Luke Ford

Compiled by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager: "I support the U.T.J. (Union for Traditional Judaism) because it believes in Jewish Law, it believes that modernity is neither the Jew's enemy nor the source of his values, and it believes more in Judaism than in denominations."

Jack Kemp: "As my good friend Dennis Prager – an observant, non-orthodox Jewish talk show host in New York and California—observed, "Committed Jews and Christians need to work together to keep… the American people God-Fearing. As a Jew who spent seven years writing a book on anti-Semitism," Dennis said, "I learned many lessons. One of them is that Jews have far more to fear from the collapse of Christianity than from its resurgence." Let us pray that Christians and Jews can work together on the great moral issues facing our nation."

Date: Mon, 27 Jan 92 (Alexander H.)

Subject: Should Jews own guns?

Last night (Sunday, Jan 27) I was listening to the Dennis Prager Show (The most popular radio program in LA in its time slot). He discusses ethics of all things! He had a guest, Neil Schulman, who is a member of CESA, Committee to Enforce the Second Amendment in Los Angeles. Mr. Schulman had written an article in the LA Times on Jan 1, 1992 in the opinion page advocating that citizens should own firearms in order to protect themselves.

On the radio program, he elaborated on his arguments . One of his arguments included the fact that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto held off a well equipped Nazi army for a long time with just a few hand guns. (3 ???). Had every Jew in Europe owned a gun, the Holocaust might never have happened!

After some discussion, Dennis Prager, a religious Jew, said sadly that he thought everyone (including Jews) should own a gun. Dennis had been on the fence for several years, but he was finally convinced by Neil Schulman and his arguments. (Dennis Prager fans know how difficult it is to get him to change his mind. :-) ) Schulman's arguments were actually more elaborate than what I've given here. I've just focused on the Jewish aspects of them.

My questions are these. Is it imperative that a Jew own a gun? Can a Jew be a gun advocate, and remain true to his Judaism? Do you think that putting a gun in every Jewish home is the best way to prevent another Holocaust?

I do not own a gun, but I have no objection to it. What do you say? Should I start saving up my pennies and buy a gun? I'm starting tothink, "Yes."

I will email a copy of the article to anyone who writes to me. To get a tape recording of the radio show, call 1-800-225-8584 between 10-6 Monday thru Friday PST. Ask for the Sunday 7:00 pm show on January 26, 1992. I think they are around $16.00 for the three hour segment. I am not associated with Dennis Prager. I am just a satisfied listener and subscriber to his journal.

TYLL THERE ISN'T YOU by J. Neil Schulman 12-31-97

My fellow Americans, the purpose of these words is to try to get a major company to divest itself of one of its holdings. Then I'd like the new owners to fire one of their employees. The company is Disney, the holding is Los Angeles's KABC 790 AM Radio, and the employee is talk show host Ed Tyll, who recently took over the second two hours of Larry Elder's afternoon talk show.

Now, I wasn't exactly pleased with KABC cutting back Larry Elder's time, even though Larry is fully capable of annoying the stuff out of me. Larry's a libertarian whom I agree with on issues ranging from economics to crime; but I also find his repeated attacks on the criminally exonerated O.J. Simpson to be disgusting. But at least Larry is honest.I can take an honest disagreement.

I was a guest several times on (not the singer) Michael Jackson's KABC weekday-morning show, before KABC exiled him to talk-show Siberia -- weekend mornings. Michael is opposed to most private gun ownership, but whenever I was on his show he gave me a full opportunity to present the case for privately held guns, and all his disagreements were gentlemanly.

But the new Disney-crafted KABC has little place for a gentleman like Michael Jackson. I worry that if Dennis Prager ever loses a rating's point, they'll dump him at first opportunity, too.

No, the new Disney-KABC style is now represented by Ed Tyll.

On today's show, Ed Tyll was ranting, ignorantly, against gun ownership. He misrepresented the legal status of the Second Amendment. He misled his listenership about the usefulness of private firearms in defending against violent crime. He made the same hoary old arguments about how we don't want to return to the Old West. And, every time he wanted to characterize his opposition, he put on a Southern accent, implying that I.Q. drops the moment you pass below the Mason-Dixon line. It was nothing I hadn't heard before from talk show hosts over on rival KFI radio, where heavy call-screening and a heavy hand on the cut-off button makes sure that no one with an intelligently crafted view in opposition to the station management's is ever heard on air.

