Rabbi Sol Solomon’s celebrity interviews, Rabbinical Reflections (sermons), songs, and other appearances on the show.
INDEX: http://davesgoneby.net/?p=25407
Segment aired May 22, 2021 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio/podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
click above to watch the interview.click above to listen (audio only)
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with actress KIMBERLY FAYE GREENBERG, who then plays the Today/Yesterday trivia quiz opposite Fred Cleaver & Wendy Highby and David Sheward.
Topics include: Fabulous Fanny Brice, COVID-19, Sylvia Fine Kaye.
Segment aired May 15, 2021 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio/podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
Segment aired May 1, 2021 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio/podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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.
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Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with actress LOUISE LASSER w/ MICHAEL CITRINITI
Topics include: acting, The Chinese and Dr. Fish.
Segment aired April 24, 2021 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio/podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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Here is the 794th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired live on Facebook, Saturday morning, April 17, 2021. Info: davesgoneby.com.
Guests: musician Frank London; theater critics David Sheward and Leslie (Hoban) Blake
Featuring: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews musician Frank London and performers a “Miscast”: song; Greeley Crimes & Old Times; Today Yesterday trivia quiz (April 17 w/ Frank London, Leslie (Hoban) Blake, and David Sheward; Colorado Limerick of the Damned (Crook, CO); Inside Broadway.
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce (miscasting, Big Sur Sucks, break a leg) 00:45:30 INSIDE BROADWAY 01:01:00 GUEST: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Frank London 01:50:00 TODAY/YESTERDAY Trivia Quiz (April 17 w/ Leslie (Hoban) Blake, Frank London, David Sheward) 03:18:00 RABBI SOL SOLOMON is Miscast 03:22:30 GREELEY CRIMES & OLD TIMES 03:41:00 Friends of the Daverhood 03:50:00 COLORADO LIMERICK OF THE DAMNED (Crook, CO) 03:52:30 DAVE GOES OUT
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.
click above to watch the interview.click above to listen to the interview (audio only)
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with musician ANDREW FARRISS
Topics include: INXS, religion, music, the West.
Segment aired April 3, 2021 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio/podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
