Rabbi Sol Solomon’s celebrity interviews, Rabbinical Reflections (sermons), songs, and other appearances on the show.
INDEX: http://davesgoneby.net/?p=25407
Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Gene Kelly’s widow and biographer, Patricia Ward Kelly
Topics include: Singin’ in the Rain, dance, choreography.
The segment was recorded in late June and aired July 5, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio 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)2014 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #102 (6/8/2014): The 2014 Tony Awards
aired June 7, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/AKwmkJ31YnM. https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27591
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of June 8th, 2014.
Well, it’s time for the Tonys, ladies and gentlemen. The moment when Broadway goes into a tizzy honoring and celebrating itself, while the rest of the world pretty much watches basketball. But I love the theater, and for all its eccentricities and unfairness and shows about men who dress up as women – because that’s the only thing Broadway seems to be about these days – I wouldn’t trade a night at the theater for ten nights under an olive tree with Mayim Bialik. Eleven even.
Broadway was a busy street this season, with more than 40 new productions. I haven’t seen that many openings since my proctologist made a time-lapse documentary. But you know, my interest in the Tonys is more religious than aesthetic; I want to know where the Jews are, and how did my beloved people fare in the season and in the voting.
For example, two of the five Best Play nominees were written by Jews. James Lapine wrote Act One, which has two acts (try figuring that shit out). The play concerns two other Jews – the great comedy-writing team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. You can tell they were Jews because they wrote You Can’t Take it With You, which is just the kind of negative thinking that drives Jews to alka seltzer. Also, that iconic faigele Harvey Fierstein returned to Broadway with his first new play in 25 years. Casa Valentina is about group of married heterosexual men who take two weeks off each year to cross-dress and live like women. Why anybody would want to spend a vacation being bitchy and unreasonable while fighting off periods, headaches and sagging tits is beyond me, but that’s the magic of theater.
Broadway musicals have been a traditional Jewish stomping ground, from Fanny Brice to Lonny Price, from Harold Clurman to Ethel Merman, from Jerome Robbins backstage to Baskin-Robbins at the concession stand. And it’s still true; this year’s musicals have enough Jews to start their own ghetto! After Midnight – yes, it’s crawling with schvartzes, but it was conceived by Jack Viertel. Aladdin, by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – one’s alive, one’s dead, both were circumcised. Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Not just Carole King but Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Don Kirshner, Neil Sedaka. If you threw in Phil Spector, you’d have a minyan. And a bloodbath, but still…
The most nominated show of all, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, was co-written by Jews, and a show that didn’t even get nominated, Bullets Over Broadway, was scripted by Woody Allen. The show got a Best Book Tony nomination, but don’t expect him to show up for the ceremony because he can’t find a babysitter. . . to rape.
It does pain me to say that other categories for this year’s Tony Awards are rather chary with their chosen choices. Samuel Barnett, who was in Twelfth Night, is half-Jewish, half-Quaker, which means he takes messages from the bible and turns them into whiny complaints. But I complain that none of the other Best Actor candidates is Jewish. There’s two Irishmen, a Brit and an Arab. (The Arab is Tony Shalhoub, so we won’t hold that against him.) Except for Idina Menzel, who’s so Jewish John Travolta tried to pronounce her name in Hebrew, all the best actresses are shikses and schvartzes. You have to go all the way down to Best Featured Actor to find a few landtsman. Danny Burstein playing an old Jewish man in Cabaret. He’s a little young for the part, so I’ve been coaching him with phlegm-hocking lessons on his day off. You’ve also got Jarrod Spector in Beautiful. Now, he committed the biggest sin a Jewish boychik can commit – he left college in his junior year to pursue the acting. He said in an interview, quote, “It wasn’t easy to tell my parents that I was leaving Princeton” – Princeton, Gottenyu! An economics major! Why not put a stake in their hearts? And a lambchop, too?” “But my parents,” Spector said, “were phenomenally understanding.” Sure they were, Jarrod – because their oven was big enough to fit two heads!
But seriously, the kid made good. He played Frankie Valli on Broadway in Jersey Boys more than 1500 times. Spector said, quote, “There’s an Italian/Jewish closeness I think I have.” Which means, he can make you an offer you can’t stop debating.
On the whole, this was not the most Judeo-friendly year on Broadway. Yes, you had Billy Crystal in 700 Sundays, but you also had Soul Doctor, about smooth-singing, hippie-grooving, teenager-touching Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. The musical sold so few tickets, they held kaddish at the box office. Harold Pinter had two plays revived – both of which were hits, neither of which were nominated. There was a play called The Velocity of Autumn, about a spunky old lady in a Brooklyn Brownstone and her gay son; both of them should have been Jewish but weren’t. That show went down faster than Malaysian Flight 370.
