We all want to leave a mark on the world, and the best of us want to leave a legacy we can be proud of, not just make a big splash that will evaporate into nothing once we are gone.
It can be as prosaic as a family who will remember you fondly when you pass, colleagues who learned important life lessons from watching or listening to you, or some great achievement that makes it into the books.
But the ones with the longest-lasting legacy build something that persists for years. It need not be physical, or a business, or anything solid you can point to. But it's something that touches people and changes the world for more than a generation.
The people we immediately think of in this context are obviously people like Elon Musk or political figures who reshape the world or just how people think. Philosophers like Plato or scientists like Newton fall into that category, as do great teachers who touch the lives of millions and help reshape society, hopefully for the better.
Among those contemporary teachers, you can point to people like Jordan Peterson, Scott Adams, and, in this case, longtime Salem radio host Dennis Prager, who is something far bigger than a mere radio host.
I bring up Dennis Prager because he just turned 78 earlier this month, and while he is off the air recovering from an injury that radically changed his life, he is still a figure who looms large in our culture through PragerU and the changed lives of the many, many people he has served as a teacher.
While not formally a rabbi, Dennis most certainly fits the description, which means "teacher." It is a great irony, if you are inclined to think in those terms, that most of Dennis' "students" have been devout Christians eager to benefit from his wisdom over the years because his lessons were universal, though often shared from a Jewish perspective.
Dennis shared wisdom, not religious instruction per se, and continues to do so to this day, now mainly through his site PragerU, which is aimed at both adults and children, as is appropriate. Adults can benefit from his insights, but now more than ever in our society, children are desperate for guidance that takes them beyond the mere celebration of desires and the shallow, dangerous ideologies that are being pumped into them by a corrupted culture.
I spent a brief period of time hosting a weekend show on our local Salem station, AM1280, and met Dennis during that time. I was not much of a radio listener before then, and when I tuned into the station, something struck me: Salem hosts are not at all what you expect when you hear "radio host," and certainly not what liberals would expect when you say "conservative radio hosts."
The two shows I listened to the most were Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, which shouldn't surprise you. I am a natural intellectual, and back in the 1990s and early aughts, those two stood out to me as the most aimed at people like me.
Hugh was and still is more explicitly political, but you can tell he is a law professor with a tremendous gift for gab and a quick wit (I once had him on my show, and I accused him of being a "Republican shill" in a teasing way, and he laughed and shot back, "Democrats delenda est," which means "The Democrats must be destroyed," which I had to admit was true enough. However disappointing Republicans can be (and Bush certainly was!), the Democrats are literally a danger to civilization itself.
Dennis, though, shared life's wisdom in a way that transcended momentary politics and distractions. I shouldn't use the past tense, because he still does at 78, both in how he is transcending adversity and in his intellectual children, PragerU, and the many, many people he has mentored in person and virtually.
Dennis is what Jews call a mensch, which roughly means "morally solid person," "good guy" in the highest sense, or a person you can count on in more ways than one. There is no perfect English translation, just as no English word captures the entirety of "schadenfreude," which is why we default to the German word.
Here we appropriate the Yiddish, which has a richness all its own, as I learned from my Jewish grandmother.
While mensch is hardly an exclusively Jewish trait, obviously, the word has a Jewish resonance, at least partly because it implies solidity in the face of adversity, and one of Dennis' great lessons was that we must not blow with the winds of cultural trends.
Truth, virtue, genuine happiness, and purpose are not strictly contextual concepts, even if their application always takes place in both time and place. You can read Homer and understand the eternal concepts of Honor, Courage, and purpose even though the story takes place several thousand years ago.
Jews study the Torah, which goes back over 3,300 years; Christians look to both the Old and New Testaments, with pedigrees starting at the same time. In graduate school, my great teachers were ancient philosophers, Enlightenment figures, and German philosophers of the 19th century.
Wisdom is ageless, and that is one of the lessons Dennis teaches to people who live in a future-oriented culture.
I was startled to see that Dennis has just passed his 78th birthday, because to me he seems ageless. Even in his wheelchair, he looks much the same as he did in 1998, which either speaks well of him now or suggests that he has prematurely aged.
I think he is just timeless.
In short, we should all wish Dennis a happy (slightly belated) birthday. Even though he has retired from radio, he remains a great teacher and a mensch.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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