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Jewishly Yours, AMERICA
3/27/07
Is America embracing Jewish humor and culture more now than ever? And does it even realize it?
"Jewish Cowboy" by Paul Graubard Last year at this time, I wrote one of my most popular columns to date, the column entitled "The Pesadic Cult of Fizzy Pleasure." It was a column about Kosher for Passover Coke; the yellow-capped soft drink that anyone who’s anyone knows tastes a hill of beans better because it’s made with cane sugar and not icky-poo high fructose corn syrup that is unpotable for observant Ashkenazi Jews during Passover. But that concept is so last year. Anyone who’s anyone knows that drinking Coke, kosher for Passover or not just ain’t p.c. anymore.
So this year, I once again offer up some food for thought for the upcoming Passover season.
Barbie as Miriam and Ken as Moses
courtesy of Sara Schwimmer From Seinfeld, (the show about nothing,) to Sarah Silverman, and phrases like "oy vey" and "kvetch" entering into mainstream language as if they were English itself, it seems Jewish humor and culture are infused in American life everywhere.
Are Americans completely aware of it? I don’t think so. This is what is so intriguing to me.
I like to go to a certain local coffee shop for my coffee and bagel every once in a while. It’s one of the only places in town I can get bagel and lox. Only you can’t call it "lox." Because they don’t know what "lox" is. They sell it, they eat it, but if you don’t call it "Smoked Salmon," you get a furled brow and a confused expression. And I had a conversation with someone not too long ago about the hit show "Seinfeld." They loved it, thought it was hilarious. But they never thought about the humor as being “Jewish.” George Costanza? They assumed he was Italian. Kramer? Irish, right? Not that they even made the connections with ethnicity so much, but they certianly never thought of what they were watching as a “Jewish” sit-com.
Do the vast majority of Americans using the word "schmaltzy" or "shmooze" or "shmuck" even know where the words came from? I wonder.
This is the time of year that I always think of as the quintessential time when Christians and Jews can or at least should open their eyes to see their own presence in each other’s traditions. What was Jesus doing in that so-called "Upper Room" with his disciples? He was hosting a seder. Perhaps he was wearing a "kittel," a burial shroud which is customary for the person leading a seder to wear. When he broke the bread surely it crumbled because it would have been matzoh. These facts are there, but somehow under the radar of most Christians in the way they think about the holiday of Easter. They do not call it the Last Seder. They do not think about the Hebrew prayers that must’ve been on the lips of Jesus’ loved ones as he died and as they mourned his death.
Passover, then, seem like the perfect celebration for all of us. So many of our traditions, even our differences, are rooted here. It’s a perfect time to acknowledge how infused our cultures are. A wonderful way to share a little love and peace with each other. Is this a little more reserved and sweet than you’re used to out of the mouth of Jacoozi? Maybe. But the state of the world weighs even on me. And so much of what many of us in this country are is an infusion of cultures that all really do seem to get along and love and cherish one another. Even if we do not all acknowledge that smoked salmon really is known as "lox."
I’ve interviewed author Danny Klein of Great Barrington, and Sara Schwimmer, founder and president of chosencouture.com, and have some great music lined up, including "Seda' Club" from the beloved Jewish Robot named Shabot 6000, and more. Sit back, enjoy, and Chag Sameach to all. Peace out, America.
Special thanks to Paul Graubard for use of his above image "Jewish Cowboy," Scribby for use of his fiddle music, The Tiptons for the short clip of their song "Frailoch," my guests Danny Klein and Sara Schwimmer, and Ben Baruch for inclusion of his song "Seda' Club". Visit their websites and listen to the show by clicking below:Paul Graubard
Scribbyworld
The Tiptons Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar www.chosencouture.com www.jewishrobot.com, Click here to see why my webbie is so proud of me... Seda' Club - shabot6000.comAdd to My Profile
3/28/2007
what a scream... guilty fish hair gel!!!!
right on,
martha
3/29/2007
A note for Scribby:
Q.) Why is this night different than all other nights?
A. ) Because the first and 4th Tueday of every month is Bimbo Politics
night, you putz!
I've become a big fan. How could I not? The show just gets better by
leaps and bounds.
Someone once asked my father what "Yiddish" was. He thought for just a
second, and then asked his own question. "Do you speak Hebrew?" The man
said, No I don't speak Hebrew. My father replied, "Then you speak Yiddish".
