Friday Night at Eight: Jewish Humor, The Wisdom of Chelm, and Bloggers

There’s a book I’ve read over and over since I was a child, so many times that I’ve memorized most of its stories.  My father and brothers also knew these stories and we’d often use them to illustrate whatever conversation we were having.

The book is entitled A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, edited by Nathan Ausubel.  It was published in 1948.

The stories are great, but Ausubel’s introduction to each section is wonderful, I think.

So I’m thinking about some of the more absurd arguments all of us get into every now and then — no, not flamewars, just minutiae unto absurdity at times, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin kind of stuff.  And I thought about the town of Chelm and the stories about the folks there.

Before I get to the stories, I’d like to share part of Ausubel’s introduction to the section of the book entitled “The Human Comedy:”

The overtones of satire, irony and quip we hear even in the Old Testament.  For example, there is the gay mockery of the Prophet Elijah as he listens to the idol-worshipping soothsayers of Baal, invoking their god morning, noon and night:  “O Baal, hear us!”  To this, the rational-minded Elijah remarks tauntingly: “Cry ye louder, for he is a god; he is perhaps talking or walking, or he is on a journey or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.”

We also find satire and irony in the Prophets, especially in the writings of Amos and Isaiah.  With matchless skill they lay bare the weaknesses and the follies of their contemporaries.  They satirize the hypocrite, the miser, the skinflint, the profligate, the coquette, the self-satisfied and the self-righteous.  It is from this acid portraiture that much of Jewish folklore found its inspiration and themes.  The fables, parables, anecdotes and sayings in the Talmud and Midrash, as the reader of this book will find out for himself, were rich in those very characteristics with which we associate Jewish humor today.

…

The liveliness and the many-sidedness of Jewish humor make it possible for everyone to find in it that which will suit his taste.  It is a treasury in which lies stored up three thousand years of a people’s laughter.  Its variety recalls the words of Bar-Hebraeus, the Thirteenth Century Syrian-Jewish folklorist, in his introduction to his Laughable Stories: “And let this book be a devoted friend to the reader, whether he be Muslim, Jew, or Aramean, or a man belonging to a foreign country or nation.  And let the man who is learned, I mean to say the man who hath a bright understanding, and the man that babbleth conceitedly even though he drives everyone mad, and also every other man, choose what is best for himself.  And let each pluck the flowers that please him.  In this way the book will succeed in bringing together the things which are alike, each to the other.”

So onward … to the town of Chelm, and why these particular stories remind me of the kinds of knots we can tie ourselves into when it comes to arguing the finer points of any issue.

I’ll begin with one of my favorites, The Worriers of Chelm:

The people of Chelm were worriers.  So they called a meeting to do something about the problem of worry.  A motion was duly made and seconded to the effect that Yossel, the cobbler, be retained by the community as a whole, to do its worrying, and that his fee be one ruble per week.

The motion was about to carry, all the speeches having been for the affirmative, when one sage propounded the fatal question:  “If Yossel earned a ruble a week, what would he have to worry about?”

A conundrum indeed!

Then we have the brilliant scholarly argument on human growth, The Secret of Growing:

Two sages of Chelm sat around the synagogue stove on a cold winter day.  They debated heatedly over the following question:  at which end does a human being grow?

“What a question!” cried one.  “Any fool knows that a man grows from his feet up.”

“Give me proof,” demanded the other.

“Several years ago I bought myself a pair of pants but they were so long that they trailed on the ground.  Now look at them — see how short they’ve gotten.  There’s your proof.”

“It’s just the other way around,” maintained the other.  “Anyone with eyes in his head can see that man grows from the head.  Why, just yesterday I watched a regiment of soldiers on parade and it was clear as daylight that at the bottom of their feet they were all the same; they differed in size only at the top!”

Try to deny the brilliance of THAT debate!

And then of course, there is Wet Logic:

A sage of Chelm went bathing in the lake and almost drowned.  When he raised an outcry other swimmers came to his rescue.  As he was helped out of the water, he took a solemn oath:  “I swear never to go into the water again until I learn how to swim!”

heh.

Finally, the great debate that will go down in the annals of brilliant jurisprudence, Chelm Justice

A great calamity befell Chelm one day.  The town cobbler murdered one of his customers.  So he was brought before the judge who sentenced him to die by hanging.

When the verdict was read, a townsman arose and cried out, “If your Honor pleases — you have sentenced to death the town cobbler!  He’s the only one we’ve got.  If you hang him, who will mend our shoes?”

“Who?  Who?” cried all the people of Chelm with one voice.

The judge nodded in agreement and reconsidered his verdict.

“Good people of Chelm,” he said, “what you say is true.  Since we have only one cobbler it would be a great wrong against the community to let him die.  As there are two roofers in the town, let one of them be hanged instead!”

Of course as these stories reminded me of bloggers arguing, they also reminded me of some of our adversaries in the US, as we hear over and over such convoluted reasonings for bad policies and laws.  But I like the folks of Chelm way too much to compare them to Republicans.  So I’ll use a story from a different part of the book to deal with these folks, Mutual Introduction:

A Jew was walking on the Bismarck Platz in Berlin when uintentionally he brushed against a Prussian officer.

“Swine!” roared the officer.

“Cohen!” replied the Jew with a stiff bow.

And these are my profound thoughts for a rainy Friday evening in New York City.  Hope everyone has a good weekend, and that the folks in California find some relief from those damned fires.