Rabbi Sol Solomon’s celebrity interviews, Rabbinical Reflections (sermons), songs, and other appearances on the show.
INDEX: http://davesgoneby.net/?p=25407
click above to watch Rabbi Sol Solomon’s phone interview with Matthew Sweet.click above to listen (audio only)
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with musician MATTHEW SWEET
Topics include: Catspaw, Girlfriend, COVID, Robert Quine, Richard Lloyd, Susanna Hoffs.
Segment aired Feb. 27, 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.
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #167 (2/26/21): Purim Jokes 2021
click above to watch.
(Rabbi Sol’s Rabbinical Reflections appear on the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAnTjN0qWOE&t=3s)
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for February 26th — Purim 2021!
As I often do on Purim, one of the rare jolly holidays on the Jewish calendar, I’m going to forego my usual bitching and kvetching and, instead, tell a couple of hilarious jokes that you damn well better laugh at.
We begin on Delancey Street, where a guy walks into a deli and asks the old man at the counter, “Do you sell pickles?”
“Funny you should ask,” says the counterman. “I have sour pickles, half-sour, butter pickles, thin slice, jagged slice, pickles in brine, extra large, extra small, extra dill. And these are just the domestic.”
“Wow,” says the customer. “You must sell a lot of pickles.”
“Not really,” sighs the counterman. “But the guy I buy from? Boy can he sell pickles!”
What can we learn from this joke? We learn that sometimes it’s not what you’re selling but how you’re selling it. Nancy Reagan could tell teenagers, “don’t do drugs”; she might as well have told them “do drugs!” for all the good it did. But if Beyonce or Lady Gaga say it their way, the message might stick. Or if you’re trying to teach Talmud, or derech eretz to your children, and it’s not getting through, don’t give up; adjust. I suggest smacking them around and making them recite the sh’ma standing barefoot on ice cubes, but that’s just me.
On to the next joke. Many years ago, a great Rabbi and his favorite student were traveling together through Poland to get to Warsaw. One evening, after a long trek, they decide to stop and pitch their tent in an open field. After prayers and some talmudic discourse, they both retire for the night.
A couple of hours later, the Rabbi wakes up, nudges the student, and says, “Chaim. Chaim. Look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”
Chaim yawns and says, “I see a black sky with many millions of stars.”
“Yes, and what may we deduce from this?”
“Well, Rabbi, astronomically, the view conveys the vastness of the universe. Scientifically, we can tell from the sky’s color that it’s three o’clock in the morning. And theologically, we see the power and majesty of God and our own insignificance by comparison. What does it tell you, Rabbi?”
“Well, first of all, Chaim, it tells me someone has stolen our tent.”
What a delightful joke! Not least because, admit it, you were expecting something disgusting between the Rabbi and the kid sharing a tent. Shame on you! If it was a priest, okay, but not a Rabbi! Still, this is a gentle joke that balances mankind’s longing for the sacred and splendiferous with his earthbound ties to the earth and its more mundane attributes. It also makes fun of Polacks.
And it reminds us not to miss the forest for the trees—or the tent for the stars. We get bogged down in the mechanics of life and get ground up in the gears of detail. Sometimes it behooves us to stop, take stock of our surroundings, and maybe put an alarm system around our tents.
Our final bit of humorosity, also goes back in time—this one to Soviet Russia in the 1970s. A Red Army officer is visiting a school and questioning all the students in the classroom. He goes to a Russian girl and says, “Who is your father?”
“The Soviet Union,” she replies.
“And who is your mother?”
“The Communist party,” she says.
“And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to work with my comrades for the state.”
The officer goes to a little Russian boy sitting behind her.
“Who is your father?”
“The Soviet Union,” says the boy.
“Who is your mother?”
“The Communist party.”
“And when you grow up, you want to be . . . ?”
“A worker for the glorious party.”
The officer smiles and moves on to a scrawny child in the back of the room.
“What’s your name?”
“Mordecai Groizman.”
“Ah,” sneers the Officer. “Who is your father?”
“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
“Mm hmm. And who is your mother?”
“The Communist Party of the Russian Federation.”
“Very nice. And do you know what you want to be when you grow up?”
