TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Power: How to Have it & How to Use it in Love and War
Date: 08/09/24 Length: 40:38
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I your rabbi reveal how the world really works. That's right. Thank you for being part of the show. And again, thank you very much, particularly those of you who have become close to us by becoming Happy Warrior members a big special thanks to you, and I hope that you are enjoying some of the things that become part of your life as a result of being a happy warrior. Let us dive right in, because I have to start with a bit of an apology. Remember, last week I said that I would make some I'd make the answer to the two questions I asked available on the Happy Warriors website, and I was not able to do that, there will be an additional specific bonus item for Happy Warrior members today and and that will have to do with the fact that what I'm going to be talking about is not directly relevant to everybody's life. So how do we bridge that gap? And I will explain that.
Daniel Lapin 1:21
But for today, we are going to go back to the two questions that I asked last week. And the two questions are, why is it that America has not won any wars since World War Two, in spite of having involved itself in many, many wars that have cost a lot of blood and a lot of money but haven't won any. Why? Big country, powerful country, mighty country. There's only one possible answer, which I'll come to. The second question was, What does America plan for Israel? Because you do know that when Hamas attacked Israel on October the seventh, 2023, had President Biden called Israel on October the eighth and said, You guys, we're going to give you three weeks. You won't hear from us. All you'll get are airplanes landing, you'll get some c5 transporters filled up with 156-millimeter artillery bombs you might run out of. We'll supply whatever you need. That's all you're going to hear from us. You got three weeks to solve the problem. After that, we are going to come in and want to know about peace and talks. But you got three weeks, you know, that the problem would be over, and they would today, it would be over in exactly the same way as the atom bomb in on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki ended World War. It brought peace to Japan. And, you know, Japanese greeted Douglas MacArthur when he took into when he drove into Tokyo to take control of Japan, people greeted him with happiness because it meant now the fighting was finished and we could rebuild when American GIs came into Germany, and they were so welcomed by people that 1000s of people who were who realized they were going to fall under the Russians in the sector on the east braved all kinds of challenges and difficulties and turbulence and pain in order to be captured and to order to be on the American side, people were happy with victory. It ends it, and instead of which, they get endless misery. And so what is it that went wrong? Why is it that things like this happen, and the answer is that I don't have to give you two answers for the two questions, right? Why is America not won a war? And what does America won for Israel by constantly preventing them from achieving a decisive victory? And the answer is exactly the same. It's one answer for both questions. Let me try and explain that.
Daniel Lapin 4:24
So remember that the best way to depict ancient Jewish wisdom, the best way to explain the Biblical blueprint, is an explanation and a matrix of understanding of how the world really works. That's what it means. And so yet, it's not surprising that as societies secularize. I reject the biblical vision of reality and replace it with a secularized vision of reality. Not surprisingly, they drift away from the fundamental principles of how the world really works, right? It makes sense. And so it's not a mystery to explain the stunning coincidence that all woke people, with almost with very few exceptions, woke people are basically overwhelmingly secular in outlook, not religious. Why? Because religious people understand how the world really works. They accept the world as how it really works, instead of how we wish it would be that way. And they therefore reject distorted depictions of reality. They just do not bear up to the truth. And so we know for example, and right now we're living in the times where you don't get a better example than male-female realities and male-female interactions. You know, basically we understand that men are actually more similar to leopards and llamas and lizards and lions than they are to women. Okay, so men and women are very, very different, and anybody who has any contact with how the world really works knows that, understands that it's a reality, and so not surprisingly, every society that banishes the biblical model and replaces it with a secular model needs to obviously banish chapter one, verse 27 of Genesis. God created male and female. That's how he created them. Got to banish that and replace it with an illusory depiction of a non-binary spectrum where people can be half male and half female. Yeah, we get that so. So right now we watch Algeria's contestant in the Olympic Games in the sport of boxing, he and he's fighting as a woman. Why do I say he? Well, let me explain to you why I say he? The Olympic Committee says yes, of course, she's a woman. Her passport says she's a woman. Okay, you can go on to YouTube and watch, and this is already seven or eight years ago. You can watch a very attractive young blonde called Lauren Southern, and she's, she's an internet personality, and she's fairly well known, and she decides she wants to get a female a male identity document in the province of Ottawa in Canada. So she first goes to a medical clinic and says she'd like to have a document that certifies that she is male. She's standing there high heels, female face, female figure, female hair, I mean as as female as they come. And she walks out of there with a medical document from the province of Ottawa that says she's a man. And she then takes that to the their equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles, and she requests a driver's license identity document from the state of Ottawa. And they say, well, she's the only thing is, I identify as a male. I want the document to show that. And they said, well, you'd need a medical statement. She pulls out, says, Here is okay, no problem, and she walks out under the street and she speaks to the camera. You can see this, and she's almost in disbelief herself.
