A Biography of Dennis Prager by Luke Ford (Part 2)

God

Said Dennis in a 2008 lecture on Leviticus 19: “Ever since I was a kid, there’s been this view of the sophisticated, ‘What is God? Some sort of accountant?’ Yeah, I think God is an accountant. That may be related to the fact that my father is an accountant and people tend to see God as they see their father, but I suspect that if my father wasn’t an accountant, I would still feel that way. Why is it sophisticated to believe that God doesn’t monitor our behavior?”

Mar. 22, 2013, Dennis said: “I want God judging. If God doesn’t judge, I want to be an atheist. The idea that God doesn’t judge not only doesn’t appeal to me, it is antithetical to everything I believe about God. I am more interested that God judges than that God loves. If God loves and doesn’t judge, that’s more frightening to me than God judging and not loving. I think He’s both.”

“This notion of hate the sin and love the sinner has never made that much sense to me. You wipe out whole villages and run a concentration camp and have orgies in Pyongyang while sentencing your people to eat bark, and I’m not supposed to hate you? I think you’re scum. How do you love good people if you don’t hate bad people? I’m not an air conditioner. An air conditioner blows out cool air whether it is Hitler in the room or Mother Theresa. When religion is reduced to an air conditioner, it is worse than useless.

“But we live in an age that hates only one thing — people who hate evil. People who judge are the only people who are really hated. Not people who exterminate human beings or run torture mills. Not the guy who raped an eight-year-old girl. We don’t hate him. We hate the person who hates the rapist. I hate it when religion is an accomplice to moral imbecility.”

May 9, 2012, Dennis said: “I believe in God entirely because of analytic thinking. It is not in my gut at all… My gut instinct is that there is no God… Hello, where’s God? I see all these children dying. There seems to be moral chaos in this world. It is my analytic abilities that brought me to God and to religion. I’ve always envied people whose gut instinct was religious, for whom faith was effortless.”

“I don’t expect anything from God in this world,” said Dennis Sept. 10, 2013.”I don’t ask God for anything. God will allow a drunk driver to hurt you. God will allow an infection to spread in your body and kill you. I ask myself, ‘What does God want me to do?”, not, ‘What do I want Him to do?'”

“My father is convinced that God willed the Holocaust,” said Dennis Jan. 15, 2010. “He said it is crazy to believe that God just watched it… It’s a debate I’ve had with my father my whole life… I am of the position that God does allow these things to happen. I postpone God’s interventions to the afterlife. I never try to talk people into my position. I envy those who have my father’s position, that whatever happened, God wills. On the other hand, it is logically difficult to hold that position and I am cursed and blessed to be very rational. If I am hit by a drunk driver, it does not make sense that God had me hit by that drunk driver.”

In a lecture on Deut. 7:9-26, Dennis said: “Anybody who allows himself to feel everything is sometimes quite angry at God. You see horrible evil and suffering on earth, you don’t get angry at God? It happened to me. I don’t have this as much now, but in my younger day I had a whole panoply of emotions towards God.

“I’ll never forget an afternoon of the eve of Yom Kippur, and I’m thinking about Yom Kippur, and I hear on the radio about some kids who have this syndrome where they just cut themselves. They just mutilate themselves. It hit me terribly. I thought, maybe this Yom Kippur, God should ask us for our forgiveness. And that thought unfortunately did not leave me.”

Sex

On Nov. 13, 2013, Dennis said: “I got this attitude I have, this openness, from my father. He was married to my mother for 69 years, faithful for 73. And he was very open about his sexual nature to her because he was open about his sexual nature with all of us, not just to my mother. It was a good model. I am more interested in behavioral fidelity than a saintly mind.”

Said Dennis in a 2001 lecture on Numbers 25: “We have a hobby farm in our family. When I see the way the roosters jump on the hens, I understand the roosters. I have more in common with a rooster sexually than I have with my wife.”

“My father is 83. I get the ability to speak out loud about sexual matters not often spoken about because he did, not at a microphone but at a dinner table. He’s an Orthodox Jew. He would say, ‘When I die, I have a question to ask God — why He made the sex drive as strong as He did?'”

In chapter one of his online autobiography, Max Prager wrote:

There were four shomer shabbos (Sabbath observer) families, including us. One was Pinchas who sported a beard and achieved notoriety by allegedly groping Mrs. Bodner who was well endowed. The latter related this incident to my mother within earshot of me. Many evenings she would come into our apartment to spend hours with my mother while her husband was working nights at the restaurant. While listening, she had a habit of placing her right hand into her dress and touching her left breast.

Max attended ninth grade at public school:

I was now blessed with one lady instructor, Miss Dalrymple, my English teacher, who came from the South. She, in my eyes, personified everything a Southern gal was supposed to look like. Possessing a beautiful face with a body to match, she aroused Mendel who had now reached puberty and whose hormones were working overtime. I sat in the rear center of her class and had a perfect vantage point in staring at her legs underneath her desk. This was my first sexual infatuation with a woman.

A plain girl named Dotty lived on top of Max’s building. He taught her to swim. “She would lie down on her chest across my outstretched arms and my feeling her tiny breasts gave me quite a charge…”

At age 16, Max stopped wearing a yarmulke outdoors. He “went bare headed for the first time in my life. My sexual aggression that followed was a direct result of this incident.”

Max got a girlfriend named Esther and when “her parents retired for the night, we would engage in ‘heavy’ petting.”

At age 20, Max became the manager at Auerbach’s Hotel in Spring Valley, N.Y. There were lots of opportunities for fooling around. In particular, there was one wife who was about 35 with four kids.

She always eyed me up and enjoyed speaking to me. On one particular weekend, her husband did not show up. While dancing with me at our Saturday night dance, she asked me to please come to her room to fix the window, which, supposedly, was not functioning properly. Whether I was still a yeshiva bocher (boy) and unsophisticated or scared to lose my virginity, I said: “I’ll be glad to send up the maintenance man;” her reply was immediate: “Don’t bother.” She never had a broken window again.

…Another experience that I had was with another woman who was very attractive with a body to match. I would say she was in her early thirties and married to a dentist who came out weekends. During the week she and I would sit at night after dinner in a swing for two and indulge in light petting.

Things got interesting when this woman’s pretty younger sister came up and repeatedly tried to seduce Max.

When there were a lot of guests, the workers had to sleep on couches in the lobby. Max wrote: “I remember vividly moans and groans emanating from the many liaisons between the waiters and guests.”

Despite these opportunities to wander from his girlfriend Hilda, Max indicates that he retained his virginity until his wedding.

During a debate with Shmuley Boteach on Jan. 13, 2010, Dennis said: “My father was in the Navy during WWII, three years in the Pacific, claims he was never with any other woman. He’s no saint. He just didn’t. He said, the guys loved their wives, but years away. These were prostitutes. This is male nature.”

Around 1960, Max served as president of his Orthodox synagogue [Kingsway Jewish Center]. During his tenure, he regularly purchased Playboy magazine. 

“My father has always been open about his sexual nature. He’s been Orthodox his whole life. He got Playboy in the house. It didn’t seem to corrupt his marriage to my mother. He was totally open. ‘Hill, look. Do you like Miss November?’

“Until her death at age 89, he said she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And he looked at Miss November too. He was a good normal male.” (January 2010)

June 10, 2010, Dennis said: “Whenever you get somebody at the airline after pressing 11 different numbers, do you imagine how the person looks? I do only with women. I don’t care how the guy looks. I imagine that every woman taking my reservation is Miss Arizona.”

“The normal male will go into a living room, spread his buttocks and toot. There’s an act of self-suppression that each of us engages in not to do that… Men have to be manufactured or we stay boys forever.”

In a 2010 interview at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said: “One night [on KABC radio in the 1980s], the topic I chose for the evening was lust. What does your religion say about lust? The minister quoted Jesus that a man who lusts after another woman it is as if he has committed adultery in his heart. How wrong it is to lust. How it is a sin. The Catholic priest said essentially the same thing. They both spoke beautifully.”

“That week, was not only an Orthodox rabbi, but a bearded right-wing Orthodox rabbi. He had a yiddish accent. He said, ‘Dennis, lust, shmust.’

“It was my proudest moment as a Jew in my life. I still have a slight scar from biting my lip.”

In a speech Jan. 24, 2007, Dennis said: “About eighth or ninth grade, the rabbis in my yeshiva took the boys aside and said, ‘Boys, you shouldn’t go to dirty movies, but if you go, take your yarmulke off’.”

“So we took our yarmulkes off. We followed advice number two,” said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 32.

Said Dennis in a 1996 lecture on Exodus 12: “I remember as a teenager when I first came across one of my favorite sections in the book stores — sex manuals with titles like, ‘How to Have Better Sex.’ And I thought, I can’t believe people need books on how to have better sex. What is more natural than having sex? Gorillas know how to do it. People need a book?”

In a 1997 lecture on Exodus 22: 18-24, Dennis said. “The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, unless it has parameters and is deep, it doesn’t give the same thrill as the last time. The first time you kissed a girlfriend, bells were going off and the world was splitting and you were having a Sinaitic experience, but unless you love somebody, kissing loses that power… The human being wants more… If the pursuit is pleasure, then intercourse is not enough. You want three people. That may well be why there is a pursuit of bisexuality. Maybe people will not suffice. There must be a thrill available to [bestiality]. That you can’t relate to it and I can’t relate to it, most perversions I can relate to, this is not one of them, that is irrelevant. Perhaps not doing it, but watching it. There are porn films of bestiality right now at your local porn shop. That is available for $49.99.
“It’s really not appropriate for a chumash class but the Torah is open so I will be open, but I once saw years ago in New York on 42nd Street, a video titled Three Nuns and a Donkey. Somebody bought it.”

Dec. 3, 2009, Dennis Prager discussed sexting (the sending of explicit images via cell phones). “What happens to people who are thrust into a world of pure sex at an early age? My prediction? Vast numbers of females will not enjoy sex in their marriage…based on talking to women on the radio precisely about this. The earlier and the more extensive the sexual behavior of the female, the less she identifies sex with joy and more she identifies it with being used, which she is. Whatever feminism has taught about male and female being the same and sex is as meaninglessly joyful to a female as to a male, the victims of that feminist idiocy have been female. The guys are scratching their heads about how lucky they got that a generation of females was raised to believe that they could enjoy sex without commitment like guys can. I don’t think this is good for the guys either. One of the great joys of growing up is to work your way into sex and romance. To win over a female is the biggest single reason men achieve. If you can win over females by doing nothing, which is what is done when you are 15, you will not be ambitious. That will be one of the never-mentioned bad consequences to boys. When I was in high school, I believed I had to become something to get a pretty girl. I had to be a man in some way. I recall very vividly as much as I love music, I wanted to be good at piano to get a girl. Anything that made a girl go wow, I pursued. That’s been true since caveman. Look at me, I killed lion better. And he got the women. The klutz who couldn’t kill a lion engaged in auto-eroticism.”

“This is a generation that has no thrill from the things that thrilled generations passed… If I got a telescope or electric trains, I was tremendously excited. Or a stereo. Or got a chance to go to a restaurant. That was a big deal when I was a kid. Or to go to a baseball game. Big deal. It’s not such a big deal anymore.”

“I am very aware of how I come across at any given moment… I was realizing as I said it that I sounded like one of these adults, not with it, you’re just hung up about sex.

“Anybody who knows, who has read me, who has heard me, who has my four CDs on male sexuality, if there is anybody who is not hung up about that subject is yours truly. What I am hung about is protecting kids’ innocence. I think it stymies the growth of kids to sexualize them so early.

