This week’s Torah portion is Shoftim.
Eat, Pray, Love With Monica is a 2010 Torah Talk by American author Monica. The memoir chronicles the author’s trip around the hovel after her divorce, and what she discovered during her travels.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Eat, Pray, Love With Monica X
This week’s Torah portion is Shoftim.
Eat, Pray, Love With Monica is a 2010 Torah Talk by American author Monica. The memoir chronicles the author’s trip around the hovel after her divorce, and what she discovered during her travels.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Revisiting Narcissism
From DennisPrager.com: “Dennis and Dr. Stephen Marmer, member of the clinical faculty of the UCLA medical school and practicing psychiatrist in Brentwood, CA revisit a key issue to your happiness – narcissism.”
Stephen Marmer: “Narcissism in common terms is grandiosity — thinking that you are the greatest ever. Narcissism is seeing things only from your perspective. Anyone else’s perspective is either wrong or irrelevant. Only your perspective counts. Only your thoughts are correct. Only your emotions are justified. Only your hurts are legitimate hurts. Only your innocent actions should be interpreted as innocent by everybody else, even if it hurts them. Everything in your life is for you. Self-referential. Your world beginning and end.”
Dennis: “The moment you can say, maybe they’re right, you’re undoing narcissism.”
Stephen: “Yes! I can see your point of view. Or, I understand how that felt for you. Or, your claim right now has more merit than mine. All those are signs that the narcissism is changing. Nowhere is this more clear than in the difference between narcissistic love and real love.”
“Most narcissistic people don’t bother to see things from an outsider perspective. If you only see things from your point of view, you won’t get to the point where you notice. Mostly people learn that they are narcissistic when people they care about tell them they are narcissistic.”
Aging Gracefully Sexually
An old woman calls in and says, “If a man does not love his wife because she won’t dye her hair, then she has the wrong husband.”
Dennis: “Why doesn’t it go in the other direction? If a man is married to a woman who won’t improve her looks by dying her hair, then he’s married to the wrong wife.”
Good point.
Dennis asks what is wrong with people looking younger than their chronological age.
Did you ask your husband if he would prefer you to dye your hair or to be grey? That is a question a wife owes her husband.
This matter is a great reason to go Asian or Persian, because they retain their naturally dark hair color longer. They age more gracefully.
The Facebook Effect
I just read this new book by David Kirkpatrick.
The story of Facebook is a great one but Kirkpatrick is a plodding writer.
The earlier book on Facebook (getting turned into a movie) was a much better read.
One thing caught my attention in this new book was that Facebook helps people become more unified. They don’t have a profile for work and a profile for friends and a profile for family. They have just one Facebook profile and it is meant to have their real name.
I used to live many lives. Now I lead one life. I have family on my Facebook. I have friends from childhood. I have Orthodox Jewish friends. I have porn star friends.
I’m listening to a 2002 lecture by Dennis Prager on his life and he says: “I was an angel at home but I was a devil at school.”
The Meaning Of Tattoos
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager, who was born in 1948, says that as a kid, he almost never saw tattooed women. “There was a sideshow in circuses of freaky people and one of them was the tattooed woman.”
“I don’t understand the appeal of women covering their skin with anything. Women’s flesh is the allure. If it is painted, why is it alluring?”
“My mother-in-law is a psychiatrist and she says that tattooing is a diagnostic issue.”
“Where there is a heavy dose of tattooing there may be an element of will someone try to get to know me through this major barrier, this veil, I’ve put up. It’s a statement of profound emotional insecurity. I’ve read that some women who’ve been raped will get obese to not attract any more men. I wonder if heavy tattooing is a way of psychologically working through something.”
Homosexuality Principles Orthodox
Luke Ford writes: The Torah does not categorize people by either sexual orientation or practice. The Torah does not divide between homosexuals and heterosexuals. It does not divide between people who like to have sex with teens and those who like to have sex with those their own age. It does not divide between people who like vanilla sex and those who like raunchy sex. It does not divide between people who like sex through a particular entrance and those who prefer another opening.
The Torah says man-on-man sex is forbidden, but it does not classify those who have such sex as “homosexuals.”
The idea of dividing people up based on the sexual acts they do is profoundly anti-Torah.
Two. The rabbi writes: “The document repeatedly acknowledges the very real possibility that homosexual orientation is genetically based and is not subject to change.”
Whether or not certain sexual preferences are genetic, or any behavioral choices are genetic, is irrelevant to the Torah. There is no basis in the Jewish tradition for cutting people a break on the observance of G-d’s commandments because they might have a genetic predisposition to doing certain things. On the contrary, the Torah assumes that the will of man’s heart is nothing but evil from his youth and therefore people should not follow their predispositions when these predispositions clash with G-d’s directives.
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