Daniel Lapin 9:07
I can't believe how easy this was. I am now officially a man, as far as the Government of Canada is concerned. So when the Olympic Committee IOC tells us that this Algerian boxer, Iman Calef is actually a woman, because her passport says that I burst out laughing. But if, on the other hand, you got ahold of a couple of doctors who examine him and testify under oath that he has female genitalia and he has a uterus, you'd keep me quiet. I wouldn't say another word on the topic, done, but you're not silencing me with silly statements, like his passport says he's a woman. Yeah. Lauren Southern's driver's license in Ottawa says she's a man, and I'll tell you she isn't a man. So they could solve this very easily if they wanted to. Yeah, a sworn testimony by, shall we say, three doctors who examine her. Make it women doctors, if you like. I don't care. Sworn testimony that she possesses-- okay, in that case, I'd keep quite in spite of the fact that it is extremely suspicious that this person has XY chromosomes, which nobody disputes. And so if somebody is producing XY is presenting XY chromosomes, the burden is on them to say, I know I'm showing the masculine cellular structure in my body, but I'm actually a woman, and here's why, it's going to have to be more than just my passport. Now none of this would even be occupying the airwaves and the media were it not for the fact that we've somehow bought into the idea that women can become men and men can become women, and the Olympic Committee is ensuring Its eminent demise by reinforcing this silly fiction and so, so he goes ahead boxing as a woman. In 46 seconds, he takes out Angela Carini, I think she's Italian, and she, I mean, he rains blows on her, and you can see, and then she says, I've never been hit like that before. Well, yeah, because up till now, you've been hit by women, and now you were hit by a man. This is not hard to understand. He towers over he's five foot 10, but yeah, a woman, yeah, I get it right. And he's just gone on to beat Thailand's Janjaem Suwannapheng, something that doesn't always happen in Olympic or any boxing matches. Unanimous judges' decision, yeah, once again, he towers over. He hits much harder. He's reached. You can take a look at his reach. He's he's punching her and her arm, her hand, her fist, doesn't even reach Him. So, yeah, but, but this is a woman, right. Okay, fine. So there it is. I, you know, if, if doctors testified, real doctors real testimony, where there would be a penalty for perjury? Yeah, I would. I would keep quiet then. But I don't think that exists, because for the Olympic Committee to fall back on the silly nonsense. Well, a passport says she's a woman, yeah, yeah, we all know how bureaucratic passports work, but if they were capable of showing that she was not a man, I think they'd have done that already. They simply cannot produce medical evidence. So I give this as an example to show that as people drift away from a biblical model, they also drift away from reality. And there it is, the Bible depicts the world as it really is. People reject the Bible, not surprisingly, little by little, they're going to reject reality as well. And I'm not saying that everybody has sort of thought this through, and everybody has philosophized about it, and everyone said, well, rejecting it doesn't work like that. Memes get out and and ideas spread in the way a virus spreads, almost that people catch it from one another, and little by little, they start thinking in a certain way and in an utterly predictable way. So if you're going to reject the biblical model, then you are going to reject that we are created as male and female. It's as simple as that.