Meanwhile, off-Broadway, they did have one show of interest. What was it called? “Bad Jews!” Playing at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center, no less. It was all about Young-Israel types fighting over their dead grandfather’s chai necklace. Well, it ain’t Sholom Aleichem but hey, I’m not Myron Cohen, either.
So I wish mazel and congratulations on a job well done to all the Tony candidates, Jewish and otherwise, for creating live entertainment in a world where “fun” increasingly means pushing a button, sliding a mouse and staring at a screen for eight hours. I think there’s more to life than that. Anyway, if you enjoyed this Rabbinical Reflection, remember you can watch it again on youtube by pressing the URL button, sliding your mouse to the video, and watching the screen.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #101 (5/25/2014): Gabriel Diaz
aired May 24, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/YJud7dG3Qs0
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of May 25th, 2014.
Is there such a thing as a person so stupid and retarded, you can’t get angry at them, no matter what they do? Either they don’t have the brain capacity to distinguish right from wrong, or they’re just so hilariously deluded, you can’t help but laugh at them?
No, I’m not talking about me. And I’m not even talking about Marco Rubio; I’m talking about a cabdriver in New York. There’s a hack in Manhattan who doesn’t believe in keeping his political opinions to himself. As he Travis Bickles his way across the avenues, he wears his affiliation on his sleeve – literally. Tourists hailing a cab photographed him wearing a Nazi swastika patch on his arm.
Turns out the guy’s a National Socialist and believes in the cause – although not so much that he’ll wear the patch where passengers can see it. I guess he doesn’t want to get garroted at a red light. But pedestrians outside the car can see it and have taken numerous photos of this idiot’s arm. They’ve also spat on his windshield, kicked his bumper, flipped him the bird and basically made clear that they don’t like taking a ride with Joseph Goebbels.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission agreed, and they’ve suspended this fascist fuckwad for 30 days, citing a TLC rule that prohibits drivers from acting against the best interests of the public. The fact that most cabbies smell like farts and sandalwood, and they go from Astor Place to the East River via the West Side Highway, somehow isn’t against the public interest. But yes, the swastika thing is a deal breaker. I’m glad this Nutzy is off the road, if only for a month. He does have the right to express his opinions in a free society, but getting stuck in a vehicle with a crazy person who embraces evil is just as bad as being on a subway with wild teenagers, or on an airplane with one of those pilots who thinks he’s a stand-up comedian. And he’s not gonna land the plane until you’ve heard his best joke – which is usually so bad, you hope you crash before the punchline.
I’m not saying we should emulate Germany and legally ban any display of Nazi regalia. Shooting on sight is probably a better idea. But if the National Basketball Association can expel John Sterling for telling his half-black girlfriend, in private, that he doesn’t like her all-black friends, certainly the TLC can do more to Hitler Junior than send him on a month’s unpaid vacation.
I do give props to the fella – much as I despise and wish death upon him – for sticking to his guns and not offering some half-hearted, lawyer-penned apology to get him off the hook. Interviewed by the press, this Holocaust denier said, quote, “We’ve been told lies about Hitler. We believe in racial separation and racial differences.” He’s like the late Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church; if you’re gonna play delusional poker, double down every time. This cab guy has agreed to take off the armband when he drives, but only to keep his job and appease, quote, “liberal crybabies,” rather than undergoing some Dickensian change of heart. He says he doesn’t hate Jews; he’s just critical of them and that just because he’s a Nazi doesn’t make him anti-Semitic. Okay. Hey, just because I’m breathing doesn’t make me alive. No, wait… it does.
The guy also equates his plight with that of homosexuals. If they can wave a rainbow banner in a parade devoted to equality and freedom, he has a right to wear the symbol of a nation that murdered 12,000,000 innocent people on the grounds of racial purity. It’s the same thing!
But I confess, I’ve been a naughty Rabbi. I’ve been holding back one piece of information. One climactic fact that launches this story from some run-of-the-mill reminder that prejudice is still potent, to the realm of the incandescently insane. It’s time to reveal the name of this cab driver. Are you ready? Gabriel Diaz. Gabriel Diaz. You would be right in assuming this guy’s ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower. And no, he doesn’t have a Spanish last name because his grampa escaped from Berlin to hide in Argentina. No, Gabriel Diaz has an ethnic name because he’s ethnic, Dominican and…wait for it…black. Let me repeat that for those of you choking on your watermelons at home. Gabriel Diaz is a National Socialist, yet his skin is pretty much the same shade as Urkel. I don’t know if he’s the world’s only schvartze Nazi. If he’s not, I imagine they’re real easy to spot in a Klan rally.