“Oh yes,” says the boy. “An orphan.”
Ah, the beauty of mordant Jewish wit. Even at the expense of angering an enemy who could send his parents to Siberia, the child tells the truth and embeds a curse inside it. You can always hope your adversary is too stupid to get that the jokes on him. But, let’s face it, it’s a little stupid of you to take that chance. At a time when we scrutinize—and sometimes over-scrutinize—things goyim say about the Jews, it’s nice to have a joke where the Yidl lobs a grenade the other way.
And isn’t that what happened on Purim? Haman planned to kill all the Jews, but Queen Esther convinced the Persian king that was a bad idea. Not only was Haman hung from the noose he’d built to murder Esther’s cousin, but Haman’s ten sons were killed in battle by Jewish commandos. The only thing left of Haman was his three-cornered hat and his name, which we drown out with noise in the synagogue. Very often Jews taste the first misery but get the last laugh.
Happy Purim! This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with playwright JOHN PIELMEIER, who then stays to play the Today/Yesterday trivia quiz opposite David Sheward and Leslie (Hoban) Blake.
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Topics include: Agnes of God, screenwriting, teleplays.
Segment aired Feb. 20, 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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Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with cabaret singer RAQUEL BITTON
Topics include: Morocco, Edith Piaf, Tony Bennett, concerts. Segment aired Feb. 13, 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.
All content (c)2021 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com.
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Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with actress JESSICA SHERR, who is then joined by her husband, actor Doug Schneider, as well as critics Leslie (Hoban) Blake and David Sheward to play the Today/Yesterday trivia game.
Topics include: Bette Davis ain’t for Sissies, Edinburgh Fringe.
Segment aired Jan. 30, 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.
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #166: Make Them Hear Me
(airs as part of the New York Theater Workshop/Poetic Theater Productions “Let Them Hear You” virtual open mic night, Jan. 28, 2021. watch on youtube: https://youtu.be/u6laq_dzYA8)
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon, founder and spiritual leader of Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. And this is a Rabbinical Reflection, a mini-sermon, as part of the virtual open-mic night, “Make Them Hear You.” CAN YOU HEAR ME? Good.
This sermon, this event, is all about joy and the future. No matter what side of the political fence you are impaled on, we are coming out of a dark period. And as the father of six teenage daughters, I have seen some dark periods. It’s like I live in a Kotex factory.
But here, we are talking about a nation riddled with division, disease, and dismay. And last May wasn’t great, either.
How do we get through this? How do the newly unemployed keep emailing resumes that never get read? How do playwrights get up and scribble their hearts when they couldn’t get produced when theaters were open? How do I keep writing these Reflections even as my prostate fills my shoes with urine?
The answer lies in the great Samuel Beckett paradox, “I can’t go on. Meh, I’ll go on.” We go on because the alternative is jumping out a window. Or going to a New York nursing home, kissing an old person, and waiting.
But death is not the answer. Well, it is, if the crossword clue is “Blank of a Salesman.” But otherwise, death deprives us of the three Ps that make life worth living: pastrami, porn, and pharmaceuticals. So to stop spiraling downward, we aspire upward. Old hippies and politicians call this “hope.”
And once you’ve drunk that Kool-Aid–or, in my case, Dr. Brown’s CelRay—
you ascend to the next level of hoping that ha-olam coolo (the whole world) will unify to build a better tomorrow. Kumba-yada-yada-yada: the great pipe dream of promise.
We are like the barflies in The Iceman Cometh, all of us, from Bernie Sanders looking so jolly at the inauguration to the dingdongs who stormed the Capitol thinking a home invasion would save America, to the BLM window smashers who thought looting would change America, to the putzes who think wearing a mask during a pandemic is fascism, to the yutzes who stand outside and risk pneumonia to get a shot for COVID. We are all idiots programmed to be hopeful. It is our human DNA.
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” I don’t know what the fuck that means, so I wrote my own poem and here it is:
“Let’s take a moment while the year is still newish
To hope for the best, be you black, white, or Jewish
May landlords and tenants avoid going broke
May Covid-19 go the way of New Coke
May Israel make peace with more Arab nations
May God put less blood in my girls’ menstruations
Health and good fortune from this little Hebe
To all–except Mitch McConnell and Rashida Tlaib
We’ve come through this crisis much older and wiser
May 2021 be our mood stabilizer
We have to be hopeful. What else can we do?