“The hyper-sophisticated will say that even five year olds according to Freud play with themselves and explore and have sexual feelings. I’m talking about a consciousness in the mind. When I looked up girls skirts when I walked up the steps in kindergarten, I was not thinking about sex. I was thinking what’s under that skirt. It was as innocent as it gets. Obviously it has sexual overtones but I didn’t know that and that’s what matters. The thought that when I was 14, a girl in my class would send me a naked picture of her, it’s a new world, and it’s not a better world for it.”

Said Dennis March 23, 2011: “Well into college, just the thought of kissing a girl was so exciting.”

Said Dennis April 20, 2011: “I remember in high school and college and I thought, why am I doing all of these things? And then I realized, it was to impress a woman.”

Dennis did not experiment with drugs. “There’s some inner boredom in one’s soul that seeks this excitement. What do you learn from a psychedelic experience? Not to mention that it’s Russian Roulette. How do you know it won’t permanently destroy parts of your brain? For what end?”

“The more a kid is excited by things in life, the less likely they are to look at this. What I didn’t understand, there was so much. I didn’t understand why girls weren’t enough to provide excitement? I don’t mean just sex. Just girls. Just chasing girls. Trying to get a girlfriend. It was unbelievable. But it’s not true today. There’s such jadedness.” (April 23, 2012)

Dennis said Nov. 30, 2010: “I remember in high school thinking that the boys who were unbelievably confident in their dealings with girls were not the finest of the guys. I was very nervous about asking a girl out for a date, so much so that I would sit by the phone with prepared notes so that I wouldn’t grope for words and I would have a handkerchief to wipe the sweat because I was so nervous.”

On Jun. 8, 2013, Dennis said: “That’s why I was sweating while making the call. The parent would pick up the phone and I’d go, ‘Can I speak to Michelle?’ And they’d always say, ‘Who is this?’ I always felt like a rapist calling in. ‘Who is this? What are your intentions,you no-good male animal?’ I never got that, but that’s what I imagined was going through his head.”

“I have too much pride. That’s why I’ve never been able to push myself aggressively professionally as others have, and I’ve been wrong. I have too much pride and dignity. If the girl said, I’m busy Saturday night, I would not have offered another time. She would’ve had to have said, ‘So let’s do it next Saturday night.’ I would not be the injector of the next possible date. I would not say, ‘When are you free?'”

“I had a blessed track record.”

“Blessed” is one way of looking at it. Prager’s total number of female conquests is surely a larger number than that of most of his Orthodox-for-life peers who tended to marry but once. People who are constant in their religious observance tend to be constant in their mating.

Psychology Today noted Dec. 20, 2019:

For adults, their sexual strategies appear to determine their level of commitment to religion. People who are inclined toward monogamy choose to be religious, because traditional religions provide support for a family lifestyle, and discourage promiscuity.

…people tend to become especially religious during the years when they have children, and then to become less devout later in life.

Our ancestors’ reproductive success depended not only on finding a mate, but also on maintaining a long-term relationship with that mate, caring for their children, developing a network of friends and relatives to protect and assist one another, and winning the respect and trust of those friends and relatives. And religion has intimate connections to every one of these fundamental human goals.

There are no victims in relationships, says family systems therapist Mark E. Smith. You pick one person to love you and meet your needs and then find that you instinctively chose someone who will suck at meeting your needs and will instead re-enact your childhood trauma. This gives you the opportunity to learn about yourself and to get healthy.

On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis said: “I’m a very serious man, but not in demeanor, in thoughts. That’s why dating was a little hard in high school because I wanted to talk about heavy duty stuff… I wanted to get into heavy stuff immediately. Stop that… I’m talking in a nicer way. Well, the other one is nice too.”

June 11, 2014, Dennis said: “This was a major factor in my own ambitiousness as a young man. I didn’t think that I could get a girl if I wasn’t superman so I tried to be superman and I did a lot of things. I would try to dazzle girls with, for example, my piano playing. I remember girls I used to invite over to my apartment in Manhattan when I was in graduate school and I would play Mozart and they would fall over, or so I believed. Whatever I could do to impress women.”

School

The proverbial “Why?” child, Prager was sent to the principal’s office so often that they named a chair “The Dennis Prager seat.”

“If I had the sense of parenting that I have today,” said Max, “I could’ve spared myself an awful lot of anguish because in most cases Dennis was right.” (CD)

Max said he’s a perfectionist, and that he was too tough on his kids. He said that as he ages, he becomes milder and more accepting.

“Dennis’s behavior in school was horrible,” said Max. “He was extremely bright and found school boring. I should’ve been more accepting and forgiving. He went to four elementary schools.

“Dennis always knew what he wanted. And this is difficult for parents who usually want to discipline or guide the child. He was always respectful, but Dennis always did things his way.” (Dennis Prager’s CD ROM released in 1998)

Dennis: “I talked in class… Took the girls’ briefcases without permission and passed them around my room.

“I didn’t feel secure enough at home to act out, so I did my acting out at school.” (CD)

On March 17, 2013, Dennis said to Hugh Hewitt: “I said, ‘Rabbi, what happens in Olam Haba (the next world)?’ I was dead serious. I wanted to know, much more than what the Chief Priest wore. He said, ‘We spend eternity studying Torah.’ I was traumatized because I thought of being in this man’s class forever. I remember thinking, ‘What happens in the alternative?'”

On April 16, 2010, Dennis said: “I used to think I was bullied by the teachers because I was thrown out of class on a very regular basis. And I would go home and if my parents found out about it, and that was the only thing I worried about, I said, ‘They pick on me because I am the tallest kid in the class’, which is a non-sequitar, but that’s what I believed, ‘I just stick out because I’m so big’. The truth is, they threw me out because I was the most disruptive and my parents knew that and they didn’t let me believe that nonsense and it was a great cure in my life.”

Hilda: “He was a rough guy in school. He’d read The New York Times [in class] and do other things that he shouldn’t… After the PTA meetings, I’d come home and want to kill him because I heard some bad things. The poor kid was shivering…absolutely miserable when it came time for the PTA meeting.

“He was always a good kid. He never fought with his older brother. They wrestled a lot in the basement.” (CD)

In a lecture on Lev. 14 circa 2009, Dennis said: “Is school a dictatorship? Yes! That’s exactly what a school should be. That’s the whole point. You don’t have the same rights in fifth grade as an adult in school. That’s the whole point of school. That’s why you can’t curse a teacher. You can curse a teacher in the street but you can’t in school. I don’t care if you want to stand or not [for the pledge of allegiance], you stand.”

Max Prager wrote in chapter 30:

When Dennis was 9 years of age in 1957, he became extremely bored with his academic career at Yeshiva Rambam and created an atmosphere in his classroom which was not very conducive to learning. He would crack jokes and make his fellow students laugh and his Rebbi or secular teacher exasperated.

…When parent-teacher evenings occurred each semester, we did not look forward to these events as the reports were always depressing. Also, my poor son went into a fearful state a few days before the meeting. When he reached the 7th grade at the age of 12, Hilda and I felt that, perhaps, a change of venue would rectify the situation. Since Dennis would always be greeted by a new teacher with the words “Oh, you are Elimelach’s brother. I am sure that you will equal his accomplishments.” They surely did not take Education 101. The worst thing a teacher can do is to compare his pupil with his sibling.

I certainly do not absolve myself for the gross error in placing Dennis in the same school as Kenny. I should have been wise enough to realize that since Kenny was an exceptional student and athlete, he should have gone to a different yeshiva. To compound my stupidity, I enrolled him in Winsocki where Kenny was the lead actor in the annual plays and the best athlete.

…Hilda and were at wits end and completely lost as to what options we had in raising our son. I have heard Dennis remark many times on his radio program, when speaking of this episode in his life, that a teacher at Rambam advised me as to the course of action that I eventually took. I dislike correcting my son, but his statement is erroneous.

The truth is as follows: since I always have a brief conversation with my spiritual Father before falling asleep, one night full of anguish and pain, I implored him to guide me in the correct parental path I should take with Dennis. Believe it or not, I awoke the following morning with a modus operandi. A day or two later, I sat Dennis down in my home office and the two of us were alone. I remember, as though it happened yesterday, the exact words that poured from my mouth.

I told him that, as his father, I loved him and will always love him. However, respect has to be earned and I could not respect his actions. I then took a risk in informing him that from that moment on, the word “school” would be taboo in our home. I would never ask him if he had homework, what his grades were, and, in fact, did not have to attend school.

From that moment on, he made a 360 degree turn in his academic life. What he needed was a hands-off approach from his parents that automatically eliminated the severe tension that had been building up throughout his school years. His grades improved substantially, he was elected president of his senior class and was editor of the yearbook.

Not being a psychologist, I cannot state definitely why Dennis behaved in the manner that he did. However, my guess is that since he feared not living up to his brother’s achievements, he preferred attributing any low grades that he may receive in the future to his poor behavior rather than being accused of stupidity.

Dec. 12, 2003, Dennis said that at age 13, in eighth grade, he met with a school psychologist, who asked him what he wanted. Dennis said he wanted his parents to never ask him about school. The psychologist relayed the request to Dennis’s parents and they lived by it. Often they did not even look at Dennis’s report card, which was usually bad.

Young unhappy Dennis felt the need to violate the rules of his home, of his school, and of his religion. While many of his peers would marry the first person they kissed, Dennis needed to experience more of life than that.

In his January 2002 lecture “Personal Autobiography,” Dennis said:

I can’t say that my childhood was particularly happy. I didn’t like school. My parents were not happy that I didn’t like school. I got thrown out of class so regularly that there was a chair in the elementary school office [at Yeshiva Rambam] that was called the Dennis Prager chair. I got thrown out for very valid reasons. Most of the time I would just talk. I was practicing for my profession. I’d write notes and send them to other kids. I’d play tricks on the girls.

When I was a kid, we all came into class with briefcases with all your supplies. So you’d keep your briefcase by your desk. It was a source of awesome pleasure for me to arrange with a couple of the guys to switch the girl’s briefcases who were sitting in the front because I thought of them as goody two-shoes and I had a hatred for goody two-shoes. I thought they were just trying to show the teacher they were terrific so I would just try to get them in trouble as much as possible.

I would frequently beat up bullies. That was a hobby of mine. There’s a big residue of that in me today. I am for beating up bullies. I hate bullies. If they were picking on some kid… I was always the biggest in the class. It’s not like I was Mr. Courageous but I couldn’t stand what they did.

My parents would get called very regularly and they would get very upset that I wasn’t a good kid at school. I was an angel at home but I was a devil at school.

The nadir came in eighth grade when I signed the report card. And I was proud of my abilities in script writing. I remember thinking, yeah, this looks pretty genuine. I would’ve gotten away with that except that when I was sick one day, my mother looked through my drawers and found all these report cards she hadn’t seen.

I also went to sleepaway camp for eight weeks a summer from the age of five. Frankly, that was too long. My grandfather would come on my birthday in the middle of summer and I would scream and cry to go back with him. They were a great source of love for me, my grandparents, in particular my mother’s parents.

High school was much more pleasant for me though things at home got tougher and I threatened to run away. But I was serious about running away. It wasn’t the typical kid threat.

My older brother was always good in everything. My parents couldn’t believe how two kids could be so different.

My brother interceded. I knew he was my last chance. He said, mom and dad, you have to listen to Dennis or he’s going to run away.

I even knew what I was going to do. I was going to go to Idlewild Airport. That’s before it was John F. Kennedy. And I was going to work in the luggage area for one of the airlines and get myself on it, or so were my dreams. I’m sure my wanderlust was shaped in part by my visits every Sunday to the airport just to photographer airplanes. I dreamed about airplanes. I collected time tables.