Diaz’s parents say he’s naïve and disturbed, and he only became enamored of the swastika from watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” A movie, by the way, made by a Jew, starring a half-Jew, and released by Paramount Pictures – a studio founded by three immigrant Yids in 1912. I guess the irony is that nowadays, times being what they are, immigrants wouldn’t get the opportunity to run film studios. They’d be lucky to get jobs as…cab drivers. Which is no profession to be ashamed of… until now.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #100 (5/18/2014): Boko Haram
aired May 17, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy1Wthfvjvo&feature=youtu.be
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of May 18th, 2014.
Well, the Muslims are at it again. And this time they’re not in Syria, or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, or any of those other countries where oil wells turned the third world into the first world without giving a second thought to the first amendment. No, today’s Mohammedian mess comes from Nigeria, of all places.
The Islamic militant organization Boko Haram, which I believe is the African word for “Procol Harum,” has spent its quality time causing terrorism and assassinations to the tune of 10,000 dead in the region over the last decade. Nobody every heard of them until now because, well, let’s face it, a bunch of African schvartzes? We have our own problems. But now they’ve gone too far: they’ve kidnapped a bunch of nubile young girls. It’s kind of like when the New York Post has a headline that someone stabbed a co-ed. You could rape a dozen fat, immigrant, Eskimo women, and you won’t even get a line in the Weird but True column. But you knife a cute co-ed, the Post has cover coverage for a week.
So now Boko Haram, this cancerous collective of terror cells – which is what cancer is, come to think of it – Boko Haram has leapt into New York Post nirvana by attacking an all-girls school and kidnapping more than 200 female students. And just to show that it isn’t personal, just business, they’ve threatened to sell the girls into slavery. I know – it’s horrible, it’s inhumane, and let me tell you, with Merry Maids charging a hundred bucks a week, I’m tempted.
But seriously, what a shock that the religion of peace would turn out to be the religion of 200 pieces of Nigerian ass. Governments around the world are working to coax the kidnappers into behaving decently, which is kind of like asking a gorilla to stop throwing banana crap. In response, Boko Haram said, “Sure, we’ll release the young ladies – in a trade for all of our terrorists that you have locked up.” Sound familiar? Ask Israel how many murderers it had to exchange just bring a few soldiers home.
Wisely, the Nigerian government has rejected the “teens-for-terrorists” swap meet, though they are open to broad negotiations – they just won’t negotiate for the broads. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan – and I’m not making that up, the guy sounds like he should have a second-act number in “Guys and Dolls” – Goodluck Jonathan is meeting with other world leaders to discuss ways to put the loco Bokos in their place. Hopefully, that won’t include meeting their demands, appeasing them or treating them like people.
Oh, and big thumbs up to the vigilantes who rose up against these Islamic Fundamurderers last week and started taking back their village. I’m sure they said to themselves, “Hey, the government won’t do it, and the U.N. won’t do it, so let’s grab some torches and pitchforks and look for Imams.”
Of course, I have a much better and safer way of getting revenge on the Nigerians. We send them all an email, and the email says, “Congratulations! You have won $5,000,000 which is being held for you in trust by my uncle, the King of Nebraska. In order to claim your lotto earnings, just send us a bank transfer for $8,000 along with three dozen Nigerian teenage nymphettes, and you’ll get your check in the mail faster than you can say (click language). PS: If you find Casey Kasem, we’ll throw in a toaster. Sincerely, Prince Chaim, Omaha.”
I know, it’s a cruel trick. But payback’s a bitch. So come on, Boko Haram, release the bitches.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Topics include: Barney Miller, The Rothschilds, Rabbis, clarinet
Segment aired May 17, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio 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)2014 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Groucho maestro FRANK FERRANTE
Topics include: Groucho Marx, Marx Brothers, comedy, TeatroZinzanni, Arthur Marx.
Segment aired May 10, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio 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)2014 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews actress Swoosie Kurtz
Topics include: Joshua White, Sisters, Mike & Molly, Michael Caine, Lillian Hellman, Tony Randall.
Segment aired May 24, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio 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)2014 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with producer Joe Corcoran
Topics include: Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, Late Nite Catechism, lung cancer, Dr. Zhivago.
Segment aired April 26, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio 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)2014 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information on Rabbi Sol Solomon: www.shalomdammit.com
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #99 (4/20/2014): Utz vs. Butler
aired April 20, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/S8bUHv8TNa0
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of April 20th, 2014.
