Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews playwright Barry Levey
Topics include: Hoaxocaust, Judaism, New York International Fringe Festival, Holocaust.
Segment aired Aug. 9, 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.
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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 #104 (8/3/2014): Great Guns in Gaza
aired Aug. 2, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/aNHPRoAQWFc
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of August 3rd, 2014.
If you play with fire, you’re gonna get burned. If you keep throwing gasoline on that fire, you’re gonna get burned blacker than the New York Knicks in a lunar eclipse. Or, put another way, if you beat up your wife ten times, each time she will forgive you, she’ll wear a band-aid and concealer, and she’ll live in fear until the next flare up. But on the eleventh time, if you haven’t killed her yet, she’s gonna call a friend of a friend named Nunzio, and, for a fee, he will relocate you – to the middle of the East River.
It’s the law of “enough is enough.” If you are the nation of Israel, and surrounding your borders are a people who have sworn to drive you into the sea . . . These people fire rockets, indiscriminately and daily, into your heimat. If you’re Israel, you tolerate a dozen rockets, a hundred rockets, a thousand fakakteh rockets that usually land in the middle of nowhere, thank God. But rocket number 1,001? It’s time to pull your Incredible Hulk costume out of the closet and kick some ass.
Three weeks ago, as I’m sure you recall, three innocent Jewish teenagers were slaughtered when they hitchhiked a little too far into Gaza. This was not just another act of violence – you know, like Saturday night in Chicago – this was a flashpoint. It was the moment the Israeli government could say, “You know what? We give the Palestinians the Gaza Strip in exchange for peace, and they give us our teenagers back in pieces. Enough with their rockets, enough with the terrorism, enough with the bullshit about Hamas being a legitimate political organization; it’s time to open up a can of whoop-tuchas on this enemy that means us only harm and destruction. Bring it.”
In my previous Rabbinical Reflection, which I’m sure you’ve nearly memorized and put on flash cards for easy reference, I urged the IDF to take action in Gaza. To avenge the death of those boys and give the camel jockeys payback for years of tears, fears and jeering Emirs. I am thrilled, therefore, that Benjamin Netanyahu gathered up his army into a white-and-blue fist, and they’ve been pounding the Gaza goons ever since.
Dead civilians? Unfortunate casualties? For sure, and what a shame. It’s called collateral damage, and every war has `em. And the Arab teenager that Israeli extremists abducted and killed in retaliation? No one’s proud of that. I’ll even go as far as saying that Israel hasn’t gone out of its way every single time to make sure they’re only blowing up militants and not bystanders two feet away from militants. But when did the Arabs ever make a distinction between soldiers and regular folk? Bombs on buses? Shrapnel in cafes? Mass murders of Olympic athletes and commercial airplanes slamming into the tallest buildings in New York? It’s a good thing I’m not an army General, because I’d napalm every speck of Gaza with a tent on it.
And where does American stand in all this? It’s honestly hard to tell. Barack Obama and John Kerry are talking the left-wing, liberal talk of “stop the fighting now, it’s a humanitarian crises, Israel and Hamas need to cease fire immediately and sit down at the table because there’s wrongs on both sides” – all the typical crybaby blah-blah that negates the basic fact that Israel tends to be in the right 90 percent of the time.
However, words and actions are entirely different things, especially in diplomacy. And for all the handwringing blather as a sop to the “Democracy Now” crowd, the Obama administration has, until this point, watched from the sidelines and let Israel do what it has to do. Thank you, Mr. President. If our Secretary of State wants to appease the Muslims by making noises about how Israel is being too harsh and causing too much suffering to the poor, innocent Palestinians, no problem. Just give Yisroel time to collapse the tunnels, kill the killers and drag Hamas, begging and desperate, to the outhouse of surrender. By eliminating terrorists and religious fanatics, Israel is doing America favor after favor, and I honestly believe Obama and company realize that – no matter how many times Republican bloggers call him “Hussein” and make him sound like the love child of Josef Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini.
It’s the nature of Israel that whenever we do strike back against those who oppress us, we have to apologize for killing more of them than they of us. When our missiles hit their targets, when 100 Palestinians die for every Israeli soldier, that’s unseemly somehow. It should be more balanced. We should die more just to ratchet up the sympathy vote. Sorry, Charlie. The goal is to weaken Hamas and make Israel safe from attack. If that means bombing Gaza back to the stone age, so be it. Besides, Arab children have proven quite skillful at throwing stones, so it’s right up their alley. Just don’t expect to throw stones at Jews anymore, because we will fire them right back at a hundred times the speed.
