Dennis, We Need You Now More Than Ever

At the age of 17, I graduated from Hillel Community School in North Miami, an academically challenging yet warm atmosphere with many teachers who make me smile to this day when I think of them. After years of classes devoted to Jewish History, Hebrew, and a variety of Judaic studies ranging from Talmud to Chumash, Judaism with Israel at its core became forever intertwined with my identity. My Peruvian parents weren’t used to the idea of teenagers leaving home to study at far off universities no matter how much my high school guidance counselor tried to convince me to apply to prestigious universities; the local university would be as good as any other one if I made the most of it. So that fall, I began college close by and soon found myself the subject of attention of a volunteer from Get out the Vote. I had never encountered partisanship in school and honestly had no idea which political party to choose. My mother had been a U.S. citizen for nearly two decades but had never been inclined to vote before, yet I vaguely remembered hearing from my father that he had voted for President Clinton in a prior election, so I registered myself as a Democrat. Little did I know that barely a month later everything was about to change.

That fall, we were still dealing with the disappointing news that our beloved rabbi was moving to another congregation more than 70 miles away, and we were not looking forward to attending Kol Nidrei services. Who could possibly inspire us like Rabbi Leonid Feldman? Someone I had never heard of, and who I had no idea was a close friend of my rabbi, had been invited as the scholar in residence. After only a few sentences of Dennis Prager’s speech that solemn night I realized he had quite literally opened and examined my soul and was giving voice to my deepest thoughts. He had started with a joke that quickly became serious; why was it that when he met strangers, only the Jewish ones insisted on telling him which university their child went to or had graduated from? And why were these parents so proud of the Ivy League universities; didn’t they know those institutions were the least likely to espouse the very values they had raised their children with? Had they not realized that expensive university education produced knowledge but generally diminished wisdom? For the first time that year I felt at peace about not having applied to Harvard.

The following morning I arrived at Temple Emanu-El before services to prepare to sing with the choir, only to be met with the unexpected news that due to a hurricane warning the synagogue leadership had decided it was too much of a liability to have services there. Cantor Yehuda Shifman was rightfully beside himself; “But it’s Yom Kippur! We must pray. I will lead the services anywhere.” A spur of the moment bolt of inspiration struck my dad; “Let’s do it at our home. Do us the honor of having services at our home and we will welcome anyone who wants to join us.” A few men took turns carrying the Torah scroll, many others gathered a bunch of prayer books and so began the walk to my family’s house. A few blocks later, a woman who had seen the Torah from her window, barged out of her apartment and onto the street; “Please, please come inside. My elderly mother can’t go to Shul. Let us just kiss the Torah. Please.” About 40 minutes later the holy entourage arrived home to my mother’s complete surprise. Soon the chairs magically appeared as more than 60 people gathered to pray together. About an hour later, Dennis Prager showed up to this new and unassuming venue as if it had been planned all along. To this day we don’t know how he found out where to go. We spent 10 hours together being cleansed, uplifted, and inspired like never before. Now being the sole member of the choir, I sang more than ever before alongside Cantor Shifman and sat mesmerized each time Dennis spoke.

Dennis encouraged us to dedicate ourselves to live as religious Jews rather than secular ones. Yes, he explained, those of us who attend a non-Orthodox synagogue can be deeply committed to Jewish faith and values though simultaneously not strictly observant in the Orthodox sense, and should still call ourselves religious. His belief that religion was not an all or none approach invited us to find ways to strengthen our commitment to Judaism in ways that felt authentic and personal. Dennis explained further that because many secular Jews saw themselves as culturally Jewish rather than religiously Jewish, they had ended up adopting liberalism as their new religion. In that new religion they had grown to venerate the university and became obsessed with not merely preserving a separation of Church and State but removing all traces of God from the public sphere and this was already creating a dangerous moral vacuum. We who considered ourselves religious Jews had a special duty to align ourselves alongside our Christian brothers and sisters in the struggle to preserve a God-centered society. Only an America which stayed true to its Judeo-Christian values would continue to be the city on the hill that the whole world looked to. He urged us Jews to look beyond our painful centuries-long history with Christianity and acknowledge the present reality; though our theologies were just as different as ever, we had many of the same core values, and modern-day Christians were some of the most loyal Zionists and admirers of the Jewish people.

