The Talmudic and Mystical Roots of Jewish Humor

Jews played, and continue to play, a major role in the history of American comedy, and Jewish humor has been a much-discussed topic at least since Sigmund Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. But while many assume the Jewish penchant for jest is a modern and perhaps secular phenomenon, Sarah Rindner points to its ancient and religious roots:

The Talmud notes the important role of laughter in the religious psyche. One story recorded in Ta’anit 22a describes a conversation between the sage Rabbi Broka Ḥoza’ah and Elijah the prophet. Rabbi Broka asks Elijah which people in the marketplace will merit a place in the World to Come. . . . Elijah highlights several people who would not obviously pass for righteous: a jailkeeper dressed in non-Jewish clothing and a pair of jesters.

Elijah reveals that the jailkeeper’s outward appearance hides a hidden holy agenda that one would never have guessed. The jokesters, too, are more righteous than they seem, Elijah reveals. But while the jailkeeper’s saintliness is hidden, the jokesters’ virtue hides in plain sight. The very reason one might think they are not particularly saintly—the fact that they make their living lightening the mood and distracting people from their sorrows—is precisely the source of their greatness.

Rabbi Naftali Loewenthal, a London-based scholar of Jewish mysticism, . . . explained that comic irony fosters [a different] kind of perspective, helping a person balance the forces of the divine soul pushing for good and the temptations of the world. Humor “takes the air out of the urges within a person,” and in doing so clears a space for him to connect with something that transcends the narrow self.

Read more at Lubavitch Magazine

More about: Jewish humor, Judaism, Kabbalah, Talmud

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society