Controversial thinker, philosopher and "Kosher Sex" author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the next speaker in the Jewish Federation's third annual Dosberg Notable Speaker Series Thursday, February 6th at 7:30 PM at the Jewish Community Center, Benderson Building. The other speakers in this series include Human Rights advocate David Harris on March 6, Historian and expert on Militant Islam Daniel Pipes on April 10, and terrorism expert Steven Emerson on May 22. 

  Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is a national Radio host on the Talk America Radio network and a world-famous thinker, author, lecturer, and activist who has become a phenomenon both in the US and internationally due to his provocative and insightful writings, live debates, and extensive media appearances. He first came to world attention through his founding of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society, an organization of Oxford students that within two years of its founding in 1988 had become the second largest student organization in Oxford's history. In Oxford, where Rabbi Boteach served as Rabbi for eleven years, he played host to and debated some of the world's leading thinkers and statesmen, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, Professor Stephen Hawking, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Joseph Rotblatt, and Yitzhak Shamir, to name but a few. In addition to its reputation for hosting the world's biggest speakers, L'Chaim pioneered the inclusion of non-Jews at Jewish events and its former members today serve in prestigious political, social, and business posts throughout the world.

  Rabbi Shmuley is also the author of thirteen books, including the international best-sellers Kosher Sex, Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments, and the critically acclaimed Moses of Oxford. His most recent relationships book, Why Can't I Fall in Love was a finalist for the 2002 Books for a Better Life Award. In May 2002 he will publish Judaism for Everyone: Renewing Your Life through the Vibrant Lessons of the Jewish Faith, as well as Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with Your Spouse.  His works cover such diverse topics as dream interpretation, Jewish and eastern mysticism, science and religion, and a book dedicated to the age-old question of human suffering in the face of seeming divine indifference. Rabbi Shmuley's four relationships books were each serialized in major international publications such as the UK's Daily Mail upon their publication, and his books have now been translated into fourteen languages. 

  In addition to having an active lecture schedule throughout the year, Rabbi Shmuley has become a familiar face on the international radio and television talk show circuit. He has appeared on nearly every American talk and news program, including the Today Show, The View, Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, The O'Reilly Factor, CBS This Morning, The Fox News Channel, MSNBC, Entertainment Tonight, Extra!, Inside Edition, and The Howard Stern Show just to name a few.  He has been profiled in print in some of the world's most prestigious publications including TIME magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The London Telegraph, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Jerusalem Post, The South China Morning Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Miami Herald, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2001, Jewsweek.com placed Rabbi Shmuley at number 17 on their annual list of the 50 most influential Jews in America.  An internationally acclaimed speaker, Rabbi Boteach was the first ever-Jewish finalist in the highly prestigious "London Times Preacher of the Year Competition" in London where in 1998 he placed as first runner up. The following year he became the first ever non-Christian to win the competition just days before the millennium, setting a record at the time for most points ever gained in the competition's history. Rabbi Shmuley has also engaged in live public debates against such formidable opponents as Prof. Richard Dawkins, the world-famous evolutionist, Dennis Prager, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Deepak Chopra, the Rules Girls, and famously debated Larry Flynt and Roseanne Barr on the effects of pornography on relationships.  In 2000, Rabbi Boteach co-founded and directed, with entertainer Michael Jackson, a year-long initiative called Heal the Kids, designed to foster nurturing relationships between parents and children. Rabbi Shmuley's nationally-syndicated radio talk show on the Talk America Network, is a three-hour a day call-in and advice show that has earned him the nickname, LoveProphet.  Rabbi Shmuley is married to his Australian wife, Debbie. They live in Englewood, New Jersey with their seven young children.  

The Dosberg Notable Speakers Series is a project of the Jewish Federation of Greater Buffalo, funded by the Paul P. Dosberg Foundation, Inc. in memory of Paul P. Dosberg.  Past speakers have included scholar Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, statesman Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, former US Memorial Holocaust Museum leader Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, NPR journalist Nina Totenberg, ethicist and author Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, and many other prominent figures.  The issues presented in this series season include Jewish current events, Israel, Militant Islam, world Jewry, and terrorism.

An ancient people who have lost their biblical tongue
By Shmuley Boteach (posted 1/20/03)

Let us deal with the mother of all Middle East questions. No, not "Why do the Arabs hate Israel?" That one is easy. Israel's existence and military supremacy is a humiliation to Arab pride. Israel serves as a permanent reminder of Arab impotence and Islamic infirmity.

The Arabs still operate on a severely outdated view of human greatness, one predicated on mortal conquest rather than moral courage. To the Arab mind, strength and honor result from gaining the upper hand over an enemy, rather than extending the hand of friendship to a former foe.

The heroic action of overcoming age-old prejudices counts for little when placed alongside overcoming an adversary's tanks. So long as the Arabs continue to embrace a Homeric model of valor, where glory is won through the gore of terrorism and splendor through the spilling of blood, there will never be peace in the Middle East. When the day comes that the Arabs feel more embarrassed by having suicide bombers than having Israel in their midst, only then will they reclaim their former greatness.

Until that day comes, we have to contend with far more vexing questions: How is it that half a billion hostile Arabs have managed to successfully portray themselves as the victims of five million Israeli Jews?

How did more than a dozen Arab tyrannies successfully portray Israel, the region's lone democracy, as the bad guy in the Middle East? And how did the Palestinians, whose contribution to civilization is the suicide bomber, ever garner the sympathy of the world?

