Harry Golden writes that “one of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a people’s collective psyche and values than do years of research.”[1] Just as biblical imagery such as “the eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms”[2] says more in far fewer words than any metaphysical treatise on Providence could ever accomplish, so humor speaks disproportionately to the word count of a particular joke or riddle, and has richer meaning than can be found in the mere words of the text. Golden’s insight has a universal applicability. One can better understand the culture of any ethnic group, professional class, political party, or religious denomination through the humor that is created by that particular group. In this regard, Jewish humor shares with any other group many of the universal elements of humor such as incongruity, surprise, and a local type of logic.[3]
At the same time, Jewish humor has some peculiarities to it that in some ways sets it apart from other types of humor. Indeed, as Raphael Patai asserts: “Jewish humor is second to no other product of the Jewish mind in revealing the mental state of the Jews in any given place and at any given time.”[4] But just because a joke uses Jewish names does not necessarily make it a Jewish joke.[5] There are several factors that contribute to the particular flavor of Jewish humor. First, as Golden writes, “At the core of Jewish humor is the belief that God made it hard to be a Jew for His own reasons. It is even harder than He imagined because the world is filled with Gentiles.”[6] Thus, even though a large corpus of Jewish humor does not directly address the subject of religion, the question of God and the relationship of the Jews to God, particularly in the manifestly obvious context of a Gentile-dominated world, is very often implicit in Jewish humor. A second characteristic is that Jewish humor lacks a glibness about it. It is characterized instead by a sobriety that reflects, albeit comically, upon an often harsh reality. As Nathan Ausubel remarks: “First you laugh at a Jewish joke or quip. Then, against your will, you suddenly fall silent and thoughtful. And that is because Jews are so frequently jesting philosophers. A hard life has made them realists, realists without illusions.”[7] To put it another way, Jewish humor often brings out “the discrepancy and the distance between what is and what ought to be.”[8] George Robinson remarks about the harsh realities of Jewish life: “The Jews have been schooled by history to expect the worst. Jewish pessimism is proverbial, the source of countless jokes. Our most eloquent philosophical and theological writings are responses to disaster . . . .”[9] At the same time, also represented in the literature is the revelation of “the indefatigable optimism of the Jewish people.”[10]As the following tale shows, this paradoxical world of a proverbial pessimism forever bonded with an unrelenting optimism shows up often in Jewish humor, but only because it is a reality in Jewish life:
A group of elderly, retired men gathers each morning at a café in Tel Aviv. They drink their coffee and sit for hours discussing the world situation. Given the state of the world, their talks usually are depressing. One day, one of the men startles the others by announcing, “You know what? I am an optimist.” The others are shocked, but then one of them notices something fishy. “Wait a minute! If you’re an optimist, why do you look so worried?” “You think it’s easy to be an optimist?”[11]
A third and related characteristic of Jewish humor is that it is often a window through which one can view the anxieties they experience, both individually and collectively. Rabbi Telushkin explains: “Jews feel anxiety about all these subjects [anti-Semitism, financial success, assimilation, etc], and one of the characteristic ways in which they, and most other people, deal with their anxieties and fears is by laughing at them: Anything that can be mocked immediately seems less threatening.”[12] Thus, since Jews have seemingly been threatened by all things at one time or another, be it their oppressors, themselves, or even God, all things are thereby the subject of their sarcasm and mockery, be it their oppressors, themselves, or even God. At times when the anxiety results from an imminent threat to safety and well-being, as quite often has historically been the case, humor “provides an acceptable way of expressing otherwise unacceptable thoughts.”[13] Consequently, a fourth and final point that should be considered is whether Jewish humor is inherently a self-defense mechanism. Shlomo Freud was the first to advance the idea that humor was a coping device.[14] In one scene of the Woody Allen film “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Lester (Alan Alda), the successful brother-in-law of the envious Clifford (Woody Allen), theorizes in one scene that “comedy is tragedy plus time.” And true, it is often the case that comedy, especially Jewish comedy, can be a sort of “laughter through tears.” William Novak and Moshe Waldoks caution, however, that it is a misrepresentation of Jewish humor to characterize it as nothing more than the coping mechanism of an oppressed people. Not all Jewish humor bears the marks of melancholy; not all of it is merely the tragic made comic through the passage of time. A large corpus of Jewish humor reveals a world of peculiar manners, successful businessmen, and neurotic mothers obsessing over the futures of their children; Jews poking fun at both the world around them, as well as the world within.[15] In a word, then, Jewish humor is in many ways no different than other humor that has a strong ethnic flavor. On the other hand, Jewish humor is perhaps unique in its ability to unlock their collective view of a paradoxical world in which they have been both envied and despised for their successes, chosen by God but often feeling rejected by the same, confident, even arrogant of their seemingly superior intellectual and economic abilities, yet habitually anxious about themselves and the world around them.