Go Israel! Go Bibi! And remember what Abba Eban said, “It is better to be disliked than pitied.” I’m both, but I’m beyond giving a crap.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
click above to listen to the episode (audio only).
Here is the 474th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio, Aug. 2, 2014. Info: davesgoneby.com.
Featuring: Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with actor-singer George Ball. Plus: Inside Broadway, Saturday Segues (Joseph Spence, Tony Bennett), Rabbi Sol’s Rabbinical Reflection (Going Great Guns in Gaza) and the Wretched Pun of Destiny (Football).
Guests: songwriter George Ball, Dave’s wife Joyce
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce 00:30:00 SATURDAY SEGUE – Joseph Spence 00:44:00 INSIDE BROADWAY 00:53:00 WRETCHED PUN OF DESTINY – Football 00:55:00 GUEST: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews George Ball 02:03:00 RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #104 (Going Great Guns in Gaza) 02:10:30 BOB DYLAN – Sooner & Later: Another Side Knocked Out Again 02:34:00 Friends 02:41:00 SATURDAY SEGUE – Tony Bennett 03:01:00 DAVE GOES OUT
Aug. 2, 2014 Playlist: “Good Morning Mr. Walker” (00:30:30), “Yellow Bird” (00:33:00), “Rock Daniel” (00:35:30), “Goodnight Irene” (00:37:30; Joseph Spence). “A New Sun in the Sky” (“The Band Wagon” 1959 film soundtrack; 00:51:30). “Some Enchanted Evening” (00:55:00), “If I Were You” (01:05:00), “The Moon is Still Over her Shoulder” (01:14:00), “Fanette” (01:27:30), “Highway Patrolman” (01:44:30) & “Save the Last Dance for Me” (01:58:00; George Ball). “Ballad in Plain D” (02:40:30) & “Brownsville Girl” (02:23:00; Bob Dylan). “Until I Met You” (02:44:30) “Shakin’ the Blues Away” (02:47:30), “Lost in the Stars” (02:49:00), “For Once in My Life” (02:53:30) & “The Best is Yet to Come” (02:57:00; Tony Bennett). “August Winds” (03:03:00; Sting).
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #105 (8/31/14): Eventful August
aired Aug. 30, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUCZgwGJnI
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of August 31st, 2014.
Well, it’s been an eventful month in World Woebegone. What should have been a nice, relaxing laze through the end of summertime – or for those of you in New Zealand, your last good shot at a snowball fight – instead has been an August fraught with war, tumult and misfortune.
Closest to my own heart, of course, is the battle raging between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza. When last we checked in together, Israel was mourning the loss of three innocent hitchhikers who took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. That was followed by Palestinians firing rockets at Israel – actually it was preceded by and followed by Palestinians firing rockets at Israel. Which led to Israel saying “enough’s enough.”
Which led to massive bombings, more rockets, a couple of psychotic Israelis killing Arab children, a few cease fires that lasted long enough for the Arabs to import more rockets, lots of dead Arab terrorists, Hamas militants and semi-innocent-semi-civilians, too many dead IDF soldiers, and a battle that President Obama has been kind enough to let Israel wage without much interference beyond the occasional “naughty-naughty.”
My feelings about the Gaza situation have been spoken so many times, I feel like a “Murder She Wrote” rerun on the Hallmark Channel. Still, I’ll say it again: tiny little Israel shaved off a sliver of itself to give the Arabs in exchange for peace. What do the Palestinians give us in return? Thousands of attempted murders by rocket attacks, punctuated by the occasional real murder, just to break the monotony. How does Hamas expect to give the Palestinians a permanent home if they’re such horrible tenants when they rent?
And to all the left-wing ignoramuses – ignorami? Ignoramians? – okay, morons, who march in Times Square and the garment district with their Arab flags and their Zionism-is-Nazism banners and their screaming about Israeli war crimes, I will say once again: when the Arabs stop terrorizing Jews – and every other culture in the Western World, we’ll stop killing Arabs back. And if they don’t like living in or near Israel, there’s plenty of Arab land in the Middle East where they can worship Islam, stone their women and cut off each other’s hands for picking their noses.