Daniel Lapin 13:57
Okay, so that was an example, but now we're coming back to the question of, What does America intend for Israel, and why has America not won a war? And why on earth should anybody take military advice from a country that hasn't won a war in 80 years? Why? Well, the answer is something called power, and power is part of how the world really works. Power is real, and let's try and understand this because it lies at the at the at the root of the question, of the two questions that I have to answer that are from last week. Let me, let me state this in as delicate a way as possible, women, for the most part, are not attracted to men who are less powerful than they are. I. Um, if, if a woman felt that she could easily pick up and wave around this very slender and non-substantive male and he absolutely could not lift her up, there are very few women in the world who would be capable of being attracted physically to that man. Women are attracted to men who are more powerful than they are both more powerful in a primary, fundamental way, as I've described physically more powerful and just as importantly, in a secondary way more powerful in terms of prestige and prosperity. It's a well-known reality. Some people call it hypergamy. It doesn't matter what you call it, because anybody who has lived in the real world for more than a week or two, knows this reality, and that is that you know guys, guys in middle school or high school are trying to strengthen themselves and bulk themselves and develop their muscles. And why are they doing that? 90% of the reason is for girls, because intuitively, even they know that girls are drawn to masculine power in every possible meaning of the word. And so we've got to understand that if Luxembourg a little teensy weensy country in Europe. Let's imagine Luxembourg issues a directive that China must stay out of the South China Sea. China would laugh at that. They wouldn't even give it any significance whatsoever. They certainly wouldn't obey. Why? Because Luxembourg has no power and China has considerable power, and nothing is more laughable than when countries that have lost their power and sometimes don't yet realize it, find themselves giving instructions, giving arrogant directives to countries with power. It's sad and it's laughable in the decades immediately following Britain's loss of the British Empire, which I date to be about 1950 approximately, the pound has lost its position as reserve currency of the world to the dollar. India has gone independent, most of the British Empire, Australia, Rhodesia, South Africa, New Zealand, all of all of these countries are already pretty much independent of England, or are getting that way. So it's pretty much the end of the empire. But for a number of years already, England still continued, acting as if, you know, Britannia ruled the wave? As if the Royal Navy had all the power in the world? And it was, it was, it was comical, sad, but comical for a while, as that was going on, there was absolutely no substance to it, because the reality is they lacked the power. Now, a
Daniel Lapin 18:37
few years later than that, came the Falkland Islands crisis, and England was itching to flex its muscles to show, wait a second, wait a second, we still have power. And yes, they were able to wrest control of the Falkland Islands back from Argentina in a strongly fought battle which I believe cost the lives of maybe one or two people, again, not exactly winning World War Two as England had done years earlier, but yeah, countries that are losing their power need to have expressions of power that sort of suggests they haven't yet completely lost it entirely and, and so they simply are unable to to help themselves from, from doing exactly those kinds of things, and, and sadly, and I believe the same case is true when President Biden rashly made the pronouncement that America would not allow China to take over Taiwan. The White House had him quickly walk that back, right? Because anybody with their feet on the ground knows that America is not in any position at the moment to stop it. I don't think. China is going to invade Taiwan or bomb Taiwan? I think they'll win Taiwan electorally. But even if they did, what would America do? And you think about it, and you realize that with a country that has to borrow a trillion dollars every quarter, and a country that is at least 40,000 people down in its military from recruiting goals, you know, and a country whose whose military equipment is outdated and much of which was left behind in Afghanistan, yeah, not in a position to go ahead and send aircraft carriers within range of China's hypersonic missiles. So the pronouncement was comical and sad, and all of this comes again from not understanding that power is part of how the world really works, whether it's in male female dynamics or in geo political dynamics. Paper is only useful if it's backed up by power. That's a really important thing, because when you lose power, one of the things that nations try and do is they brandish documents and agreements and papers and again, anybody who knows how the world really works knows that that just has no value, because paper that is not backed up by power is completely meaningless. If you think about the International Court of Justice. Right with the International Court of Justice makes a ruling. What does that mean? They have no army, they have no means of enforcing it. It's as meaningless as if you could imagine an American city that stopped enforcing justice. Oh, wait, that's happened. And so you know the answer, when there is no longer any law enforcement, when there's no longer policing, when there is no longer any ability of the government to enforce, to make sure that a ruling of the courts is carried out, the courts become absolutely meaningless.
Daniel Lapin 22:22
So power is part of how the world really works. And not surprisingly, you discover that throughout Scripture, power is real, right? Moses tells Joshua in Hebrew chazak ve'ematz often gets translated as be strong enough good courage, not a good translation, because those are merely attempts to sort of duplicate the same sentiment, but in Hebrew, what they really mean is acquire the power and make sure You retain the will to use it, because power without the will to use it is completely as valueless as the will to use power that you don't possess. Right? I want to quote to you something that that our son Ari wrote on the Happy Warrior website. As a Happy Warrior, he responded to a marvelous Ask the Rabbi. We had, we had a fantastic question. And again, if you're a Happy Warrior, please go ahead and take a look at it. At in your library of resources that as a Happy Warrior, you acquire and you will read this most recent Ask the Rabbi, where a woman watched her husband take down a bully. There was a man who was harassing people, and her husband faced him down and took care of it, and she wrote to us saying, I don't know what to say. I'm fearful of my husband. Now perhaps he'll do that to me as well. And we wrote to her and basically said, You're a silly goose. You know, how many women would change places with you to have a man capable of defending you and willing to defend you, my goodness, and this was a woman who somehow something wrong with her because to not find that power in her man appealing and wonderful and valuable anyway, we politely explain the situation to her. And our son wrote on the Happy Warrior website. He said, "You know, you've got to remember you cannot truly call yourself peaceful unless you are capable of inflicting great violence. If you're not capable of violence, you're not peaceful, you're harmless." There's a vital difference between between being harmless and between being peaceful and. So in Exodus, chapter 15, verse three. Exodus, chapter 15, verse three, the Israelites have crossed the Red Sea, and they're now on the beach singing a song of praise to God, and they refer to God as a man of war. And that is the first usage in history of God as a man of war. Its first usage of the term man of war in the 1500s and the 1600s and the 1700s the Royal Navy, back to Great Britain, used to call their most powerful warships men of war. I'm not sure if you've heard but if you're, if you're a fan of any of the novels The O'Brien series, anything that speaks about the war on the high seas and naval warfare in earlier centuries, you will have come across because ever Oh, if the British send two of their men of war, we're in big trouble. Yeah, man of war was a big sailing ship, multi mastered with many, many canons, probably more than 100 Canons on board. It's called a man of war, by the way, just as an example of how secularism penetrates the culture so entirely, I want to mention that I looked at a Wikipedia listing of man of war. I also looked at dictionaries. I wanted to see how many dictionaries correctly identified the etymological origin of the term man of war.