It was said that when my great grandmother was on a rampage, and
cursing, it was like poetry and singing. She would sometimes make a very
ancient Middle Eastern eggplant recipe that involved roasting the
eggplant on a gas burner. Then you mix the roasted eggplant with olive
oil, onions and spices. Often, when she was roasting the eggplant, it
would burst and leak all over the stove top, making quite a mess. She
would exclaim, "Schwartze Teivel", (Black Devil) at finding the
difficult mess it caused. That's what we have always called that family
favorite - Schwartze Teivel.
My lovely wife is always eager to learn a few special words to add to
her vocabulary. I'm happy to oblige. For a former and extremely fallen
Catholic, she does quite well. Her late father's ancestry is cloudy and
mostly Hungarian, so she may be more Jewish than her mother would like
to consider.
On the topic of merchandising. Do you know where I can purchase
yarmulkes with political messages embroidered into the design? I might
be inclined to start my collection with one that says "Bimbo Politics",
and take it from there.
Breathe & Smile
Mike
ps. I enjoyed the fiddle greatly! I'm guessing you can probably wave a
towel pretty well, too.
4/16/2007
My friend Sonia sent this, on the subject of laughter, in honor of Isaac turning two yesterday. She wrote it for the New Year a while back...
Rosh Hashona 5762
By Sonia Pilcer
In the beginning there was laughter.
Imagine the scene. The Lord tells Abraham, who’s one hundred years old: “Your wife, Sarah, shall bear you a son.”
What does Abraham do?
Genesis 17: “Abraham threw himself upon his face and laughed, saying to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man a hundred years old. Or can Sarah bear a child at ninety?’”
And how does his wife, who has been childless all these years, respond to the news?
Genesis 18: “Now Sarah had stopped having the periods of women. Therefore she laughed to herself, saying, ‘Now that I am withered, am I to have pleasure, and my husband is old?’”
You can almost hear the laughter that surrounds the beginning of the Jewish people and their covenant with God. The Hebrew word is Tzahak. To laugh. The root is spelled Tzaddi Chet Kuf. Powerful letters.
Tzadi stands for righteous Tzadik. The bent shape of the letter Tzadi depicts our capacity to bend our will to a Higher Will, often acting through uncanny events and coincidence. Chet is the letter of health and vitality, for it begins the word for life, Chai. Kuf begins the word Kedushah, holiness.
When Abraham laughs, he bows to the ground before the Lord. He has been through this before, heard strange things from Him before. But it seems a joke. Tzahak also means joke.
I imagine Sarah’s laughter is not a titter, a giggle or a chuckle, but a deep roar from her solar plexus. She is to have pleasure with her husband. The word for pleasure, ednah, is connected to Eden. Sexual pleasure.
She has watched as her husband spent his youthful seed with the Other One. In desperation, she sent him to her. Now he is ancient. An alte cocker. One hundred years old. Hers is almost a shriek rising from the depths of her neshuma, her soul.
“You make me barren as a stone my whole life. I have to give my husband to my maid, my rival. Hagar with her dark, flashing eyes, full seductive lips. Over the years, I’ve imagined my husband in her bed. It was unbearable. Further, I’ve had to suffer the humiliation of the other woman’s gloating smile as she holds her son, gotten by my husband. And now – NOW – you tell me I’ll have a baby.”
The Lord says to Abraham, “‘Why did Sarah laugh?’ Is there anything too difficult for the Lord?”
Sarah responds with a lie. She says, “‘I did not laugh,’ for she was afraid.” But the Lord replies, YOU DID LAUGH.
Sarah laughed, but sobers up quickly. God is not known for his sense of humor.
The enormity, the enormous irony begins to dawn on her. “Really?” she says in wonder. It’s true. She knows it in her heart. She is with child. And how to react when one is astonished, utterly bewildered by life’s incomprehensible ironies. As the Readers Digest tells us, laughter is the best medicine.
Psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, a contemporary of Freud’s, writes in Jewish Wit: “The realm of the comic is as wide as that of the tragic, and in Jewish wit, it is wider since it encompasses the hopeless and the catastrophic. Where once was lament, there is now laughter.”
Think of all the Jewish comedians from Lenny Bruce to Mel Brooks to Seinfeld. The gazillion Jewish jokes, so many filled with scathing self-knowledge and knowledge of Jews as a group. “The joke is often extended beyond the boundaries of family life,” Reik adds, “because Jews of all countries form a single large, family.”
