I asked him what he would say if there were young kids listening to the show who might be gangbangers but who listen because they’re different from their friends. Those kids would never admit they listen to Michael Savage, but I thought they might be listening because there was something there for them. For kids like that, tough as nails, in the street, doing what he had done as a kid, I asked Michael Hardy what he would say to them. Would he tell them it’s the hero who puts the gun down?
Hardy replied, “Well, I would say—I would say that. I would definitely say that, but I’d say this also: when you see prison movies, you see two hours, American Me, or whatever else the prison movie is. Okay? If you want to go there, it’s not gonna be two hours. It’s gonna be millions and millions of seconds and minutes. Okay, millions of misery-packed time, okay, in a concentration camp setting where people concentrate on making your life miserable. Okay? They concentrate on doing that, whether it be the guards or the other inmates. You walk out, you don’t know if there’s gonna be a shooting. I was there when they fired eighteen shots in Corcoran on the yard. Okay? I watched people get stabbed in the mess hall. They start shooting the M14s, bullets are ricocheting. This is a hell that I can’t understand anybody—and—and you’re not fighting for anything. There’s nothing worthy.
Train up a child in the way he should go,
And even when he is old, he will not depart from it.
—Proverbs 22:6
“It’s not like what Audie Murphy did. Killed like, what, a hundred sixty Germans in twenty minutes? He did something here. Okay? It’s not that. You’re fighting for nothing. For people—your homeboys? You ain’t gonna get a card from them. You ain’t gonna get a letter from them. You ain’t gonna get a grunion from them. Nothing. You’re there alone.
“Make the decision. Make the decision before you cut that line and wind up in the Colorado River on the greatest rapids that you can ever imagine, and you’re probably gonna drown in the mix. Make that decision. Stay home. Be true to your family. I’ve met a lot of—I met a lot of good kids in that—in this system I just came out. Good kids that are gonna spend the rest of their life, because of three strikes, in prison. And they got a lot of good values, they just need a little turn. And I’m gonna tell you something, they ain’t gonna get it, because the biggest—the biggest maggots of the system here are the California Department of Corrections. They want three strikes because they want job security. So these kids that could do something, could be something, they need a break.
“You need to change the—some kind of learning system, whatever it is, okay, but you need to reach people. Waste all this energy and spend all this money on prisons and not school and not religious training, and take God out of the equation of this country. This is one country under God. When you take Him away, He’s not above us anymore, you understand?”
And He shall judge between the nations,
And shall decide for many peoples;
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruninghooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more.
—Isaiah 2:4
Yes, I understood exactly what he was saying. We lose our protection. And though Michael Hardy was ultimately 100 percent responsible for the crimes he committed, we can certainly do things to help future kids make better decisions than he did. It all starts with God. As individuals, as a nation, we must decide to seek Him out, to turn our backs on the sins of our past, and to follow through on doing His will. It’s up to each one of us.
And Job spoke, and said:
Let the day perish wherein I was born,
And the night wherein it was said: ‘A man-child is brought forth.’
Let that day be darkness;
—Job: 3:2–4
Loss
A lot of people are in pain right now. Everyone has lost something, either dear to them or that they believed in. People react differently to loss. For example, we see the madness of the progressives expressing their election loss with violence and hatred. What is loss but losing that which you once possessed or thought you possessed?
Consider what loss is. What has been the greatest loss in your life? How did you cope with it, be it of a loved one, a business, your pride, your dignity, your job, your promotion, your health? It’s an interesting question to me because loss is part of life. Everyone thinks they’re only going to win. They think that every time they throw the dice they’re going to win. They’re not.
I want to talk about this issue of loss, because a long time ago, back in the 1960s, when I was studying for my BS in science, there was a popular writer named Kahlil Gibran. He was a Lebanese Catholic writer who later converted to Baha’i, who lived between 1883 and 1931. He wrote a simple book called The Prophet. In it, he wrote on love, children, death, joy, and sorrow. My friends and I read and discussed him avidly. It shows you how different the generations are. So many of the young today are numb. They’re frightened of life. They’re frightened of love, not even knowing what love is or what loss is. Many of them are afraid to get a driver’s license or take their place in society. They can’t become adults.
A lot of people in America are hurting right now. Years ago, I wrote a book, and in it I told a story called “The Yarn Man Gets Cancer.” It was about a man in the world in which I grew up, in Queens, New York. He was a poor man, as my father was. They were immigrants. They had probably come over on the same boat together. They had nothing; they were dirt poor. They lived fifteen to a room. I’m talking about cold-water flats on the Lower East Side before it became hip. It was a slum. Fifteen people lived in that man’s apartment, his whole family that had come over from Europe together.
