Remember "When you learn with Rabbi X, Rabbi X doesn’t change, Rabbi X changes you!"
Brothers and Sisters,
Today I want to talk to you about the blessed affliction our community is struggling with, Alcohol, as one of the great sages of our day put it “The answer to and cause of all the world’s problems.” One cannot understand our zany topsy-turvy religion without its mysteriously disassociative properties. I mean one day me and all the rabbi’s of the Gemara are having a nice picnic till Onkeleos pulls out the Jack Daniel’s and the next thing you know Rav Sheishis is in neck deep water with a sunburn and a disemboweled slowly congealing chicken hat while playing air guitar, Rabbi Akiba is up a tree with a hard-on and I’m in Reno and have just married the most repulsive women I have ever seen because she had a hotly appropriate name. Yes, all these things have happened, maybe not at the same time, or in the context I have mentioned or in such a comfortably sacrilegious manner, or with me actually involved, but we as a people have never been big on the direct, clear and chronologically correct narratives, why? Drink’in! Break the Vessel and join the fun.
One can’t hope to understand the last 3,000 years of Jewish development without it, hell the Messianic hopes that we all hold as our dearest and greatest hopes for the future, since, let’s face it, the next generation has been a bit of a letdown, is founded in Alcohol induced Incest, the First Temple was built by getting a demon drunk, and some of our more spectacular assassinations have involved cold wine and hot women, but that was just the beginning people. For nearly two millennia our people had to suffer the weak and lowly intoxication of Wine and Beer, but then a Irish Monk who was probably Jewish, because that how we like these things to work out, invented Whiskey, and then everything changed, the dark ages ended and the age of the Kabbalah began!
Sure some “Secular” authorities might try to break it down into Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial, Modern and Post-Modern eras/ages but we know its all about the Kabbalah. Sure it was once known as the natural law as seen through the prism of Torah knowledge, but that was lost until we, we being the aforementioned closeted Jewish Irish monk, who incidentally might or might not have entered a bar with two other ironically spectacular ethnic/cultural specimens, check the mesorah, distilled natural law into the magical elixir we now refer to as hard liquor.
All of a sudden a lowly sheep herder can gain unlimited spiritual heights by getting trashed and jamming on his flute in front of the ark, why? Because that’s how we roll, actual Torah scholarship, which is more important than making a living, obeying your parents and proper hygiene combined is all trumped by spirituality, which some foolish individuals might describe as those cosmic truths beyond our current ability to understand but which we learn to sharpen our basic skills knowing that we don’t understand the whole truth but hope that what we are doing will allow us to understand lesser ones, those people are heretics and should be shunned passively but aggressively. We know that spirituality is that warm feeling one gets on the beach with their eyes closed, which is also the feeling one gets from fuzzy cosmological ideas that gives one a sense of knowing more than we do, that and…Alcohol!
Those creepy logic obsessed people we talked about before might say that is just a placebo, a symptom of lesser logic competing with the higher mind, but we know that there are two kinds of drinkers me and you who use to bring us closer to each other, very close, and close to the Rebbe through which we become closer to G-d, and then there are Goyim, sick, disgusting depraved Goyim who drink and hook up in bars while burning shtetles and shaving our beards with impunity, and not those beards which look like they need shaving!
So remember Alcohol within the context of “our” religion is a blessed portal to higher understanding and a grand tradition, and the preferred means of Ollie’ing into heaven,while any other context is the realm of Goyim and their greatest idol, the Evil Eye.
