I had the pleasure of hearing Dennis Prager at a local appearance. His topic, "The Ten Commandments: Up Close and Personal." On the way I stopped for dinner at a Middle Eastern Restaurant. Turned out to be owned by Jews. The Middle Eastern food store next door was owned by Muslims, and they're good friends. Only in America. An example of the type Prager brings up on his show. A nice setup for the evening.

Dennis spoke at Temple Beth Shalom in Chandler, Arizona. Here are my notes:

Dennis is one of the clearest moral thinkers I have heard, and he has the ability to convey his thoughts in direct and understandable terms. He's quite tall, something you don't get from the radio or a TV interview where he's always seated.

After asking for a brief show of hands, he noted that suffering we have experienced in our lives was about equally divided between suffering at the hands of others, suffering by some natural occurance, or a combination. A goal of the 10 Commandments is to limit human suffering at each others' hands. The American Founding Fathers recognized the 10 Commandments as God's laws and the foundation for democratic human law. They were unique among Christians in that their referential base was in Judaism. How else to explain the use of biblical Hebrew in several university seals and the like?

Law itself is amoral. A nation of laws can be a nation of bad laws (Nazi Germany or Saddam's Iraq for example). A Judeo-Christian legal base helps ensure that the resulting civil laws are good.

1. I am the Lord your God...I took you out of slavery...
The Commandments don't make sense without this introductory statement, which establish the source of the Commandments. Hence, in the Jewish numbering, this is the first Commandment. The point of establishing God as the One who delivered the Israelites from slavery is that if we want to remain free, we must follow the Commandments. Unique among societies is the United States which forms the conjunction of liberty with "In God we trust" with "E Pluribus Unum"--From the Many, One--the Melting Pot. In our society, religion and liberty are mutually interdependent.

2. You shall have no other gods before Me...
There are more gods today than when the Commandments were written. A god is what people give their lives to. That which we make an end unto itself, such as fame or health. "The purpose of life is not to live; the purpose of life is to do something with it." Those American soldiers who died in Iraq did more with their lives than most 20-30 year olds could ever hope to do. Why the importance of One God? If there is One God, we're all brothers and sisters. This is a profound power of monotheism.

3. Do not take God's name in vain... Literally, do not "carry" God's name in vain, that is, do not do ungodly things in God's name. Evil in God's name is the worst sin, because you have brought shame on God. If you make it impossible to associate God with goodness (as He is the source of goodness) then you lessen the power of good in the world.

4. Keep the Sabbath day holy... Here is the only ritual prescription in the 10 Commandments. If you keep the Sabbath "all things will follow. Keeping Shabbat is a major way of keeping my sanity, the one day a week I leave the World and spend it with God, family, and friends...Turning off your electronics for 24 hours alone will transform your life. "God is the Absolute in a universe of relativity," he once told his atheist roomate, a physics major, which properly stumped him(!) Observing the Sabbath offers a witness to the world of a way to be holy, as one rabbi wrote, "building a cathedral in time."

5. Honor your father and mother... It says honor, not love, as in the case of stranger or neighbor. "It's sad if you don't love your parents, but it's not a sin." What about abusive parents? "Every law has a context." You don't have to love them, but you have to call them once a week" [audience laughs]. "Without honoring parents there is chaos in the home." And the Commandment "is addressed to adults, not just 7 year olds."

6. Do not murder... Improperly translated "kill." Hebrew, like English, has different words to distinguish different kinds of homicide. The commandment refers to murder, "to take life immorally."

7. Do not commit adultery... Moses comes down from the mountain and says, "I have have some good news and some bad news. The good news is I got Him down to 10. The bad news is [the one about] adultery stays [audience laughs]. Dennis notes that every time he tells that joke, it's the men who are laughing the most(!) We have confused infidelity with adultery. Christians have it tougher, but often misinterpret: "Jesus was precise in his wording. The sin of the heart is not the same as the act itself." The concern of the commandment is to preserve the family.

8. Do not steal... In some way the most important of all the commandments. All the Commandments are based on theft of some sort. "In my opinion the most widely violated of the Commandments." The concern of this Commandment specifically is the value of private property.

9. Do not bear false witness... Specifically perjury. "In my opinion all social evil (vs. individual evil) come from lies."

10. Do not covet...Unique in that it is the only Commandment concerning thought. To covet is not the same as to envy. Envy is unhealthy, but it is not a sin per this Commandment. Coveting is to want some specific thing; envy is to want something like it. If you covet and start scheming to steal, it leads to bad things. In large measure, the other Commandments can be drawn from this.

Various other quotes:

"There is no better an argument for God than good religious people; there is no better an argument against God than bad religious people."

Regarding his assessment of Islam, "I don't judge religions, I judge practicioners...Texts don't live, people live."

"I can't tell you at all the connection between what people believe and how they act," because he has not seen consistency.

Apologies to Dennis Prager for any misquotes.