If not, we’ll be shtupped in 2022.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon. Shalom, and shana tovah.
(Rabbi Sol Solomon’s 165th Rabbinical Reflection aired Jan. 16, 2021 as part of the Dave’s Gone By show. watch video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y0DFpad8eto).
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of January 17th, 2021.
Can we speak freely? No, I mean, can we speak, freely? I don’t like the “Stop the Steal” mishegoss any more than you do, and I think the nudniks who stormed the Capitol building deserve the strongest punishment. Like fines, imprisonment, or being trapped in an elevator with Jeanine Pirro in your left ear and Nancy Grace in your right. And they’re both using megaphones. And guess what? They’re angry.
But back to the point: we’ve got a paranoid President who is circling the drain because he’s terrified of being called the one thing he is–at least in terms of the 2020 election–a Loser. Not with Israel and the Middle East; he’s a winner there. Not with Wall Street and big business; he’s a Superman there. And, up till March of last year, not with the economy, which had low unemployment, tons of job growth, and a gung-ho attitude.
But COVID knocked him down, as it did 350,000 of his countrymen. Trump’s rash pronouncements and veiled racial signaling appealed to America’s baser instincts, so although 75 million people voted for him, 80 million didn’t. He lost. Deal with it. I wish he would. I wish his Confederate flag-waving acolytes would. I wish the folks on QAnon would get a Clue-Anon.
However, just before the riots, the President gave a speech where he dubbed the elections fraudulent, the news fake, and the elections rigged by Big Tech. He called on Congress to recount everything, and he said, and I quote, “I know that everyone will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” unquote. He also praised the size of the crowd–he does love a big crowd–and urged them to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. As a protest. As a way for those who legitimately felt the election was stolen to make their voices heard.
For this, Donald Trump was again impeached. For spinning a false narrative, yes, about the election, but moreover for inciting the crowd to riot. “Something is wrong here, really wrong,” he said, “and we fight. We fight like hell, because if you don’t, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” You know what that’s called? Rhetoric. Not insurrection, not incitement to anarchy. It’s a politician telling his believers not to give up hope and to channel their rage into action. If some followers in buffalo skins and football-fan camouflage took that to mean storm the government, break stuff and take stuff, that’s on them. At the very least it’s trespassing; at most it’s sedition.
The Democrats are accusing the President of having a signed First Sedition. True, he wound the bozos up, but he didn’t set them loose, any more than the makers of Cabbage Patch dolls doing TV commercials telling parents “buy these horrible things for your even-more-horrible children,” caused riots in Kmart.
But pushing past impeachment and trying to remove Donald Trump from office–which will happen two weeks after he’s already been removed from office–my problem is with the censoring of free speech. President Trump has been banned, permanently, from Twitter. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram have deleted him for however long they choose, and YouTube has pulled his channel down. Far more worrisome, they’re doing the same for all his nutty followers who now have no place to share their cries of “fraud!” and “conspiracy!” Google, Apple, and Amazon have all removed the social-media site Parler, because too many kooks were spoiling the broth.
Now, these are private companies–sort of–so their CEOs have the right to monitor everything that goes on them. If you own a restaurant, you can’t discriminate against your customers based on race or gender, but you can still demand, “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” I’ve thrown people out of my synagogue for wearing dirty tallises. Well, they weren’t wearing anything underneath them, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is we are on a very slippery slope when our biggest purveyors of public palaver start telling us, “Well, you’re allowed to post hopeful things about Joe Biden’s inauguration, but you can’t write anything questioning the legitimacy of his victory.” “You’re allowed to condemn the violent idiots rioting in Nancy Pelosi’s office, but don’t you dare encourage the peaceful idiots to keep marching two blocks away.”