Two Jews walk through a menacing neighborhood at night. Ahead, they see two toughs. “Let’s run,” says one Jew to the other. “There are two of them and we are alone.”[16]
We begin our look into the Jewish world with what has been a ubiquitous theme in Jewish life for the better part of the last two thousand years: oppression and survival. So seared into the Jewish psyche is the reality of oppression that it is said that “as Elie Wiesel observed after the screening of The Day After, the TV film about the end of the world, ‘Now we are all Jews.’”[17] The great German poet Heinrich Heine once said, famously, that “Judaism is not a religion but a misfortune.”[18] Similarly, so prevalent is the survival instinct in Jewish life that a story is told about a day when scientists had predicted a global flood which promised to bring catastrophe over the entire earth. In response, the Pope instructed his faithful to make good use of their final days and place their hope in the resurrection. The chief Mufti in Mecca encouraged all faithful Muslims that Paradise awaited them. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, however, called upon the Children of Israel: “Brothers, we have four weeks to learn how to live under water!”[19] This particular joke hints at a darker side of the Jews’ relation to oppression and survival: whereas other religious leaders pointed their faithful to a hope beyond, implicitly secured by God, the Jews’ hope is in their own resiliency in the here and now. It can be seen from this how the nature of the Jews’ relationship to God is characterized even in a joke in which God is not specifically mentioned. The absence of any mention of God in a joke about survival speaks volumes. But had God been named, He probably would have been the subject of the joke tellers’ grievance. As Emanuel Goldsmith observes: “The source of a good deal of Jewish humor is the eternal Jewish complaint voiced frequently by Sholom Aleichem’s character Tevye: Where is God and where is justice? For the authentic Jew, God, justice, and equality are inseparable.”[20]
The history of European Jewry has been marked by frequent pogroms, a Russian term that means to wreak havoc or demolish violently. A pogrom was essentially disorganized mob violence directed at ethnic groups, very often the Jews. Though any number of factors could set off a pogrom, the following joke reveals how the Jews, threatened by mass violence, could find relief even in a harsh irony:
In a small village in the Ukraine, a terrifying rumor was spreading: a Christian girl had been found murdered. Realizing the dire consequences of such an event, and fearing a pogrom, the Jewish community instinctively gathered in the synagogue to plan whatever defensive actions were possible under these circumstances. Just as the emergency meeting was being called to order, in ran the president of the synagogue, out of breath and all excited. “Brothers,” he cried out, “I have wonderful news! The murdered girl is Jewish!”[21]
One of the darkest periods in the history of the European Jews occurred during the reign of the Russian tsar Nicolas I. As the folk song lamented: “When Nicolas Pavlovich became tsar Jewish hearts filled with sadness . . .”[22] Nicolas I was an autocratic ruler who sought to “reform” the Jews, that is, through severe oppression. The tone for the tsar’s treatment of the Jews was set by the edict of military conscription in 1827 which forced thousands of soldiers, even adolescents, into service, often forcing them to “convert” to Christianity as well. The oppression was so severe that some parents resorted to mutilation to keep their children from being conscripted. Sadly, once the children were taken, most parents never saw them again.[23] In the midst of, or rather owing to those days of darkness, the Jews learned to “return fire” by mocking the stupidity of their oppressors. At the same time, using coy language they could hail their own clever survivability:
During the last days of the reign of cruel Czar Nicholas, a Jew fell into the Moskva River and was in imminent danger of drowning. “Help! Help! I can’t swim!” screamed the terror-stricken Jew. A squad of the czar’s soldiers, loitering on the bank, laughed derisively, making no move to help the doomed man. “Save me!” bellowed the poor soul again. But the soldiers only laughed louder. “Down with the czar – up with the revolution!” screamed the nimble-witted Jew hoarsely as he was going under for the third time. The soldiers immediately jumped into the river and dragged the man to safety. “We’ll teach you to defame the sacred name of the czar,” they roared as they hauled the grinning Jew to jail.[24]
A major theme of Rodger Kamenetz’s book The Jew in the Lotus, is the idea of survival.[25] The book examines the travails of two exiled peoples: one, the Tibetans, looking for the secret of the Jews’ survival, the other, the Jews, wondering how the Tibetans might contribute reflectively to their own self-understanding. The Jews who met there with the Dalai Lama represented a collective psyche that had been terribly scarred by that most horrific episode in all of Jewish history, the Nazi Holocaust. Along with the reestablishment of the state of Israel, the Nazi’s all-too-successful attempt at Jewish extermination represents the formative event that steers the lives of the Jewish people to this day. During one of the dialogues, Moshe Waldoks described the pain of the Holocaust in unforgettable terms:
There isn’t a serious Jew today, whatever denomination or affiliation, who is not still somehow traumatized that a third of our people were destroyed so viciously and in such a short period of time. It’s like the amputee who still feels the phantom pain. The leg isn’t there, but the pain is always there.[26]
Just like the amputee experiences the phantom pain of a limb no longer attached to his body, it is the memory of the Holocaust seared into the Jewish psyche, the unceasing reminder that a full third of the people were severed from the Jewish population, that prolongs and aggravates the pain of that unbearable, inexplicable experience. Hitler’s demonic attempt an absolute extermination of the Jewish people was often met with the only consistently available “weapon” with which the Jews could offer any resistance:
A badly frightened Jew stood before the bar of “justice” in a German court. “The charge against you is very serious,” intoned the judge. “You are accused of maligning the Nazi Party – the government itself.” “B-b-but, Your Honor,” stammered the Jew, “I was referring to the Communists, not the Nazis.” “Don’t lie to me!” spat the magistrate. “The indictment accused you of using the words ‘murderers, gangsters, and thieves.’ This court knows exactly whom you meant!”[27]
The irony in this witticism is the very fact that it places on the lips of the oppressors a self-incriminating admission of guilt in a very Freudian-like fashion. By putting the confession into the mouths of their impenitent malefactors, the joke permitted a well-deserved mockery of the collective moral depravity of the Nazis while avoiding the penalty that was guaranteed to result from any attempt at direct confrontation. At times in history, as this gallows humor reveals, Jewish resistance has been noticeably absent:
Three Jews are about to be shot by a firing squad, and each is offered a blindfold by the captain of the squad. The first Jew takes the blindfold, and the second Jew takes the blindfold. When the third Jew says that he would prefer not to wear a blindfold, the one next to him says, “Take a blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”[28]
But some jokes paint a quite different picture, one that reveals a more defiant side:
Two Jews had a plan to assassinate Hitler. They learned that he drove by a certain corner at noon each day, and they waited for him there with their guns well hidden. At exactly noon they were ready to shoot, but there was no sign of Hitler. Five minutes later, nothing. Another five minutes went by, but no sign of Hitler. By twelve-fifteen they had started to give up hope. “My goodness,” said one of the men. “I hope nothing’s happened to him!”[29]
The reality is that Jewish resistance was considerably more widespread than often believed.[30] But just as real is the fact that there was, obviously, precious little that the Jewish people could do to physically oppose the Nazi killing machine. Of the minimal resistance that could be mustered up, some of the most effective means were found not in guns and assassination attempts, but in the mocking scorn they heaped upon their oppressors through bitter, ironic humor. In the end, the indefatigable Jew could at least mutter to his oppressors under his breath: “Just because you win doesn’t mean I lose.”[31]
“Now the man Moses was very humble, more than all men who were on the face of the earth.”[32]
Even though Jewish humor, following Freud, is often viewed as being self-deprecatory in nature, there is much to the view, as Novak and Waldoks observe, “that the real offense of the contemporary humorists is not in their dwelling on Jewish inferiority, but rather their revealing the more or less secret feelings of Jewish superiority.”[33] It is hard not to see in Jewish humor a collective self-image that is at once both exalted and debased. In a addition to the sense of “chosen-ness,” much of the inflated Jewish ego comes from their high rate of worldly success. In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was the world’s financial center, and that largely due to the influence of the Jewish community. Today, particularly within contemporary American culture, Jews have been disproportionately accomplished in education, business, and skilled professions.[34] It has been quipped that the definition of a Jewish dropout is “a boy who didn’t get his Ph.D.”[35] Entertainment is another place where Jews are especially well-represented. Roughly four-fifths of Americas most popular comedians are Jewish, including an impressive list of household names such as Woody Allen, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Billy Crystal, Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis, Groucho Marx, Jackie Mason and Jerry Seinfeld.[36] But despite their successes, in congratulating themselves Jews have often had to mask their self-adulation in the form of a self-effacing joke to keep from inciting the wrath of the envious and powerful. Christie Davies provides some helpful insight: “This aspect of Jewish social experience [their high rate of success] has produced a humor that appears to be the opposite of self-deprecating, though it could just be argued that self-gratulation had to take the form of jokes because overt serious statements would have triggered the hostility of a prejudiced majority resentful of Jewish “over-achievement” and apt to construe it in a negative way.”[37]
As the usual stereotype would have it, Jewish financial success is at least partly attributable to the twin “virtues” of being cheap and being sneaky. Indeed, as the jokesters would have it, the legendary business dealings of Jews seem to even have affected their anatomy: “Why do Jews have long noses? Because air is free.”[38] Another tale ridiculing the legendary miserliness of the Jews is told about an excessively wealthy man who is suddenly beset with anxiety:
The rich Mr. Goldberg was brooding one day. Finally, he muttered to himself: “What good are my steamship lines to me; my oil stock; my department-store chain; all my hundreds of millions of dollars – when my poor mother is starving in an attic?”[39]
In nineteenth century Britain, a large number of Jews traded in inflammable dry goods, which probably led to an also disproportionate amount of fire insurance claims.[40] To the Gentiles, not surprisingly, fires became known sarcastically as “Jewish lightning” and the sound of the fire truck as “Jewish wedding bells.”[41] In one wisecrack, when the fire inspector cannot determine whether the cause of the blaze was the gas light or the electric light, he concludes on his report that it must have been the “Israelite.”[42] The Jewish jokesters captured their own reputation for insurance fraud in this joke: “Levine meets his friend Shwartz. “I heard your factory burned down,” he says. “Sh, sh,” Shwartz answers, looking around anxiously. “Next week.”[43]
