ARCHIVES – RABBI SOL SOLOMON – Page 48

Dave’s Gone By Interview (12/7/2013): DONNA McKECHNIE & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews dancer-actress Donna McKechnie

Topics include: A Chorus Line, Michael Bennett, Company, Stephen Sondheim, State Fair, arthritis

Segment aired Dec. 7, 2013 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.

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 (11/30/2013): SARAH KAUFMANN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews The Cheese Lady! Sarah Kaufmann

Topics include: carving cheese and carving more cheese

Segment originally aired Nov. 30, 2003 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

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #83 (12/1/2013): Thanksgiving Meets Chanukah

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #83 (12/1/2013): Thanksgiving Meets Chanukah

aired Nov. 30, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/0tnyNRjxP5M

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of December 1st, 2013.

When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars – who gives a shit? I don’t follow astrology. But when two happy holidays intersect, that can be a time of much joy and reflection.

Now, all too often, Christmas and Chanukah fall around the same time. This has been hell on Jews, because the media conflates the two festivals into one big secular holiday, which it is not. There’s no such thing as Chrismukkah. Judah Maccabee did not find the baby Jesus in the Syrian temple, and Christ was not crucified on the shamash of a giant wooden menorah.

And yet, the proximity of Yuletide and Chanukah made for an uneasy coexistence. Jewish children would see their goyishe friends on Christmas Day riding new bicycles, playing X-box, unwrapping a new drum set. Then the Yiddishe children would come home, light a candle, sing a song, and then hold out their hands for a big present. Wow! Two ounces of chocolate money. A day-glo dreidel. Next door, the blonde kid gets a Vespa; in the Jewish house, “happy Chanukah, here’s a dollar. Give half to charity.” Is it any wonder the yidlach would look longingly at outside culture and say, “I want to go to there!”?

So Jewish families started playing catch-up. It wasn’t enough to put a menorah in the window. Now we have to decorate, just like the goyim. And the first night of Chanukah is meant to approximate Christmas Eve, so the kid gets a half decent gift. That way, the Jewish child can go next door and say, “Ha ha! Sure, you got all that stuff from Santa. But at 12:01am on Christmas Day, you’re done. No more presents. I got an iPad tonight, and there are seven more days of presents to come. Good stuff like chocolate or money, or chocolate that looks like money. Have fun cleaning up pine needles for a month, you foreskin-totin’ suckaah!”

Even so, the drawbacks of an omnipresent Christian holiday overshadowing a
Jewish one can be oppressive. It’s like people who have their birthday on Christmas. You get screwed, because not everyone double-gifts. You receive a single present, and it’s marginally better than the two items you would have scored had your parents shtupped in February instead of April.

But sometimes, holiday alignment isn’t a bad thing. This year has a rare occurrence of Chanukah falling at the same time as Thanksgiving. Wednesday night we light the first candle, and Thursday is turkey day, with Chankuah continuing all through Thanksgiving weekend.

We can draw parallels between the two festivals. First of all, they both call for gratitude. On Thanksgiving, Americans are grateful that the Indians were trusting and outmatched in warfare, so the Pilgrims could take advantage of them, give them smallpox and take their land. Thanks Pocahontas, pass the giblets. In the Chanukah story, Jews had to fight against Hellenism. I don’t know what they had against girls named Helen, but there you go.

After decades of treating the Jews fairly, the Syrians changed their tune to a song of anti-Semitism. They killed and pillaged, they made Judaism illegal, and they defiled the Hebrew temple in Jerusalem. This caused a number of Jewish families to revolt – and God knows, I’ve met some revolting Jewish families. But you had Mattathias and his son, Judah Maccabee, who fought the Syrians of the Greek empire and drove them out of Judea. They Hebrews and re-dedicated the temple, so we’re grateful to them and to HaShem for saving the Jewish people from conversion, death and unidentifiable gyro meat.