He told my parents, you’ve got to leave him alone. You can’t bug him anymore about grades or about school. They said, parents can’t do that. We’re abdicating our role. And he said, you have no choice. You’re going to lose your son if you don’t leave him alone.

My father said he actually spoke to G-d. He said, G-d, what am are we going to do? We’re tried punishment. We’ve tried yelling. We’ve tried discipline. We’ve tried notes from school. Nothing has worked.

The school psychologist and my brother prevailed upon my parents to leave me alone and let me raise myself. And they agreed. And from the age of 14 on, they never asked if I got a report card. They never asked if I had homework.

I lived at home the first two years of college. One day I said, ma, I’m off this week. And with a totally straight face, she said, I thought you were off last week, which shows you how much class I didn’t go to. There was no way to know when I was off and when there was school.

This was very dramatic in my life because from age 14 on, I was a happy person. I needed to be left alone. I know that my loathing of controls by government over people, even in America where we are putting more and more laws on people, they actually unnerve me. I can only thrive in freedom. I’m very good at imposing laws on me but I don’t want them imposed by others.

My parents gave me money to eat supper out. They gave me $1:50 a day to eat dinner wherever I wanted.

After school, I’d take a subway into Manhattan and go to museums and concerts and plays. I didn’t do any homework.
Eating out has never ceased being a good psychological feeling for me of freedom. I still love to eat out. It is a credit to the home Fran has made that I am now happy to eat at home. To this day going to Denny’s and getting a tuna melt is fun. It’s still exciting. Anything I want! I’m not restricted to the menu at home. There’s no chance I’ll have liver.

[Sept. 1, 2010, Dennis said he has not had a $200 restaurant tab in his life.]

Once a week, my mother would serve a food that should not be eaten by humans — liver. I like anything but I hate liver. I’d find out when liver would be served and I’d make sure not to be home that night.

Who would tell me when we had liver? We had a housekeeper, a black woman. Ethel was my confidant in life. I told Ethel everything. Ethel loaned me money to buy hockey magazines. I don’t know if I ever paid her back. Ethel was my surrogate mother. I am convinced that this had an effect on the ease and comfort I have always felt with people of any race. The profound role an African-American woman played in my upbringing. When I had a bad report card, I went to her.

I am thoroughly abnormal. Never in my life have I liked parties. I didn’t understand. What do you do at a party? It was very loud. My mode of communication is to speak. Anytime there is loud music, I can’t speak. I’ve lost all of my interest and my powers. I was as interested in girls as any of the guys who went to parties but party wasn’t going to be my method of meeting anybody.

What was my method? It was not a successful one in high school I had these dreams of meeting a girl who loved music like I do at Carnegie Hall. It didn’t happen.

I had a hobby called short-wave radio listening. I got for my bar mitzvah from my grandfather a great short-wave radio — the Zenith Transoceanic. For me to pick up Radio Moscow.. Starting my second year of high school, I became transfixed by the enemy (communism). I listened and I was intoxicated. Not persuaded. Not for a second. I’ve always loved propaganda. It fascinates me how people try to sell what is not true.

I would listen to Radio Moscow in English [while smoking a pipe]. They said, if you will write to us, we will send you a complete set of books on how to learn Russian. So I sent away. I will never forget the thick packet filled with Soviet stamps arrives at my parent’s house in Brooklyn. It was so exciting. I looked at it. Somebody licked these stamps in Moscow!

It was also exciting unfortunately to the government. My next batch of mail was from Radio Peiking. We had no relations with communist China. People get packs of things from China were suspect in the eyes of the Post Office and they tore my mail open.

I wrote a letter to the then senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, saying to him what happened and that I should be allowed to get unmolested mail from communist China. And he wrote back. It’s one of the many things that I regret throwing away.

I did start learning Russian.

I’ll never forget when my parents went to a parent-teacher meeting, the nadir of my existence. I hated when my parents went to talk to my teachers because none of them said what a wonderful student we have there. It was always a bad report. It was not a happy night when they went.

One night they went and met my close friend Joseph Telushkin’s parents. My father said to the Telushkins, ‘We should’ve sent Dennis to a Russian school. Then he’d be studying Hebrew.’

It was a good line and very true because under my desk I read two things during classes — the New York Times and Russian. The Herald-Tribune had closed by then. It was my first paper of choice. The rabbis of the school were not happy that I was not studying their holy subjects. One teacher said to me, and it was all in Hebrew, I did learn Hebrew rather well, because all these teachers came from Israel and didn’t speak English, and he said to me, ‘No New York Times? Go back and bring it in and then you can come back in.’ That’s how bitter he was.

I remember the Torah portion then was the ten things the Chief Priest wore in the holy Temple. And I could not think of a more boring thing to study.”

I did get to speak at graduation even though I graduated 92nd in a class of 110 because I was president of the class.

They were very grade conscious in my school and they divided us A, B, C, D. A = very bright. B = pretty bright. C = a little stupid. D = very stupid. I started in the D class and graduated in the C class. Telushkin went from moderately smart to moderately stupid. He’s now the most prolific author in Judaism in America.

I spent most of my four years [of high school] laughing. It was a very happy hilarious time.

My parents every so often very gingerly raised that however much I enjoyed learning Russian and conducting symphonies, the world was not going to grade me on that. How was I going to get a job?

November 14, 2022, Dennis said that when he was a sophomore in high school, he turned in a composition on “The Tyranny of Marksism.”

Happiness

“I don’t have many memories before I was 13,” Dennis said Dec. 14, 2009.

“It’s largely just a cloud. I think that my happiest single memory is the day at twelve that I got paid for three hours of work shoveling Mr. Klein’s driveway. I got $8. It was a fortune of money. I think I got a herniated disc as well. I remember I immediately went and bought the board game ‘Clue’ and two Hardy Boys books. I remember I never owned anything that brought me as much pleasure as what I bought on my own.”

“I loved being 14,” said Dennis. “I hated being 13. Fourteen started a happy period in my life.” (Dec. 17, 2010)

Jan. 25, 2011, Dennis said: “The single funniest story from all of my childhood — in eighth grade, one of the kids tooted in class. The rest of the class laughed. The principal was walking by and the door was open and he passes by and sees the kids laughing. He gets very angry. He walks in and yells at the class, ‘What’s the big stink about?’

“It was the only time in my life I laughed so hard, I thought I might choke. I fell off my chair. It was pandemonium. The teacher knew what was happening and he was stifling laughing.”

Feb. 24, 2011, Dennis said: “I was never bored, not even as a child.”

In a 1994 lecture on Exodus 2, Dennis said: “Stories never moved me as a kid. Maybe because I was never read any. It was a home that was very clear and talked about moral issues, but we weren’t story oriented. As I get older, the stories not only mean more to me, they mean more than anything to me.”

In his 2008 lecture on Leviticus 19, Dennis Prager said: “I am writing my autobiography. Tentatively, it’s about my three journeys — as a man, as an American and as a Jew. I’m writing the Jew part right now.

“Part of the reason I have such a powerful association with the Sabbath was that it was the only family time we had. That was the time we ate together — Friday night and Sabbath afternoon.

“When I would make a family, I had only one image — the family at the Shabbat table because that was our only family time.

“To this day, when I visit my family in New Jersey, we’re together on Shabbat. We’re not together on a Monday. We’re busy.”

Dennis Prager’s best friend, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, wrote three paragraphs in the Summer 2001 issue of Olam magazine that seem to be about Dennis:

I have a friend who grew up harboring deep resentment toward his parents. He often lamented, “They never really cared about me. They had little time for me, they didn’t take my ideas seriously, and they were always getting angry at me.”

But one day, his attitude started to soften. It all happened when he became a parent, and found himself getting up at 3 a.m. to bring a bottle to his crying daughter.

“I realized then that my parents probably devoted far more hours to me than I had ever previously thought. The fact that I survived to my teenage years with all my fingers and toes intact means that they were watching me far more than I realized.”

Oct. 15, 2009, Dennis said: “My earliest years were strained with my mother. After late teens, it just got better and better every year until they were just wonderful. And that’s why I miss her. Thank God she and I had all those years.”

“My mother told me that I would be in reform school forever.” (Nov. 11, 2009)

“I had a short skinny rabbi in eighth grade throw me over two desks and then continued to puff on a cigarette. I remember thinking that I deserved it.” (Dec. 17, 2010)

“I was never little and he was. That’s how annoyed he was with me. I remember thinking, I’m sure as hell not telling my parents that my rabbi did it because then my father would’ve thrown me over two desks. I would’ve been thrown over four desks in one day. I wasn’t a masochist, so I said nothing. I came home black and blue and that was it. It was a different world. I’m a better man for it. I didn’t come home and think, ‘I was physically abused by my rabbi.’

“I remember writing an apology note. I went to the boys’ room and I wrote an apology note on toilet paper because I thought I was wrong.” (Jan. 17, 2011)

In an April 3, 2011 lecture, Dennis said: “My rabbi was not Sam. If anybody called my rabbi Sam, he wouldn’t even have turned around because only his wife called him Sam. Nobody referred to him as Sam behind his back. It was the rabbi, but with the sixties, they became Sam. They became what God became — your buddy. In mainstream Judaism and Christianity, God became your buddy.”

Nov. 11, 2009, Dennis said: “I was quite unhappy at 13. It was my unhappiest year. Almost overnight, I know why, my parents stopped intervening in my life. I was an abnormal child. I taught myself Russian and how to conduct orchestras… To their credit, not only did they not ask me if I had homework, they didn’t ask to see my report card. They allowed me to sign it for them…. They had no choice. I was going to leave the house. They knew it. I was always strong-willed.

“Around fourteen-and-a-half, fifteen, I blossomed. That blossoming is very powerful now in my remembrance and how it was in daily life. College is a blur compared to high school.”

“High school [meaning tenth grade] was my turning point.”

“High school was transformational for me in my last three years. I am who I was then. Massive details changed in my life since high school but not Dennis.”

“I’ve had a very exciting post-high school life… It got more exciting. There was nothing exciting that happened to me in high school but it was transformational that period of time. I began to know Dennis and be who I am.”

“There were a fair number of years when I was truly unhappy,” said Dennis Nov. 12, 2010. “It did inoculate me [from future unhappiness]. I became an unbelievably grateful human.”

As a child, Dennis thought about what people would say about him at his funeral. (Dec. 13, 2010)

“My goal in life since high school was to influence as many people as possible.” (Jun. 21, 2011)

Dennis was raised to not take the easy way out. “I didn’t like this idea when I was a child, and my family sometimes carried it to an extreme, but this principle has served me well as an adult.”

One day when he was 15, Dennis decided to be happy. “I was on a New York subway train. I remember it vividly. It was a fairly empty car. My arms were outstretched on the two sides of me, leaning on the backs of the row. I remember saying to myself, ‘It is very easy to be unhappy. Any jerk can be unhappy’.” (Dec. 6, 2009)

“I don’t get despondent over the bad stuff,” said Dennis. “I am very touched by people’s kind words to me but I don’t let it go to my head and I don’t let the insults go to my heart. It’s a great equilibrium to have. I trade in feeling great over the compliments for not feeling hurt over the insults.”

“My temperament is even-keeled. And I thank God for it. I think people enjoy being with people who are even-keeled rather than being with people on some sort of emotional rollercoaster.”

“As my wife puts it, ‘I know how you’ll be tomorrow.’” (Jan. 22, 2010)

“I was raised by my society,” said Dennis Mar. 18, 2010. “I was raised by my teachers. I was raised by my rabbis. I was raised by my parents’ friends.”