In addition to the sometimes-veiled self-adulation, there is the ever-present element of self-deprecation found in much Jewish humor. One such form of mockery is manifested in some Jews stigmatizing the dishonesty of Romanian Jews: “What is the recipe for cake in a Romanian cookbook?” “First, steal a dozen eggs.”[44] Or this one, in which a certain, inherent distrust of even one’s own business associates is satirized:
The three partners were cavorting in Miami Beach. They all had decided to take a vacation together. Suddenly Hymie clutches his head and shouts, “Oy, I forgot to lock the safe in the office.” “So what’s to worry?” replied one of his partners. “We’re all here, no?”[45]
But no one has ever gotten more mileage from self-disparagement than the incomparable Rodney Dangerfield. The one who “never got no respect” once recounted this revealing story of a memorable (forgettable?) childhood trip to Coney Island Amusement Park:
I got lost. A cop helped me look for my parents. I said: “Do you think we’ll find them?” He said, “I don’t know, kid. There’s so many places they could hide.”[46]
Were Freud alive today, he may be tempted to theorize how Dangerfield’s childhood abandonment complex is a sub-conscious representation of the collective Jewish feeling of rejection by both God and man. In any case, there is an unmistakable feeling of self-loathing in much of Jewish humor, as this anecdote shows:
I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father’s speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father’s opinions, and my mother’s contempt for my father.[47]
This joke provides a peek into a fascinating aspect of Jewish life: the role of the Jewish mother. In the case above, this Jewish man is beset by a self-loathing that is inextricably bound up in his perception of how his mother viewed his father. Jews sometimes joke that one way you know Jesus was a Jew was that he still lived with his mother at age thirty (see below). A regularly occurring irony in Jewish humor is the idea of men, even the successful ones, still living under the watchful eye of their doting mothers. The central idea involved is captured in a little instruction book appropriately entitled, How to be a Jewish Mother:
There is more to being a Jewish Mother than being Jewish and a mother. Properly practiced, Jewish motherhood is an art – a complex network of subtle and highly sophisticated techniques. Master these techniques and you will be an unqualified success – the envy of your friends and the backbone of your family. Fail to master these techniques and you hasten the black day you discover your children can get along without you.[48]
The author further teaches that “underlying all techniques of Jewish Motherhood is the ability to plant, cultivate and harvest guilt. Control guilt and you control the child.”[49] Perhaps the mother in this joke had mastered some of these techniques:
A mother goes into her son’s room. “You’ve got to get up for school, Bernie.” Bernie pulls the blanket over his head. “I don’t wanna go to school.” “You have to go,” the mother says. “I don’t wanna. The teachers don’t like me, and all the kids make fun of me.” The mother pulls the blanket down. “Bernie, you don’t have any choice. You have to go to school.” “Yeah,” Bernie says. “Give me one good reason!” “You’re fifty-two years old and you’re the principal.”[50]
From the time of the first century, Jews have always had strained relationships with Christians. From the time that Christendom was born in the fourth century, the Jews have found themselves on the wrong side of political power too closely aligned with the Church, an alignment that frequently led to inexcusable abuses on the part of those who claimed to follow Jesus. Rabbi Telushkin highlights one such abuse: “Another unpleasant feature of Jewish life in medieval Europe was that rabbis were forced to engage in disputations with Christian clergy. The Jews hated these no-win encounters. If the rabbis argued aggressively and effectively, they were accused of insulting Christianity and were threatened with death. If they did not, they lost the debate and were expected to convert.”[51] Many such “conversions” took place over the course of the centuries. Conversions were not limited to those forced at gun point, so to speak, but rather often Jews sought assimilation into the surrounding culture in order to avoid the unremitting persecution. Assimilation, accordingly, has been the subject of the comics’ derision, as these two examples demonstrate:
Some friends asked Professor Chwolson why he had become a Christian. “Out of conviction,” Chwolson answered. “Out of what conviction?” he was asked. “Out of the conviction that it is better to be a professor in St. Petersburg than [a Hebrew schoolteacher] in Shklop.”[52]
American banker Otto Kahn was Jewish by birth but had converted to Christianity. He was once walking with a hunchbacked friend when they passed a synagogue. “You know I used to be a Jew,” Kahn said. “And I used to be a hunchback,” his companion replied.[53]
Some have sounded an alarm over the high rate (52%) of intermarriage among American Jews, fearing that such a trend will eventually spell the end of American Jewry.[54] George Robinson replies with some dry wit: “And if American Jewry disappeared because of assimilation, it would be a nice change of pace from defeat in war, forcible expulsion, and genocide . . . .”[55] But Robinson does not, in fact, think that American Jewry is in danger of disappearing. On the contrary, owing to the checks-and-balance of the American government that helps prevent majority domination, Robinson sees a positive answer to the centuries-old Diaspora.[56] Nevertheless, because a prevalent school of thought denies that a Jew can ever be other than a Jew, those who do assimilate find themselves the subject of ruthless mockery.
