Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality

The Jewish Religion, and later Christianity, brought about the ultimate sexual revolution

When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. It is not overstated to say that the Torah’s prohibition of non-marital sex made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism, and later carried forward by Christianity.

The revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

By contrast, throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.

Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is utterly wild. Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men sexually.

Desexualizing God and religion

Among the consequences of the unchanneled sex drive is the sexualization of everything–including religion. Unless the sex drive is appropriately harnessed (not squelched–which leads to its own destructive consequences), higher religion could not have developed.

Thus, the first thing Judaism did was to de-sexualize God–“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” by his will, not through any sexual behavior. This broke with all other religions, and it alone changed human history.

The gods of virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations. In the Near East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan, El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god Krishna was highly sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha; the god Samba, the son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men. In Greek beliefs, Zeus married Hera, chased women, abducted the beautiful young male, Ganymede, and masturbated at other times; Poseidon married Amphitrite, pursued Demeter, and raped Tantalus. In Rome, the gods sexually pursued both men and women.

Given the sexual activity of the gods, it is not surprising that the religions themselves were replete with all forms of sexual activity.

• In the ancient Near East and elsewhere, virgins were deflowered by priests prior to engaging in relations with their husbands, and sacred or ritual prostitution was almost universal.

• Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship.

• In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place between the king and a priestess.

• Women prostitutes had intercourse with male worshipers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa, and ancient and modern India.

• In ancient Israel itself, there were repeated attempts to reintroduce temple prostitution, resulting in repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex. The Bible records that the Judean king Asa “put away the qdeshim [temple male prostitutes] out of the land;” that his successor, Jehosaphat “put away out of the land...the remnant of the qdeshim that remained in the day of his father Asa;” and that later, King Josiah, in his religious reforms, “broke down the houses of the qdeshim.”

• In India until the last century, certain Hindu cults have required intercourse between monks and nuns, and wives would have intercourse with priests who represent the god. Until it was made illegal in 1948, when India gained independence, Hindu temples in many parts of India had both women and boy prostitutes.

• In the 14^th century, the Chinese found homosexual Tibetan religious rites practiced at the court of a Mongol emperor.

• In Sri Lanka through the last century, Buddhist worship of the goddess Pattini has involved priests dressed as women, and the consort of the goddess is symbolically castrated.

Judaism placed controls on sexual activity. It could no longer dominate religion and social life. It was to be sanctified–which in Hebrew means “separated”–from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of husband and wife. Judaism’s restricting of sexual behavior was one of the essential elements that enabled society to progress.

Along with ethical monotheism, the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching changes in history.

The ubiquity of homosexuality

The revolutionary nature of Judaism’s prohibiting all forms of non-marital sex was nowhere more radical, more challenging to the prevailing assumptions of mankind, than with regard to homosexuality.

Indeed, Judaism may be said to have invented the notion of homosexuality, for in the ancient world sexuality was not divided between heterosexuality and homosexuality. That division was the Bible’s doing. Before the Bible, the world divided sexuality between penetrator (active partner) and penetrated (passive partner).

As Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University, recently wrote, the ancients were no more concerned with people’s gender preference than people today are with other’s eating preferences:

Ancient categories of sexual experienced differed considerably from our own. The central distinction in sexual morality was the distinction between active and passive roles. The gender of the object . . . is not in itself morally problematic. Boys and women are very often treated interchangeably as objects of (male) desire. What is socially important is to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. Sex is understood fundamentally not as interaction but as a doing of something to someone . . .

Judaism changed all this. It rendered the “gender of the object” very “morally problematic;” it declared that no one is “interchangeable” sexually. And as a result, it ensured that sex would in fact be “fundamentally interaction” and not simply “a doing of something to someone.”

To appreciate the extent of the revolution wrought by Judaism’s prohibiting homosexuality, and demanding that all sexual interaction be male-female, it is first necessary to appreciate just how universally accepted, valued and practiced homosexuality has been throughout the world.