Well, they went out on the road of life here in America, that Yarn Man and my father. My father went down his road; the Yarn Man went down that road. They remained friends for life. The Yarn Man became wealthier than my father. He struck it big in a certain business that became fashionable, and he enjoyed his wealth. He bought a brand-new house out on Long Island, while we stayed in our little attached house in Queens.
My father did okay, but he never did great. That’s okay. He always made a living, and my mother never had to work. She was a housekeeper and, believe me, a great one. It meant a big deal to us children. We didn’t know how great it was to have a mother who was always there, who made sure that the sheets were clean, the meals were served, we did our homework, and did all the other things mothers do.
So the Yarn Man went on in life and made a lot of money. He opened a chain of wholesale stores. But then something happened. The trend that had made him wealthy changed. People no longer bought his product. He went bankrupt. He lost the house and had to move with his in-laws back to the tiny apartment he had lived in when he was an immigrant boy. He fell from Heaven to Earth.
I’d known him since I was a little kid. I’d always loved him. I loved all my father’s friends and all my uncles. I loved everybody. It was an extended family. It was very warm and very close. This doesn’t exist in America anymore, unless you are in an ethnic community or a very religious community. The sense of togetherness, the close-knit sense, is gone. Let me tell you something, it’s beautiful when you have it. He was part of that for me. He was like a second uncle, father, whatever. We didn’t separate it.
Many are the ills of the righteous,
But the LORD delivereth him out of them all.
—Psalms 34:19
I left New York, went out on my road, and came back. I left as a young man and came back a few years later. And there was this man, who had been very big in my mind, who had been wealthy, reduced to sitting in a chair in the living room in which I had grown up on Utopia Parkway, with tears in his eyes. He had a cigar in his hand—he was always a cigar smoker—and he looked at me with tears in his eyes and almost reached out and held my hand. He said, “Michael, Michael, look what happened to me. Look what happened to
me. Did you hear what happened to me?” I said, “No, no, what happened, Barry?” He said, “I lost everything. I have nothing.” He said, “I wish God had given me cancer rather than what He did to me.” I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned.
Well, I went out back on my road, I went back to my plant collecting, my graduate studies. I heard he got cancer a few months later and died. What is this story about? It’s about how he took that loss internally and it killed him. He just couldn’t cope with the loss. Yes, he was a cigar smoker, but there are many cigar smokers who don’t get cancer. Cancer’s a very interesting disease, and I don’t want to go into that right now. We’ve all thought about it our whole life. If we’re somewhere in the level of consciousness, we all think about diseases from time to time. What do you think all this obsession with food, vitamins, healthy living is about? It’s trying to keep away the undertaker, isn’t it?
Of course, he increased his risk of cancer with the cigars, but that’s not what did it. When he lost his business, his dignity, and his pride, he was hollowed out inside, and nothing replaced it. As you well know, nature abhors a vacuum. And in his vacuum, some cells grew. Because that vacuum was not filled, the cells multiplied and divided. That’s how cancer grew in him.
Again I’m asking you an esoteric question, which I realize doesn’t have much to do with the news of the day. It isn’t what people are talking about on the radio or in the newspaper. I’m asking you to consider what is the greatest loss in your life, because there’s not an adult who has not lost something important. How have you coped with the loss, be it of a loved one, a business, your pride, your dignity, your job, your promotion, your health? You must have lost something. Humans lose things. Lots of people are in pain right now, and people react differently to loss.
The Lebanese poet and artist Khalil Gibran wrote about loss. He was a very tragic figure who died young and is best known for his classic 1923 book The Prophet. But for some reason, his writings touched my friends and me. We didn’t know why at the time, but everyone was reading him in those days.
I particularly remember Gibran’s writings on children, on joy and sorrow, and on love and on death. They were simple.
I’ll give you a short example of what he wrote:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
That’s one of the things he wrote on joy and sorrow. What a great insight. Some of it was such great poetry. It’s so true that joy would have little meaning without sorrow. Only the possibility of sorrow or disappointment can elevate the human soul to the heights of joy. And only hoping or wishing for joy can give definition to sorrow, which is the absence of joy. Are we not all like a wine cup fired in a potter’s oven, burned by sorrow many times in our lives, only to be filled with wine at others?
The one poem I remembered the most, and I was young when I read this stuff, was his poem on children. We talked about this one and never forgot it. I still remembered it as I was raising my own children. It stays with me to this day.