Chanukah and Thanksgiving have other things in common, as well. They’re both pretty secular. Chanukah is post-bible; it’s a cultural tradition rather than a top-down mandate. And Thanksgiving is for anyone happy to be living in the good ol’ USA. Both holidays also share special foods associated with each. Chanukah, you have potato latkes and jelly donuts. Thanksgiving, you have turkey and Dunkin’ donuts. Sports are also a part of both holidays. Thanksgiving, you sit in your armchair and you watch people who aren’t fat and lazy play football. Chanukah, children sit on the floor with a dreidel and learn the basics of gambling. You start with a pot of money, and then try to take money from everyone else. Is it any wonder Jewish children grow up to be bankers?

Chanukah is the festival of lights; Thanksgiving is a feast of lite beer. Both holidays also incorporate fire. Thanksgiving, we recall the way our ancestors burned down Indian teepees and villages. Chanukah, we stand at a menorah holding a colored candle while molten wax runs down our hands. You’d think after 5,000 years they could invent a candle that doesn’t make you look like the accident guy on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Most of all, both holidays are about spending time with family and friends. They’re about women arguing in the kitchen, men falling asleep during halftime, children getting loaded up on snacks and then being forced to eat cranberry sauce – does anybody enjoy eating cranberry sauce? Chanukah and Thanksgiving are about expressing our appreciation to HaShem for keeping us alive, either by letting us defeat empires or giving us delicious crops to harvest. Either way, it’s something worth singing about:

“Over the river and through the woods to Bubbie’s apartment we shlep;

It takes quite a while, and she’s kind of senile
And the baby comes home with strep.

Out of the tunnel, across the bridge and through the old neighborhood
The latkes were yucky, the presents were sucky
And yet, and yet, life’s good.”

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

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #82 (11/19/2013): Crystal Spa

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #82 (11/19/2013): Crystal Spa

Aired Nov. 16, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/uoM7W0ecZKg. https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27958

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of November 17th, 2013.

I’m not exactly a spa kind of guy. Relaxation frightens me, and if you’re gonna put me on a massage table, you better have huge boobs and a latex glove because I ain’t leaving without my money’s worth. If I were the spa type, however, one place I would hesitate to visit is the Crystal Sauna Wellness Park in Thuringia, Germany. By all accounts, it’s a lovely place: gourmet food, heated pool, sauna, live entertainment, cozy rooms. They really should promote the place more.

Or maybe they shouldn’t. An advertising agency came up with a print ad for Crystal Park that went on the spa’s website. The copywriter wanted to marry the theme of romance and relaxation with the name of the venue. Something that said, “spend a memorable evening here at the Crystal Spa.” However, those were not the words they used. Instead they said – and I’m not making this up – quote, “Enjoy the evening hours in candlelight and relax, in a long, romantic Kristall-Nacht.”

You’d think a German would know that putting the words “Kristall” and “nacht” together is the opposite of romantic. It’s like a cruise ship promoting itself by saying, “Come with us on a journey of titanic proportions!”

An employee of the spa said the advertisement was, quote, “a misunderstanding,” one that stemmed from the park’s name, Crystal. It certainly had nothing to do with the beginnings of the Holocaust. But all we can wonder is how a German ad exec could not know that November 9th, 1938 was the beginning of Hitler’s final solution. That was the night of the broken glass – “crystal night” – when German-Jewish store owners were beaten, their windows smashed, ethnic slurs painted on their bricks – the first wave of the Holocaust. Most importantly, it proved to the Nazi regime that they could get away with state-sanctioned brutality without anyone trying to stop it.

It’s like when the first West Coast rapper said, “Hey, the album is a little short. Maybe I’ll do a duet with someone else on the label. How bad could it be?” He tries it, and two years later, every other song on a rap CD has a guest appearance. Yes, the scale of the tragedy is different, but the principle is the same.

Even as we move into the 21st century, 80 years and three generations since the Nazis took power, Germany remains a prickly pear. Grandchildren carry the moral burden for something completely alien to them, and yet some of those guilty grandparents still walk the earth. It’s illegal to be a white supremacist there, or to own or display Nazi memorabilia or even give the “Heil Hitler” salute. Which is probably as it should be. There are silly aspects to the censorship, but consider this: in 1945, the world would have had every right to set off 25 atom bombs over Germany. So even allowing that country to survive – not to mention letting them reunite – is an act of mercy for which they should be abundantly grateful.