Oh, and for all those “Democracy Now” types bashing Israel for killing Arabs, guess how many Arabs were killed by Arabs in Syria? 191,000, give or take. Meanwhile, Iraq is falling apart, so we have to go back there because of militant Mohammedans, and in response, a Syrian terrorist cut off the head of an American journalist and put it on youtube to see how many likes he could get. Some say the video is a fake, but even if it is, somebody got his head handed to him.
And speaking of violence: it just wouldn’t be a summer in the American south without racial tension, would it? So a black guy shoplifts from a convenience store, roughs up the owner a little bit when he tries to resist, gets stopped by a cop for reasons that have nothing to do with the crime, starts charging at the officer – or surrendering – depending on whose story you believe, and gets a half a dozen bullets in his head for his troubles.
Are the blacks upset? You bet. The guy had no knife, no gun, no nothing. Instead of his deadliest weapon, the cop coulda reached for a taser, or his nightstick. Then again, Michael Brown coulda reached for his wallet instead of stealing those cigars. He’s lucky the store owner didn’t blow his head off before the po-po did.
Obviously, police have a trigger-finger problem, especially when it comes to foreigners or people whose skin is darker than your average manila file folder. So if this whole Ferguson, Missouri calamity leads to better policing, I’m all for it. But when I see protestors willing to believe everything bad about American cops and everything angelic and wonderful about Michael Brown, my eyebrow rises. And when I see other protestors somehow equating Israel’s retaliation against Hamas with the death of this teenager, my gorge rises. And when I see actress Penelope Cruz denouncing Israel for committing genocide, my dick rises. I can’t help it, it’s Penelope Cruz. But the bitch really needs to show more tits and less mouth. I hope she chokes on her Nescafe.
Speaking of choking, a fond farewell to Robin Williams, actor, comedian and apparently all-around good guy. He really wasn’t that funny, but he made such a constant effort to be funny that you had to give him props and marvel at his gusto. I liked him in “Mork and Mindy,” I loved him in “Awakenings,” and I’ll miss his risk-taking performances as much as his more patented standup. Yes, he suffered from depression, but if you made “Patch Adams,” you’d be depressed, too.
We also had a suicide by Nascar, with Kevin Ward, Jr., stepping out of his vehicle to confront driver Tony Stewart for sending him into a spin. Okay, here’s a math problem everyone: If you stand in front of a car going 250 miles an hour, what are the odds of getting hit by a car going 250 miles an hour? I’d say 100 percent, Alex. Maybe Kevin Ward was too angry to think straight, but he was certainly too dumb to live.
Then again, the state of our government could make anyone suicidal. The Republicans keep vowing to impeach the president for being Karl Marx, while 2016 GOP front runner Rick Perry gets indicted for being Machiavelli.
We lost a nice Jewish girl named Betty Jane Persky who grew up to be Lauren Bacall, and the month of August also gave us a 6.0 earthquake in Northern California, causing millions of dollars of damage to vineyards in Sonoma and Napa Valley. Great, just when we need to get rip-roaring drunk to forget all the crap that’s happening, God smashes the bottles.
So where will we be a month from now? Will Russia invade the Ukraine? Will September 11th come and go without ISIS offering us an anniversary gift? Will Malaysia start making airplanes out of rubber, just in case they have to bounce? Hang on, my friends, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
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.
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.
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 6th, 2013.
Idiocy and nonsense! Selfishness and stupidity! Pride and prejudice! Welcome to the United States Federal government, Fall 2013. As I write this, the Fed is in its fourth day of shutdown. Why? Because Republicans won’t approve a budget unless the President kills his healthcare plan. And Obama won’t even talk to the G.O.P. unless they kiss his boots and keep his baby. It’s an impasse created by two sides of impass-holes.
Now, I’m not saying both sides are equally at fault. That’s an easy trap and one that the media loves to fall into – especially when they’re discussing, say, the Palestinians. Arabs bomb and kill and bargain in bad faith; Israel protects land she rightfully won in the war. And yet, because the strife is ongoing and expensive, the world says, “ehhh, a plague on both their houses” and “Oh, the Jews are the oppressors.” That is reductive and retarded. And while there’s reason to blame everybody for our current federal fakaktehness, the Republicans and their tea-party poopers are absolutely the instigators of this fiasco.
I don’t care what you think of Obamacare. I mean, me? I’m running to the doctor every two weeks for a high colonic, so I need affordable health coverage or else my prostate is gonna start looking like one of those frosting bags on “Cake Boss.” But even if I wasn’t crazy about the Affordable Care Act, it’s the law, it passed, Obama beat Romney with the plan already on his platform – deal with it. If it’s not going perfectly, make small adjustments while it’s already in progress, as we do with voting, or cunnilingus.
