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Dave’s Gone By Skit: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #140 (6/12/2016): TONY AWARDS 2016

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #140 (6/12/16): Tony Awards 2016

Aired June 11, 2016 on Dave’s Gone By. YouTube link: https://youtu.be/RghaoMma4aU

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of June 12, 2016.

Lovers of the theater — and by that I mean geeks, shut-ins, homosexuals, and the desperate — rejoice! The time has come once again to celebrate Broadway — the talent and creativity that bring a bissel fun and sanity to this increasingly meshuggenah world. Huzzah for the Tony Awards.

Now, it is hard to deny that Broadway has become a playground for the rich, a parcel of real estate increasingly off limits to working people who just crave two hours of tits, tunes and tears. But remember: many places offer discount tickets and two-fers — trust me on this, I know from bargains. And even if those prices are beyond your purse, for three hours this Sunday night, you can sit in front of the TV and watch the dazzle of 42nd Street unfurl before your glazed, lower-middle-class eyeballs.

You can’t get into Hamilton? Alexander Hamilton couldn’t get into Hamilton. But Sunday, June 12th, you get a digital front-row seat to the cast of Hamilton doing a song . . . and then winning every Tony Award known to man. Actually, they won’t, they can’t. They have 16 nominations — a record! — but they have multiple nominees in some categories, and not every race is a shoo-in. So Mel Brooks’s The Producers will likely remain the all-time Tony Award winner. Ah, if only I’d bought 112 shares of that show. Quel dommage. But there are other reasons to watch the Tony Awards either in person at the Beacon Theater or on CBS, whose viewership is so old, they should be nicknamed The Yahrzeit Network.

Seriously, though, what I love to do most of all this time of year is look through the Tony nominations and find the Jews. There’s generally a batch of them, this being theater and all, and it’s a point of pride when my people are being recognized for their brilliance — and for briefly escaping Equity’s 95 percent unemployment rate.

First and foremost, let us exult that Fiddler on the Roof is back, and this time, they have a Jew playing Tevye! He’s Tony-nominated Danny Burstein, who starts off as a modern guy who comes onstage reading the stories of Sholem Aleichem. Then he takes the jacket off and turns into Tevye the milkman. This has confused some matinee audiences. I guess when you get to a certain age, it can be hard to make the mental leap of: no jacket, 1910 Russian village; yes jacket, 2016 Sears men’s department. How these audiences survive Tom Stoppard is beyond me.

By the way, in the lead-actor category, Danny Burstein is up against Zachary Levi for She Loves Me. Now, this truly is confusing because Levi has a Jewish name, but he’s a gentile. Worse, in recent interviews, the Welsh actor said he was turned down for parts in Hollywood movies because he looked too Jewish. Levi said, quote, “I guess they were looking for more of a corn-fed, white boy look. My family is from Indiana, come on!” I feel for you, Danny. It’s like that time I auditioned for the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I nailed it; sang like an angel. But did they call? Did they write? Not a word. And don’t even get me started on how I tried to get into the Celtic Women. Actually, I almost got into one, but she found out I was married.

Anyhoo, moving on to other Tony categories . . . where the hell are my people? Where are the Cohens and the Rothsteins and the Schiowitzes and the Bermans? This year gives us names like Brooks and Nyong’o and Pigott-Smith and the erotic-sounding Sengbloh. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for diversity. But it’s not so diverse if Jews are virtually absent.

Thank God, thanks to Hamilton, we do have a featured actor in a musical: Daveed Diggs. Yes, he’s a schvartz, but his parents gave him the Hebrew name for David because he’s half schvartz and half-Jewish. So I’d let him marry half my daughter. And speaking of halvsies, hooray for Sophie Okonedo, the celebrated British actress who already won a Tony for A Raisin in the Sun two seasons ago. Yes, she looks black, but there’s cholent under the chitlins! Okonedo’s mom is a Jewish Pilates teacher, and her parents were emigrants from Eastern Europe who spoke Yiddish! As Wikipedia notes, Okonedo’s father took a powder, and her single mom raised her in unavoidable poverty, but, says the actress, “We always had books.” If that isn’t Jewish, I don’t know what is. Well, a synagogue is Jewish; that kind of is. And Hebrew. And mezuzahs, but you know what I’m saying.

