Jewish Comedy by Jeremy Dauber

Author:Jeremy Dauber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN once said that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.” Is it true that a good work of Jewish theology—or philosophy, or thought—could be done the same way? Well, no, and also yes. This is not the only model for the relationship with God in Jewish theology; and maybe it’s not surprising that some of the models and texts that accentuate distance and fear—the medieval Maimonideans, for example—are hardly what you’d call a great source of theological comedy. (I don’t want to present that extraordinary jurist, scholar, philosopher, and medical professional as a total killjoy, though: in advice to other doctors, Maimonides—who attended the Sultan of Egypt as personal physician—noted that “One should strengthen the vital power . . . by telling patients joyful stories which widen his soul and dilate his heart, and by relating news that distracts his mind and makes him laugh as well as his friends.”) On the other hand, as we move into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hasidic movement, with its emphasis on divine proximity, its insistence that God is all around us and infinitely reachable, is full of humor of various sorts, joyous, wry, rapturous, and the like.

This sensibility was hardly limited to the Hasidic movement. One of the founders of what we’d now call modern Orthodoxy, Samson Raphael Hirsch, contemplating the verse in Exodus where the Jews complain “Are there no graves in Egypt that you have brought us to die in the wilderness?,” wrote: “This sharp irony even in a moment of deepest anxiety and despair is a characteristic trait of the witty vein which is inherent in the Jewish race from their very beginnings.” Indeed, it may be a hallmark of traditional societies for whom comfort with divinity in their lives is a given that joking is far less taboo than in societies where that faith is constantly in question. Here are two jokes that tell the tale:

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