The one continuous exception was Jewish civilization–and a thousand years later, Christian civilization. “None of the archaic civilizations prohibited homosexuality per se,” notes professor of sociology Dr. David E. Greenberg.

Judaism alone declared homosexuality wrong. And it said so in the most powerful and unambiguous language it could: “Thou shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22) “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed an abomination.” (Leviticus 20:13)

It is Judaism’s sexual morality, not homosexuality, that historically has been “deviant.” In order to make this point clear, consider but a handful of examples from throughout the world. Without these examples, this claim would seem unbelievable.

Unless otherwise noted, these examples are taken from a major work of scholarship published in 1988 by the University of Chicago, “The Construction of Homosexuality,” by New York University sociology professor David E. Greenberg. It is the most methodical sociological study of homosexuality through history ever written. (Each of his examples cites numerous sources.)

Pre-Columbian Americas: In North America, the Spanish and French explorers and missionaries who visited the New World quickly became aware of widespread Indian transvestism (men dressing as women) and homosexuality. Writing in 1776, Father Charlevoix, a Jesuit priest, found the Iroquois to have “an excess of effeminacy and lewdness. There are men unashamed to wear women’s clothing and to practice all the occupations of women, from which follows corruption that I cannot express. They pretend that it’s usage comes from their religion. These effeminates never marry and abandon themselves to the most infamous passions.”

In Central America, among the Mayans, there was widespread male homosexuality: “A strong homosexual component pervades close friendships of young married Mayan men as well as bachelors in southern Mexico and among Guatemalan Indians.”

Among the Aztecs, “Sodomy was virtually universal, involving even children as young as six. Cortez also found sodomy to be widespread among the Aztecs, and admonished them to give it up–along with human sacrifice and cannibalism. One of the Aztec gods, Xochipili, was the patron of male homosexuality and male prostitution.”

Ancient Near East: In Mesopotamia, Hammurabi, the author of the famous legal code bearing his name, had male lovers.

Egyptian culture believed that “homosexual intercourse with a god was auspicious.” Having anal intercourse with a god was the sign of a man’s mastery over fear of the god. Thus one Egyptian coffin text read, “Atum [a god] has no power over me, for I copulate between his buttocks.” In another coffin text, the deceased person vows, “I will swallow for myself the phallus of [the god] Re.”

Greece: Homosexuality was not only a conspicuous feature of life in ancient Greece, it was exalted. The seduction of young boys by older men was expected and honored. Those who could afford, in time and money, to seduce young boys, did so. Graphic pictures of man-boy sex (pederasty) adorn countless Greek vases.

“Sexual intimacy between men was widespread throughout ancient Greek civilization. . . . What was accepted and practiced among the leading citizens was bisexuality; a man was expected to sire a large number of offspring and to head a family while engaging a male lover. . . . The male homosexual act usually involved anal intercourse with a boy.”

“The interchangeability of boys and women was widely taken for granted.” But the culture most appreciated boys: “Atheneus, for example, remarked that Alexander the Great was indifferent to women but passionate for males. In Euripides’ play ‘The Cyclops,’ Cyclops proclaims, ‘I prefer boys to girls.’ Plato never married. The philosopher Bion (third century B.C.) advised against marriage and restricted his attention to his (male) pupils. The stoic philosopher Zeno . . . was also know for his exclusive interest in boys.” And “Plato makes clear in ‘Symposium’ that it was perfectly acceptable to court a lad, and admirably to win him.”

As Greenberg writes: “The Greeks assumed that ordinarily sexual choices were not mutually exclusive, but rather that people were generally capable of responding erotically to beauty in both sexes. Often they could and did.”

“Sparta, too, institutionalized homosexual relations between mature men and adolescent boys.” In Sparta, homosexuality “seems to have been universal among male citizens.”

Greek philosophical systems:

Epicureanism - “Within the framework of Epicurean philosophy . . . no distinction was made between homosexual and heterosexual partners.”