The wonderful lesson that we take from Daveed Diggs and Sophie Okonedo is that we can integrate, we can intermarry but not lose the spark of Yiddishkeit. We will no longer look the same or sound the same. And we will probably have better hair. But Jewish upbringing, connection, and belief need not go by the wayside, even if our people are far away from Bayside.

And so, on Tony night, when Lin-Manuel Miranda is giving his 32nd speech about inclusion, please remember that we are not as excluded as it might first appear. Just look at the best-musical nominees: Hamilton, School of Rock, Shuffle Along, Waitress, and Bright Star. Hamilton deals with money, which Jews are always worried about; School of Rock concerns education, which is sacred to us; Shuffle Along is what every Jew over 70 does, and Waitress is what we all holler in a restaurant. As for Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s Bright Star, who’s to say it isn’t six-pointed?

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York. On with the Tony show!

NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #140 (6/12/16): TONY AWARDS 2016

Dave’s Gone By Interview (6/4/2016): SAM HARRIS & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews actor-singer Sam Harris.

Topics include: cabaret, Broadway

Segment aired June 4, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio show/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.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com

More about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Interview (5/28/2016): AL DUCHARME, BERNADETTE PAULEY, & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Dave Lefkowitz and Rabbi Sol Solomon interview comedians Al Ducharme & Bernadette Pauley

Topics include: comedy, marriage
Segment aired May 28, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Interview (5/21/2016): DYLAN BRODY & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews humorist Dylan Brody

Topics include: comedy, Paul Provenza, depression, Judaism, religion, Steve Allen, George Carlin, Garry Shandling, Robin Williams.

Segment aired May 21, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Interview (5/14/2016): ZALMEN MLOTEK & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Yiddish music maven Zalmen Mlotek

Topics include: National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, Yiddish, Jewish, Shlomo Carlebach, Mandy Patinkin, Leonard Bernstein.

Segment aired May 14, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com

More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #139 (5/8/2016): Donald Trump

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #139 (5/8/16): Donald Trump

Aired May 7, 2016 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://youtu.be/UcZDJBjwbW8

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of May 8, 2016.

Just over a year ago, I did a Rabbinical Reflection about the 2016 presidential candidates for the Republican Party. There were a dozen and a half of them—remember? Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Scott Walker—a veritable who’s who of who’s hooligans.

Almost as an aside, I included the candidacy of Donald Trump. I said, and I quote, “Donald Trump, who went bankrupt three times and yet brands himself as a financial genius. Donald Trump, who has a magnificent knack for self-promotion but spends money he doesn’t have like it’s going out of style—why isn’t he running as a Democrat?”

The idea of Donald Drumpf actually getting traction as a viable candidate, and the thought that more than a few flakes would vote for this narcissistic, self-aggrandizing Oompa Loompa was downright comical. And even if he did ride the cult of celebrity for awhile, you had fifteen other G.O.P. hopefuls with their own deluded followers. But then America happened. And the people rejected Chris Christie and his highway robbery. They rejected Marco Rubio the wind-up doll. They rejected Ben Carson, who didn’t need anaesthesia during heart surgery because he could put patients to sleep just by talking to them.

By the time the conservative muckymucks realized that Donald Trump was not just a fad but a movement—and I don’t just mean the kind of movement I have every other morning if I’m lucky and drink my prune juice—by the time the powers that be of the G.O.P. realized their conservative groundswell was getting dug up by a real-estate developer, it was too late to stop him.

My God, their best shot was Ted Cruz, a man who couldn’t find one person to like him—even when he was looking in the mirror. Ted Cruz was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, vehemently pro-Israel (God bless him for that), and seemingly in line with everything the Republican party wanted to roll back from the last eight years. And yet, not a single soul in the House or Senate wanted to work with him. Former speaker of the house John Boehner called Ted Cruz, quote, “Lucifer in the flesh!” and “the most miserable son of a bitch” he ever worked with, unquote. This from Boehner, a man who always behaved like he had a stick so far up his tushie, you could see splinters on his uvula.

