Under The Table
here there are no endings
only tides of change
here the path goes ever wending
through forests born of rain
there’s a shadow of a raven
gliding over fields of stone
life and light have found each other
we are none of us alone
come with me and join the dancing
add your voice to evening’s song
find a place to watch the turning
of the day to night and dawn
give yourself to silent wonder
shout your feelings to the sky
bless this chance to share the gift of life
never mind the reasons why
There’s a light on the hill at the end of the day,
That’s as sweet as the sweet yellow rose.
I would give you this flower if only it bloomed
Any time but the golden hour.
There’s a song in my heart every time you are near,
That’s as sweet as the breeze off the bay.
I would sing you this song if only I knew
What the sweet breeze was trying to say.
Come away with me now to the top of the hill,
We will dance for the golden hour
We’ll open our hearts to the breeze off the bay
And give voice to the sweetest flower
my grandmother Goody at a Hollywood party with Red Skelton and William Bendix
Author’s Note: Here we are nearing the end of 2019 and a few days away from my 70th birthday, and I’m happy to report that my last blog entry Telling Jokes brought several positive emails from readers. Inspired by this deluge (more than two and less than eight) of good reviews and requests for more jokes, I’ve decided to resurrect for your reading pleasure an article I posted on my blog in 2008 that was subsequently published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser and the Sacramento News & Review. I wrote Jewish Jokes while in the throes of self-publishing my collection of contemporary dharma tales Buddha In A Teacup, which has subsequently been published in paperback by Soft Skull Press (2016) and is currently available from bookstores and online as an actual book, an e-book, and an audio book.
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“The truth is not ashamed of appearing contrived.” Isaac Bashevis Singer
I recently self-published a new book, and with its publication a press release was loosed upon the nation. There were several responses, one from a Jewish publication in Detroit. “Is the author Jewish? If so, we would like a review copy.”
“Funny you should mention it,” is the punch line to a well-known Jewish joke, and that’s what popped into my head when I considered this question about my racial background. Clearly, the inquiry was about ethnicity, not religion.
Jewish jokes are always funnier when told rather than written because how the joke is told is paramount. I should also note that if one is not Jewish, Jewish jokes (as opposed to anti-Jewish jokes) often make little sense and are not particularly funny. This is because Jewish jokes refer to things that non-Jews rarely know anything about.
For instance: On the first day of school, a teacher asks her Second Graders to tell about what they did over the summer. A boy stands up and says, “My name is Mike Jones. My dad and I went snorkeling and I found a really cool bird’s nest.” He sits down and a girl stands up and says, “My name is Fiona Parker. We went to Yosemite and I saw a bear, and my mom taught me how to bake cookies.” She sits down and a boy stands up and says, “My name is Jaime Goldberg and I pledge ten dollars.”
That’s the joke. It refers to the phenomenon of Jewish gatherings frequently turning into fundraisers. When my mother’s mother told me this joke, and whenever she told jokes, she began to laugh midway through the telling but without disrupting the flow of the narrative. No easy feat.
So… two Jewish guys, old friends, meet up after some years apart and reveal that they gave their respective sons the same college graduation present—a trip to Israel to get in touch with their Jewish roots. And lo and behold, while traveling in Israel, both sons became Christians. Perplexed by this double outrage, the two Jewish guys rush to the synagogue and demand an explanation from God. Thunder rumbles and God’s voice intones, “Funny you should mention it.”
That’s the joke. I will risk insulting your intelligence by explaining that God’s response implies that his Jewish son, Jesus, also became a Christian while traveling in Israel.
My grandmother Goody was born in the Detroit ghetto, the Jewish one, in 1900. Her father, an orthodox Jew, was from Poland. A cantor with a golden voice, he earned a pittance from singing in the synagogue and preparing boys for bar mitzvah, while Goody’s mother, also an orthodox Jew from Poland, kept a grocery store and was the family’s breadwinner. Goody was more formally known as Gertrude, which was an anglicized version of Golda.
Most people knew my Jewish grandfather by his nickname Casey, and more formally as Myron. Whenever I pressed him to tell me his “real” name, he would rattle off a burst of Yiddish that never failed to send Goody into gales of laughter.