The words Dennis spoke pierced through the cognitive dissonance I had experienced often. As a child I distinctly remembered a teacher warning me that all Christians merely wanted to convert me. Yet at home, I was the daughter of Jews from Arequipa, a city that at the time barely had one tiny synagogue and certainly did not have a Jewish school. Instead my mother had attended an Evangelical school for 12 years, a school that encouraged and celebrated her Judaism, never once tried to convert her, and made her the most spiritual person I knew. My mom may not know more than a few words of Hebrew, but she can quote all of the psalms in Spanish, and both of my parents had taught me to appreciate rather than fear those of other religions. As Dennis spoke, my mother and I looked at each other knowingly many times that day. We both concluded that the “religious right” was the place for us. She never missed another day of voting in a local or national election from that moment forward, and I promptly changed my voter registration that week.

Over the next year I spent much of my free time reading articles and books by Dennis, listening to his radio show while I commuted to school, and eventually became an honorary intern in 2006 through which I transcribed several of his lectures. Though Prager University had yet to be founded, Dennis had already given me an education far beyond the walls of my university. I tried to see him in person at every opportunity I had; in 2012 at the Jewish Policy Center Forum and in 2013 at a Shabbat with Dennis Prager at Temple Menorah. There, my brother Simon remembers Dennis speaking of his visit to Jews in the USSR while trying to help them escape to Israel. In 2015 I watched Dennis go head-to-head with Alan Dershowitz in a talk titled “The Left, The Right, and the Challenge to Jewish Life in 21^st Century America.” Interestingly, ten years later, it appears their positions on Israel and the DEI movement have moved ever closer together as the Democratic party has moved further to the left.

Dennis taught me that actions matter more than feelings, and as such we should “examine policies on whether they do actual good rather than whether they simply feel good.” He reminded me that the great evils of recent centuries, communism and fascism, were not defeated by peace activists but by action through military might. He taught me that happiness isn’t a state of being, instead it is a moral obligation to be happy, one that we must constantly work on. Dennis highlighted that personal responsibility, rather than making oneself out to be a victim of others, is the key to resilience and leading a happy life. As such, moral poverty, not material poverty, causes crime. I looked to Dennis as my ally in my personal quest against profanity; we both agreed that profanity not only reflects poorly on one’s character as a lack of self-discipline, but also contributes to the moral decline of society at large. Like Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, a close friend of Dennis, explains in his book “Words that Hurt, Words that Heal,” vulgar language desensitizes us to the power of language and runs contrary to the moral imperative of engaging in ethical speech. To this day, I cringe inside every time I hear profanity and wonder, does the person who’s speaking not realize how he is affecting his own soul and that of his listener? I don’t want to get used to hearing certain words no matter how often they are said by much of society or my peers.

And, Dennis frequently said “Jews are the messengers that have lost their message.” As Jews distanced themselves from their religious beliefs and prioritized secularism, we stopped transmitting Judaism’s universal message of one God who demands moral behavior and adherence to absolute moral truths. It was time for us to take back our message and spread it across the world, and for me, that mission started on Yom Kippur of 2004. Because of Dennis I came to love and admire Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel and David Brog, its executive director for many years. When Jews fail to appreciate and misattribute Christian support of Israel, I feel truly ashamed. I see them as having taken on the important mission, and it is the Jews who have fallen behind and need to catch up.

In November 2024, I attended a lecture at the home of the man who had carried the Torah into that woman’s house on Yom Kippur more than 20 years ago. We flashed back to that unforgettable day as if it had happened yesterday and tears filled my eyes as I had only just learned that Dennis had fallen and seriously injured his cervical spine the day before. To the tall man who took a short nap on our couch on Yom Kippur, his legs dangling over the edge, I thank you for having changed my life indelibly, and the lives of so many. I will never forget spending the holiest day of the Jewish calendar year with you and I will continue to hope alongside your millions of listeners that we will once again be blessed with the opportunity to learn from you. I pray those long legs lift you up once again as God grants you, Shmuel Nechemia ben Hinda, a miraculous healing and complete recovery. America so desperately needs you at this precise moment; your clear and unapologetic wisdom expressed calmly, respectfully, and purposefully is sorely lacking in our crass, rude world. You who speaks fluent Russian after studying the USSR for many years would encourage the United States, the greatest force for good in the history of the world, to clearly and unabashedly support Ukraine against an advancing Russian empire. You would help rally the world alongside Israel in its fight against pure evil.

Dennis, we need you now more than ever.