Stoicism - The Stoics “held the sexual function of the body to be morally indifferent, just like other bodily functions–from which it followed that love of men or women was to be viewed strictly from the point of view of expediency.”

Cynicism - The founder of cynicism, Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, “considered homosexual affairs acceptable provided the partner was worthy, and so did his disciple Diogenes (412-323 B.C.).”

Rome: Homosexuality was so common in Rome, that Edward Gibbon, in his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” wrote that “of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct” (i.e. not homosexual).

According to psychiatrist and sexual historian Norman Sussman, “In contrast to the self-conscious and elaborate efforts of the Greeks to glorify and idealize homosexuality, the Romans simply accepted it as a matter of fact and as an inevitable part of human sexual life. Pederasty was just another sexual activity. Many of the most prominent men in Roman society were bisexual if not homosexual. Julius Caesar was called by his contemporaries every woman’s man and every man’s woman.”

Polybius, the Greek historian who visited Rome in the second century BCE, wrote that most young men had male lovers. And Greenberg notes that “many of the leading figures in Roman literary life in the late Republic–Catullus, Tibullus, Vergil and Horace–wrote homophile poetry.” In addition, “male prostitution flourished throughout Italy.”

The emperor Trajan was known for his love of boys; his successor, Hadrian, put up sculptures of his male lover and Commodus “kept a little boy, naked except for jewelry, and often slept with him.” Tatian, a Christian who lived in Rome in the second century, wrote that the Romans “Consider pederasty to be particularly privileged and try to round up herds of boys like herds of grazing mares.”

Other ancient and feudal societies:

Carthage - As testified to by the 5^th century priest, Salvian, the Carthaginians “gloried in pederasty.”

The Celts - “According to Aristotle, the Celts esteemed homosexuality.” And writing in the 1^st century BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote: “The men are much keener on their own sex; they lie around on animal skins and enjoy themselves, with a lover on each side. The extraordinary thing is they haven’t the smallest regard for their personal dignity or self-respect; they offer themselves to other men without the least compunction. Furthermore, this isn’t looked down on, or regarded in any way disgraceful . . .”

The Gauls - “In lists of national characteristics, pederasty was considered the particular distinction of the Gauls.”

Scandinavia - “Cult transvestism persisted for centuries in Scandinavia. . . . Adam of Bremen, a church historian of the 11^th century, reports that ritual human sacrifices were carried out every nine years at Uppsala, during which obscene incantations were sung.” These “obscene incantations” were described by a Danish historian in the 12^th century as essentially involving “womanish body movements” and other features of cult homosexuality.

England - “The people of England,” wrote St. Boniface in 744, “have been leading a shameful life, despising lawful marriages, committing adultery and lusting after the fashion of the people of Sodom.” According to Greenberg, this was because “there was no prejudice against it [homosexuality].”

Asia:

China - According to Robert H. Van Gulik in his classic “Sexual Life in Ancient China,” during the last centuries BCE and the first century CE male homosexuality was quite fashionable in China. The first three emperors of the Han dynasty, for example, kept “powdered and roughed boys.”

Sex historian Arno Karlen reports that “two Arab travelers trekked through India and China in the 9^th century, and in their chronicles said that Chinese were addicted to sodomy and even performed it in their shrines.” During the Five Dynasties Period, 907-960, man-boy sex was generally accepted. Six hundred years later, “When the Jesuit Matteo Ricci visited Peking in 1583 and again in 1609, he found male prostitution to altogether lawful, and practiced openly. . . . To his dismay no one thought there was anything wrong with it. Several hundred years later, European travelers still reported that no one was ashamed of homosexuality.”

In the 19^th century, according to a visiting French physician, male bordellos acquired boys as young as 4 years old to train as prostitutes. “The boys received depilation, dilation of the anus, massages to develop the buttocks . . .They were effeminate and luxuriously dressed.”

Sir Richard Burton summed up the Chinese in these words: “Their systematic bestiality with ducks, goats and other animals is equaled only by their pederasty.” The Chinese, he wrote, are “the Chosen people of debauchery.”