Many cite the world's ignorance of the Middle Eastern conflict as the solution to this riddle. Indeed, in a recent national assessment test, only 30 percent of American high-school seniors correctly identified NATO as a military alliance, and 87% couldn't locate Iraq on a map. In a world of such breathtaking ignorance, it is easy to see why continued Arab lies could gain credence.

When I debate the Middle East question with friends who are opposed to Israel and point out that the Arabs rejected, among others, the Peel Commission partition proposal of 1937 that would have given them a state three times Israel's size, the UN partition plan of 1947, and Ehud Barak's magnanimous (and reckless) offer of 97% of Gaza and the West Bank and a land swap within the Green Line for the rest, they are convinced that I'm pulling a fast one on them. They are also unaware that there has never been, in the history of the world, a Palestinian state.

Others in the Jewish community maintain that Israel's horrible PR is a no-brainer. Are we surprised that a world that has been murdering Jews for two millennia is prejudiced against Israel? No doubt there is truth in the belief that anti-Semitism animates much of the hostility toward Israel, particularly in Europe.

Still, it would be more honest for the Jewish community to look internally for some of the answers to Israel's horrendous PR, rather than wallowing in victimhood and self-pity.

I believe that the primary blame for Israel's PR should be laid at the Jews' own doorstep. What Israel has failed at utterly is framing the conflict with the Palestinians in moral terms. This is not a dispute over land. Rather, it is a conflict between good and evil, between democracy and tyranny, between those who sanctify life and those who glorify death. It is a conflict between those who believe in due process and those who believe in summary execution. In choosing the depravity of dismembering civilians, Palestinian murderers have cast off the image of God. While Israel has always been prepared to negotiate a settlement with the Arabs, they have instead made a pact with the devil.

INSPIRING murderers to blow up teenagers is not an abrogation of a treaty signed in Norway. It is the apogee of wickedness. Teaching schoolchildren that one goes to heaven for killing Jews is not irresponsible. It is evil. Blowing up teenagers outside a disco is not merely morally repugnant. It is satanic. And Palestinian leaders who justify these bestial means are not desperate, they are satanic.

Whatever grievances the Palestinians claim to have against Israel, choosing to settle them by maiming and murdering innocent men, women, and children is a crime against God and a sin against humanity. The Jews were put into ghettos and turned into piles of ashes by the Nazis. But they never retaliated by machine-gunning German schoolgirls. More than a million Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottomans in World War I. But they never responded by blowing up coffeehouses. China completely overran and occupied Tibet. But the Dalai Lama never called upon his monks to bomb kindergartens.

Only the Palestinians have chosen this course and in so doing they have gone over to the dark side. But because my lines above cause discomfort among Jews is the primary reason that we have failed to win over the decent people of the world to our side.

The average person living in Australia, confused by the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, needs to hear a simple moral message. This is not a battle between moral equals. One is right, the other is wrong. Case closed.

And if we are afraid of firmly stating the justice of our position, if we are unsure of our own moral standing, is it any surprise that others are as well?

Many readers will tell me to crawl back into the synagogue with my religious simplifications of complex geopolitical issues which they maintain is utterly unrealistic. Religious language doesn't belong in political discourse. But when president Ronald Reagan wanted to sum up the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, did he go into lengthy
polemics about how the US is free while the septuagenarian tyrants of the Russian politburo ruthlessly rein over unwilling subjects? Or did he simply call them, in his most memorable speech, an evil empire?

When President George W. Bush wished to boldly declare to the world that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea pose a threat to the peace of the world, did he speak of their political corruption? Or did he label them an "axis of evil"?

Yet, not one Israeli prime minister has referred to Yasser Arafat, the father of international modern terrorism, as simply being malevolent, wicked, and evil.

On the contrary, the most memorable thing that Ariel Sharon, to whom we are all indebted as Israel's greatest warrior, said of Arafat was that he was "irrelevant." Is that a term that inspires clarity? Can one see Bush calling Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein "irrelevant"?

And would the president of the United States have galvanized the allies of the United States to join in a war against Iraq with such morally neutral terms?

The language of good and evil is utterly lacking from Israeli political discourse and government pronouncements.

While the Greeks built a civilization with the power of their ideas, and the Romans ruled the world with the muscle of their legions, the Jews shook the world with the weight of their words. But in reconstituting the ancient Jewish republic, how is it that we have lost the biblical tongue upon which our commonwealth was built? Where is the modern-day Amos exhorting us to "hate evil, and love good, and establish justice."

The greatest American of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr., used the pregnant words of the Bible to shame the world into granting his people justice: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." (Amos 5:24) Can the prophet's words not stream forth from a Jewish tongue? Imagine how the world would contrast our own religious calling to life and righteousness with the Muslim's modern call to murder and mayhem.

It seems, however, that not only are Israel's secular politicians incapable of galvanizing the power of biblical morality in establishing the justice of Israel's cause, but even its religious politicians have failed at doing so. About the only biblical words we got from the leaders of Shas last week at a rally of 10,000 people in Tel Aviv was the reference to Yosef Lapid as a dog, which was later corrected by Shas spokesman Yitzhak Sudri to "a pig." And while both terms do indeed appear in the Bible, I'm not convinced that either of these characterizations will help Israel to either win the war of words with the Arabs or heal its own increasing and damaging internal rift.

The writer, a rabbi and best-selling author, hosts a daily radio show syndicated across the United States on the Talk America radio network.