When I was a little Rabbi, a Rabbette, I was taught three things you couldn’t do: yell fire in a crowded shul, slander someone, or be so obscene that a reasonable person would go, “dude, I’m as kinky as the next fetishist, that’s messed up.” But no law says you can’t lie. That’s not even one of the Ten Commandments. Wait, let me make sure (thinks and counts), nope. False witness is different. And there’s certainly nothing in there about not sharing things that you actually believe are true–even if there’s overwhelming evidence they’re false.
So what happens when you censor folks on the fringe? You make them angrier, you drive them deeper underground, and now it gets harder to track them to make sure they don’t escalate from angry TikTok videos to kidnapping Ilhan Omar. You also cause everyone else to self-censor. “Hmm, maybe I better not post this because they’ll just take it down anyway. Maybe I better not think this, because then I’ll waste time posting it, because they’re just gonna take it down anyway.”
I am of the mind that you say what you have to say, and if I hate it, I get to say what I have to say back at you, louder. The problem in 1925 was not that Hitler published Mein Kampf; it’s that not enough people read it and went, “ooh, this guy’s bonkers and maybe dangerous.” The problem is not that right-wing Republicans are posting that the elections were a fraud; it’s that they believe it and won’t be de-convinced no matter the proof. Still, prohibiting them from non-violent, non-slanderous, non-obscene communication is non-okay.
Big Brother is already watching us from every stop light, website, Smart TV, closed-circuit camera, and GPS system. You can’t sneeze without someone in the CIA muttering gezundheit. Must we have social-media platforms that restrict content based on alternative narratives? Do we really want to side with Cardinal Maculani over Galileo? With Anthony Comstock over James Joyce? With Ayatollah Khomeini over Salman Rushdie?
In my version of reality, Donald Trump was an okay president who made just enough poor decisions to lose the election. In your version of reality (points), Donald Trump was a terrible president who should have been impeached before he was elected. Or in your version of reality (points elsewhere), Donald Trump was a great president who got cheated out of a second term. Can’t we all just not get along? Tolerating stupidity is one of the great virtues of our nation. That and cream soda. What, you disagree? That’s your right.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
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Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with comedian SHAWN WICKENS
Topics include: Bad Theater Festival, Stoner Morning Show, window washing.
Segment aired Jan. 16, 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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Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with director WOODIE KING, JR.
Topics include: New Federal Theater, off-Broadway, Langston Hughes, Checkmates.
Segment aired Jan. 9, 2021 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio/podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Note: Farewell to our Friend of the Daverhood, Woodie King, Jr., who passed Jan. 29, 2026 at age 88.
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.
Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #164 (12/31/20): 2020 FAREWELL
(Rabbi Sol Solomon’s 164th Rabbinical Reflection airs Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020 as part of the Dave’s Gone By annual New Year’s Eve special). youtube link: https://youtu.be/1J8f9dTce1o.
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2020.
Well, it’s been a year, hasn’t it? I mean, we’ve had some doozies: 1929, 1941, late 2001, a very bad dental appointment I had in 2017. It’s the nature of living that we have to enjoy the good times, because the shitty, rotten, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-God? times come up right behind them.
The year started well. The stock market was booming, so a couple-hundred really rich people got really richer. And that trickled down to the rest of us because unemployment sank to three percent. Which made it a terrible year for lazy people because now there was no excuse for not getting a job. Everyone was hiring! They weren’t paying a living wage or decent health benefits or treating you like a human being, but you could get a job if you wanted one.
Also, we felt kinda safe. Kim Jong-Un seemed to like Donald Trump and the feeling was mutual. We killed an Iranian General by drone, and Iran went, “eh, we’ve got others.” Meanwhile, American diplomacy was creating peace in the Middle East! Well, not the whole Middle East—never the whole Middle East—but Israel is now doing trade and tourism with Sudan, Bahrain, and United Arab Emirates. It’s an Abu Dhabi honeymoon!
Granted, at home it was politics as usual. 117 BIPOC Democrats were running for President, which got whittled down to . . . an old white guy. Maybe a too-old white guy, but Joe Biden picked a black woman running mate. And thank God for that because anyone whiter than him and Mike Pence would hurt people’s retinas. And through it all, the left continued to despise Donald Trump, the right despised Bill—uh, Hillary—uh, Obama—uh, anyone who doesn’t like country music. President Trump was impeached—remember that? Remember why? Because he allegedly solicited foreign help in the 2020 elections. The Republicans called that crazy and blocked an indictment. Months later, it’s Trump who’s bitching the elections are rigged, and it’s the Democrats calling him crazy. If you ever thought the world was nothing more than a snowglobe that HaShem shakes up and down to amuse Himself, 2020 was your year.