Dennis Prager came to Phoenix to share an evening with a few hundred of us, and here are some notes:

Again I was impressed with his genuine warmth and thoughtfulness. He is real. The theme, which sort of became crystallized in the course of the talk, was "What brought me to where I am today," or some such thing. He told a few amusing anecdotes--how his camp counselor from when he was 11 years old listens to him on the radio and emailed him the other day--Dennis reads his emails himself--and recalled that Dennis--at age 11 mind you--would read The New York Times (admitting now how it's just not right for an 11 year old to be doing), and what a slob he was (more on that in a bit). He spoke of the development of his own faith, and his upcoming book on Judeo-Christian Values (you can get a taste from my weekly posts of his articles on the
Blog and in his article archive.

A few nuggets of wisdom:

• "Boise, Idaho is more cosmopolitan than New York City." Growing up as an Orthodox Jew in NYC, he never met a Christian (he liked the idea of Christianity as a child because "all you had to do to go to heaven was believe in Jesus, and not have to follow all the laws in the Torah"). As a youth, he didn't even meet a Reform Jew. New York is largely a conglomeration of ethnic neighborhoods, so many people can go through life and never meet someone outside of his ethnic group.

• Religious "belief is not what matters: values matter. They are separate things." I don't quite agree with the statement at face value, as my values come from my religious beliefs. But it helps to explain something that has baffled me. My conservative social values come from my Orthodox Christian faith, but there are some within my faith that fall along the liberal values line, a la Jim Wallis and his ideas in his book, God's Politics, which is basically an apologetic for the Left. Prager notes how he, as a practicing Jew, has much more in common with the Evangelical Christians who employ him than he does with liberal Jews. He said that he cannot judge the validity of any given religion; he can only judge the actions of practitioners of a religion. His statement is not as heretical as it seems. You will know a tree by its fruits.

• He reiterated how he is a JFK Democrat, and suggested sending John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address to college students to see if they could guess if it was a Republican or Democratic president who gave it. His point is how the values of liberals of JFK's day are the values of conservatives today. Conservatives tend to vote those [traditional] values, while liberals tend to vote their economic values [social values from an economic reference point] Thus, they couldn't understand how people in Kansas, for instance, voted against their economic interests by voting for Bush.

• The American Founding Fathers were very attuned to the Jewish roots of their Christianity, unlike the Christianity of Europe which suppressed its Jewish roots. Hebrew was in Harvard's core curriculum requirements until about the year 1800, the Yale University Shield depicts a Bible with Hebrew words they translate as "light" and "truth," and Thomas Jefferson saw the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt as a national symbol. Thus the values of the Founding Fathers were truly Judeo-Christian.

• Referencing a disagreement he had with his wife (I forget the context now) he pondered, "If a man is alone in the woods, is he still wrong?" <laughter, women poking their husbands was observed>

I got to ask a "two-part" question, which really was two different questions (I honed those skills in seminary, when there would be speakers and chances were you only got one question, so I would nest a couple into "one," partly to get them in and also to have a little fun at the expense of those who did ask ridiculously complex, multi-part questions). So I asked, on behalf of a "friend" how he learned to stop being a slob. He said, "How do you know I have?" [laughter]. But apparently something snapped a couple of years ago where he just started to clear his office of all the clutter--I'm waiting for that "snap" to happen... He also clarified how he would be messy, but clean (a distinction I have maintained as well).

The second "part" was what he thought of my idea of "Relative Absolutes," in which one can maintain the exclusive claims of his own religion, yet recognize at the same time how God is infinitely greater than what He has revealed to us. He liked it. And it still seems to me that such a perspective allows one to completely affirm the Gospel, while recognizing that God can reveal other truths to other people. So, as regards reincarnation, for example, I can say resolutely that is not true. Each person is a unity of body, mind, and spirit, and is thus unique. However, as I like to say, "God is God, and He can do whatever the hell He wants!" Yet I do not believe that reincarnation might be true. It isn't. But God may make it true for Buddhists, let's say, if He wants to. I can't judge that, at the same time, it does not diminish the Christian imperative to spread the Gospel, because that's what God has commanded us to do.

When the show ended, he took out his minicam and panned the audience slowly. It's sort of a video journal. After the show, I approached him with a "third" part to my question. He had said earlier, somewhat in a tongue-and-cheek context, that as a Jew, he only need concern himself with his actions, not his thoughts, and it seemed to him that a lot of Christians shoulder a lot of guilt over sinful thoughts, so being a Jew was much easier. I asked him about the Tenth Commandment (not to covet). And he clarified that in that particular provision that is true, but did not apply to thoughts in general. I linked that to Jeremiah 31:32-34, and whether that implied an accountability for thoughts, recognizing that Christians interpret that as a Messianic prophesy. He didn't have an answer, and he was direct and honest about that. I wasn't trying to needle him; I just learn more about his perspective. I would have loved to have explored it more with him, but that simply wasn't possible as others were waiting their turn.

So someday, hopefully in the very distant future, when he is in Jewish heaven and I am in Christian heaven, God willing, perhaps we can continue that conversation.