But, before Disney took it over, KABC was an oasis of civility on talk radio, where knowing something and being able to talk about it authoritatively was no impediment to getting on the air.

Now, I don't mind ignorance on a subject, as long as one is willing to be honest about it. I've heard Dennis Prager make ludicrous statements on a number of issues, only to take calls where informed listeners correct him. Dennis takes these corrections in stride and, usually, immediately admits when he's wrong....

J. Neil Schulman Personal Web Page

Check the count of crimes prevented by privately held guns on the World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock

A Fundamentalist Christian publication:

Beverely LaHaye is an enthusiastic supporter of her husband's ecumenical stance. Through her Concerned Women for America (CWA) organization she is encouraging Christians to forget their differences and join hands to effect political and social change. CWA's radical, unscriptural ecumenism was demonstrated in a CWA radio broadcast I heard Oct. 13, 1994. The speaker was an unsaved Jew, Dennis Prager, who was also the keynote speaker at this year's CWA national conference. Prager was speaking about the moral problems of America, and promoted, as a solution, that all religious people of good will must come together to resist the powers of secularism. The statement was made, "All Christians must come together." This dangerous, unscriptural sentiment was echoed by the hosts of CWA's broadcast. Like her husband, Mrs. LaHaye does not limit her ecumenical wanderings to political activities. She was a featured speaker at the 15th anniversary celebration of the charismatic magazine Charisma. On this occasion she joined hands with Oral Roberts, members of the rock group Petra, and Charles and Frances Hunter to celebrate this dangerous, unscriptural publication. Beverly LaHaye has spoken at least twice at the annual conference sponsored by the charismatic Christian Believers United (CBU) Fellowship. Calvary Contender editor Jerry Huffman notes, "When you ask charismatics to join your political crusade, it must be hard to say no when they want you to `join' their religious `crusade.' Satan is subtle! As husband Dr. Tim LaHaye admitted last year: `If you had told me ten years ago that I would be on a platform with a Catholic Priest and a rabbi, I would have said you were crazy'" (Calvary Contender, March 1, 1986).

We repeat, for supposed fundamental Baptists to feature these ecumenists at a prophecy conference is a great and serious error. It needs to be rebuked in no uncertain terms. Where are the Baptist Bible Fellowship men who will publicly and unhesitatingly lift their voices against this confusion? I know many BBF preachers who are sickened by this type of thing. Let your voices be heard! The only thing good men have to do for error to triumph is to do nothing (O Timothy, Volume 12, Issue 1, 1995, Way of Life Literature, 1701 Harns Rd., Oak Harbor, WA 98277).

Learned at The Masters Forum

by Michael Finley

A scan of the text of Masters Forum talks in 1997 will show that the name of Ludwig von Beethoven came up only twice, each time in the context of one of our sessions on personal development.

The first was August 5, at Dennis Prager's Renewal Day talk on happiness. One of the points he made that day was that not everything is equal. Some things are just better than others. Beethoven, he said, was just better than the Grateful Dead. It's not a matter of individual taste, and it's not debatable, he said. That's just the way it is.

The master's name came up again at the last session, by philosopher-storyteller Robert Fulghum. He used Beethoven as an example of a kind of cheerleader for the human race.

Here, after all, was a man with lots of problems. In his fifties, familyless and abandoned by his friends, in poor health, and suffering the excruciating humiliation of being a deaf musician, Beethoven fought back, creating his Ninth Symphony, arguably the most stirring piece of music ever written, a piece he himself never heard one note of.

Against this triumphal piece of music, Fulghum set something much humbler -- a pantomime of a nursery song about an itsy bitsy spider. We take the story for granted, he said, but it contains the same lesson of defeat and resurrection as the Choral Symphony. A small spider, attempting to crawl up a narrow, dangerous passageway, is thwarted and nearly drowned. Does the spider despair? No, it climbs up the waterspout again -- and this time succeeds. Or if it fails, the song makes no mention of it.

Each story, Beethoven's and the little spider's, is about two aspects of human experience that are paramount in Fulghum's view -- a quality of yearning and the potential for fulfillment.

Such as it is, that is Fulghum's "system." Unlike Dennis Prager, or last year's Harold Kushner, Fulghum is content to be astonished and humbled by the beauty that he sees in people. His highest value is a human nature. His greatest tactic in expressing this value is the story.