But in addition to the caricature it draws of those who have assimilated, Jewish humor has for centuries aimed its ridicule at the dominant culture that engenders such assimilation. Because that dominant culture more often than not, at least with regard to the Jews, has been a Christian culture, the cardinal doctrines of the church are an inviting target. The teachings singled out for the greatest degree of scorn have been, unsurprisingly, the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Peter Ochs elaborates:
The Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity present two main challenges to traditional Jewish study. One challenge is that the narrative of God’s incarnation in one Jew belongs to a history that Jews do not share and cannot accept as part of their story. In this case, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation appears comprehensible but simply wrong; the event did not occur. A second challenge is that the doctrine of God’s having three identities appears incomprehensible: the Jewish biblical record does not speak of God in a way that allows us to characterize His nature as a relation among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.[57]
The following joke illustrates not just Jewish contempt for Trinitarian theology, but also their disdain for the eagerness of Christians to seek the conversion of Jews under any possible circumstances: “An old Jew is run down in front of a church. A priest runs out and whispers in his ear, ‘Do you believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?’ The Jew opens his eyes, ‘I’m dying and he asks me riddles.’”[58] Sometimes, the sharp-witted Jew in the tale is able to neutralize the evangelistic effort: “A Catholic priest asked, ‘When will you finally give up the old dietary prejudice and start eating pork?’ Geiger replied, ‘At your wedding, your Reverence.’”[59] Touché.
Even when the doctrine of the Incarnation is not directly the butt of a joke, lurking in the background of all Jewish cracks on Christianity is the fact that Jews consider it beyond absurd that the goyim are so gullible as to believe a Jew when he claims to be God. Rabbi Telushkin explains the Jewish view of the deity of Christ: “If a Reform rabbi suddenly announced that, as a result of reading about the Holocaust or because of terrible tragedies among his congregants, he had serious questions about God’s existence, I strongly doubt that he would be urged to see a psychiatrist. To many Jews, however, any Jew who flirts with the idea of worshiping another Jew as God is undoubtedly having mental problems.”[60] More ominously, Richard Rubenstein warns: “As long as the Christian world regards a Palestinian Jew as God incarnate, it will find it excessively difficult to see Jews in terms devoid of mythic distortion.”[61] Nevertheless, some Jews find a twisted sort of pride in the fact that one of their own was able to pull off the greatest “scam” of all time on so many people. But, of course, whatever pride is found in the global fame of one their own is negated by the bitterness of being found guilty of deicide. The Jew, however, still has good reasons for acknowledging the Jewish identity of Jesus. For starters, like a good Jew, he went into his father’s business. Moreover, he was thirty, unmarried, and still living with his mother, whom, incidentally, he thought was a virgin. And to return the favor, his mother thought he was God.[62] All very Jewish.
But it is not just with Christian theology that the contemporary Jew takes issue. In this post-Holocaust period, belief in God at all can be a serious problem for many Jews. The haunting quote from Elie Wiesel’s Night has become the theology of many a post-Holocaust Jew:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.[63]
To paraphrase Rubenstein, for post-Holocaust Jews to affirm God as the ultimate actor in history is to accept Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will. Thus, for Rubenstein, Jews can no longer believe in an omnipotent, omni-benevolent Creator.[64] Emil Fackenheim, on the other hand, takes a more classical view of God, and calls upon Jews to resist handing to Hitler, by abandoning Judaism, a “posthumous victory” over the Jewish people. The commanding Voice of Auschwitz demands such an unequivocal stand.[65] Irving Greenberg more or less represents a mediating position, but is adamant that no theology – atheism or theism – is credible if it cannot be affirmed in the presence of the burning children of the death camps.[66]
Jewish religious life is complex. To the question, “What is a Jew?” the answer does not necessarily involve belief in God, or even adherence to the Torah but rather an intimate identification with the experience of the Jewish people and a willingness to put the other before oneself. Being a Jew is not necessarily to have some particular theological orientation, but rather to immerse oneself in the “extended conversation” of the Jewish history by standing in the flow of that history. As a matter of fact, to take an agnostic view of God may even be considered a virtue by some Jews, as is the case with Dr. Marc Ellis: “Once I refused belief because I was unable to define God in a satisfying way. Now I accept God without a sure definition or even the desire for one.”[67] Moreover, along with Jews like Rodger Kamenetz, Ellis has incorporated elements of Buddhism into his Jewish practice, disciplines that he claims have helped him unite the practice of religion with the observance of religion. Ellis’ case is an example of the apparent pliability of the religious odyssey of a contemporary Jew. Another case in point, which adds to religion a political element as well, is illustrated in the following tale:
In the 1920s, a Jew travels from his small Polish shtetl to Warsaw. When he returns, he tells his friend of the wonders he has seen: “I met a Jew who had grown up in a yeshiva and knew large sections of the Talmud by heart. I met a Jew who was an atheist. I met a Jew who owned a large clothing store with many employees, and I met a Jew who was an ardent Communist.” “So what’s so strange?” the friend asks. “Warsaw is a big city. There must be a million Jews there.” “You don’t understand,” the man answers. “It was the same Jew.”[68]
It is often noted that those who marry into Judaism are shocked to find that the Jewish family into which they have become a member disdains their adopted religiosity. Religious observance is not necessarily a high priority among contemporary Jews. George Robinson explains how there are four types of Jews. First, the ideal Jew who studies Torah and performs good deeds. Second is the one who studies Torah but lacks the good deeds. Third is he who does the good deeds, but does not study Torah. And fourth is the Jew who neither studies Torah nor does good deeds.[69] But notice, they are all just as Jewish as the next one. Notwithstanding this tolerant element within Judaism, the unobservant Jew fails to escape this taunt:
A Jew comes to a rabbi. “I committed a sin,” he says, “and I want to know what I should do to make teshuva [repent]” “What was the sin?” the rabbi asks. “It happened once,” the man answers, “that I didn’t wash my hands and recite the blessing before eating bread.” “Nu, if it really only happened once,” the rabbi says, “that’s not so terrible. Nonetheless, why did you neglect to wash your hands and recite the blessing?” “I felt awkward, Rabbi, doing it. You see, I was in an unkosher restaurant.” The rabbi’s eyebrows arch. “And why were you eating in an unkosher restaurant?” “I had no choice. All the kosher restaurants were closed.” “And why were all the kosher restaurants closed?” “It was Yom Kippur.”[70]
Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, is the Sabbath of Sabbaths on the Jewish calendar. It is the only fast day that is not postponed for Shabbat. Indeed, for many non-observant Jews, it is the only day of the year that they darken the door of the synagogue.[71] By dining in a non-kosher restaurant on Yom Kippur, this poor fellow is about as religiously non-observant as a Jew can be. Yet, he is still a Jew.
Pardon me, do you have another globe?[72]
Rabbi Telushkin tells of “the Zionist leader, and Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, [who] declared in the late 1930s, ‘There are two sorts of countries in the world – those that want to expel the Jews, and those that don’t want to admit them.’”[73] Perhaps the sense of Jewish homelessness the Jew experienced for the better part of two thousand years is at least a partial explanation for why Judaism emphasizes the holiness of time over the holiness of space.[74] The establishment of the nation-state of Israel on May 14, 1948, along with the Holocaust, are the two formative events that dominate contemporary Jewish life, even for those for whom those events have not been direct and immediate physical realities. It makes no difference that a Jew might not have been born until after the Holocaust. Nor does it matter if he does not live in Israel, or has ever stepped foot in Israel for that matter. For the simple fact that to be a Jew is to identify with the historical and existential experience of the Jewish people, those events are thereby formative for all Jews.
The majority of Jews are supportive of the nation of Israel, which by its very existence represents the unfamiliar possibility of militarized self-protection. Men like Rubenstein view Israel as the only bulwark protecting against another Holocaust. To be sure, despite overwhelming odds, Israel has been phenomenally successful in defending itself against aggressive Arab neighbors for six decades now.[75] So hostile have been the relations between Israel and her neighbors that Rabbi Telushkin tells this story: “Abba Eban, Israel’s longtime foreign minister and ambassador to the U.N., claimed that if an Arab nation introduced a motion that the world was flat and that it had been flattened by Israeli tanks, it would pass the General Assembly by a resounding majority.”[76] Literally from day one, when Israel was attacked by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon on May 15, 1948, Israel has had to continually fight for its very survival.[77] While minor skirmishes with her neighbors have seemed to be the rule rather than the exception throughout Israel’s short history, major wars have been fought in 1948 (War of Independence), 1967 (Six-day War), and 1973 (Yom Kippur War). Israel’s victory in 1967 was so resounding that this joke circulated as a result:
During the Six-Day War an Israeli tank collides with an Egyptian tank in the Sinai desert. The Egyptian jumps out of his tank yelling, “I surrender.” The Israeli jumps out yelling, “Whiplash.”[78]
Because of its militarization, however, while the nation-state of Israel offers a heightened ability for Jews who live there to defend themselves rather than seek refuge in their notoriously inhospitable host nations, it has also meant that little humor has come out of the young nation. Why settle for a sarcastic put down when you have missiles and tanks? Who needs the miniature revolution of a joke when you have one of the world’s most advanced air forces? Nevertheless, at least a couple good jokes have come out of the Holy Land. The first one is a variation on a New York joke that may have had a Jewish flavor to it anyway, given the large population of Jews who live in the Big Apple:
An American, a Pole, a Chinaman, and an Israeli are standing on a street corner when a man comes over with a clipboard. “Excuse me,” he says, “I am taking a poll. What is your opinion of the meat shortage?” The American asks: “What’s a ‘shortage’?” The Pole asks; “What’s ‘meat’?” The Chinaman asks: “What’s an ‘opinion’?” The Israeli asks: “What’s ‘excuse me’?”[79]