Last Monday, Michael Utz, of Culpepper, Virginia, was awarded $5,000 in punitive damages from a former fellow employee. That coworker, James Carroll Butler, also spent a month in prison back in 1999 for a little prank he pulled on Utz at the office.
Butler was mad at Utz – in a way that only people who have to work next to each other 40 hours a week, week after week after week, can get angry at each other – so Mr. Butler grabbed the office coffee pot and took it with him to the toilet. No, don’t get ahead of me; he did not pee in the coffee pot. He peed in the toilet. But then he took the coffee pot and filled it from the toilet. He then waited – tee hee, tee hee – for Michael Utz to use the pot for coffee.
Luckily for Utz, he smelled something unpleasant in the pot before he went to use it. So instead of brewing a pot of Chock Full o’ Nuts – or, more accurately, chock full of pee from his coworker’s nuts, Mr. Utz brought the coffee pot to his superior who sent it to a lab. Tests came back positive for fecal matter, and Butler was arrested, charged with a misdemeanor and given a one-year sentence with 11 months suspended. As far as his job was concerned, he was, of course…relieved. Oh, and just for the sake of irony, did I mention they both worked at a waste-treatment facility?
As anyone who has labored day-in, day-out in a cubicle, offices can be fraught with tension, jealousies, grudges and disappointments. Surrounded by strangers you’d never bother with otherwise, you’re forced to put up with the aggravations of office politics. Either that or you quit, or you get yourself fired if you want unemployment, or you whip out a semi-automatic rifle and shoot anyone who jams up the copy machine. Which is pretty much everyone.
That, of course, is going too far, but let’s face it: revenge is a dish best served piping hot. Or in this case, fresh brewed. We’ve all seen the movie “9-to-5” where they tie up Dabney Coleman and improve the workplace in his absence. And who didn’t enjoy the pranks Jim and Pam played on Dwight in “The Office?” Well, Dwight didn’t, but he deserved them.
So I’m not about to delve into the moral equivalencies of crime versus prank punishment. I’m not here to ask: What would a co-worker have to do that would make you justified for crazy-gluing their telephone receiver to the hook? Or to their ear? What would a boss have to put you through so you’d get to the point of saying, “Yes, I deleted her hard drive and replaced it with a grilled-cheese sandwich, but in fairness, that was a good sandwich”? How badly would a superior have to piss you off before you offer them piss? We all have our breaking points and our tit-for-tat total tallies.
What I do not understand is why it took five years for this incident to be resolved – to the tune of $5,000. How many man hours, how many lawyer hours, how many other cases were pushed aside in order for this to come to trial? Were there clerks of the court sitting in front of their calendars going, “Okay, we have a guy who shot three people in a hold-up, and there’s this other fella accused of planting a terrorist bomb at the graves of Afghan vets at Arlington . . . But wait, no, stop everything! James Carroll Butler took a whiz in his co-worker’s Café Bustelo. Clear the dockets! Clear the schedule! And somebody sniff the coffee maker; I don’t like the looks of that intern.”
Half a decade of legal wrangling to find out that Butler did it. Why the delay? It should have been easy to find a jury of his peers. After all, being a pee-er is what got him in trouble in the first place. Couldn’t this have been settled out of court? Maybe Utz could have crapped in a bucket and made brownies. “You eat mine; I drank yours – we’re even! Let’s shake hands. Or maybe not.”
There should be a way to resolve small disputes – or, in this case, piddling ones – without tying up tax dollars and the justice system. I’m not saying discharging in the Dunkin Donuts is acceptable behavior. It’s just that you don’t need to turn it into the next O.J. trial. Unless someone pees in your o.j..
So I suppose the moral of this story is, well, don’t urinate in the Yuban. But, also, if someone hands you a cup of joe, and you can taste Joe, report it – but also don’t expect to hit the lottery. And if worse comes to worst, and you do take a sip, even then just remember: it will still taste better than Starbucks.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
(c) 2014 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.
–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27692
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of March 30th, 2014.
The most hated man in America – well, besides me – is dead. Fred Phelps, the founding pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, passed away of natural causes on March 19th. Somehow, he made it to 84 years old without enemies taking a bat to his head or sprinkling anthrax in his undershorts.
Now, we can’t expect right-wing Christians to be forward-thinking or even moderate about such issues as abortion, gay rights and Lady Gaga. Bible thumpers aren’t wired like that, and if they wanna tie a straitjacket around the Old Testament and interpret it the way Muslim extremists bungle the Koran, that’s their business. The reason Freddy Phelps was so loathed is that he went out of his way to spread hatred, and he targeted people who were guilty of nothing more than living their lives differently from what he thought the bible recommended. Fred Phelps was not a live-and-let-live kinda guy. He was more a “hurt and disrupt” sort of person.