FIRST THINGS

by Richard John Neuhaus

What Dennis Prager Did, and Didn't, Learn in Yeshiva

"I'm sorry, but I find that hard to believe." He was a Harvard-trained lawyer in a large New York firm, and the subject was Jewish and Christian attitudes toward church-state relations. What he found hard to believe, what he obviously did not believe, was my observation that millions of Americans do not personally know any Jews. In a country where no more than 2 percent of the population is Jewish, and that 2 percent is concentrated in a few cities, many Americans have never, to their knowledge, met a Jew, and for a majority it is likely that there are no Jews among their friends, acquaintances, and associates. Jews growing up in, say, New York City and attending Ivy League schools understandably find that hard to believe. A colleague, a successful writer, says it was one of the great shocks of her childhood to learn that Jews are not at least half the American population. "I think somewhere in the back of my mind, contrary to what I know for a fact, I still believe we are at least 30 percent," she says.

Dennis Prager, editor of Ultimate Issues, recalls the isolation that came with attending a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish day school. Most Jews of course do not attend yeshiva, yet they, too, are frequently isolated. The difference is that Prager has good Jewish reasons for caring about non-Jews, even if his yeshiva teachers did not understand those reasons. These are among the questions engaged in Prager's reflection on what he learned, and did not learn, from attending yeshivas from age five through eighteen. He learned, for instance, about wasting time. "Bitul torah literally means 'annulling the Torah.' In practice it means 'wasting time that you could otherwise be devoting to something related to Torah.' The way it was taught to me, bitul torah covered just about everything not directly related to Torah. Watching television was therefore certainly bitul torah. But to some of my rabbis, so were Shakespeare, sports, and nonreligious music. They overdid it, but the concept of bitul torah has never left me. . . . Thanks to the concept of bitul torah, Judaism taught me that time may be God's most precious gift to us. To squander it is a sin. That is not the general attitude in secular society where 'killing time' is not considered a form of killing. But it is."

He also learned a truth so important that he thinks humanity can be divided between those who do and those who don't know it. "One night when my older son was in third grade, I asked him what he had learned that day in school, an Orthodox Jewish day school. 'That I have a yetzer harah,' he responded. I was delighted for both psychological and moral reasons. . . . The moral reason for my delight at my son's learning that he had a built-in bad inclination was that he would know from then on that life is a constant battle with his yetzer harah, i.e., with himself. This traditional Jewish belief is at total variance with the intellectual mindset of our time, which holds that the most important battle for us to wage is with our environment, with our society. A generation has been raised to believe that its greatest problems emanate from hostile and oppressive outside forces such as racism, sexism, and economic inequality." The awareness that the battle is within oneself, says Prager, "is a defining characteristic of the truly religious person," whether Jewish or not.

As is also a sense of kedusha, or holiness. "The sense that some behaviors, while not immoral, are still wrong because they are unholy is alien to a generation raised thoroughly secular. 'If it isn't illegal, it isn't an issue' can almost serve as a description of the secular mindset. There is a sort of secular equivalent to the religious concept of the unholy-'vulgar.' But vulgarity is not an often used term in our time, as it just doesn't seem to bother many people today." A sense of kedusha, as Prager discusses it, is not unrelated to the aesthetic, a sense of what is appropriate, and he laments what he thinks is the growing use of dirty language even in presumably polite company. But more than dirty language is at stake. "Awareness of kedusha had a powerful impact on me. By my late twenties, my premarital sexual life increasingly struck me as unholy (though not immoral, a distinction that must be strongly maintained). This awareness played a decisive role in moving me to get married."

Then there is the question of how you talk about others. "Perhaps my rudest awakening to the secular world after a lifetime in yeshiva was the amount of lashon hara I encountered. I remember the first time I heard that people could make a living as a 'gossip columnist.' 'A lashon hara columnist!' I thought. I could hardly believe it. . . . Of course, all the public lashon hara is more than matched by all the private lashon hara that people engage in. At yeshiva, I learned the power of the tongue to destroy. Think of how long it takes to form a good opinion of a person after hearing just a few seconds of lashon hara about him."

Another lesson learned in yeshiva is likely of particular interest to authors. "According to the Talmud, 'Whoever cites the source for what he says brings redemption to the world.' This oft-cited quotation is literally true. If people would cite the source of an idea or quote that they express, they really would bring redemption to our unredeemed world. For it means that people would then be more interested in truth than in personal glory. . . . I am still taken aback when someone, with all goodwill, tells me, 'I stole one of your ideas in a speech that I gave.' When the source isn't cited, it is stealing."