“If my parents micro-managed my life, I would not be Dennis Prager. I’d be a wimpier guy.”

“I didn’t think my parents understood me. I’m sure my teenage kids said the same thing about me.” (May 21, 2010)

On March 20, 2013, Dennis said: “When I was a student, the last thing that we thought of was expressing ourselves. We believed that society, named the school, had certain principles that we conformed to or left the school or embraced those differences as adults.”

“The blind men and the elephant — the only poem I ever really enjoyed.” (May 20, 2010)

Gays

Dec. 23, 2013, Dennis said: “Gays should never be harassed. I have always supported that. one of the reasons that I didn’t become a Republican until the Reagan era was what happened. It seared me. When some people in the Goldwater campaign outed a gay advisor to Lyndon Johnson and ruined his life. Some people followed him into a men’s room. I thought that was so despicable that I couldn’t become a Republican, even though I was always anti-left.” 

Like Jordan Peterson, Oprah Winfrey, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and other such gurus, Dennis Prager has a gift for assembling and delivering words in a way that makes people feel amazing.

Upon examination, however, many his claims fall apart.

Prager’s teachings fall into a modern variant of the ancient literary genre of wisdom. Pragerisms feel profound but they are rarely empirically testable. 

The Bible website, GotQuestions.org, notes: “Wisdom literature deals with the way the world “works.” This is not lofty, academic philosophy, but it is philosophy of sorts.”

December 4, 2020, psychologist Allen Berger said: “There was a psychologist at Harvard University, Jerome Frank, who did an interesting study and he wrote a book called [Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy]. He wanted to understand what are the therapeutic forces operating in psychotherapy. So he compared three different healing activities to see if he could find some commonality. He looked at western medical doctors, shamans, and therapists. The commonality in all of these practicioners is that they instilled hope in the people who came to see them. The installation of hope mobilized certain forces within that person that heretofore they were unable to mobilize. Now you feel like there is an explanation for why you are suffering and that there is a path to resolve the problem.”

October 3, 2022, Dennis said to his Youtube cohost Julie Hartman: “Early on, I said to myself, wow, your instincts are identical to the Torah’s. And it blew my mind. My natural mode of thinking was the Torah’s mode of thinking. That’s why I feel such a moral obligation to get it in print.  Because if you take those five books seriously, you will think clearly about everything.”

Julie: “And you will be so much happier.”

Dennis: “You can testify to that.”

Julie: “Society will run better. Your life will run better… I think it’s the answer to everything.”

Dennis: “I know it is the answer to everything. That’s why it is frustrating that it is not out there more… This is the answer to evil. To unhappiness.”

Apr. 10, 2014, Dennis said: “I get my values from the Bible.”

I’ve never heard any other Jew say this.

In the summer 1988 edition of his journal Ultimate Issues, Dennis Prager wrote an essay entitled “Beyond Reform, Conservative and Orthodox: Aspiring To Be A Serious Jew.”

The serious Jew meets four criteria:

1. This Jew is committed to each of Judaism’s three components: God, Torah, and Israel.

2. This Jew attempts to implement the higher ideals of each of these components.

3. Whatever Jewish laws this Jew does or does not observe is the product of struggle.

4. This Jew is constantly growing in each of these areas.

Somehow the Torah and the ongoing rabbinic tradition forgot to instruct Jews to ponder whether or not they should observe the Law. It’s inconceivable that Jews would have survived as a distinct people for thousands of years if they kept asking themselves whether or not they should follow the Torah. Prager’s approach is only for intellectuals and even then it doesn’t work, hence Prager’s description of himself as “lonely” in Jewish life, hardly a recipe for a good life.  

It is easy for the Jewishly illiterate (those who can not pick up a Talmud and read it in its original languages) to assent to Prager’s thinking. Nobody can convince you that you’re wrong because there is no code in Pragerism (the Pentateuch, which Dennis believes is uniquely divine, is not a code that can govern life without a binding tradition to interpret it). By contrast, defining the good Jew as one who is Orthodox dramatically reduces the room for fooling yourself. Orthodox Judaism has thousands of books filled with specific behaviors and a community committed to this observance.

Pragerism is an intellectual black hole, “a bubble of belief that, while seductively easy to enter, can then be almost impossible to think your way out of again.” (Stephen Law)

What makes Prager’s belief bubble so seductive? I think it is these components:

* The feeling that Dennis uniquely understands your pain and that by joining his fight for good values, you can be a hero. 

* Belief that without God, murder is not objectively wrong. 

* Belief that without God, you can’t produce a good society.

* Belief that people aren’t basically good. 

* Belief that the most important thing in life is to develop good people. 

* Belief that God gave the Torah, the divine recipe for goodness. 

* Belief that Judaism embodies ethical monotheism.

* Belief that hatred of Jews represents hatred of God. 

* Belief that God rewards and punishes, not just in this life, but in the world to come. 

* Belief that the United States is great because of its Judeo-Christian values and that it represents the best hope for humanity. 

* Belief that if academic studies contradict common sense, you can ignore them. Like presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, Prager prefers to go with his gut rather than with the experts. 

* Belief that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. 

* Belief that IQ doesn’t matter while character does. 

Philosopher Stephen Law writes in his 2011 book Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole:

Cosmologists talk about black holes, objects so gravitationally powerful that nothing, not even light, can break away from them. Unwary space travelers passing too close to a black hole will find themselves sucked in. An increasingly powerful motor is required to resist its pull, until eventually one passes the “event horizon” and escape becomes impossible.

My suggestion is that our contemporary cultural landscape contains, if you like, numerous Intellectual Black Holes —belief systems constructed in such a way that unwary passersby can find themselves similarly drawn in. While those of us lacking robust intellectual and other psychological defenses are most easily trapped, we’re all potentially vulnerable.

If you want to achieve the status of a guru, it helps to have some natural charisma and presentational skills. Sincerity and empathy, or at least the ability to fake them, can be useful…

Orthodoxy

“My father baked challah, the special Friday night bread, on his ship,” said Dennis. “And he was one of a tiny number of Jews on his ship fighting the Japanese. That ability to bake challah on your Navy ship, I think, I’ve translated into my own life with a very great deal of openness about my Judaism and yet an immersion in the larger world.”

“Within Jewish life I’m in the no-man’s land, denominationally. I am equally comfortable, and yet not fully a member, as it were, although I attend, of course, services each week.” (CSPAN, 1995)

Dennis: “When people find out that I won’t broadcast on a Jewish holiday or — in fact, it was a very powerful thing — the night of the O.J. Simpson verdict, I was invited to be one of only two people on Nightline, and I had so much passion about that verdict and I was so dying to talk, essentially, to a country. But it was Yom Kippur night, the holiest night of the Jewish calendar, and I turned it down. I don’t broadcast on Jewish holidays or Saturday.” (C-SPAN 1995)

In a 2010 interview at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said: “A week after my bar mitzvah, I stopped putting on tefillin. To do that in my home was so against how I was raised that I didn’t want my parents to know lest they be hurt. I didn’t do any of it out of rebellion since I hid all of my sins from my parents.”

“I would take the back of a comb and make little lines on my arm [before going down to breakfast] so that my mother thought I had put tefillin on that morning.”

“I don’t believe that rabbinic law is binding. Rabbis today can change rabbinic law, not Torah law.”

“Also, I found services way too long. I love musical instruments. Why the rabbis would ban musical instruments when God wanted us to use musical instruments in the temple [on the Sabbath and holidays], I can not understand.”

“I wanted the answers. I wasn’t given them. What is the Jewish role in the world? In 14 years in yeshiva, I never learned the Jewish role in the world. I learned how to build a sukkah. I learned you can eat an egg born on yontif (Jewish holiday).”

“Since going into the diaspora, Jews have been preoccupied-occupied with surviving, not influencing. Jewish life exists to exist. We feel like an endangered species… I don’t care if we survive. If we don’t influence the world, Jewish survival is of no interest to me. We have a task [to bring the world to God and His moral demands]. If we don’t do the task, we have no reason to live. We should assimilate. That’s why Jews do assimilate. Nobody gave them a task. I said that to audiences when I was 23 years old. I have not changed an iota. Where there is a why, there is a how.”

“I don’t care about Jewish culture. That’s why the board at Brandeis[-Bardin Institute] got angry at me. They were very into Jewish culture. I was very into Judaism. It was a conflict from the time Shlomo Bardin appointed me and then died that week until I left. I don’t care about Jewish dance. That’s not a reason to be Jewish any more than Albanian dance is a reason to be Albanian. The reason to be Jewish is to take Torah to the world.”

“Why stay Jewish if you’re secular? For what? Jewish culture? European culture dwarfs Jewish culture. Christian music is fifty times more beautiful than most Jewish music. We don’t have instruments [on Shabbat and holidays]. What kind of music could we have made? The rabbis [of the Talmud] did us an injury with that. I can have Handel’s Messiah or Adon Olam? Gee, that’s a toughie.”

“Jewishly, it’s been a lonely journey. That’s not a complaint. I go through my days profoundly grateful.”

“I left the two things that I was raised. I was raised religiously Orthodox and I am not. I was raised liberal and I am not.”

“I am thrilled that I was raised Orthodox… I saw it all. I got a phenomenally good education. The Torah is much more familiar to me in Hebrew than it is in English.” (2010 at Stephen S. Wise)

In a lecture titled “My Jewish Intellectual Biography” delivered  circa 2003, Dennis said: “I was never Orthodox, but I’ve always been orthodox… I was about ten years old. I grew up in an Orthodox home. We did not pick up the phone on Shabbat. One Shabbat afternoon it rang and it kept ringing. I remember thinking, ‘Why doesn’t anyone pick it up?’ It didn’t strike me as sinful as it would a typical kid at yeshiva. It was unnerving. We thought maybe somebody had died or someone was in terrible trouble. So my family sent me to pick it up, almost as if they had read my mind. The member of the family who cares the least. Their reasoning was that I was not bar mitzvah yet. I didn’t take it that I wasn’t bar mitzvah yet, I took it as they knew I didn’t care… So I picked it up and someone asked for Fernando.”

“What brings us to where we are Jewishly is not just intellectual conviction. From the earliest age, my older brother [Kenneth] loved davening. He loves it today… From the same earliest age, [davening] drove me crazy. I remember when I was about ten, it was in the succah of my uncle and aunt in Irvington, and everybody benched (the grace after meals). And after the first paragraph, everyone [recited] it to themselves. I just yadadabba. My father looked at me and said, ‘You’re not benching.’ I said, ‘Of course I’m benching.’ ‘But you don’t have a bencher.’ ‘I know it by heart.’ So I recited it by heart. And from then on, I just went yadadabba. I’m saying this in front of my son David. David, I’m not proud of this.”

“I have always identified Judaism with goodness, the thing that I most value in this world. I’m not certain as to why… I met dummies who were religious, crooks who were religious, but I don’t remember meeting cruel religious Jews.”

“My brother loves halacha. My brother loves observance. I don’t have that… I am convinced that is the way people are made. That is why we need different vehicles to God and Judaism because we are not all made the same.”

“I am prepared to reform halacha. I am not prepared to reform faith [in the Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith according to the Rambam].”

“My brother frequently says to me, ‘You are a religious party of one.’ Thus far, he has a lot of credibility. That doesn’t change my life but it does disturb me.”

“When David, my oldest son, was born, I said to myself that I have to raise him Orthodox and for a while, we went to an Orthodox shul, virtually never drove on Shabbat, and lived the life I was used to in my home where I grew up. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t true to me. When David was eight, he asked me if he could use my tape recorder [on Shabbat]. I said, ‘Sure, if you record Shabbat songs.’ Technology to honor Shabbat, I am prepared for, that’s while I’ll drive to synagogue on Shabbat or drive to lunch with fellow Shabbat observers.”