And yet, this loathed and despised senator, Ted Cruz, was the Republicans’ last hope of putting one of their boys into the White House. Oh, wait, I’m forgetting about John Kasich. Because we all forgot about John Kasich. The past three months, he should have just changed his name to something Chinese, like: “Oh Him Too.” Especially since his name was on ballots like those restaurants in Chinatown that keep items like putrefied eggs and pig bladders on the menu even though no one in their right minds would order them.

To be fair, Kasich seemed like he had a brilliant strategy compared to go-for-broke losers like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. Why spend money? Why knock yourself out in races you can’t individually win? Just keep treading water, don’t make waves, and when it’s time for the contested convention, make your perfect dive. What Kasich didn’t realize is that voters saw through his shabby chicanery with Cruz and voted straight up for the man who wasn’t endorsed by the party, wasn’t owned by the Koch brothers, and wasn’t a career politician.

So when the dust settled last week, and the delegate votes were counted, the only candidate with a clear mandate was the one with the cloudiest agenda: Donald Trump. The clown had become the clown prince. This despite—or maybe because of—his penchant for school-bully insults and his crazy, off-the-cuff statements about the Klan and Mexicans and ugly women and pretty women being punished for their abortions. They used to call Reagan the Teflon president because everything stupid slid off him. Well, Trump is Teflon sprayed with Pam, coated with goose grease, and dipped in K.Y. Jelly. Whatever he says, his followers counter with, “He really speaks his mind” or “well, he may say one thing, but we know what he really means.” Do we?

Look, I’m the first to admit—or, if not the first, maybe the 12,030th—to admit that Donald Trump’s wildcard, shoot-from-the-lip status has a visceral appeal. If the two parties running, and usually ruining, the country for the past 30 years don’t approve, he must be good, right? And being a great persuader, he appeals to our emotions—unlike Hilary, who appeals to, well, not even her husband.

But let’s not forget that Donald Trump is a man who promises a robust job market, and yet he grew famous from a TV show on which he fired everyone! This is a man who used to be pro-choice, but when he becomes a Republican, hup!, he suddenly turns anti-abortion. This is a man who vows to fix the country’s troubles by collaborating with the best and brightest, but he couldn’t even find enough intelligent minds to teach in a bogus university. This is a man who wants to keep out immigrants, unless they’re six feet tall, anorexic, and look good on a bearskin rug. This is a man who wants to help the little guy, by building casinos to take their money and hotel rooms that only movie stars can afford.

In other words, the wizard behind the curtain has done very, very well for himself. For others? Not so much. For better or worse, we’ve spent the last eight years led by a community organizer who, perhaps naively, thought he could bring everyone together to solve problems. Are we now ready, instead, for a semi-benevolent dictator who thinks he knows everything and whose answer for every crisis is, “It’ll be amazing. It’ll be beautiful. Believe me.”

We’d like to believe you, Donald. We’d like to believe in something. But 240 years of politics, not to mention the Bernie Sanders campaign, have taught us the futility of belief. And I’m a Rabbi saying this! So if the votes are counted on November 8th, and America chooses the bloviating, thoughtless TV star over the jilted, calumniating harridan, all we can do is what we always do every four years on January 20th: pray.

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

Dave’s Gone By Interview (4/30/2016): MOLLY RINGWALD & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews actress Molly Ringwald

Topics include: John Hughes, jazz, swing, Brat Pack.
Segment scheduled to air April 30, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #138 (4/24/2016): SHMURA MATZOHS

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #138 (4/24/16): Shmura Matzohs

aired April 23, 2016 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://youtu.be/9e-dOyy_cQA

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of April 24, 2016.

Among the great inventions of mankind are the wheel, the lever, the polio vaccine, and the computer microchip. But let’s not leave out one of my favorite all-time creations. Something so simple yet so perfectly imperfect. Something both great and crummy — pun intended.

You take flour and water, mix them together, roll it flat flat flat—flatter than a ten-year-old’s training bra—poke the dough with tiny holes, and push it into a super-hot, dry oven. After a couple of agonizing minutes, shazam! Matzoh! Somehow, this flour-and-water combo doesn’t turn into pita bread, it doesn’t become olive loaf, it doesn’t blossom into a Pepperidge Farm cookie. It just stays matzoh, and that’s good enough for me. Almost.