Here is another short example of what Gibran wrote:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.…
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
I like the imagery of children being the arrows, parents the bows. Both are necessary, but once the bow has released the arrow, it can no longer control where the arrow goes. Everything has been done up to that point to put the arrow on the right path, but now the bow can only watch. Who’s ever touched anything like this in his life? Not since the Bible itself has anything this good been written about children. I’ve read a lot in my life. I’ve read an awful lot of books. As a scholar working toward my master’s degrees and my PhD, believe me, I read a lot of books. Back then I read a lot of scientific articles. I’ve read thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of stuff on the Internet since then. No one else has ever written about children like that.
Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord;
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
As arrows in the hand of a mighty man,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them;
They shall not be put to shame,
When they speak with their enemies in the gate.
—Psalms 127:3-5
The Meaning of Hanukkah
So why do Jews light candles for eight nights? It used to be a joke that Christian kids get gifts on only one day during the holidays and Jews get gifts on eight nights. It used to be a joke between Christians and Jews. It was very cute. See, in those days, you could joke about religions and everyone still got along. Then a meanness came into this country like you cannot believe. An ill wind was brought in that makes people hate every other religion.
So what is Hanukkah? What’s its meaning to you? Is it a kids’ holiday? You light candles, get gifts, spin a dreidel.
The story goes that in ancient times the Jewish temple was sacked by the Romans. And when the Jews went back to the temple, they went through the rubble and looked for the holy oil that had been used to light the lamps. The oil was supposed to last only one night, but it lasted for eight.
What is the symbolism of such a story, even for those who are hopeless and have no religion whatsoever? It has tremendous symbolic power. It means that when you think all is lost, when you think you can’t go on, when you think there’s no hope, somewhere within you there is a holy oil that can still be lit. It can still light the fire within you. You must learn to always look for that holy oil within yourself. It’s there in the rubble of your being. No matter how destitute you are, no matter how broken you are, no matter how horrible your life appears to be, even if you don’t think you can take another second of it, stop for one minute and take a deep breath. Think of the deep resonance that put you here and put your ancestors here.
You weren’t born unto yourself. You’re the end line of millions of years of evolution. Countless thousands of generations of human beings produced you. What a waste it would be for you to go away, wouldn’t it? To kill yourself with drugs or alcohol or some other way?
So you say to yourself, wait a minute, I can’t just waste this incredible gift I was given, this gift of life. So you start to think, okay, all those generations that preceded me, dig into the rubble. Dig into the rubble of your being and look for that oil inside you, the holy oil, and reignite it.
That’s the true meaning of Hanukkah. I think it’s a beautiful story. It has no religious connotation in any way, but it has a tremendous power of giving anyone who’s looking to find it something within themselves to go on. It’s been written by poets in many other ways. Read Rudyard Kipling, and you’ll know what I’m talking about, the man who fights for the last ounce of strength. Every fighter knows it, every runner knows it, everyone in the field of battle knows it: you can reach into yourself and find something more.
Witness to the First Moment
Not to trivialize a sacred day, not to remove the power of abstinence did I find myself first resisting the commandment to fast, and later, years later, after “coming back,” I resisted my teacher’s temptation to enjoy food on this holiest of holy days!
As a rebellious kid, I once sped past my Queens temple in a gray and narrow AC Bristol on an autumn gold Yom Kippur. Blasting the exhaust to shock the congregants into noticing me, I awoke to the realization, about twenty years later, that by turning my back on my congregation, I had created my own exile. Loneliness and alienation may be good fuel for the searcher. Once discovered, a worthwhile goal should reward the seeker with a place, his place in time—and hopefully, reentry into his “group” or congregation.
In my case, nothing of the kind happened. Forever addicted to the sense of isolation that had sustained me in my travels, I became unable or unwilling to join any group, except
the occasional Passover celebrants I somehow managed to connect with from Fiji to Jerusalem.
Rabbi Zadok said:
Separate not thyself from the congregation;… make not of the Torah a crown wherewith to aggrandize thyself nor a spade wherewith to dig.
Then I found myself in a suicidal phase, a crisis congealed by piling too many “life stresses” into one brief month of my life.
Then, at the moment of my daughter Rebecca’s birth, seeing life oozing from life, witnessing the first moment, I faced directly the fact of the last moment, my mortality.
Unusual only in the Western world, this male distancing from birth? Not so! Prohibitions abound. Men in many cultures are forewarned to stay away. Yet millions have attended and do attend this rite of passage without experiencing an emotional cataclysm. But for Jewish men descended from kohans (priests), this moment, among others, is strictly taboo.
Do not contact a corpse, nor witness a fetus to life. Why?
Perhaps our ancient priests abstained from some of life’s most poignant moments to maintain their intellectual distance and objectivity. However, perhaps this distancing, this aversion to life’s messier moments, established a too-intellectual Judaism bearing a sea of dry teachings, devoid of meaning to an unbridled meanderer.
God, Faith, and Reason Page 12