Rabbi Nachum Braverman wrote to Dennis in the second edition of Ultimate Issues in 1985: “I find, however, that people’s frustration with the ‘tyranny of the law’ is often merely their own unwillingness to inconvenience themselves.”

Aug. 23, 2022, Dennis said to his Youtube cohost Julie Hartman: “The typical response from a non-Jew, and I’ve always had non-Jews come to my Shabbat table, was, you have this every week?”

Julie: “It’s Christmas and Thanksgiving every week.”

Dennis: “I learned a lot of my ability to think and to speak from the Shabbat table. My father and brother would talk and talk and talk. And I would listen to them. And then around eighth grade, I started to chime in. My father looked at me one time, very early on in my speaking up at the table, and said, ‘Dennis, that’s nonsense.’ And I remember thinking he’s right. My father’s voice, when I spoke publicly, remained in me almost my entire life. ‘Dennis, are you speaking anything that is nonsense?'”

Sept. 28, 2012, Dennis said: “I have the training of a rabbi but I never sought ordination.”

This is a dubious claim. Dennis never had a year of training equivalent to the work in the Yeshiva University rabbinic curriculum. 

Dec. 19, 2011, Dennis said: “I did think about being a rabbi. I studied to be a rabbi but I decided I preferred the title of “Mr” to “rabbi” because people expect the rabbi to say certain things and I wanted the freedom to say anything.” 

People not only expect a rabbi to say certain things, they also expect him to not do certain things, such as the sexual experimentation before marriage that Prager enjoyed.

In fifth grade, Dennis asked his rabbi what Heaven would be like. The rabbi said that they would study Torah all day long. Dennis decided he did not want to go to Heaven. (Adam Carolla dialogue, Feb. 25, 2012)

I sometimes hear something different in Dennis Prager’s voice when he’s attacked by Orthodox Jews. His normal command becomes occasionally strained. While he’s rarely rattled by attacks from the left, attacks from Prager’s religious right bring out his anxiety. His three marriages make his moral leader perch unsteady.

A search for “Dennis Prager” in Google during 2010 revealed the first suggested term to add to the search was “divorce.”

Christians and Christmas

In December of 2016, Dennis said that if he were born a Christian, he would “probably” have stayed a Christian. “I don’t know if I would have been an orthodox Christian… Unless you are born into a religion that you determine makes the world worse, you should probably stick to it… Or you cannot believe any of its distinguishing tenants and you find a more rational vehicle to God and goodness… Modern Muslims have a unique dilemma because the Islamic world today is a net moral deficit.”  

Dennis Prager never heard about “unconditional love” from his rabbis. He wrote April 21, 2009: “In 15 years of study in a yeshiva I had never heard the phrase, and it would have struck me, as it still does, as quite odd.”

Said Dennis in a 2000 lecture on Numbers 6: “If my rebbe had said in yeshiva, ‘Dennis, you have an individual relationship with God,’ I would’ve had a heart attack. I would’ve thought he had become a Christian.”

In a 2005 lecture on Deut. 24:5, Dennis said: “I’ve read Christian theologians since college. They made me aware of the battle with secularism. My yeshiva didn’t make me aware of these things. My yeshiva taught me how to build a succah and how to keep kosher and that was great, but the great over-arching concerns about how to battle the false gods of modern life, Christians opened my mind to that.”

March 24, 2008, Dennis said: “I have a relationship with God, but it’s not the way people often use the term. My relationship with God is that I want to do what He wants to do. It doesn’t go much beyond that. We don’t talk a lot. He doesn’t answer a lot. There are people like my father who talk to God every night of their lives. I envy him.”

“Before I give a lecture and before my radio show, I [say] a little prayer. ‘God, I would like to do what You would like me to do. Thank you. Just give me the strength to do what You would like.’ That’s it. It makes me not nervous because I am not there for me… It’s a very centering thing. Am I in line with what I believe God wants me to do with my life? Will I meet my Maker and be able to say I did what You wanted?”

In his lecture on Gen. 41-42, Dennis said: “You’re a lot more confident in life when you think you are doing God’s work. Take it from someone who thinks he is doing God’s work.”

Dec. 15, 2009, Dennis said: “I was 20 years old when I went for my junior year to England. During the Christmas break, which was about three weeks, like most students in England, I left England for warmer weather. I crossed the English channel, took a train down the western part of Europe, then to the bottom of Spain and then took a boat to Morocco. This was on my own. This was a very adventurous trip. I was in Morocco for Christmas that year. To my amazement, because I monitor my own emotions a great deal. I have a lot of feedback. I’m very fortunate in that way. I realized what’s troubling me. I’m missing something. To my amazement, I didn’t immediately realize it, but I was missing the Christmas season. It was not Morocco’s fault. It’s a Muslim country. I couldn’t believe how I missed it.

“I was two years away from immersion in Jewish education. Of course I never had [Christmas], but it permeated my life. My parents, both Orthodox Jews, would watch the Christmas mass from Rome every Christmas eve. I loved it. My father, I and the Pope were all wearing yarmulkes.”

Dec. 20, 2011, Dennis said, “It had a big impact on me which eventually expressed itself in such a wonderful relationship with Christians and to be the best I could a bridge between Jews and Christians… I miss this time so much that I do my best to not miss this time. I’ve been offered many times the opportunity to take listeners on a cruise during Christmas week but I don’t want to miss this time.”

Dennis Prager wrote in the Dec. 17, 2010 Jewish Journal:

How could I miss something that I never had? And being so Jewish, how could I miss the quintessential Christian holiday? It seemed religiously wrong, maybe even sinful.

…I subsequently spent a lot of time reflecting on this. It made little sense to me: Why would a yeshiva boy miss the Christmas season?

I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to deny the existence of Christmas — for example, we had school on Christmas Day, and “midwinter vacation,” as it was called, was at the end of January, not at the end of December — this yeshiva boy really liked the Christmas season.

And, second, this Jew, whose yeshiva upbringing taught him to think of himself only as a Jew, was in fact an American as well.

…My youth in New York had consisted of an Orthodox home, Orthodox shul, Orthodox yeshiva, Orthodox friends and Orthodox Zionist summer camp in which only Hebrew was spoken and which was entirely Israel-oriented. Of course, I was an American, but how was I supposed to feel American?

…In that Orthodox world, American identity was not denigrated, just ignored. Anything Christian, however, was sometimes denigrated and always avoided…

…As the years passed, I not only made peace with my American identity and with my enjoyment of the Christmas season, I came to treasure that season and to fall in love with America and its distinct values (what I call the American Trinity: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum). While director of a Jewish institution — the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley — I volunteered to be a Santa Claus for the Simi Valley Rotary Club, of which I was a member. So, during the same week that I led Shabbat activities for a thousand Jews, I also went to my Rotary Club meeting (what is more American than the Rotary Club?), and I played Santa Claus at a local department store.

…When my yarmulke-wearing children were younger, I used to take them to see beautiful Christmas lights on homes.

Dore phoned Dennis Prager’s radio show Dec. 24, 2010: “Dennis, you love the holiday [of Christmas] so much, do you have a Christmas tree in your house?”

Dennis laughs.

Dore: “You are so enamored with it. Why? Do you get enamored with Easter?”

Dennis: “No. I am enamored with Christmas.”

Dore: “Why don’t you become a Christian? You don’t like Chanukkah, right?”

In the past, Dennis described Chanukkah music as “pathetic” in comparison to Christmas music.

Dennis: “Why does liking Christmas as a Jew mean I don’t like Chanukkah?”

Dore: “Why is it so important? If you take away the shmaltz, the music, the tree and everything else, you’ve got a religious holiday?”

Dennis: “Yes. I love the religion of my neighbors. For me, it is not a religious holiday. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ. Is it a national holiday?”

Dore: “Yes. Unfortunately, it is.”

Dennis: “The vast majority of Americans do [observe Christmas]… It is a meaningful day [for most Americans] and I like that and that’s why I live here. I love this country and I love its holidays including Christmas. My colleague Michael Medved is an Orthodox Jew and he plays this Christmas music [on his radio show]. My brother is Orthodox and he sang Christmas carols with a yarmulke with the Columbia’s Glee club. You are insular, we are not… You live in a tiny little ghettoized mind. I don’t.”

Dore: “Do you know the only day that Jews weren’t killed in the concentration camps? Christmas day.”

Dennis: “You’re an ingrate. How many Jews are living in the freest country on earth thanks to American Christians… You are an ingrate, sir.”

Dore: “No, I’m not.”

Dennis: “You are living in the best country Jews have lived in and you are crapping on the Christians who made this country. Why do you continue to live here if you have such a contempt for the Christians who surround you?”

Dore: “I have no contempt for non-Jews. I have contempt for Christmas day.”

Dennis: “Your entire call has been how crappily Christians have treated Jews. Why do you continue to live among Christians when you could live in Tel Aviv among Jews?”

Dore: “If I had the money, I would make aliyah to Israel.”

In a May 1, 2012 speech, Dennis said: “I text my rabbi (Orthodox), ‘Merry Christmas.’ And he texts back, ‘Gut yontif.'”

Dec. 25, 2023, Julie Hartman asked Dennis: “What do you do to celebrate Christmas?”

Dennis: “On Christmas day, I don’t listen to classical music. I listen to Christmas music. I revel in the ambience of the day. My wife converted to Judaism. She is as Jewish as I am from the perspective of Judaism, but she comes from a Christian home and we have all of her family over and we have a big Christmas dinner, which I love. I even wear my kipa at the dinner. It’s my way of both reminding everyone that it is the Jew in your family who’s enjoying this with you, and while it is not my holy day, it is their holy day. I open up with a prayer.”

One Muslim scholar wrote in 2015: “If saying “Merry Christmas” implies belief in Jesus’s status as son of God, the same would apply to many other things e.g. saying ‘Goodbye’. Goodbye was coined from the longer phrase “God be with ye.” Though I believe we all have the same one God, those who immerse themselves into meaningless intricacies should know that this God (originally in Goodbye) is the God that most Christians believe begot a son.”

On Dec. 24, 2013, Dennis published an essay sure to make most Orthodox rabbis wince. Titled, “Most Jews Wish You a Merry Christmas,” the essay said: “It doesn’t matter with which religion or ethnic group you identify; Christmas in America is as American as the proverbial apple pie. That is why some of the most famous and beloved Christmas songs were written by guess who? Jews.”

Dissident intellectual Steve Sailer wrote:

The Christmas songs that Jews wrote seldom involved religion…

But this long, amiable tradition of Jews helping to enliven a Christian feast day seems, sadly, to be drawing to an end. American Jews, those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas…

Considering that thousands of Jews chose death rather than to confess Christ, you won’t find much support in the Jewish tradition for a Jew to say “Merry Christmas.” It’s about as Jewish a thing to do as eating ham. Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who is Messiah and God according to those who celebrate Christmas for religious reasons. The word “Christmas” originates from the compound “Christ’s mass” meaning the eucharist (the ritual drinking of Christ’s blood and the eating of his flesh through consuming wine and a wafer).

Dennis Prager wrote in 2014:

I believe it is significant that three of the four dissenting justices are the three Jews on the Supreme Court — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. So, too, one of the two women (the “respondents” at the Supreme Court level) who filed the original lawsuit against the town of Greece is a Jew. And Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the Union for Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Anti-Defamation League, had filed amicus curiae briefs in support of the women.

This is all significant because the Jewish justices, the Jewish woman who brought the suit against the New York town and all the Jewish organizations that filed briefs in support of the two respondents represent a battle that many American Jews and Jewish organizations have been waging for decades against public expressions of God and religion.