It also is extremely important to recognize that one reason for homosexuality’s acceptance in China (and in Japan) was Buddhism. “Chinese Buddhism considered homosexuality to be a minor transgression . . .”

“During the feudal age, it [homosexuality] flourished among the military aristocracy. A samurai warrior went to battle accompanied by a favorite youth, who also served as a sexual partner. . . . Literary sources depict the relationship as highly romantic, sustained by undying loyalty. Sometimes samurai fought duels on behalf of their lovers.”

As noted above, Japanese Buddhism posed little obstacle to male homosexuality. “Japanese Buddhism appears to have disregarded it [homosexuality] altogether. . . . Buddhist monks were not allowed to have intercourse with women; but as male partners were not explicitly prohibited, many monks took youthful male lovers, a practice that was considered quite acceptable. The Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier registered his shock at the indifference of the population to the open homosexuality of the Buddhist priests on the occasion of his visit to Japan in 1549. Legal codes of the period do not even mention homosexuality.” In the 1630s, emissaries of the Dutch East India Company reported that “all the priests . . . are strongly attached to unnatural lusts . . .”

Thailand - In Siam in the 17^th century, “pederasty was extremely common, virtually universal.”

Indochina - In French Indo-China, “adult men commonly had boy lovers, even if they were married.”

Arabs and Muslims:

Arabs - In the Arab and Islamic worlds, “A de facto acceptance of male homosexuality has prevailed in Arab lands down to the modern era.” As early as the 10^th century, German historians depicted Christian men as preferring martyrdom to submitting to Arab sexual demands.

In the words of one of the world’s great scholars of Islam, Marshall G.S. Hodgson, “The sexual relations of a mature man with a subordinate youth were so readily accepted in upper-class circles that there was often little or no effort to conceal their existence.”

“It is a common belief among the Arabic-speaking mountaineers of Northern Morocco that a boy cannot learn the Koran well unless a scribe commits pederasty with him. So also an apprentice is supposed to learn his trade by having intercourse with his master.”

“In Morocco . . . pederasty has been an ‘established custom’ with boys readily available in the towns. As late as 1952 . . . male students of the Islamic University engaged in homosexual relations openly and publicly.

“In 19^th century Algeria, ‘the streets and public places swarmed with boys of remarkable beauty who more than shared with the women the favor of the wealthier natives.’

“In Siwa, an oasis town in Libya, pederasty was practiced very widely [in the 20^th century], with parents prostituting their own sons.

“A psychiatric survey [reported in 1971] of Iraq found male and female homosexuality to be common among men and women.”

Non-Arab Muslims - As for non-Arab Islam, “the situation,” Greenberg concludes, “has been little different.”

“Ever since the 16^th century, Western visitors have commented on the pervasiveness of Turkish pederasty. Large numbers of boys were captured or purchased for personal use, placed in brothels, or resold; the demand for them struck all observers as remarkable.”

The Marlukes, who ruled Egypt from 1249, “were renowned for pederasty with youths purchased from non-Moslem peoples.”

In Northwest Pakistan, men “consider the most satisfying form of sexual gratification to be anal intercourse with a bedagh (passive male partner).”

“John Fryer, who traveled to Persia in the late 17^th century, found that ‘The Persians, when they let go their modesty . . . covet boys as much as women.”

Another visitor to Persia in the same century, John Chardin, reported that he had found “numerous houses of male prostitution, but none offering females;” and “some of the greatest Persian love poetry is written to boys.” In 1985, Paul Cowan reported that an Iranian student who wore Western-style clothes and who laughed at a Khomeini demonstration was raped by a group of teenagers loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In Afghanistan, at the end of the 19^th century, Sir Richard Burton found a country “saturated with the Persian vice.” He saw Afghan merchants invariably “accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in women’s attire with Koh’d eyes and roughed cheeks, long tresses and henna’s fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in Kajawas or camel-panniers. They are called Kuch-I safari or traveling wives . . .”