Sure, the Holocaust is taught over there, relentlessly, I hear. So there are people who say, “it’s enough. The country can’t move forward if you grind everyone’s soul into the past.” But the reply to that is, well, this Park-Spa ad. Some product of the German school system, who went into advertising, didn’t hear the alarm bell go off in his head. He saw “Kristall,” he thought of “nacht,” and he had no compunction about slamming them together. This is why there can never be too much Holocaust education – especially over there. And the same goes for any act of savagery that we never want to see again.

I would hate to think that 60 years from now, in Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, or Syria, there’d be a commercial on TV going, “Come to Achlabad for your bedding needs. On-sale now, our heavenly mattress and box spring – twin towers of comfort.” Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to a blooper reel.

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

(c) 2013 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.
–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27958

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #81 (11/10/2013): Chocolate-Covered Chips

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #81 (11/10/2013): Chocolate-Covered Chips

Aired Nov. 9, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://youtu.be/324WHZEig1c

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of November 10th, 2013.

As if Americans weren’t fat enough already, the fine people at Frito Lay have come up with a new snack item that began its rollout last week: chocolate-covered potato chips. That’s right, they’re dipping Lay’s potato chips, the wavy kind, and covering them with milk chocolate. The idea is to create a salty-sweet taste sensation – one that people will remember fondly ten years from now when they’re in the emergency room having their arteries unblocked.

Now, I am a big fan of Lay’s; that includes the Hawaii kind, the sex kind AND the snack-food kind. And of all the big-batch commercial brands, Lay’s, in my humble opinion, does the best potato chips. My dear wife, Miriam Libby, says they make her think of the ideal man: golden, big, and just the right thickness.

I grew up on Wise potato chips, which are tasty but greasy and small. And half of them are partially burned. Eating a bag of Wise chips is like going to a garage sale after a fire; there’s good stuff, but you have to check every item for smoke damage. I like Utz chips because of the name; it sounds Jewish. Utz! Utz! It’s the noise a guy in assisted living makes when he gets off the couch. Uuuutz! Uuuutz! Ut a zoy!

And then you’ve got your boutique chips. These small-batch micro-fryers with their organic chips and their veggie chips and the kettle chips. I don’t get the kettle thing; it’s like they throw in a whole potato with the skin on, and it comes out so crunchy it makes your head hurt. You’ve got your no-salt potato chips…why bother? At their core, potato chips are a salt-conveyance apparatus, just like celery is merely a less-guilty way of getting to the onion dip.

You’ve got ketchup-flavored potato chips, which I think is just trying too hard. You’ve got Pringles – which the company says aren’t potato chips at all, they’re potato “crisps.” Who are they trying to fool? Chips, crisps – “ooh, I don’t have a beard, I have facial hair.” Get over it Pringles, you pretentious assholes.

And speaking of assholes, remember potato chips with Olestra? It was an idea by snack-food makers to add this fat substitute to the food, so you could eat without getting all the cholesterol. You also wouldn’t gain much weight, because the Olestra gave you rampant diarrhea. What a brilliant strategy for dieting! You eat five-dozen potato chips, but you stay slim because a half hour later, out they go. And Proctor & Gamble wins, because as soon as you empty your guts, you’re hungry again. So you can have more potato chips. And then you shit, and then you eat more chips. And then you shit, and you eat more chips. You don’t even have to leave the bathroom. Why risk a horrible accident? Sit on the crapper, put a Ruffles back on the sink, grab a case of Charmin, and you’re in business. Lean back, eat a chip; lean forward, take a dump. Eat a chip, take a dump, eat a chip, take a dump. Repeat until dehydration. You could just sit all day on the toilet eating potato chips. Which is, I believe, how we got Wendy Williams.

I’m pretty sure that Lay’s’ new chips are made with chocolate and not ExLax. And I’m sure they’re delicious. After all, the salty-sweetness combo is not new.