Though Israel was not officially established until 1948, marking nearly nineteen hundred years of Diaspora, the idea of Jewish nationhood goes back to the Torah.[80] The modern Zionist movement traces its roots to the nineteenth century, most notably the eventful year of 1881. Fleeing the anti-Jewish revolts that were sweeping across Russia that violent year, many young Jews settled in Palestine.[81] The earliest advocates of Zionism ranged from Orthodox believers to Marxist socialists.[82] Zionism gained its momentum, however largely as a result of the unlikely leadership of Theodor Herzl, who although a thoroughly assimilated German, would lead the reclamation of the promised land. Herzl was not literarily astute, but he possessed tremendous leadership skills that he used to bring together a fractious mass made up of rich and poor, religious and secular. Perhaps Herzl’s ability to wheel and deal, a type that we might today ascribe to the skills of a used car salesman, is one source behind this Zionist riddle:
How many Zionists does it take to replace a light bulb? Four – one to stay home and convince someone else to do it, a second to donate the bulb, a third to screw it in, and a fourth to proclaim that the entire Jewish people stand behind their actions.[83]
Another element perhaps present in this riddle is the felt-need of many Zionists to disregard any Jews who do not stand in uncritical affirmation of the policies of the nation of Israel. The non-Jew might in his naiveté think that all Jews are pro-Israel. What one finds, however, is that some Jews decry political and military actions taken by Israel that seem to mimic some of those very same types of oppression that Jews themselves were subjected to for hundreds of years. In other words, some Jews, while far from being Holocaust deniers, object to Israelites using the memory of the Holocaust to excuse their own repressive measures against their neighbors. Hypocrisy is the word for it. Marc Ellis is an example of one such thinker who considers it moral failure not to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to the activities of Jews in the present. To Ellis, Israel has adopted the “tough-guy” image as a matter of policy, and thus, Jews have now become the aggressors.[84] Israel, says Ellis, is in danger of breaking Fackenheim’s 614th commandment to not hand Hitler a posthumous victory insofar as they become an oppressor like him. Other thinkers do not quite see it that way and consider it a moral duty for post-Holocaust Jews to become their own defenders. For Fackenheim, thus, Zionism is the desperate, yet totally legitimate determination for Jewish survival. The relation between the Holocaust and Israel is simply a matter of the latter being the authentic Jewish response to the former.[85]
The self-mockery that is found in so much of Jewish humor, even if it is a thinly veiled cover-up for self-aggrandizement, is not nearly as prevalent in humor coming out of Israel. It seems, at least from one perspective, that there is a historical irony to be found here. In the days prior to Israel independence, when Jews necessarily relied upon the often-arbitrary hospitality of their host nations, a high degree of levity helped introduce psychological balance into what for them was an imbalanced world. Though Israel is a tiny nation surrounded by hostile neighbors, having recourse to military force seems to lessen the need for psychological balance. Or perhaps, the psychological balance is found in the fact that Israel now has the power to defend itself with physical force, whereas for the previous 1900 years it could only defend itself with the weapons of a quick wit and a sharp tongue. This notion is supported by the fact that the humor that is created in Israel tends to ridicule those aspects of life about which Israelites still feel powerless, like the economy:
What’s the difference between a dollar and a shekel? A dollar.
How do you make a small fortune in Israel? Come with a large one.[86]
Or, famously, the highly aggressive driving that results in so many traffic deaths:
An Israeli bus driver and a pious rabbi die on the same day. They are brought before the heavenly tribunal, and the bus driver is immediately admitted to heaven. The rabbi is told to wait; his case must be examined more carefully. The rabbi is outraged: “I know for a fact that that bus driver was a totally irreligious Jew, while I gave a shiur in Talmud every day.” “That is all very well,” the heavenly angel tells him. “But when you taught Talmud you caused many people to sleep. When that driver drove his bus, everybody prayed.”[87]
Good humor, by definition, is always funny. But really good humor is also one of the best ways to learn the past and present, the virtues and vices, and the fears and hopes of a people. Jewish humor, in that regard, is the richest of all because the Jewish people’s past and present seem at once to be both higher and lower than any other. Because their celebrated virtues and lampooned vices seem so inseparable from one another that it seems impossible to praise one without also despising the other. And because their indefatigable hope as God’s chosen people has been routinely shattered by an irrational and violent hatred that escapes the explanatory efforts of even the sharpest minds. Within all that, their humor exalts them and it debases them. It comforts them and it assaults those who cause their discomfort. It also opens up their world to the non-Jew in a way that perhaps nothing else can. Once the non-Jew enters the world of the Jew, he may find himself puzzled by their thoughts and exasperated at some of their ways. But he might just also discover a sympathy for their sufferings. In any case, he will find himself laughing at the sad reality that for many Jews, they really do wish there was another globe.
