LESLEY PEARL
Bulletin Staff
If you said a prayer before eating a bagel or afterward, you'd be a happier person.
So says Dennis Prager, outspoken Los Angeles-based ABC radio host and the author of "The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism," "Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism" and a collection of secular essays, "Think a Second Time."
Prager's newest treatise, "Happiness is a Serious Problem," will be released later this year by HarperCollins. It lists 17 obstacles to happiness and 30 solutions.
"Needless to say I can't make anyone happy. But I would wager the price of the book to anyone that they would be less unhappy after reading it," Prager said in a recent phone interview, before a recent appearance in the Bay Area.
Prager spoke at Congregation Beth David in Saratoga as part of the Jewish Community Center of Greater San Jose's Distinguished Lecture series. The topic was "Why Be Jewish?" And Prager, author of the newsletters "Ultimate Issues" and "The Prager Report," contends that religion and happiness go hand in hand.
Human nature is the greatest obstacle to happiness, Prager says. Gratitude is the solution. And "religion is the greatest gratitude-inducing system devised.
"Human nature is insatiable. It can never be satisfied. Understanding that we're never going to be satisfied is part of the key," Prager says.
The other part is embracing opportunities that invoke a sense of gratitude, like "making blessings before you eat. Secular people don't thank anyone before they eat," Prager says. "There is no question in my mind that people who thank God for what they have are happier."
Prager adds that while gratitude is ubiquitous in all religions, Judaism offers specific prayers for a variety of situations, from meeting a learned person to waking up in the morning. He was thrilled at the opportunity to speak about them, "because I'm not often asked to talk about my first passion," he says, and because "the case for Judaism is made rarely, and not effectively and not rationally."
Secular Jews uphold the Holocaust and Israel as reasons to be Jewish, he says. Religious Jews cite tradition and the phrase "God says" for their observance. "I believe [this]. But it is not convincing except to a handful of people willing to make a leap of faith," Prager says.
"I am as equally unhappy with the Orthodox movement to the right as the Reform movement to the left," he adds.
Prager argues that the Jewish people have a unique role in history and that this is reason enough to be Jewish.
"We are divinely appointed. I believe in our chosenness and make a case for ethical monotheism. It's the only response to evil in the world," he says. "The answer is to take Judaism seriously, to take God seriously; to not worship either tradition or political correctness."
Prager does neither. He says no to both kosher veal and same-sex marriage, and contends that both notions are oxymorons.
Raising veal is inhumane, Prager says, pointing to the crowded conditions in which calves are kept. While laws of kashrut provide for only the most painless form of killing, they do not prohibit eating veal, which can be considered kosher.
Same-sex marriage goes against Judaism's "radical battle to channel sexuality into heterosexual monogamy," he adds. "Human completeness is, according to Judaism, available only though bonding with the opposite sex.
"What adults do on their own is their business. If they want social sanction, that's my business."
Such hard-line, Torah-based views account for the unpopularity of religion, Prager says. Spirituality, on the other hand, is popular.
The two should not be confused, says the man dubbed a "moral compass" in Buzz magazine's "10 Most Powerful People in Los Angeles" issue.
The search for spirituality "is not exclusively, but mostly, 1960s self-preoccupation: `What will make me feel good now that I'm getting older?'" he adds. "Religion is wherein I say, `There is something that pre-exists me, is wiser than me and to which I am accountable.'"
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