Chocolate-covered pretzels have been popular for decades, and Trader Joe’s was dipping potato chips in chocolate when I was still in Rabbinical school . . . for a few weeks.

Is it gilding the lily, though? Separately, both snack items are close to perfect. The first thing the archangel Gabriel hands you when you get up to heaven is a Cadbury bar. Or, if you’re Mother Teresa, a Godiva assortment. And if there were one snack food most people would take to a desert island, it would be potato chips. Which is stupid, because you’re surrounded by non-potable water, but I’m assuming if you’re on an island that somehow has unlimited supplies of potato chips, on the other side of the island there’s probably a storeroom Diet Pepsi.

But if you put these two ideal items together – potato chips and chocolates, are you overwhelming your tastebuds? I mean, I like Picasso and I like Grant Wood, but you put `em together, and you’ve got the pitchfork sticking through the old woman’s eye. And that’s because her eye is where her elbow should be.

Yes, chocolate and peanut butter go together. And you can even put chocolate – unsweetened – on chicken to make a mole sauce. Or you can put it on moles to make a chicken sauce. Your call.

I suppose the main issue is health-related, especially for weight watchers. At least with regular potato chips – of course, you can’t eat just one, but if you eat ten or so, you have your little indulgence, you count the calories, and then you watch your snacking for the rest of the day. With these chocolate things, one chip and you have to subsist on water and two grapes for the rest of the month. Two ounces have so many calories, they have to write out the number with commas.

Look, I am all for new products, more variety, novel taste sensations. I’m only saying it would be nice if Proctor & Gamble and Nabisco and Nestle would take a little of their R&D money and figure out how to make okra taste as good as an M&M. Maybe there’s a way to combine cauliflower with fish-oil, so that every child in America would be in the supermarket going, “Mommy, mommy! I want caulifish! Oreos are too sweet, nachos are boring – where’s the aisle with the candy bars made of onions and goat milk?”

Anyway, all this talk of snack food is making me hungry. I got my potato chips. (crinkling) Let’s see… I want something sweet… what can I dip it in? mmm…borscht!

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

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27963

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’s RABBINICAL REFLECTION #80 (11/3/2013): Redskins

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’s RABBINICAL REFLECTION #80 (11/3/2013): Redskins

Aired Nov. 2, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/rInYlSN4Gpg

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of November 3rd, 2013.

In 1932, the Boston Braves football team changed their name to another Indian-related moniker: the Redskins. A few years later, they moved to Washington D.C., but they kept their name and have ever since. No one really paid attention to whether the name “Redskins” was offensive – not until 1992, when a group of Native Americans filed a trademark lawsuit against the team. The details are too complicated for me to explain here – because I have no idea what the hell they are. But I do know that arguing went back and forth in the courts for nearly two decades, and still, nobody really gave a crap.

But recent times and sensitivities have changed, and there’s a legitimate movement afoot to get the Washington Redskins to change their name to something that doesn’t bring to mind tomahawks, smoke signals and sunburned skin color.

Team owners remain adamant that the Redskins have an 80-year history that would be needlessly negated by a name change. Not to mention the cost of changing the signage on everything from souvenir jackets to Rex Grossman bobblehead dolls. And let’s not forget having to change all the signs at Washington’s Jack Kent Cooke Stadium – wait, that was changed to FedEx Field in 2000. How terribly sad for the undying legacy of Jack Kent Cooke. I guess.

Anyhoo, people who are against keeping the Redskins ruby tinted always use this example: What if you had the same situation with a different ethnicity? The Florida Yids? The Pittsburgh Polacks? What if there was a basketball team in the NBA called the Darkies? Well, they all are, but you know what I’m saying.

For 80 years, the University of North Dakota nicknamed its team The Fighting Sioux – which sounds pro-Indian until you realize that “Sioux” was a blanket name given by the whites to cover several different Indian tribes. No doubt, the blanket had smallpox on it, too. But hey, if North Dakotans can adapt, why can’t Washingtonians? I realize that asking someone in Washington DC to be flexible is like asking Stephen Hawking to catch a fly ball, but still.