I have never seen such sore losers as Republicans. They lose the election in 2008; they all vow to spend the next four years making sure nothing the Democrats put forward gets passed. And if something should somehow, by accident, get through, they’ll just repeal it when their guy wins in 2012. Except he didn’t. America looked at Mitt Romney like a used-Rolls Royce salesman – and said, “No thank you. We’ll stick with the guy who’s done next to nothing, but the country’s turning around anyway. We’ll stay the course.”
This left the G.O.P. in shellshock. After four years of mocking and blocking, retching and kvetching, moaning the blues all night on Fox News – where did they wind up? Hemorrhaging on election night. But, of course, there’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. Well, apart from George Zimmerman with a gun permit. The Republicans are lashing back, hurting the Democrats any way they can, even if it means bringing the government to a virtual halt and jeopardizing the recovery that their last president made necessary in the first place.
The G.O.P.’s idea of a compromise is saying, “Look, we’ll pass your budget; just delay Obamacare for a year.” Sounds reasonable – even though we know that would be a year of legal wrangling, political blackmail and further ways to dismantle the program. What we must not forget is that a “one year” delay is a smokescreen. Republicans have been delaying healthcare reform for two goddamn decades. Back when Bill Clinton was in the White House, his darling and incredibly tolerant wife, Hilary, made it her number-one priority to reform the out-of-control insurance business. She could’ve done it, too, had the Republicans not despised her and Bill so much, they brought his presidency to a standstill. Then George W. Bush was in the White House for eight years. Eight long, long, long, long years. In that time, Republicans had every opportunity to make their own health plan, to devise their own strategy to help a system in crisis. What did they do? If I had a sound effect of crickets chirping, you’d be hearing it right now.
Since then, Barack Obama has been in office for five years, which is more than a thousand days for Republicans and Democrats to have worked in tandem to create, maybe not Obamacare, but OBoehner-Care, or Clintingrich-Care. But no, all the G.O.P. did was plot and scheme. And now, when they don’t get their way, they sit in a corner, they pout, and they hide daddy’s wallet in revenge.
It’s happening elsewhere, too. In beautiful Colorado, where the G.O.P. hates gun laws, legalized pot and renewable energy, right-wingers want to secede and make their own state. I think they’re gonna call it “Spoiled Bratville,” or something. Funny, I didn’t hear them squeal about socialism when the rains came, and they had to go hat-in-hand to Joe Biden for flood relief.
Republicans whine that Obamacare means lack of choice; a curtailment of freedom by making everyone get insurance whether they want it or not. But folks, if you have a car, you gotta get car insurance and wear a seatbelt. If you have a baby, you gotta give her shots. If you kiss Miley Cyrus, you gotta buy Abreva. Obligating people to do something does not automatically cause the collapse of capitalism. I mean, we’ve all gotta eat, unless you wanna starve to death. Eating is not a choice, it’s a mandate, but there’s still room for choice. I might have roast chicken, you could have salmon, or pay extra for prime rib. Okay, now I’m hungry. But still angry.
Republicans say that most people hate Obamacare and don’t want it to go forward. That is not true. Most people are scared of Obamacare and don’t know what the hell to expect. But we also know that insurance is insanely expensive, and that millions of people without it are playing Russian roulette by not going to the doctor, or draining our taxes if they’re at a free clinic with the sniffles every week. Or, if they’re Republicans, with accidental bullet wounds.
But enough elephant bashing. After all, they embarrass themselves more than I ever could. Let us also not ignore the arrogance of Barack Obama and the donkeys. For weeks, the sequester is building to chaos, yet he can’t pick up a phone? He can’t get in a room with Boehner, et. al., and say, “okay, we’ll take out the medical-device thing, but you’ve gotta leave in abortions.” He can’t even say, “You know what? We will not delay Obamacare for a year, but three months? To work the kinks out? Sure, It’s not gonna kill anyone. Well, maybe some fourth-stage cancer patients, but other than that…” For a community organizer, Obama couldn’t organize paint cans in a Home Depot. And the Democrats are so cocky about winning the last election and so sure they have the Republicans cornered, they’re not even faking being interested in compromise.
