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Humor: August 5, 2009

“Thou hast chosen us from among the nations… Why did you have to pick on the Jews?”

– Tevye the dairyman

• Lecturer: Ruth Wisse (Harvard University)
• Respondent: Hillel Halkin (Author of Across the Sabbath River and Yehuda Halevi, forthcoming from Schocken Books)
• Required Readings: 

Sholem Aleichem: “The Haunted Tailor”, “Home for Passover”, “On Account of a Hat” from The Best of Sholem Aleichem.

Listen to the lecture here:

Ruth Wisse's Opening Lecture (0:00 - 35:12)

  “It is arguable that Sholem Aleichem had a more profound influence on modern Jewry than any other Jewish thinker or writer.” 

     “Without the Bible you don’t have a Jewish people. Its everything… and yet the very text that supports Jewish national existence is a constant reminder of how far one has come from the civilization that it depicts.” 

     “For Sholem Aleichem the incongruity between the divine promise and the humiliating realities of Jewish life were  not to be resolved, they were only to be accepted.”

     “Humor was as it were the prescription for moral balance. It allows you to hold on to the promise while acknowledging its liabilities… Sholem Aleichem, like Freud, considered humor the mature way of dealing with contradictions… How does he accomplish this? How do you create the simultaneity between the sacred and the profane?”

Hillel Halkin's Response (35:12-)

  “If Jewish humor is a way of dealing with adversity, if it’s a way of dealing with the contradiction between Jew’s image of who they should be and who they would like to be and their knowledge of reality of who or what they really are, why does it take so many centuries before Jewish humor develops is in this form? I think the answer is that it’s really only in the 19^th century that Jews as a community begin to lose their confidence in who they are, their sense of psychological security about who they are, their natural sense of superiority about who they are.”

   “[In Jewish humor] there is a situation of ambiguity in which its not entirely clear who is really the ridiculous one. And then there is the person who understands the joke - who is basically the Jewish audience, who is superior because they understand something that a non-Jew could not understand and has a certain wisdom and a certain insight that a non-Jew could not have.”

A few old jokes
   … The one about the Jewish atheist and the Minyan
     … The one about great German Jewish philosopher and the Hasidim
     … The one about the Apikores (Heretic)
   … The one about not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.

   “[Jewish jokes] create an ambiguity, they create an uncertainty about who is the butt of the joke, and they create an enormous sense of satisfaction on the part of the listener that they can understand this ambiguity, they can overcome it, and in doing so they can do something that only a Jew can do.”