[1] Harry Golden, The Golden Book of Jewish Humor (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972), 11.
[2] Deuteronomy 33:27
[3] Avner Ziv and Anat Zajdman, eds., Semites and Stereotypes: Characteristics of Jewish Humor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), vii.
[4] Raphael Patai, “Introduction: Jewish Humor – A Survey and a Program,” in Ziv and Zajdman, xvi-xvii.
[5] Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say About the Jews (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992), 16.
[6] Golden, 12.
[7] Nathan Ausubel, ed., A Treasury of Jewish Humor (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1951), xvi.
[8] Emanuel S. Goldsmith, “Sholom Aleichem’s Humor of Affirmation and Survival,” in Ziv and Zajdman, 15.
[9] George Robinson, Essential Judaism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs, Customs, and Rituals (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), 496-97.
[10] Goldsmith, 16.
[11] Telushkin, 26.
[12] Ibid., 17.
[13] Carolyn Miller, “Are Jews Funnier than Non-Jews?” in Ziv and Zajdman, 59.
[14] Avner Ziv, “Preface,” in Ziv and Zajdman, vii. See also Dan Ben-Amos, “The ‘Myth’ of Jewish Humor,” Western Folklore 32, no. 2 (Apr., 1973): 112-31.
[15] William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds., The Big Book of Jewish Humor (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1981), xviii-xxi.
[16] Golden, 15.
[17] Paul Lewis, “Three Jews and a Blindfold: The Politics of Gallows Humor,” in Ziv and Zajdman, 56.
[18] Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136.
[19] Patai, xix.
[20] Goldsmith, 15.
[21] Novak and Waldoks, 73.
[22] Gartner, 167.
[23] Ibid., 167-72.
[24] Golden, 137-38.
[25] See generally, Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994).
[26] Ibid., 23. emphasis added.
[27] Golden, 138-39.
[28] Lewis, 47.
[29] Novak and Waldoks, 81.
[30] Lewis, 52.
[31] Golden, 86.
[32] Numbers 12:3
[33] Novak and Waldoks, xvi.
[34] Gartner, 411-13. Telushkin, 75.
[35] Christie Davies, “Exploring the Thesis of the Self-Deprecating Jewish Sense of Humor,” in Ziv and Zajdman, 34.
[36] Telushkin, 19.
[37] Ibid., 36.
[38] Telushkin, 79.
[39] Ibid., 170.
[40] Davies, 37.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid., 38.
[43] Telushkin, 66.
[44] Telushkin, 102.
[45] Golden, 25.
[46] Telushkin, 80-81.
[47] Ibid., 82.
[48] Dan Greenburg, How to be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual (Los Angeles: Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc., 1975), 11. emphasis added.
[49] Ibid., 13.
[50] Ibid., 38.
[51] Ibid., 111.
[52] Ibid., 133-34.
[53] Ibid., 125.
[54] Robinson, 501.
[55] Ibid., 502.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Peter Ochs, “The God of Jews and Christians,” in Tikva Frymer-Kensky, et al, eds., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), 59.
[58] Davies, 34.
[59] Novak and Waldoks, 160.
[60] Telushkin, 137.
[61] Richard Rubenstein, “The Making of a Rabbi,” in Michael L. Morgan, ed., A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93.
[62] Telushkin, 39.
[63] Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 32.
[64] Richard Rubenstein, “Symposium on Jewish Belief,” in Morgan, 95.
[65] Emil Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment,” in Morgan, 115-22.
[66] Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Morgan, 102-115.
[67] Marc H. Ellis, Practicing Exile: The Religious Odyssey of an American Jew (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 4.
[68] Telushkin, 25.
[69] Robinson, 106-07.
[70] Telushkin, 166-67.
[71] Robinson, 97-98.
[72] Telushkin, 107.
[73] Ibid., 108.
[74] Robinson, 88.
[75] Ibid., 496.
[76] Telushkin, 180.
[77] Gartner, 393.
[78] Telushkin, 173-74.
[79] Ibid., 176.
[80] Robinson, 480.
[81] Ibid., 483.
[82] Ibid., 482.
[83] Novak and Waldoks, 126.
[84] Ellis, 33, 55.
[85] Emil L. Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and the State of Israel: Their Relation,” in Morgan, 131-35.
[86] Telushkin, 174.
[87] Ibid., 177.