These aren’t difficult times for America; these are ridiculous times for America. Maybe we need a third party again, only this time without Ralph Nader, or Ross Perot, or Roseanne Arnold, or Lyndon Larouche, or – you know what? Two’s more than enough.
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 #75 (9/1/2013): Egypt Again
Aired August 31, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/6jZy0FXcg1E
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 1st, 2013.
Oy, Egypt, Egypt, Egypt. Doesn’t it figure that the one country in the Arab world that seemed stable, the one place that wasn’t a scary mess of Islamic Jihad and anti-West anti-Semitism, Egypt, would collapse into chaos?
Forty years ago, Anwar Sadat made a brilliantly savvy political move – albeit a lousy personal one since it got him shot – but for the good of Egypt, he signed a peace treaty with Israel. And against all odds, it lasted! It was real. There was peace, there was economic and cultural exchange, there was falafel everywhere. Israel had a million things to worry about in the Middle East, but Egypt, which had been our worst military enemy, wasn’t one of them.
And Egypt took a Western approach to its politics. So Western, that they ended up copying our own runaway corruption. Hasni Mubarak, who succeeded Anwar Sadat – about the only thing he succeeded in – ran the country for 30 years until being deposed by the military. And then, for his replacement, they hold democratic elections. Great, right?
Not so great; the winner is Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. Which is basically Al Qaeda Lite. Young Egyptians hate this, because with radical Muslims in charge, Egypt is destined to slide into the same soul-crushing totalitarianism that made Afghanistan and Iran such glorious vacation hotspots. So what happens? There’s an uprising, the people protest and riot, and the Egyptian military pulls Morsi out of office and takes over.
This does not sit well with the Muslim Brotherhood, so they show their brotherly love by rioting, pillaging and forcing the army to crack down and make a police state. Meanwhile, the military are busy trying to drum up some kind of revised constitution and figuring out how to hold elections before the whole country implodes. In Egypt, every day is like the night the Steelers win the Super Bowl; if you weren’t in the car when they were overturning it and setting it on fire, you’re ahead of the game.
Now, the Egypt situation is more complicated than others in the Middle East because they were getting along with America and Israel. Mubarak was no great shakes as a leader, but he held to the treaties and kept things on an even keel. I’ve been on an uneven keel, and let me tell you, I got so nauseous, I almost keeled over. Of course, in those situations, it’s keel or be keeled, but I digress.
Egypt holds free and democratic elections, and the last guy in the world America wants in there wins. So, we’re happy when the army discards him, but at the same time, what kind of democracy is it when the people elect a leader, and a year later, the army says, “Ehhhh, Do over, do over!”
I mean, imagine if in this country, we have an election, the popular vote goes to one candidate, but there are problems and miscounts and shenanigans, so the Supreme Court takes over and appoints the president based on the judges’ political leanings rather than the actual voting. Thank God, something like that could never happen here.
So both America and Israel are mired in wait-and-see limbo when it comes to Egypt. If we support the army, that means we rejected the election process. If we support the Morsi Muslims, well, we might as well just send over pilot-training manuals so they can get started on the next 9/11. We’re shtupped either way.
Whatever happened to the good old days when the CIA would muscle into a country, assassinate the dictator, and prop up some crooked but pro-Western puppet with billions of our tax dollars? What’s the point of being a Superpower if you can’t be superpowerful? We used to look out for number one. Now all these countries submerge us in number two.
That said, I do really wish the Egyptians well, and I hope – against all hope – that they can somehow form a coalition government. One that puts modernized moderates in charge but allows right-wingers a voice and the freedom to worship as they please – which, since it’s the exact opposite of what they allow, will cause their heads to explode. Hey, a guy can dream.
Until then, we would do best to recall that twice the Egyptians have done the impossible: they built the pyramids, and they stunned the rest of the Arab world by making nice-nice with Israel. So is it too much to ask for another miracle? Oh wait, I’m still hoping for that one about the Jets winning another Super Bowl. Quel dommage.
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 #58 (2/24/2013): More Purim Jokes
aired February 23, 2013 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/e9ICds0fO8k
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of February 24th, 2013.
Happy Purim everybody! A wonderful day on the Jewish calendar where we give thanks that we weren’t all killed by Persians a couple of thousand years ago. We celebrate by reading the book of Esther, giving shalach manos – which is a charitable donation of food and snacks to people we care about. We celebrate by putting on costumes, getting drunk, and, in certain areas of the world, watching Nascar.