American Jews have become the most active ethnic or religious group in America attempting to remove God and religion from the public square. Why is this the case? Why have American Jews been so active in fighting any expressions of God and religion in the country that has been the most hospitable to us in our long history?

Nearly every Jew who does so will give this answer: In order to fight for the separation of church and state in America.

But let’s be honest. If there were no such concept in America — and in fact, the phrase “separation of church and state” never appears in the Constitution — most American Jews would be just as opposed to public expressions of faith.

So, then, once again: Why are American Jews so opposed to public religious expressions? Moreover, this opposition exists not only to government-sponsored religious expression. For example, many Jews are avid supporters of substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” or “holiday party” for “Christmas party.”

I think there are four reasons.

One is antipathy to Christianity. Most Jews just don’t like Christianity. They associate it with centuries of anti-Semitism, and therefore believe that a de-Christianized America will be a much more secure place for them.

Second, many American Jews feel “excluded” when Christianity is expressed in public.

A third reason is antipathy to religion generally. Most Jews are little more positively disposed to Orthodox Judaism than they are to traditional Christianity.

That leads to reason four: a fervent belief in secularism. Most American Jews believe in secularism as fervently as Orthodox Jews believe in the Torah or traditional Christians believe in Christ.

On December 13, 2014, Dennis conducted Christmas music for the LA Premiere Orchestra.

Said Dennis in his 2007 lecture on Leviticus 4: “I love good religious services whatever the religion.”

“I was raised in an Orthodox home and with yarmulkes on, we watched the mass from the Vatican every Christmas eve (except for Shabbat). I loved it. The ceremonies. I loved it. When I visited the Vatican and I was taken to the inner parts by a major monsignor from Argentina who I was friendly with, I felt religious.”

In a lecture on Leviticus 14-15, Dennis said: “It was almost halacha in our house [to watch]. I’ve always been enthralled with all religions. What I really loved was the clothing, the pomp, the incense, the holy water, the sprinkling of water, the giving of the wafer. I didn’t know what anything meant. He could’ve given the people french toast and I wouldn’t have known the difference, but it didn’t matter to me. I was moved.”

On Jan. 16, 2014, Dennis Prager said: “The American Protestant produced the greatest society ever produced by any religious group.” 

“If I had been talking 2,000 years ago, I would’ve said Judaism.”

Dennis told Hugh Hewitt about Hasidic hats: “The big-rimmed hat is merely a carry-over from Eastern European life. There are parts of Jewish life that are extremely traditional. I am not that traditional. I like American garb and modern Western garb. But so be it. They have chosen to wear the clothing that was worn at the time in Eastern Europe, and to…there’s a certain nostalgia for the shtetl, the insulated Jewish religious village. I don’t have that particular yearning.”

While teaching the five books of the Torah at American Jewish University between 1993 and 2011, Dennis Prager wondered aloud why so few Orthodox Jews came. In his fifth lecture on Numbers circa 2006, Dennis said: “That’s amazing. More Mormons than Orthodox Jews. That’s fascinating. I love it. It cracks me up. How do you get Orthodox Jews to attend non-Orthodox?”

The lack of Orthodox interest in Prager’s Torah teachings is akin to the lack of Christian interest in Muslim teachings. In-groups aren’t much interested in out-groups. 

In a lecture on Deut. 22:1, Dennis said: “I’m very unhappy that you asked that question because it may invalidate a certain community [Orthodox] from buying these tapes and listening to them. Your question, was I taught these things at yeshiva? Some things I was. Most of the things I am conveying to you I was not taught in my traditional upbringing. I’m doing something with this that is very different.”

“When I meet learned Jews who find out that I am teaching the Torah verse-by-verse, they will say, ‘Oh, so you teach it with Rashi?’ And of course I have studied the Rashi but I don’t teach it from Rashi for while he is invaluable, if I need to learn how to live today, he’s not the best source now. From the filter of my background with these rabbis but living in the modern world, what I am working out is is this book rationally morally applicable to your lives. It is an original attempt to make that clear. I don’t know of another attempt like this. It is easy to say, he is really arrogant. He thinks he understands the Torah that well to teach that way. I can’t defend against the arrogance. Why would I do this? It’s not for the money. It’s very hard. I wish that I had been taught these things.”

“I am very moved that wherever I go to speak in Jewish life, very often, Orthodox rabbis, Chabad rabbis, will tell me that they use these tapes when they teach Torah. Not to mention Reform and others. That says to me that they know that this comes from a good place.”

“I picked up a lot of it from great scholars. Very often they were Christians who taught me these things… I obviously don’t use the parts where they say, ‘This shows that Christ…’ That’s not my faith.

“Irving Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi, wrote in his book on Christianity that he has been deeply influenced by Christian thinkers. He said that from an early age, when he read Christian thinkers, when he read ‘Christ’, he substituted ‘God’ and it worked perfectly. I cracked up when I read it because that’s exactly what I do.”

“That’s how I know Judeo-Christian is a legitimate term. I did learn a lot from these [Christian] people who do relate it to life today. I learned things [in yeshiva] that I knew were not going to help me deal with life. Moses was caught by Pharaoh and his neck turns to marble when he’s about to be killed. Or the reason that Moses had a speech impediment was that when he was a baby on Pharaoh’s lap, they put before him gold and hot coals, and he was about to reach for the gold and give away how brilliant he was, but he reached the hot coals and burned his tongue forever. I don’t mind those stories but they don’t help me understand what the Torah really wants to teach. And those are some of the things I learned at that time. I’m fighting for the belief that this is a divine text.”

“I respect the notion that God gave us laws that we can’t understand, but I don’t think He did.”

In a lecture on Deut. 22:15, Dennis said: “I am versed in the sources like Rashi, Rambam and so on. They have helped shape my understanding but I believe that we need to dust off a lot of the traditional coloring of our view of the Torah to make it understandable for modern men and women. Many Orthodox rabbis get these tapes and have no problem with anything I have said, even though I am not making reference often to Orthodox sources. I’m being as true to the Torah as possible. It almost comes as a relief to many Orthodox Jews that an honest reading of the peshat plain reading of the text without commentary leads you to an elevated view of the Torah.”

“On Deut. 22:16, Rashi says this teaches us that the woman has no permission to speak in the presence of her man, i.e. her husband. What am I going to say? Is this really what the Torah teaches? That a woman in the 21st Century should not speak in front of her husband?”

In his lecture on Lev. 14, Dennis said: “It is not the specific act of ritual [in the Torah] that is of interest to me as what is it aimed to say. Of course it will be time-bound… When people bring a turtle-dove after menstruating, I don’t relate to that… The message has to be eternal or there is no message.”

“I believe that a lot of people confuse ‘divine’ with ‘eternal.’ It should not be. I believe the Torah is a divine text… ‘Divine’ does not mean that every detail is eternally the same. The message and the values are eternal. Some of the laws are clearly eternal, but the idea that the priest will come to your home when it suffers from skin disease, obviously that will not take place today. With the end of the temple, the whole concept of tame and tahor (purity and impurity) has evaporated. It is our task to figure out what is eternal without just choosing what we are comfortable with.”

In his 2009 lecture on Leviticus 21, Dennis said: “The Talmud is about the rabbis debating how a Jew should live. I admit there were times when I studied these debates, I got so bored that I learned how to say words in English backwards. It happened in sixth grade in yeshiva when we spent an entire year on whether or not one could eat an egg laid on a Jewish holiday. My favorite word backwards is Republican.”

“Some of the [Talmudic] rabbis’ debates are profound and some of them are not. Sometimes you just feel that they have a lot of time on their hands.”

In a June 2011 lecture, Dennis said: “The rebbe’s [Menachem Schneerson] emphasis on happiness is so big. It’s as big as the non-judgmental attitude is big.”

“In my elementary school yeshivas, all the rebbes were from Eastern Europe. They either escaped right before the Holocaust or right after the Holocaust. They radiated misery. I don’t remember them smiling. I don’t remember if they had teeth. I remember thinking that to be frum (religious) meant to be unhappy. It was almost an aveira (sin) to laugh too much. What are you laughing about? You could be studying another blatt (page) of gemara and you’re telling a joke? It’s wrong.”

“Nothing alienates the non-religious from God and religion as unhappy religious people. I remember Phil Hendrie, the talk show host, he used to imitate people. He has a very narrow but true gift of genius to do this.

“He was once ribbing Muslims. It was a fair rib. His whole routine was that if you laugh or smile, you’re not a Muslim. Have you seen imams laughing? The laughing imams? It’s almost a self-contradictory term. Can you imagine Khameini back-slapping and laughing and having a great time? Another l’chaim!”

“If Judaism doesn’t make you happier, either the religion is a failure or your practice of it is a failure.”

“We over-emphasize brilliance in Jewish life. When I was a kid, the best student was the one who memorized the most blatt gemara. The kid was an idiot but he memorized blatt gemara. So what?”

“A third aspect (after non-judgmentalism and happiness) of the Chabad revolution was to go into the world. This was my biggest problem with the Orthodoxy of my youth. It was too insular.” (COTV Chabad Banquet Gala 2011)

Unlike most Orthodox Jews, Dennis Prager does not wear a kipa (skullcap) out of the house. He wears one at home and in shul and when he’s reciting blessings and teaching Torah.

Unlike Orthodox Jews, Dennis Prager has no concern about whether or not the plate he eats off of is kosher. He eats vegetarian food in non-kosher restaurants and he prays in non-Orthodox synagogues. He drives on the Sabbath.

Unlike Orthodox Jews, Dennis Prager does not believe in the divinity of the Oral Law.

Speaking October 28, 2010 at Temple Israel Ner Tamid in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, Dennis said: “Why didn’t I accept full Orthodoxy with the oral law? When I was in yeshiva, I asked my rabbis in sixth grade, if God gave a written and an oral Torah, why didn’t He write it all? Why was some written? It can’t be because of significance because there are parts of the written Torah that are incredibly over-detailed and there are things in the Oral law of tremendous significance. It seems capricious and God doesn’t seem capricious. Second, it doesn’t say anywhere in the written Torah that God gave an oral law. It’s an oral tradition that I should believe that an oral tradition was given at Sinai.

“Maybe God wanted there to be an oral tradition so that it could change and the written Torah was the constitution that doesn’t change.

“I believe the oral law developed the most humane way of killing an animal devised in history… This is all wonderful, but now that we have stunning where an animal doesn’t know what is bout to be done to it, why don’t we stun animals in kashrut and then kill them ritually? Because the answer is that the oral law says that the animal has to be fully conscious. In my opinion, in this case, the oral law undermines its own brilliance. If there was stunning 3,000 years ago, the Talmud would have said there could be stunning.”

No important rabbi in the Jewish tradition prior to the 19th Century held that while the written Torah comes from God, the oral Torah does not. Such a Sola Scriptura position is uniquely Protestant. The only organized group of Jews who’ve held to Sola Scriptura over the past 1,800 years (prior to Reform Judaism in the 19th Century) are the tiny Karaite sect (there are about 50,000 Karaites in the world).

Reform and Conservative Judaism reject not only the divinity of the oral Torah but also of the written Torah, particularly when it conflicts with modern mores (such as homosexuality).

While rejecting the divinity of the Oral Torah makes Dennis Prager’s life easier by permitting him to do what he wants, it separates him from the Jewish tradition. 

There’s no way to organize Jews according to Dennis Prager’s teachings. His principles are too elastic. They’re a variant of Judaism for people who can’t read Hebrew.