Louis Dupree, perhaps the West’s leading scholar on Afghanistan, wrote in his 1973 book on Afghanistan that male homosexuality remains common there.

Among the Moguls (Muslims who ruled in India), a Dutch traveler wrote that male homosexuality “is not only universal in practice among them, but extends to a bestial communication with brutes, and in particular with sheep.”

Summary: David Greenberg summarizes the ubiquitous nature of homosexuality in these words: “With only a few exceptions, male homosexuality was not stigmatized or repressed so long as it conformed to norms regarding gender and the relative ages and statuses of the partners . . . The major exceptions to this acceptance seem to have arisen in two circumstances.” Both of these circumstances were Jewish.

Biblical opposition to homosexuality

The Hebrew Bible, in particular the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), has done more to civilize the world than any other book or idea in history. It is the Hebrew Bible that gave humanity such ideas as a universal, moral, loving God; ethical obligations to this God; the need for history to move forward to moral and spiritual redemption; the belief that history has meaning; and the notion that human freedom and social justice are the divinely desired states for all people. It gave the world the Ten Commandments, ethical monotheism, and the concept of holiness (the goal of raising human beings from the animal-like to the Godlike).

Therefore, when this Bible makes strong moral proclamations, I listen with great respect. And regarding male homosexuality–female homosexuality is not mentioned–this Bible speaks in such clear and direct language that one does not have to be a religious fundamentalist in order to be influenced by its views.

Judaism cannot make peace with homosexuality because homosexuality denies many of Judaism’s most fundamental principles. It denies life, it denies God’s expressed desire that men and women cohabit, and it denies the root structure that Judaism wishes for all mankind, the family.

If one can speak of Judaism’s essence, it is contained in the Torah statement, “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life.” Judaism affirms whatever enhances life, and it opposes or separates whatever represents death. Thus a Jewish priest is to concern himself only with life. Perhaps alone among world religions, Judaism forbade its priests to come into contact with the dead. To cite some other examples, meat (death) is separated from milk (life); menstruation (death) is separated from sexual intercourse (life); carnivorous animals (death) are separated from vegetarian, kosher animals (life). This is probably why the Torah juxtaposes child sacrifice with male homosexuality–condemning both as “abominations.” Though they are not morally analogous, both represent death: one deprives children of life, the other prevents their having life. This parallelism is present in the Talmud: “He who does not engage in propagation of the race is as though he had shed blood.”

‘Choose life’

God’s first declaration about man (the human being generally, and the male specifically) is, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Now, presumably, in order to solve the problem of man’s aloneness, God could have made another man, or even a community of men.

But instead God solved man’s aloneness by creating one other person, a woman–and not a man, not a few women, not a community of men and women, Man’s solitude was not a function of his not being with other people; it was a function of his being without a woman.

Of course, Judaism also holds that women need men. But both the Torah statement and Jewish law have been most adamant about men marrying than about women marrying. Judaism is worried about what happens to men and to society when men do not channel their drives into marriage.

In this regard, the Torah and Judaism were highly prescient: The overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by unmarried men. Thus, male celibacy, a sacred state in many religions, is a sin in Judaism. In order to become fully human, male and female must join. In the words of Genesis, “God created the human . . . male and female He created them.” The union of male and female is not merely some lively idea; it is the essence of the Jewish outlook on becoming human.

The family

Few Jews need to be informed of the centrality of family to Jewish life. Throughout their history, one of the Jew’s more distinguishing characteristics has been their commitment to family life. To Judaism, the family–not the nation, and not the individual–is to be the fundamental unit, the building block of society. Thus, when God blesses Abraham, He says, “Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

Homosexuality’s effect on women

Yet another reason for Judaism’s opposition to homosexuality is homosexuality’s negative effect on women.

One of the most remarkable aspects of contemporary society’s acceptance of homosexuality is the lack of outcry from and on behalf of women. “Outcry” is used deliberately, for there is certainly a significant amount of quiet crying by women about this issue. One frequently hears single women lament how many single men are gay.