Harry and Meghan exited Buckingham Palace, England brexited from the European Union, and Yuri Tolochko sexited from his blow-up doll. Look it up.
And, of course, the world blew up in the middle of March. One day, a few passengers got sick on a cruise; a month later, the globe is closing restaurants, theaters, nightclubs, massage parlors—or so I’ve been told—and ordering everyone stay home, wear a mask, and don’t get within six feet of another human being. Go figure, the Unabomber becomes a role model. And worse, thousands of people die. New York’s Governor Cuomo herds all the old geezers into nursing homes, where they do not get herd immunity. And Central Park turns into a M*A*S*H unit because the hospitals are full of victims on ventilators suffering from a malady the President once called a hoax.
Where did Coronavirus come from? You tell me. Did Wuhan mishandle it? Did someone undercook the bat they were making for dinner? Did swine flu go through conversion therapy? The only good news is that a disease no one heard of in March already has two vaccines to prevent it in December. Now if if you can just keep from coming down with corona when you’re on the long lines to receive the shot, we’d be getting somewhere.
So we’re nearing 350,000 dead, 19 million diagnosed, and everyone avoiding each other like the plague—because of a plague. Everyone, that is, except, I’m ashamed to say, Orthodox Jews, who think goyishe rules don’t apply to them. Ten thousand of them show up at a wedding in Williamsburg where they sing, dance, eat, drool, and pull the garter off the Rabbi’s leg. Maybe my Jewish brethren think if they stay among their own kind, they don’t affect anyone else. Except the mailman, the doctor, the grocer, the funeral director. They say they’re being unfairly targeted for just trying to keep their businesses open—especially since the media simultaneously glorified Black Lives Matters protests—which weren’t exactly masked, socially distanced, or peaceful.
To be fair, schvartzes had a lot to feel violent about. They didn’t come through 400 years of slavery and oppression to ignore a policemen crushing a suspect’s neck. Or a bunch of other hinkie deaths of unarmed perps who just happened to be the wrong color. And even more deadly than rogue policemen? Murder hornets! Have you heard about these things? Along with Covid, the Asians have given us flying, stinging insects that are killing off the flying, stinging honeybees that keep our ecosystem going.
And since we’re talking biblical catastrophes: Locusts devoured all the food in East Africa, wildfires burned up half of California, and Cats became a major motion picture. This was the year Hamilton came to Disney, Tiger King came to Netflix, and Harvey Weinstein came just enough times to put him in prison. Aunt Becky from Full House also went to prison, although for some reason, the writers of that show didn’t.
2020 was the year we lost Sean Connery, Kirk Douglas, Diana Rigg, Olivia de Havilland, Eddie Van Halen, John Prine, Tom Seaver, Whitey Ford, Terrence McNally, Toots Hibbert, Terry Jones, Buck Henry, Carl Reiner, RBG, Squiggy, Regis Philbin, and “Jeopardy’s” Alex Trebek. No question: they will be missed.
To paraphrase Charles Dickens: It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. But hey, we still got through a presidential election and the less-awful candidate won. SpaceX put humans into orbit—not the humans we’d want to send into orbit, but it’s the science that counts. And speaking of science, because we’ve all been staying indoors, animal species that were becoming extinct are coming out to play again, and best of all: researchers in Australia discovered that giving doxycycline to koala bears cures their chlamydia! Who knows? Maybe by this time next year, they’ll zap the gonorrhea out of those poor giraffes.
I hope we’re here next year. Well, I hope I’m here next year. But if we can get through the pandemic, and the global warming, and the political divide, and the racial unrest, and the coming apocalypse, we just might have a passable 2021. Hey, I’m Jewish. That’s as optimistic as I get. But even if it’s an even worse year, you can still try to be the best you. In times like these, even HaShem couldn’t ask for more.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches. Shana Tovah, ovah and ovah.