Wikipedia says about the minor Jewish holiday of Chanukkah: “The story goes that there was only enough oil to burn for one day, yet it burned for eight days.” 

Dec. 23, 2011, Dennis Prager said he believed that that miracle historically happened. 

Sept. 19, 2012, Dennis said: “I’ve had no miracles in my life.”

July 13, 2001, Dennis said: “I did however try Orthodoxy once again after my first child was born (1983). For a number of years [until 1991], I lived an Orthodox life to try it again as an adult. I’m quite observant but I always announce that I am not Orthodox because I never want to mislead anybody.”

Caller: “What about kosher? Is that important to you?”

Dennis: “Yes. But my level would be different from yours if you are Orthodox. I don’t care, for example, about dishes at a restaurant. If a dish has touched bacon and then was washed, I will have food off of it.”

Caller: “What would you advise young people, especially Jews, aged 12-25 about whether they should follow what you’re doing?”

Dennis: “I am proud to say that I have brought a lot of Jews to Judaism. And they know, as my own children know, that I do not give a hoot if my children or any Jew I influence expresses a serious Judaism as an Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Hasidic Jew. I am just as happy. I have zero preference.”

Caller: “What happened after your Bar Mitzvah?”

Dennis: “I don’t have an Orthodox temperament.”

On Oct. 23, 2013, Dennis published seven reasons for why Orthodoxy is growing:

Second, the more Orthodox one is, the more he or she is likely to live among Orthodox Jews. One’s entire social life (outside of work) revolves around fellow Orthodox Jews. That makes it, to put it gently, very difficult to leave Orthodoxy. If you do, you are likely to lose your whole support system and probably most of your friends, as well. You may even risk alienating your family.

Third, the great majority of Orthodox Jews send their children to Orthodox Jewish day schools — usually through high school. The Orthodox child rarely has close non-Orthodox, let alone non-Jewish, friends, thereby reinforcing Orthodoxy both experientially and socially from the earliest age…

On Oct. 25, 2013, Dennis said: “I believe in the 13 Principles of the Jewish faith as enunciated by Maimonides, but there are many rabbinic laws I don’t find rational. The practices that man made should be rational. The adding of a day to the list of days you have to keep for Passover… God wanted it to be seven days [not eight days as the Orthodox keep it]… That stuff drove me crazy intellectually.”

In a March 10, 2009 lecture on Leviticus 19: 26-28, Dennis Prager said: “When I was in yeshiva, [I was told about] a very very pious rabbi who on Yom Kippur was so careful not to drink that he would not even swallow his own saliva. He would spit it out. I remember thinking the man was an idiot. The thought of a guy spitting all Yom Kippur, what’s so pious about that? I would leave shul.”

In a 2009 lecture on Leviticus 22-23, Dennis said: “Shinui is the notion of doing something different on Shabbat. I had an uncle, may he rest in peace, who was right-wing Orthodox. He loved playing chess. The vast majority of Orthodox Jews see nothing wrong with playing chess on Shabbat, but he would say you would have to move the chess pieces with your left hand on Shabbat. To me that is excessive.”

Many people influenced by Dennis to take Judaism seriously end up Orthodox (if you want high-intensity Jewish religion, that’s usually your only choice) and many of them come to despise Dennis for not being religious enough. In a column Sept. 5, 2006, Dennis wrote: “I recall a young man who attended a Jewish institute I used to direct. When he first arrived at the institute, he was a particularly kind and nonjudgmental individual — and completely secular. After his month-long immersion in studying and living Judaism, he decided to become a fully practicing Jew. When I met him a year later he was actually less kind and was aggressively judgmental of the religiosity of fellow Jews, including me and others who had brought him to Judaism. In one year he had become in his eyes holier than the teachers who brought him to religion in the first place.”

Dennis Prager’s eloquence inspires such fervor in some people that it is impossible for him to live up to their unrealistic expectations. Thus, many fans who idealized him come to despise him.

Secular moral philosopher John M. Doris writes in his 2005 book Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior: “Commitment to [moral] globalism threatens to poison understandings of self and others with disappointment and resentment on the one hand and delusion and hero-worship on the other.”

What is the alternative? Doris suggests: “Behavior is – contra the old saw about character and destiny – extraordinarily sensitive to variation in circumstance.”

Dennis said in a March 24, 2008 talk at Nessah Synagogue: “I grew up in an East European Hasidic shtible in New York. The rabbi was from Romania. Ultra-Orthodox. In order to do Maftir Yonah, the greatest honor of the year was to recite maftir and the book of Yonah on Yom Kippur, you bought it… You bought every single honor at the shul. No dough, no go up to the Torah. No one resented it because it was the only way this poor rabbi could support this little nothing shtibl on East 17th Street in Brooklyn.

“My father bought Maftir Yonah every year. He wanted that kavod (honor). God bless him. He installed the air conditioning at that shul.”

In a 1998 lecture on Exodus 28, Dennis said:

We do not associate Judaism and Jews with the aesthetic. The Greeks honored beauty, so there was a Jewish reaction to the worship of physical beauty. It’s only the life of the mind that matters. You had in the yeshiva world that I know very well an anti-aesthetic thing. It didn’t matter if your clothing was rumpled. It was almost considered in the yeshiva world of Eastern Europe, and though I didn’t grow up in Eastern Europe, I grew up in an Eastern Europe-type yeshiva in my elementary school, it was almost considered a virtue that the the boys would have a sheen on the seat of their pants. It meant that they almost never moved. They sat and studied all the time.

Do you know what yeshiva means? It means seated. If I had said to the rebbe, I need to go out to lift weights, he would’ve looked at me, how did he get in to this school, let alone my class? The rebbes were not Jack Lalane imitations. There would be recess but you can waste your time running around, real life is study.

Mar. 21, 2013, Dennis said: “I never ever think about whether God loves me and I am deeply God-centered. I have taught the Bible my whole [adult] life. All I ask is what does God want from me.”

In 1955, when Dennis was seven years old, sociologist Marshal Sklare described the American Orthodox as “a case study of institutional decay.” Its rebirth has taken place with Prager outside its fold.

History professor Marc B. Shapiro wrote April 13, 2010:

On the internet there are loads of sites devoted to aspects of Orthodox life and culture from all different angles. Even though the Orthodox are significantly smaller than the other denominations, the amount written about them in recent years dwarfs what we can point to with regard to the Conservative and Reform movements. In terms of blogs and other Internet sites, there also is no comparison. How to explain all this?

When it comes to the blogs and more popular sites on the Internet the answer is not hard to find. It is true that the other denominations have more “members” than the Orthodox. Yet if we are talking about those who are educated Jewishly, and interested in Jewish matters, the Orthodox unquestionably outnumber the other denominations. Since the Internet is the great equalizer, with everyone able to set up his or her soapbox, it is no wonder that it is crawling with Orthodox sites. Furthermore, average Orthodox Jews, by which I mean those who are not in the rabbinate or the academy, buy books of Jewish interest to a much greater extent than other laypeople.

Between 1934-1950, many Haredim (fervent right-wing Orthodox such as rabbis Aharon Kotler, Moshe Feinstein, Joel Teitelbaum) moved to America and by the 1980s the right-wing Orthodox dominated Orthodox life.

As opposed to the modern Orthodox, the traditional Orthodox generally scorn university education for any other purpose than earning a living. They generally refuse to cooperate with non-Orthodox forms of Judaism and they don’t identify with Zionism.

Until 1992, Dennis had his membership in Modern Orthodox shuls such as Young Israel of Century City on Pico Blvd in Los Angeles (with several people from his childhood). From 1992 until about 2016, he’s belonged to the Reform temple Stephen S. Wise. Around 2016, he formed his own Sabbath morning minyan in the San Fernando Valley. 

“I’m orthodox, not Orthodox,” said Dennis in his first lecture on Deuteronomy (2002). For many years Dennis said that he belonged to a Reform temple, sent one child (Aaron) to a Conservative day school, another child (David) to an Orthodox day school (Shalhevet), and served on the board of the Chabad day school in Conejo Valley. “They had no building of their own for the first years. It began in the back of my own home and then moved to a church property. A woman we hired sued within the first couple of weeks under the Americans With Disabilities Act because she had to walk up the hill to the bathroom. Precious funds we had to pay out to settle. We were always on the brink.” (Jan. 16, 2012)

Dennis said in a January 2002 lecture “Personal Autobiography”: “Modern [Orthodox] meant we kept kosher, we kept the Sabbath strictly, but outside the house we didn’t wear a yarmulke. We’d eat in any restaurant though we wouldn’t eat non-kosher food. We wouldn’t eat meat out, but we’d eat fish out.

“In Brooklyn, it was very possible even in a Modern Orthodox home to lead a very insular life. I never met Reform Jews. I never met Conservative Jews. I met more non-Jews than I met non-Orthodox Jews.”

In a 2008 lecture on his 25 years in broadcasting, Dennis said: “I ached to meet non-Jews. I remember talking to the mailman as much as I could. I wanted to know what do you eat?”

Apr. 11, 2014, Dennis said: “In my synagogue, I would tie the men’s prayer shawls together, so that when they separated from each other, all of their prayer shawls would fall off. I thought it was the funniest thing of my childhood. It still makes me crack up.”

Dennis wrote Aug. 10, 2010:

When I was a kid in yeshiva, we played a game during davening (prayer services) called siddur (prayer book) baseball. We mostly played this at Orthodox summer camp during Shabbat services — because it was baseball season, and because Shabbat services were much longer than the daily service.

It was a game that demanded no skill. When it was your turn to bat, you closed the siddur and opened it up to any page. If the first letter on the page was an aleph, you had hit a single; if the was a bet, it was a double; a gimmel meant a triple; and a daled was a home run. Entire rows of kids — we sat on long benches — could be seen opening and closing their siddurim and mumbling something like “man on first, two out.”

We did this because we were bored out of our minds. And remember, we knew what the words meant. We had studied the siddur and Hebrew all our lives.

We were bored for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the davening was so long — usually more than three hours.

“I didn’t care that in school they didn’t ask me, how do you feel? One of the great moments of my life, it helped shape who I am, was in fourth grade. The rabbi announced it was time for the afternoon prayer. I walked over to the rabbi [Fastag] and said, ‘Rabbi, I’m not in the mood for mincha.’ The rabbi thought for a few moments, looked up and said, ‘Dennis Prager is not in the mood for mincha? So what?’ It was one of the great moments of my life that my mood did not matter.” (Oct. 12, 2009)

April 29, 2011, Dennis said: “I am not good at petitionary prayer and rarely make it [on behalf of myself]. I’ve done it maybe twice in my life. I don’t like using God as a celestial butler.”

“The type of prayer that is meaningful to me is two things: A very beautiful service at a house of worship — and they are not common — with beautiful music in a beautiful environment. That can be uplifting to me if it is brief… After a certain period of time, you have the law of diminishing returns with prayer. I particularly like when a benediction or invocation or some sort of prayer is made at the beginning of the meal. That is the one that most moves me — a brief spontaneous prayer at the beginning of a meal invoking God and uplifting eating from that of biological necessity to something higher. The purpose of prayer is to elevate the moment.”

“In my religion, there’s too much prayer and it’s too long and it has not had good effects within religious Jewish life.”

April 13, 2010, Dennis said: “Are Orthodox Jewish women subservient? Boy, my mother was an Orthodox Jewish woman. The idea that she was subservient would make one laugh. It would create levity in the Prager home. She loved it. She loved the idea that there were specific obligations that fell on men and fell on women.”