He didn’t start out that way. In 1954, on the day Brown beat the Board of Education, Phelps, who had a law degree, took it upon himself to fight civil-rights cases. I mean, on the black side – really! Really! Of course, a few years later, he was disbarred for corruption, but there was something righteous in the guy before he turned self-righteous. Back in the early `90s, he ran for governor, senator and mayor – on the democratic ticket. He lost and lost and lost, and maybe that’s what set him off on the path of bitterness and bile.
Whatever goodie points Phelps racked up defending schvartzes in Kansas have long been pissed away in his tirades and protests against homosexuals. To preach in a sermon against the sin of being a buttmuncher is one thing. To send your followers out in public on streetcorners with signs that read “God Hates Fags” is another thing. But to bus your parishioners to funerals… that takes balls the size of planets. These Westboro wackos would send – or threaten to send – protesters to everything from the Boston Marathon bombing funerals to school-shooting victim burials, warning everyone that God Hates America, which is why He kills people so randomly.
On the web, these Baptist boneheads post gleeful messages anytime an American soldier gets killed overseas. “You see?” they say. “That’s God showing how much he hates gays and lesbians.” This has about as much logic as a guy tripping over a curb and thinking, “Hmm, I know why this happened. Somewhere in the south of France, a farmer is raising too many geese.”
Here’s the truth, Fred Phelps, wherever you are down there. God does not hate fags. Well, maybe Perez Hilton, but otherwise, no. If he’s mean to them, it’s because he’s mean to everyone because he’s the Old Testament fire-and-brimstone rageaholic we all know and love. And as far as God hating lesbians, well, if man is made God’s image, that means God is a lot like man. And let me tell you: men love lesbians. Case closed.
Do I have a personal vendetta against the WBC? Well, it’s not enough they hate gays; they hate Jews, too, saying we stole Israel and killed their favorite Jew – the one on the cross with the big mouth and the death wish. Westboro put up videos calling us filthy Jews and Christ killers and fag enablers. All the way back in 1996, Phelps led a protest against the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC – possibly the only decent institution in Washington DC – writing, and I quote, “American taxpayers are financing this unholy monument to Jewish mendacity and greed and to filthy fag lust. Jews, thus perverted, out of all proportion to their numbers energize the militant sodomite agenda… Jews are the real Nazis.” And that was just his warm-up joke.
But seriously, now that Fred Phelps is becoming fertilizer instead of spewing it, the question is, how do we react? I ask this because Passover is coming in a couple of weeks, and during the Seder, we spill ten drops of wine when talking about the Egyptians, because we’re not supposed to be a hundred percent happy when our enemy is vanquished. Even though the Egyptians enslaved us, treated us like cattle, turned us into fifth-class citizens in a country where we’d been welcomed just a few Pharaohs earlier. Even though we were overjoyed to escape and watch the slave owners get what was coming to them…still, death of the first born is a heavy price, and they are God’s creatures, too, so…hold off on the noisemakers a bissel. Fireworks and disco dancing – no problem, but in moderation.
That can be a hard principle to accept, however, in modern times. On May 8th, 1945, don’t tell me every surviving Jew in the world didn’t want to drown every last German in the Danube. When bin Laden bought it, I danced a hora in the living room and flushed a Koran down the toilet. I admit it: I was flooded with emotion, and then just flooded – it’s a thick book in a very old toilet. But the point is, I understand the desire to rejoice at the finish of Phelps. He’s not having a funeral, but if he were, what release and elation to show up where they’re shoving him in the ground and jeer at his inbred followers. Curse at them, mock them, drown them out with glam rock, have gays and lesbians kiss and roll around – especially the lesbians…yeah – find the triggers for these ludicrous people and pull those triggers till they go off.
A bigger man than I would say we must take the high road, lead by example, and don’t sink to the Westboro level by stooping to their tactics. But that would be a bigger man than I. I’m a small, angry Jew, and I hate these fucking people. If you find where they’re burying Phelps, or holding one of their protests, go with a rainbow banner in one hand and a spray can of piss in the other. But most of all – and I wish I had written this so I could take credit, but blessed be the man or woman who wrote: “Live your life in such a way that the Wetsboro Baptist Church will want to picket your funeral.” Isn’t that great? And then, during shiva, bend them all over and show them exactly what you can do with a yahrtzeit candle.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