And he learned to ask questions. "In the words of the Talmud, 'the shy one doesn't learn.' This is taught to yeshiva children from our earliest years. Ask, ask, and ask again. Not all questions were answered (see below), but asking was always encouraged. Friends who grew up in other religions are often amazed at the amount of questioning that went on in yeshiva." In sum, he learned that there is a code of right and wrong that overrides, or should override, one's own feelings. "The most powerful legacy of yeshiva education was the Halakhic mentality. Halakha is the word for Jewish law, and in the yeshiva, it is the guiding principle of life. Simply put, there is a right and wrong for every action. The emphasis, unfortunately, was more on the laws between man and God than on the laws between man and his fellow man, but there was plenty of teaching of the latter as well. . . . Again, when I attended college, I was struck by the fact that for most of my fellow students everything seemed to be permitted. This aroused in me ambivalent feelings of envy and fear. I envied their ability to do just about anything (like drive on Saturdays!), and feared that the lack of issurim (prohibitions) in their lives might lead to evil." Prager writes, "I suspect that even if a person from yeshiva overthrows the entire religious tradition, he will still go through life with the question, 'Is it permitted?' ringing in his ears."

And What He Did Not Learn

There were also things he did not learn. "Despite all the encouragement of questioning at yeshiva, one seminal area of Judaism seemed to be off limits to questions-reasons for the laws. Not only were reasons not given, but we were largely taught that looking for reasons bordered on the sacrilegious." Prager says he now believes that every law in the Torah has a rational basis and "the more one understands these laws, the greater one's faith in them."

Most regrettably, the yeshiva turned the world beyond Orthodox Judaism into a non-reality, and "non-Jews became more of an abstraction than real people created in the image of God." "To this day, of course, the yeshiva world regards interfaith dialogue, for example, as ludicrous at best (true bitul Torah!) and prohibited at worst. And whereas it is common for Catholic schools to invite Jews to speak to Catholic students about Judaism, it is inconceivable that a yeshiva would invite a Catholic to speak to its students on Catholicism. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a yeshiva would allow a Conservative or Reform Jew to lecture about his movement. In the yeshiva, non-Jews-the people who comprise 99.8 percent of humanity-were rarely mentioned. Their significance lay only in their ability to hurt or help Jews. 'All I ask of the goyim is that they leave us alone,' is the way one rebbe put it. That was the entirety of his concern with the rest of the world."

Prager regrets also that the yeshiva did not teach him the personal character of the believer's relationship to God. "The first time I heard the words 'God loves you' was probably on a Christian radio or television show. The first time I heard the words 'personal relationship with God' was probably in a Christian context. The first time I heard a personal prayer-as opposed to a communal pre-written prayer-also was among Christians." Nonetheless, what he learned in yeshiva is, he is convinced, much more important than what he did not learn "Despite its flaws and though I am not Orthodox, I am profoundly grateful that I attended Orthodox day schools. As a prominent Reform Rabbi, David Woznica, has noted, he never met a Jew who regretted having attended yeshiva or day school, yet he has met innumerable Jews who deeply regret not having had such a Jewish education. . . . A child in an Orthodox day school studies under teachers who truly believe in God and Judaism. Their beliefs are more fundamentalist than mine, but I can temper those beliefs at home. It is much easier to be the liberalizing and universalizing influence on a religious child than to be the religious influence on a secular child."

And, bringing us back to the opening question of Jewish isolationism, he learned, despite the practice of the yeshiva itself, why Jews must care about the rest of the world. "The purpose of the Jewish people is to influence humanity, specifically, to bring mankind to ethical monotheism, the one God and His one morality. In the yeshiva world, there is no thought of a mission to the non-Jewish world; the only purpose of a Jew is to learn more Torah and observe more mitzvot."

Dennis Prager is among a small but growing number of Jewish writers building bridges to Christians who are similarly concerned about the renewal of our culture. For the most part, the bridges are not theological, but for the shared purpose of reviving moral and social responsibility they are indispensable. For Christians who have no personal engagement with Jews and Judaism, and for Christians who do, Dennis Prager and Ultimate Issues provide wisdom and encouragement in the penultimate effort to envision a more promising common future. (The Prager Perspective, 310-558-3958. Fax: 310-558-4241.)

Index

Prager KABC Radio Highlights

Why Be Good

Why Not Be Good

Defining Good

Obstacles to Goodness

How to be Good

Dennis Prager's Biography

Prager on Homosexuality

Disclaimer

Essays on Prager

Prager Update 1-98