America’s history with its indigenous peoples is one of lies, bullying and bloodshed – which is America’s history with everything. It was only two generations ago that Cowboys and Indians was a game in which the macho anglo, chaps-wearin’, chaw-chewing Cowboys were the good guys trying to tame the savage, sneaky, tomahawk chopping, paint-wearing, ugga-wugga, smoke-signaling red man. Howevermuch scriptwriters tried to make him noble and clever, Tonto was the Lone Ranger’s bitch. Even his name, “tonto,” means stupid in Spanish. I know this because I looked it up – when my junior high school teacher nicknamed me that in Spanish class. I told my parents, and they made her change it. From then on, she called me “hijo de puta,” which she said means “wise one.” I should probably look that one up, too, but I trust her.

Getting back to the Redskins: as someone who comes from an oppressed people – New Yorkers – I empathize with the desire to undo a little piece of ugly history. There’s no good reason not to change the team name if enough people find it derogatory. When teams move, they change – look at the L.A. Dodgers and the Brooklyn Nets. Even the Beatles went through name-revisions. Do you think John, Paul, George and Ringo sat around saying, “No, we can’t change; we have such an important legacy as `The Quarrymen’”?

Of course, the fun part is finding a new name for the Redskins. One blogger suggested “The Washington Monuments,” which is brilliant, especially if it’s a defensive team; you try toppling a monument to get to the end zone. Others have suggested The Washington Warriors, or the Renegades. Then you had the punsters with their government jokes: The Washington Shutdown, The Washington Impasse, The DC Douchebags. And, for those of you getting old enough to eat your steaks in liquid form, how about The Watergates? Or the Reaganomics?

Polls have shown that most people – even Native Americans – are fine with the name “Redskins.” They’re used to it; they’ve even coopted it, the way black people have made the “n” word their own. And by the “n” word, I mean Nikes. Still, why are Americans still eating Aunt Jemima syrup and Uncle Ben’s rice? How many decades have the movies given us fast-talking Hispanic sidekicks, Asian dragon ladies, Italian guidos and Jewish mothers? There’s truth in stereotypes, and even some good things implicit in stereotypes, but there’s also a time to break the mold. So come, Washington Redskins, let’s smoke-um peace pipe and move forward. How? And how.

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

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=28899

Dave’s Gone By Interview (11/2/2013): SUSAN L. SCHULMAN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews press agent Susan L. Schulman

Topics include: Backstage Pass to Broadway, theater, David Merrick, George C. Scott, Robert Redford, Dream, Lesley Ann Warren, John Dexter, Zero Mostel.

Segment aired Nov. 2, 2013 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

Sad Note: Our friend of the Daverhood, Susan Schulman, passed Oct. 19, 2022.

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 (10/26/2013): SYLVIE SIMMONS & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Dave Lefkowitz and Rabbi Sol Solomon interview rock journalist Sylvie Simmons

Topics include: Simmons’s Leonard Cohen biography, “I’m Your Man”; rock journalism, Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Lou Reed, Johnny Cash.

Segment aired Oct. 26, 2013 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

All content (c)2013 TotalTheater Productions.

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 #79 (10/13/2013): Motorcycle Mayhem

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #79 (10/13/2013): Motorcycle Mayhem

Aired Oct. 26, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/TbJpi_SsDUk

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 27th, 2013.

Remember New York in the 1970s? Graffiti everywhere, druggies in the alleys, hookers on the corner, people getting shot, stabbed, punched – or worse: forced to hear disco music. Since those days, Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg have transformed the Wild West into the Mild East. Manhattan is a giant strip mall of Disney stores, Starbucks, Chili’s, $2500-a-month studio apartments and miles of lovely construction scaffolding. The closest we get to cowboys n’ Indians is the Naked Cowboy in Times Square, and even he wears tidy whities and a guitar over his pizzle.