On Jan. 11, 2012, Dennis Prager wrote in the Jewish Journal:

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat, …was still living in the United States and was looking for a rosh yeshiva (a dean) for a yeshiva he was starting. When the selection process had narrowed the applicants to 10 highly learned young talmidei chachamim (scholars), he interviewed each of them. First, he had them read and explain a particularly difficult portion of the Talmud. Each one passed that part of the interview handily.

Then he asked them a question: Suppose you ordered an electric shaver from a store owned by non-Jews, and by accident the store sent you two shavers. Would you return the second shaver?

Nine said they would not. One said he would.

What is critical to understand is why they answered the way they did. The nine who would not return the second shaver were not crooks. They explained that halachah (Jewish law) forbade them from returning the other shaver. According to halachah, as they had been taught it, a Jew is forbidden to return a lost item to a non-Jew. The only exception is if the non-Jew knows a Jew found the item and not returning it would cause anti-Semitism or a Khilul Hashem (desecration of God’s name). The one who said he would return it gave that very reason — that it would be a Khilul Hashem if he didn’t return it and could be a Kiddush Hashem (sanctification of God’s name) if he did. But he, too, did not believe he was halachically bound to return the shaver.

The nine were not wrong, and they were not taught wrong. That is the halachah. Rambam (Maimonides) ruled that a Jew is permitted to profit from a non-Jew’s business error.

This same subject came up recently in talking with a rosh yeshiva of a “black hat” yeshiva, a good and decent man, who defended this halachah in order to make the point that it is halachah — not “humanity,” as he termed it, or common sense, or conscience — that determines what is right.

On Dec. 25, 2006, the Orthodox Union in Los Angeles hosted a debate about Orthodox Judaism between Dennis Prager and Rabbi Yitzhok Adlerstein (The two have been friendly since the 1980s, Dennis often refers to Adlerstein as his “right-of-center Orthodox rabbi friend” in speeches, the friendship has waxed and waned over the years, with the men sometimes going years without talking). I was there and wrote the following:

People are upset about [Prager]  being invited to an O.U. event.

Rabbi Korobkin says the O.U. got a telephone message from a local leader of left-wing Orthodoxy complaining about Prager’s inclusion. That Prager was intolerant of other religions because he wants Muslim congressman Keith Ellison to take his swearing in oath on a Bible (in addition to the Koran).

Dennis: “If we Jews think we are secure in America because of the constitution and not because of the Bible, we are fools.”

“Of all the ethnic groups in America, we are the most foolish.”

“The great majority of serious Jews are Orthodox.”

“On the great moral issues of life, you and I are in agreement 99% of the time… Because we both believe the Torah comes from God.”

“The average Orthodox rabbi and Reform rabbi share almost nothing [in values].”

“You turned out to be right… I could not argue against it — the ordination of women. The adding of vast numbers of females to the Jewish and Christian clergy has not helped those religions. Women bring gifts that are different than what clerical leadership need. Women prefer compassion to standards and clergy have to prefer standards to compassion.”

“Faith matters a great deal. When I grew up [in Orthodoxy], everything was halakah. About once a year, one of the rabbonim might have a hashkafa [worldview] shiur where God might be mentioned. In my Orthodox world, the question was never what does God want. It was, what’s the halakah?”

“It’s hard to argue that God does not women to be able to marry if their husbands refuse a get [divorce]. Why even ask what does God want if my only question is, what is the halakah?”

“The eruv is baloney. It is a legal fiction. We’re going to fool ourselves that it is ok to wheel our kids to shul.”

“I can’t believe that God wants a woman [a mother of young children on Shabbos] to be under house arrest because there’s not a string around the city.”

“I believe that God doesn’t want us to look silly in the eyes of the nations. The L.A. Times article [on the Venice eruv] makes Orthodox Judaism look silly. You can’t blame the L.A. Times.”

“I believe that God wants Pesach [Passover] to be seven days [rather than the eight days now observed by traditional Jews in the diaspora]. That’s what he wrote. The Torah’s from God.”

“The siddur [prayer book] is too long. The mahzor [High Holiday prayer book] is too long. Nobody understands the piyutim [which make a Rosh Hashanah morning prayer service last over six hours].”

“Then I have Orthodox friends tell me, ‘Dennis, at our hashkama minyan, we do everything in 90 minutes.’ Then you have to say the prayers so fast they become gibberish. Evelyn Wood [speed reader] grew up Orthodox.”

“I believe that the Torah wants Pesach to be seven days because it recreates creation. Judaism stands on two pillars — creation and the Exodus from Egypt. When you make it eight days, you lose the whole point of what HaShem wanted.”

“Are we a Kiddish HaShem in the way we kill animals? We had the most humane way to kill animals…but do we today? I don’t think so.”

“Kosher veal? It’s killed in a painless way but it is raised in a painful way.”

“I wish I could say that halakah [Jewish law] makes people good.”

“My dad has been Orthodox his whole life. Even though he enlisted in World War II, he noticed all these yeshivot popping up in New York during World War II so Jews could avoid service in the armed forces by studying to become rabbis. All these goyim are fighting Hitler and all these frum Jews are enrolling in yeshiva to not fight Hitler.”

“The finest Jews I have known have tended to be Orthodox.”

Dennis complained about Orthodox Jews who don’t greet gentiles on the Sabbath.

“When I first met Rabbi Adlerstein, he was not the same. He had to get halakic permission to go on Religion on the Line (KABC) and dialogue with non-Jewish clergy. Today he’s a leader in Jewish life in talking to Christians and meeting with them and hugging them.”

Rabbi Adlerstein: “Just the men.”

Dennis: “The problem with Conservative Judaism is not the non-fidelity to halakah. They [the rabbis] are overwhelmingly faithful to halakah… The problem with Conservatism is that they don’t believe the Torah is divine.”

Dennis says it is wrong that we have to stand during Neilah (and much of the High Holiday prayer services). “If you had to stand during my talk, all you’d think about is when you could sit down.”

“We’re stuck with standing up more than any other religion.”

“You can’t say anything in Orthodox life that something rabbinic is a bad idea.”

Dennis says that only two or three people in his yeshiva class did not cheat.

“Joseph Telushkin was a Republican ten years before I was.”

A young man gets up and says how disgusted he is that Prager was invited to speak and to criticize the Orthodox. About 15 people applaud him.

Dennis: “Reform does not invite me (because of my politics). Conservative does. I spoke at the Rabbinical Assembly convention.”

“My parents went to my Stephen S. Wise minyan Saturday morning for my youngest son’s bar mitzvah. They loved it.”

Rabbi Korobkin says Dennis Prager thinks more like an Orthodox Jew than most Orthodox Jews.

At the end of the program, a man loudly pleads with Dennis to daven mincha with them. Prager agrees.

Getting ready to run his sixth straight high holiday service, Dennis wrote in the August 28, 2013 Jewish Journal:

I believe that study can bring many modern Jews closer to God and to Judaism than prayer does. Therefore, in our services, there is less prayer time and more study time. By study I am referring not to Torah study, but to studying the prayers that we do say (all from the traditional machzor, the High Holy Days prayer book), to the talks I give, and to a two-hour question-and-answer session on Yom Kippur afternoon.

I regularly explain a prayer that the chazzan is just about to recite: What does it mean that “God revives the dead?” If “God loves His people Israel,” why have His people suffered so much? Virtually every paragraph in the machzor offers the leader of the services a chance to speak on a great theme…

Music, too, brings many of us closer to God and religious feeling than prayer alone. Of course, many prayers are sung by cantors and/or the congregation. And I find the distinctive High Holy Days melodies extraordinarily uplifting. This is especially so with musical instruments. As I noted in a previous Jewish Journal column on musical instruments on Shabbat, God obviously knew the power of musical instruments to bring people closer to Him. He ordained their use in the Holy Temple on Shabbat and holidays. It was the rabbis who forbade their use after the Temple was destroyed.

I well recall the first time I attended a Reform Yom Kippur service — at Stephen S. Wise Temple — and heard the Kol Nidre played on a cello. I had tears in my eyes…

In our services (pragerhighholidays.net), the goal has been to shorten prayer time, but not necessarily the length of the service. Between listening to beautiful liturgical music sung and played, regular commentaries on the liturgy, and a sermon on a religious or ethical Jewish theme, the percentage of time during which the congregation prays is relatively small. In addition to holding people’s interest, this has another benefit: the prayers we do recite take on added meaning.

Keeping the services interesting and, hopefully, inspiring, has yet another benefit: people come on time…

The screenwriter and novelist Roger Simon attended our services last year and afterward wrote a column on how the services motivated him to fast for the first time since he was a child.

In order to encourage nonobservant Jews to fast on Yom Kippur, the best thing one can do is figure out how to keep them in shul all day. So this is what we do:

First, we start Yom Kippur services at 11 a.m. This late beginning is enormously helpful. For one thing sleep gives you strength to fast. For another, we reach the afternoon break after only about four hours. Instead of going home, the attendees are then encouraged to stay for an open discussion with me (and sometimes a guest) on any subject except politics for two hours. By the time that ends, we are within about two hours of the fast ending.

In a 2008 lecture on Lev. 19:19-25, Dennis said: “Over time, Jewish law exponentially increased beyond Torah and even rabbinic law, became burdensome, and that’s why you had the Sabbatai Zevi phenomenon in the 17th Century. One half of the Jewish people including many of its greatest rabbis believed that a man called Sabbatai Zevi was the Messiah. He was a Turkish Jew. It’s one of the most interesting religious stories. It’s never taught in yeshiva. 

“Jews were so embarrassed by their belief in Sabbatai Zevi that when it ended, it entered the memory hole of Jewish history. I went to yeshiva until 18 and never heard his name. And that included years of study of Jewish history. I learned about it in college. Nobody talks about it because it is so embarrassing. It wasn’t a goofy movement.”

“Sabbatai Zevi had a motto — ‘the annulling of a commandment is its fulfillment’. He changed a blessing from ‘He who frees the bound’ to ‘He who permits the prohibited.’ Two basic statements of his that were anti-law. It was an antinomian movement, which religious Jews bought into. That’s my argument that over time, the law did become too burdensome, and when given a theological out, many Jews jumped on that bandwagon.”

Dennis wrote in the Jewish Journal Nov. 6, 2013:

Many Orthodox Jews think that observance of halachah, more than faith, is what ensures Jewish survival. Every yeshiva student is taught the famous line from the Midrash: “It would be better that the Jews abandoned Me [God] but kept my commandments.”

But Conservative Judaism provides a nearly perfect refutation of this idea. Many Conservative rabbis in the past, and many today, have led thoroughly halachic lives, virtually indistinguishable from many modern Orthodox rabbis. If halachah is what keeps Jews alive, the Conservative movement should not be in decline — and it should certainly attract more Jews than Reform, the least halachic of the major denominations.

Furthermore, if halachah is the single most important thing to the Orthodox, why has Orthodoxy been so opposed to Conservative Judaism and to Conservative rabbis who have been scrupulously halachic? The answer is that the Conservative movement dropped belief in a God-given Torah. (Jewish Theological Seminary Web site: “The Torah is the foundation text of Judaism … not because it is divine, but because it is sacred, that is, adopted by the Jewish people as its spiritual font.”) And it is that, not lesser observance of halachah, that is the primary reason for Conservative Judaism’s decline.

Judaism cannot just be a commitment to the Jewish people, love of Israel or even just ritual observance. As important as each is, none will ensure Jewish survival as much as belief — belief in the God of the Torah and in the Torah of God.

In 1989 in a lecture series on the 13 principles of the Jewish faith according to Maimonides, Dennis delivered what he then described as the most difficult lecture of his life — whether or not God wrote the Torah. “My attitude is that I live as if [the Torah] is true while my brain retains its intellectual honesty and just doesn’t know.”