See, you can get Streit’s or Horowitz-Margareten or Manischewitz and other commercial brands of matzoh, and they’ll get you through the Passover holiday just fine. You make matzoh brei, where you dip it in egg; you can crumble it and make matzoh-meal pancakes, which iHop would not be remiss in adding to their international breakfasts. Dear God, they make chocolate-covered matzoh, which sounds gross, but hey, if they can do it with crickets and bumble bees, why not the bread of affliction? (Chocolate-covered matzoh is not to be confused, by the way, with chocolate matzoh, which is just a giant chocolate bar made into the shape of a matzoh. In other words, a thousand times better. Chocolate-covered matzoh is to chocolate matzoh as a gold-plated watch is to a Rolex. If you promise your grandchildren chocolate matzoh, but you give them the chocolate covered, don’t expect them to visit you in the nursing home years later.)

But I digress. Matzoh is a tasty, non-nutritional but sustaining food meant to remind us of the bread our ancestors ate when they high-tailed it out of Egypt. `Cuz when you’re leavin’ hasty, you ain’t got time for pastry.

However, my reflection today is not just about matzoh; it’s about a special version of matzoh. The platinum standard, if you will. And I will. When I’m conducting a seder, or kicking back watchin’ baseball during chol hamoed, I want me some shmura matzoh! That’s the stuff! That’s the bread of affection! It’s the same flour and water, the same procedures. But with shmura matzoh, the harvested grain is guarded from the very first second it’s plucked to the moment the Rabbi slides it and its compadres out of the oven.

Shmura matzoh is the ultimate homemade bread. No machines, no slicer cutting the edges into right angles. No opening a box where every piece looks like a ceiling tile in a suburban office. Shmuras are individually mixed, rolled, and baked. And they don’t look beautiful or symmetrical. They’re lumpy, they’re brittle, often overcooked, and the burnt parts are all over the place. In fact, shmura matzohs are so ugly, they could replace Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

But oy my God, are they delicious! There’s something so real and so pure about them. Everything else you get in the store is machine-pressed, dye-cut, flushed with preservatives, and so far away from actual food, you’re not even sure what the hell you’re eating. With shmura matzoh you taste three things: flour, water, and Rabbi sweat.

Now there’s all sorts of hoo-ha/doo-dah rules about using shmura matzohs. You’re supposed to eat them only at the seder and no other time — not even the rest of the holiday. I’m sorry, but at $17 a box with six pieces of bread in it, I’ll eat it on Christmas if I want to. Also, since the matzoh is utilized during the seder ceremony — including breaking it for the afikomen, the bread has to be complete, unbroken. You think it was tough for the Jews to cross the Nile out of Egypt? Try getting a one-millimeter cracker from a Brooklyn factory to a Staten Island dinner table without having a few oopsies.

Still, it’s worth it because shmura matzohs are the bomb. Yes, they’re impossible to butter, and they don’t actually break in half; they splinter — leaving shards of crumbs everywhere you look. But I don’t care; their deliciousness trumps all. I mean, on Passover, we have to eat raw horseradish, and then we have to take yummy charoset and ruin it by mixing it with horseradish, and then for eight days: no pizza, no pretzels, no ravioli, no danish, no muffins, no waffles, no wafers, no hoagies, no heroes, no oatmeal, no beer. So if I want a piece of homecooked unleavened bread that looks like a manhole cover but tastes like Judaism, I will seek no further than shmura matzohs. Mmm mmm flavorless — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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

NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #138 (4/24/16): Shmura Matzohs

Dave’s Gone By Interview (4/23/2016): BOB KAYNES & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews The Bronzing King, Bob Kaynes

Topics include: baby shoes, bronzing.
Segment scheduled to air April 23, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com

Dave’s Gone By Interview (4/2/2016): TOM CHAPIN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews singer-songwriter Tom Chapin

Topics include: Harry Chapin, Pete Seeger, children’s music, fracking.
Segment scheduled to air April 2, 2016 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com