In Wit and Unconscious, Freud tells the following joke: “A little girl of four years old heard her parents refer to a Jewish acquaintance as a Hebrew. Later, she hears his wife referred to as Mrs. X. The little girl corrects her mother saying, “No, that is not her name. If her husband is a Hebrew, she is a Shebrew.” Now what does that mean?
As a novelist, I fell upon this strategy almost accidentally. I was very serious at first and unreadable, but when I discovered humor, it opened up a way of telling stories. Make your reader laugh and you can deliver the most devastating truths, I learned. Lemons into lemonade.
When God asks if Sarah laughed, she answers, “No, not me, never.“ But God knows everything. He knows she lied. The last line is delivered like a punchline to a joke. One can imagine Jackie Mason saying: YOU DID LAUGH.
The scene is reminiscent of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Like Eve, Sarah is caught in a lie, trying to cover up. But unlike Eve, she isn’t punished. Why? What is the quality of laughter that informs Rosh Hashona?
I’ve pondered why this portion of Torah with its intimate view of a marriage, jealousy, surrogate motherhood and child-bearing is read during Yom Noraim, the Days of Awe.
In Mirrors of Time, Joel Ziff describes this period. “Through the month of Elul, we acknowledge, with compassion, the truths of our lives. On Rosh Hashona, we find ourselves confronted by God, sitting on a throne of judgment, evaluating our lives, and deciding our fate for the coming year.”
As we face this new year, these are days of anxiety, of humility, and soul-searching. We are asked to be accountable for our actions and clarify the ways in which we are the authors of our own destines. We face the Day of Judgment – who shall live and who shall die in the coming year.
Yet the Torah gives us the laughter of a husband and wife, who have spent their whole lives together childless, not to mention all their other tsuris. What can we learn from this story?
I would suggest that the Torah is teaching us, through the example of its characters, a way of dealing with failure, disappointment, our inability to live up to our own expectations as well as God’s.
Laughter is not a cruel or aggressive act. It’s like tears – maybe the opposite side of the mirror. And it is involuntary as anyone who has had a case of the giggles can attest. Thus, Sarah goes unpunished for her mirth, and when the male child is delivered in the midst of both of his parents’ joyful laughter, he is named Yitzhak, the one who laughs.
“The entire beginning of the Jewish people is laughable,” Samuel Raphael Hirsch has written. “Its history, its expectations, its hopes. God waited with the foundation of this people until its forefather had reached a ‘ridiculous’ high age. The derisive laughter which has followed the Jew through history is the surest proof of the divine nature of the path. The Jew is not touched by this ridicule because from the beginning he has been prepared for it.”
As Sarah waits to give birth, she worries. Genesis 21: “Laughter has God made me. Whoever hears will laugh at me.”
Tzahak also means mockery. People who hear of her pregnancy may rejoice with Sarah, but they might also laugh at her.
Yet the laughter that Sarah imagines she will encounter can be perceived in a different way. Amidst the suffering, so much unfairness, a miracle occurs. Perhaps that is the message too. We are all provided for, but not on our timetables, not in the ways we expect or desire. And there is the mystery.
Theodor Reik writes: “Yehovah has forbidden the Jews of our time to express his tragic experiences in a way appealing to a world that is hostile, or, at best, indifferent. But by conferring upon him the gift of wit, his God has given him the power to speak of what he suffers.”
I recall my parents and their survivor cronies in Blue Paradise, a bungalow colony in the Catskills, where they organized poolside beauty pageants, champagne dance balls, and mock weddings. The bride wore white (as few of them ever had in the lager) and was always played by the hairiest man among them.
During these Days of Awe, as we assess the previous year, contemplate our shortcomings, which are huge, all the ways we’ve failed our expectations of ourselves as well as others, may we remember our forefather and mother’s laughter. In humor, there is compassion. Laughter is the human way – without heroic embellishment. May we face ourselves and each other on this Rosh Hashona with a sense of life’s profound humor.
Sonia Pilcer has published five works of fiction. “The Holocaust Kid,” her most recent book, is a collection of autobiographical stories about being a second generation Holocaust survivor. (Persea Books)
5/15/2007
Thank you for the proper usage of "furled."
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