Daniel Lapin 26:29
Back to the Bible, Exodus, chapter 15, verse three, Wikipedia didn't, which means that Google doesn't, because Google references Wikipedia. So if you ask Google, what is the source of the word man of war? I'm pretty sure it won't give you Exodus, chapter 15, verse three, they come up with all kinds of obscure, much later explanations for it. But there it is, the reality. So in other words, look, I wish it weren't the case if I had the power to remake the world as I think it should be Believe me when I if I was in charge, I'd have plenty changes, and I would rule out what make war is so awful and causes such incredible suffering for so long. I mean, there's you suffer from a war well beyond the end of the war, beyond another two or three generations, easily. Of course, I'd get rid of war if I could, but don't hold your breath. And so we understand from the Bible, yes, if you like, war is God's way of recycling countries.
Daniel Lapin 27:35
You know that's I don't mean to be frivolous about it, but it's a reality. It has to do with power. And sometimes countries that do not have enough power wage war against countries that have more power, and they usually get a hiding. They get punished. And so yes, power is a reality. It is part of the dynamic, both of of between individuals, and we speak all the time of there are people who have power by reason of prominence and prestige and prosperity, and you know, they're not allowed to take advantage of other people. Again, within a legislated moral system as the Bible describes, yeah, we recognize they are people of power, and we and we understand the tendency for power to corrupt, and we try and take allowances for that and correctives for that, but we recognize the reality of power for heaven's sake, and power is very often decisive in resolving things. There's a phrase violence never solves anything. And it's a phrase that began to be popular only after the 1960s not before that, because the way the world really works, violence always solves something. If you were ever bullied on the playground, if you're a guy, and you were bullied on the playground, and one day, you decided you'd had enough, and you reared back, and you let the bully have it flat in the nose, and then you went in and took him to the ground. Did you notice something? He stopped being a bully. Never bothered you again. Violence absolutely solves problems. The violence of the atom bomb solved the problem in the Pacific, the violence of the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and Berlin, well, that solved the problem in Europe. Yeah, it does. I wish it weren't so I wish, I wish innocent people never had to suffer. I wish it. I wish children never had to die in a war. But that's unfortunately, not what war is. And war does get resolved by power. It is almost invariably the case that the more powerful adversary wins the war and. Are prestige and prominence and power are very tied to prosperity, right, as I've explained, and so America's military might carried the day in the 1940s no other country was able to turn out the 1000, the 10s of 1000s of airplanes per year against which neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan were able to stand. And the same is true today. Peace comes from decisive victories. Peace does not come from imposed agreements, ceasefires, pieces of paper. That's not where peace comes from. And so we have to ask ourselves, not just what does America plan for Israel, but also, what is the explanation for America's failure to win wars after World War Two, and responding to the second question, first, America hasn't won any war since World War Two, because the secularization of America began almost immediately. I tend to identify it as about 1960 62 but you know, it's impossible to specifically label an epoch to a date, but that's approximately where it is. As soon as America starts getting secularized, it loses some degree of conviction in its own value, in the place of the world, American exceptionalism. Oh, the population hasn't lost that. But the population who hasn't lost it is a population that is not focused on political activism. It's a population that is focused on family and finances and friendships and faith and fitness. It's that population of us here in middle America who want to take care of our families, and we want financial independence from the government, and we want to take care of our churches and our faith communities, and we want to take care of our own health, and we want to have a social life. We want to have community organizations. We want to be left alone, basically by the powers of government. We want God above us, not government. We believe in the big G, not the little g. We want to educate our children in accordance with our values. We do not want their lives to be reshaped by GICs, by government indoctrination camps. And so we left, we left the corridors of power vacant, ready to be occupied by university trained bureaucrats, university trained politicians, and we saw that change start to happen immediately after World War Two. And when that happens, bureaucrats believe that America is just one other country among many, and when President Obama worked so hard to make sure that Iran got the nuclear bomb. He did that because he believed that it wasn't good for a unipolar world. He didn't think it was good for America to have disproportionate power. He did want other places to have power as well. That was his worldview, but it wasn't the worldview of middle America.