But the major reason for women, and men concerned with women’s equality, to be concerned with homosexuality is the there seems to be a direct correlation between the prevalence of male homosexuality and the relegation of women to a low societal role. At the same time, the emancipation of women has been a function of Western civilization–the civilization least tolerant of homosexuality.

In societies where men sought out men for love and sex, women were relegated to society’s periphery. Thus, for example, ancient Greece, which elevated homosexuality to an ideal, was characterized in Sussman’s words, by “a misogynistic attitude.” Homosexuality in ancient Greece, he writes, “was closely linked to an idealized concept of the man as the focus of intellectual and physical activities. . . . The woman was seen as serving but two roles. As a wife, she ran the home, as a courtesan, she satisfied male sexual desires.” Classicist Eva Keuls describes Athens at its height of philosophical and artistic greatness as “a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to the male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers. . . .”

In medieval France, when men stressed male-male love, it “implied a corresponding lack of interest in women. In the Song of Roland, a French mini-epic given its final form in the late 11^th or 12^th century, women appear only as shadowy, marginal figures: ‘The deepest signs of affection in the poem, as well as in similar ones, appear in the love of man for man. . . .’”

The women of Arab society, wherein male homosexuality has been widespread, remain in a notably low state in the modern world. This may be a coincidence, but common sense suggests a linkage.

So, too, in traditional Chinese culture, the low state of women has been linked to widespread homosexuality. As a French physician reported from China in the 19^th century, “Chinese women were such docile, homebound dullards that the men, like of those of ancient Greece, sought courtesans and boys.”

The homosexual life

A final reason for opposition to homosexuality is the homosexual “lifestyle.” While some male homosexuals live lives of fidelity compared to those of heterosexual males, it is usually not the case. While the typical lesbian has had fewer than 10 lovers, the typical male homosexual in America has had over 500. This is probably why less attention is paid to female homosexuality. But this is not a slur on gay men; heterosexual men would live the same way without women to stop them.

When male sexuality is not controlled, the consequences are considerably more destructive than when female sexuality is not controlled. Men rape. Women do not. Men, not women, engage in fetishes. Men are more frequently consumed by their sex drive and wander from sex partner to sex partner. Men, not women, are sexually sadistic.

The indiscriminate sex that characterizes much of male homosexual life represents the antitheses of Judaism’s goal of elevating human life from the animal-like to the God-like.

Accepting homosexuality as the social, moral, or religious equivalent of heterosexuality would constitute the first modern assault on the extremely hard-won, millennia-old battle for a family-based, sexually monogamous society. While it is labeled as progress, the acceptance of homosexuality would not be new at all.

Wherever homosexuality has been encouraged, far more people have engaged in it. And wherever heterosexuality has been discouraged, homosexuality has similarly flourished, as for example, in prisons and elsewhere: “High levels of homoeroticism develop in boarding schools, monasteries, isolated rural regions, and on ships with all-male crews.”

By and large, it is society not the individual, that chooses whether homosexuality will be widely practiced. A society’s values, much more than individual tendencies, determine the extent of homosexuality in that society.

To a world which divided human sexuality between penetrator and penetrated, Judaism said, “You are wrong–sexuality has to be divided between male and female.” To a world which saw women as baby producers unworthy of romantic and sexual attention, Judaism said, “You are wrong–women must first be the sole focus of erotic love.”

To a world which said that sensual feelings and physical beauty were life’s supreme goods, Judaism said, “You are wrong–ethics and holiness are the supreme goods.” A thousand years before Roman emperors kept naked boys, Jewish kings were commanded to write and keep a sacred book–the Torah.

Dennis Prager, one of America’s most respected and popular nationally syndicated radio talk-show hosts, is the author of several books, including “Think a Second Time,” “Why the Jews: The Reason for Anti-Semitism” and “Happiness is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.” Prager is a frequent guest on television shows such as Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity and Comes. His website is www.dennisprager.com.

[Copied from “Whistleblower,” a monthly publication of WorldNetDaily.Com, Inc. March, 2006]