But Manhattan got a taste of the old days last month when a gang of bikers terrorized a driver on the West Side Highway. You’ve all seen this story on viral video: the motorcyclists were in a group slowing down traffic. Alexian Lien was with his wife and two-year-old son in their van when he saw all these bikers around him, driving erratically and brake checking. A brake check is where you hit the brakes suddenly so anyone driving close to you has to slam their brakes if they don’t want to bump into your tuchas. Miley Cyrus was brake-checking Robin Thicke on the MTV awards; and let me tell you, she made me honk my horn.

But dancing on television and terrorizing on the highways are two different things. When Mr. Lien got brake checked, he didn’t stop fast enough and clipped one of the bikers. This made the other Hell’s Devils mad. They swarmed around the van in a menacing fashion.

Now the guy’s afraid for his life, so he floors it, trying to escape. In so doing, he runs over a couple of cyclists, paralyzing one for the rest of his life. Well, bikers are like bedbugs, if you only squash a couple, the others will come back in force. The other cyclists – now with legitimate reason to be pissed – go chasing after Lien’s van, get him down a side street and stop him. It’s like Orange County Choppers Meets Cujo.

That’s when a biker, a 37-year-old thug who goes by the name of Chance – this Chance character goes up to the SUV, takes his helmet and smashes in the driver-side window of the van. Someone else bashes in the back window, and they’re all trying to yank the door open and pull Alexian Lien out of the SUV. Which they do. And they beat the scheiss out of him. All you need is the Rolling Stones playing “Under My Thumb” in the background, and it’s the late 60s all over again. It’s Altamont with schvartzes.

Because there was such a melee, it took days for the police to wade through the evidence and start looking for people to arrest. When they did, they found that some of the bikers were undercover police. These cops couldn’t step out of character and help for fear of blowing their cover. God forbid they should try and save someone’s life; it’s more important they gather evidence for a drug bust. It’s comforting to know that if I have a gang of thugs punching and kicking me while my wife and toddler are watching, at least, 30 pounds of hemp won’t get into the wrong hands.

As of this writing, everything is in the hands of the grand jury, with four of the bikers racking up serious charges of gang assault, rioting and criminal mischief. Good. Although I’m a little thrown by that word: mischief. It’s too cute. “Ooh, the criminal’s making mischief – he put silly string all over that yield sign, how mischievous.” It makes them sounds like scamps. “Ooh, Allen Edwards is pulling a little Asian guy out of his car and punching him. How impish!”

Seriously, this kind of hooliganism cannot be tolerated, and I hope all the bikers are punished for turning a highway into their own personal skee-ball alley. What’s funny is to read people’s online comments to stories about the incident, most of them against the bikers – good; however most of them by right-wing libertarian types using the incident as a reason to defeat gun control. They’re all arnchair cowboys, going, “Well, if it were me in that van with my wife and brat, I’d pull my .38 out of my holster and start wasting these vermin one by one. They’d all die slowly, gasping “I’m sorry!” with their last breaths.

Yeah. Let’s examine the flaws of that non-Talmudic logic, shall we? First of all, guns are legal; Mr. Lien just didn’t have one. But let’s say he did. So he opens fire on 30 bicyclists who may be armed themselves. Now you’ve got a shootout instead of a beatdown. Do you think Mr. Lien’s wife and brat, not to mention nearby drivers and pedestrians, would have fared better with bullets flying everywhere?

This Harley Hellride is a terrible story, but to use it as some kind of object lesson in gun ownership is like saying if John F. Kennedy were packing heat, he could have taken down Oswald and all his CIA helpers. It’s fun to fantasize about empowerment; we all want to be Clint Eastwood riding through Lahood or the Israeli Defense Force raiding Entebbe. But the truth is it’s usually better to stay quiet, mind your business, and hope that the asshole on the moped flipping you the finger (because you didn’t see him in your blind spot) isn’t a cop on his day off looking to take out his homicidal frustrations on your kidneys. Even John Wayne would pish himself when faced with that.

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

Dave’s Gone By Interview (10/12/2013): KELLY CARLIN & Rabbi Sol Solomon

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Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews radio host Kelly Carlin

Topics include: her father – George Carlin, comedy, podcasting, self-help, life coach.

Segment aired Oct. 12, 2013 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.

All content (c)2013 TotalTheater Productions.

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