I like to celebrate by spreading laughter, by telling a joke or two, and then explaining the joke for people who are too shikkered up on Kedem to get the punchlines. Or, more importantly, the moral.
Let’s begin with the tale of three sons, nice grown Jewish boys, all of them successful abroad, all of them forever trying to impress their mama back in Brooklyn.
They meet for lunch in London, and the oldest son, Moishe, says, “I built mama a three-story house near Prospect Park. She just moved in last week.”
The second boy, Yitzchak, says, “Well, I bought mama a brand-new Mercedes with a round-the-clock driver to take her anywhere she wants to go.”
Avi, the youngest son, says, “I’m the only one who’s really thinking of mom’s needs. I bought her a parrot!”
“A parrot?” the other two go. “What are you meshuggeh?”
“Not at all,” says Avi. “Mama’s a widow, she’s lonely. I got her a beautiful parrot that is also brilliant. I spent thousands of dollars getting language teachers to teach the bird English, Hebrew and Yiddish. And then I paid a Rabbi even more money to help the parrot memorize all five books of the Torah, so whenever mama wants, he can recite.”
Just at that moment, Moishe’s cellphone rings, and it’s mama on the phone. He puts her on speaker and says, “Mama we’re all here. How do you like our gifts?”
And the old woman’s voice comes out the phone and says, “Well, to be honest, the house is very nice, Moishe, but it’s so big. I can’t deal with the cleaning, and I get lost from room to room. I think I’ll move back to my apartment.”
Moishe sighs and hands the phone to his brother. “Yitzchack,” the mother says, “I know you mean well, but a German car? And that driver, he never shuts up. Really, I’d rather walk.”
Yitzchak deflates and hands the phone to the third brother. “Avi, my youngest,” the mama says. “Thank you! Thank you! What a perfect gift! The chicken was delicious!”
We have all heard the old adage, “It’s the thought that counts.” It’s not how much money it costs or how puffed up you feel by making an impression. It’s trying to please the person you are gifting. You could buy a $200 pair of Nikes, but if you give them to Oscar Pistorius, what’s the point? Of course, if you gave him a Smith-Wesson, that he might have use for.
A studious but poor young Rebbe would sit in the backyard of his little shul and ponder and ponder and ask questions of God. This went on for months, years, until one day, HaShem decides to make it a conversation.
“I’m here,” He says, “What do you wanna know?”
“Well,” says the Rebbe, “I’ve been thinking about the nature of time. For example, what is a million years to you?”
God says, “You’re a human. A million years to you is just one second to me.”
The Rabbi thinks a little bit and says, “What about money? What is a million dollars to you?”
“Ha!” God laughs, He says, “a million dollars to you is less than a penny to me. It’s a pittance.”
“In that case,” the Rabbi says, “can I have a million dollars?”
“Sure,” says God, “in a second.”
If there’s one thing that Jews seem to know better than almost any other religion is that God, if He exists, follows His own rules and principles. We can assuage him with prayers and good deeds, we can interpret the Torah six ways to Shabbos, but really, HaShem does what He does, and we all follow furtively along. Like storm chasers. Get too near the tornado, you’ve got the Tower of Babel; stray too far from the tornado, and you wander for forty years. So the best bet is to pursue God with a lot of awe, a little fear, and a good pair of binoculars.
Last joke: What’s the difference between an Orthodox Jewish wedding, a Conservative wedding, a Reform wedding and a Reconstructionist wedding?
Simple. In an Orthodox wedding, the bride’s mother is pregnant. In a Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant. A Reform wedding, the Rabbi is pregnant. And in Reconstructionist, both brides are pregnant.
What I love about this joke is that despite the mockery, it embraces all the different strands of Jewish practice. You don’t have to wear a fur hat and payes – especially if you’re a woman. Or if modern ways are a little too modern, you can create the niche of Jewish custom that works for you. So, if you want to celebrate Purim by going to synagogue and singing and hearing the megillah, great! If you don’t observe Purim at all, but you’re a good person and Jewish in your heart, also great. And if you’re somewhere in the middle, but you wanna send me some shalach manos – prune is my favorite, though the apricot isn’t bad.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. Purim Sameach!
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with documentary filmmaker and theater expert Michael Kantor (“Broadway: The American Musical,” “Make `em Laugh”).
Topics include: the Jewish influence on Broadway musicals, banjos.
Segment originally aired Dec. 29, 2012 on the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Note: Interview 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)2012 TotalTheater Productions.
More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information on Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com