Daniel Lapin 33:39
Those of us who concentrate on our five F's, and because we concentrate on our five F's, we have less ability available to go on and take over the culture the long march through the institutions take over. Education take over. Universities take over. Entertainment take over politics, eventually, yeah, take over news media. All of that was the long march perpetrated by people who were not focused on being married and raising children. They were not focused on family or finance. They certainly weren't focused on faith, and they certainly were not focused on friendships and fitness and and so the idea that America could project power decisively, they began to be uncomfortable with that. You know, that's the biblical model that things are resolved by means of war. But that's not we're more civilized. We're more sophisticated and and if you go back and read the history of the Vietnam warned, read a lot, satisfy yourself. Don't take my word for it, and you'll discover that we had the power. America could have won Vietnam, absolutely. Could have won Vietnam decisively. But. The lack was not of the chazak but of the ematz. The lack was not of the power, it was of the will. And that's really what has happened to America since then, and having become accustomed to it, they seek to find virtue in it, the world order, the international world order, the community of nations, as if there is such a thing. I cringed every time President George W Bush used the phrase the community of nations. It's a non-existent nonsense. It's foolish, but there it is. Somehow we're all going to find peace and security by the United Nations. No, we actually won't. We'll acquire peace and security only by power. There isn't any other way at all to do it. However, as a nation becomes more secularized and more driven by an evolutionary, biological picture of the origin of humanity. People then find themselves drawn to this idea that we'll all be one unified world, nation of communities, and we'll all get together, and we'll talk our way to a lasting peace. And again, anybody with eyes in their head, anybody who understands how the world really works, knows that this is a foolish illusion and so, yeah, America could not win a war after that period, and at the moment, is still incapable of winning A war. Quite clearly. What do they want with Israel? Well, making sure that Israel operates in the image of the United States,
Daniel Lapin 36:48
America, as you know, not only tries to promote what it sees as democracy, quote, quote, but they've also been promoting LGBTQ, two values around the world, particularly in Africa and in the American Embassy in Hungary astounded the Hungarians. Irritated them. Bothered them enormously, again, because what business is it of a United States Embassy in a foreign country to promote homosexuality? But that's part of what happens when you become a secularist? You become an evangelical secularist, not a secular Evangelical, that would be a oxymoron. And even a evangelical secularist means a secularist who wants to spread their values of secularism, because it is, after all, a belief system, and so they want to spread it to Israel as well. And they want to make sure that Israel also doesn't resort to power. Power is ugly. We must do this by means of peace agreements. And you know, the Middle East now 80 years down the road, with all the papers and all the green lines and all the agreements got absolutely nowhere at all. The only thing that produces peace, that produces security and produces tranquility, is power. But again, we cannot expect a secular mind to fully embrace that concept that is the reality.
Daniel Lapin 38:23
And so the the the theme that I'm going to talk about in the special bonus for Happy Warriors members of the Happy Warrior community is, and again, somewhat controversial, obviously, but then the fact that something is controversial in no way means that it is untrue, right? And so it is a very simple reality that the true, controversial thing that I'm going to be talking about on that is how a woman can help her husband achieve success, right? Shocking, isn't it? Well, who says the man's career, the husband's career should take precedence over their wife's career, right? That makes no sense. Oh, it makes all the sense in the world, and you are going to be truly astounded. And I decided to make that available, especially for our happy warrior community, whom we cherish, and again, partially also because you've got to be at a certain standard of openness and awareness in order to ever hear certain things. Because I don't want you to be mad at me. I don't want to aggravate you for no reason. I want to show you how the world really works, and I'm going to show you aspects I'm. Of marital relationships that you won't hear almost anywhere else, but all of that for members of the happy warrior community. So until next week, I want to wish you all a week of great happiness and great success as you climb onwards and upwards with your faith, your family, your finances, your friendships and your fitness. Thank you very much for being part of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show. God bless you.
