Nov. 6, 2009 Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes) Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man Nov. 5, 2009 The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes) Nov. 4, 2009 Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered? JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes) Nov. 3, 2009 Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes) Nov. 2, 2009 Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes) Oct. 30, 2009 Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America Oct. 29, 2009 Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity? JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes) Oct. 28, 2009 Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes) Oct. 27, 2009 Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes) Oct. 26, 2009 The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes) Oct. 23, 2009 Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure? JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes) Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us Oct. 22, 2009 Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes) Oct. 21, 2009 Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies' JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes) Oct. 20, 2009 Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes) Oct. 19, 2009 The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q. Is nepotism kosher? JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes) Oct. 16, 2009 Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes) Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost Oct. 15, 2009 Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process' JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes) Oct. 29, 2003 Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 22, 2005 / 11 Adar II, 5765 We all have moral bank accounts By Dennis Prager http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If you've ever heard of a Ponzi scheme — and almost every American has — you will surely assume that Charles Ponzi, the man after whom the scam was named, was a bad man. He, like everyone else who ever started the scheme, cheated people out of their money. But a fascinating new biography of Charles Ponzi by Mitchell Zuckoff, "Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend," reveals that a few years before inventing his scheme, Ponzi had given a fair amount of his skin so it could be grafted onto a woman who he learned was dying of severe burns. He suffered pain from this act of incredible generosity, which saved a person's life. Yet, were it not for this biography, who would ever associate Ponzi with anything except scamming people out of their money? I note this because it brings home a point that is often lost on most people — religious or secular, conservative or liberal — that human beings all have what I call moral bank accounts. Just like a real bank account into which we make monetary deposits and from which we make monetary withdrawals, we make moral deposits into and moral withdrawals from our moral bank accounts based on the actions we engage in during our lifetime. Now, of course, some people make so many withdrawals — Hitler, for example — that no imaginable good act they can do will seriously change the balance from extremely negative to positive. But most people need to be assessed based on this bank account analogy. I first came up with this idea when Clarence Thomas was accused by Anita Hill and the Democratic Party of sexual harassment. Needless to say, no one knew for sure which party was telling the truth. But I made the argument on my radio show that given all the good Thomas had done, given the absence of indications of him ever acting indecently toward women employees, his moral bank account was, to the best our knowledge, quite in the black. Whether or not he said the words "pubic hair" in a conversation with Anita Hill 10 years earlier was of absolutely no concern to me in assessing his moral character — i.e., the balance in his moral bank account. Similarly, I wrote in this column and argued on radio that the dismissals of William Bennett made by people, conservatives and liberals alike, over revelations that he had gambled large sums of money were unfair even if one is opposed to gambling. Why? Because the gambling paled in comparison to how much good Mr. Bennett had done with his talks and books on moral character. It was conservatives — usually religious conservatives (whose social attitudes I so often identify with) — who were particularly disturbed. If they had applied this notion of moral bank accounts to Bill Bennett, they would not have been. Without a moral bank account, who among us, at some point in our lives, is not doomed to being perceived as having a moral balance in the red? And at the same time, some people who have done true evil are given a free ride. I will never forget the attorney for a man who had kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered a young girl describing his client as "a good man who'd had a bad weekend." No good that murderer ever did could outweigh the evil of that weekend. What I am asking for is moral perspective. If your spouse has been a good and loyal man/woman and a good and loving father/mother for 10, 20 or 30 years and had an unfaithful night on a business trip, do all those years of deposits into his/her moral bank account count for nothing? Without the moral perspective a moral bank account gives us, good people are usually the greatest victims of our loss of moral perspective and bad people are the greatest beneficiaries. We exaggerate the good done by the generally bad, and the bad done by the generally good. G-d, of course, is the ultimate judge of us all. But in the meantime, moral judgments must be made by us humans here on earth. And to do so we need perspective. Charles Ponzi heroically saved a woman's life at a great personal price. His scheme was awful; but he was not. Likewise, Oskar Schindler saved many Jews during the Holocaust while regularly being unfaithful to his wife. Yet, we, correctly, I believe, regard Schindler as a moral hero. I am for moral clarity and calling good "good" and evil "evil." But we lose the war against evil and the war for good when we lose moral perspective. We all have moral bank accounts, and it's good to make deposits because, G-d knows, we all make withdrawals. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Dennis' Archives JWR contributor Dennis Prager hosts a national daily radio show based in Los Angeles. He the author of, most recently, "Happiness is a Serious Problem". Click here to comment on this column. © 2005, Creators Syndicate

Arnold Ahlert  Mitch Albom  Michael Barone   Dave Barry  Tony Blankley  Andy Borowitz  David Broder  Stratfor Briefing  Mona Charen  Linda Chavez  Ann Coulter  Greg Crosby  Larry Elder  Suzanne Fields  John Fund  Frank J. Gaffney  Lloyd Garver  Jonah Goldberg  Julia Gorin  Jonathan Gurwitz  Paul Greenberg  Lewis Grossberger  Victor Davis Hanson  Betsy Hart  Nat Hentoff  David Horowitz  Laura Ingraham  Cheri Jacobus Jeff Jacoby  Paul Johnson  Jack Kelly  Ed Koch  Ch. Krauthammer  Michael Ledeen  John Leo  David Limbaugh  Kathryn Lopez  Rich Lowry  Michelle Malkin  Jackie Mason  Dick Morris  Bill O'Reilly  Jim Mullen  Clarence Page  Kathleen Parker  Dennis Prager  Wesley Pruden  Tom Purcell  Jonathan Rauch  Celia Rivenbark  Robert Robb  Cokie & Steve Roberts  Pat Sajak  Debra J. Saunders  Culture Shlock  Roger Simon  Michael Smerconish  Thomas Sowell  Mark Steyn  John Stossel  Cal Thomas  Bob Tyrrell  Diana West  Dave Weinbaum  George Will  Walter Williams  Byron York  Mort Zuckerman  Robert Arial  Chuck Asay  Baloo  Chip Bok  Dry Bones   Lisa Benson  John Branch  Gary Brookins  John Cole  J. D. Crowe  John Deering  Brian Duffy  Everything's Relative  Mallard Fillmore  Jake Fuller  Bob Gorrel  Joe Heller  David Hitch  Jerry Holber  Steve Kelley  Jeff Koterba  Dick Locher  Chan Lowe  Ranan R. Lurie  Jimmy Margulies  Rick McKee  Michael Ramirez  Kevin Siers  Jeff Stahler  Ed Stein  Danna Summers  John Trever  Gary Varvel  Kirk Walters  How 2  Lori Borgman  The Savvy Consumer  Elder matters  Fixit  Dr. Peter Gott  GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko  Richard Lederer  Tech Maven  Every Monday Matters  Nutrition Myths  Bookmark These  Bruce Williams  How Stuff Works