those of us who’ve done everything right and rewarding us? it’s time to give us the ice cream — non-dairy! We don’t want to be too greedy.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