I did not know of Goody and Casey’s Jewishness—or my own—until I was twelve years old. My mother, born Avis Gloria Weinstein, was, as far as my siblings and I knew, a Winton who married a Walton. I would find out much later in life that her parents changed their name from Weinstein to Winton during the depths of the Great Depression so, as Casey put it, “I could get a job and we could get a place to live.”
Twice in her childhood—in Los Angeles, no less—my mother was stoned by gangs of children when they discovered she was Jewish. Following Goody’s advice, my mother tried to hide all traces of her Jewishness and married my father, a non-Jew, who was then disowned by his parents for marrying a Jew. Oy vey.
So there I was, twelve years old, at a party at Goody and Casey’s house in Los Angeles. Goody deposited me in front of a quartet of Jewish matrons and said, “Girls, I’d like you to meet my grandson Todd,” and then she hurried away.
One of the matrons pinched my cheek and said, “What a good looking Jewish boy you are.”
Another of the matrons nodded in agreement, said something in Yiddish, and seeing my bewilderment translated, “You’ll break a thousand hearts.”
“But I’m not Jewish,” I replied. “I’m a Unitarian.”
Two of the matrons frowned, two laughed.
“You’re Avis’s boy,” said the eldest. “You’re Jewish, sweetie pie. Through and through.”
“No,” I said, emphatically. “I’m not Jewish.”
To which she replied, “They would have burned you.”
I did not get an explanation of this frightening remark from my mother, but from my father. He explained to me that in Hitler’s Germany, in accordance with Jewish matrilineal law, anyone born to a Jewish mother was considered Jewish, and thus I would have been considered a Jew and sent to a concentration camp where I would have died.
“Mom is Jewish?” I asked, stunned by the news.
“No,” said my father. “She is of Jewish origin. There’s a difference.”
For the next twenty-eight years, when asked if I was Jewish (and for some reason I was often asked) I would reply, “I am of Jewish origin on my mother’s side.”
So there’s this Catholic priest sitting in the booth, a slow day in the confession business, when in comes an old guy who puts his face up to the little window and says, “Bless me father for I have sinned. I’m eighty-years-old. I’ve been married for sixty years and never once cheated on my wife. Yesterday I met a gorgeous young woman. We went to her apartment and had fantastic sex.”
The priest considers the gravity of this sin and asks, “How long has it been since your last confession?”
The old guy says, “Oh, I’ve never confessed.”
“You’re a Catholic and you’ve never confessed?”
“I’m not Catholic. I’m Jewish.”
“You’re Jewish? So why are you telling me?”
“Telling you?” says the old guy. “I’m telling everybody.”
But seriously, folks, when I was forty, my life in shambles, I began therapy with a woman who literally saved my life. One day, a few months into the therapeutic process, I found myself face down on the floor of the consulting room, my body shaking uncontrollably. I had no conscious understanding of why I was so terrified, but I was absolutely scared to death. My therapist deftly touched the center of my back and said, “Right there. What’s that?”
I shouted, “I’m Jewish!”
And I knew with every fiber of my being that storm troopers were going to kick the door down and drag me away to be killed. I didn’t imagine this might happen. I didn’t think it. I knew they were coming to kill me because I had violated the great taboo and revealed I was Jewish. This taboo was implanted in me in my mother’s womb and amplified day and night through my entire childhood, though it was never spoken aloud and never known to my conscious mind.
To insure that I would never reveal this awful truth, I was also commanded from day one (through emotional osmosis) to never stand out, never succeed in a big way, and never become well-known, else questions would be asked, inquiries made, and misery and death would inevitably follow. This was how my innocent psyche was programmed.
“Is the author Jewish. If so, we would like a review copy.”
And now for a few mohel jokes.
Pronounced moil, a mohel is a person (traditionally a man) trained and anointed to perform the physical and religious procedures of circumcision that Jewish boys undergo eight days after they are born. Now please imagine a tiny woman with a sparkle in her eye, laughing until she cries, telling the following jokes.
Mohel Joke #1: So there’s this mohel with a shop in the village. In the front window he’s got a big grandfather clock. Along comes a man from out of town. He’s been wanting to get his watch fixed, and seeing the big clock in the window he enters the shop and says to the mohel, “I vant you should fix my vatch.”
“I don’t fix vatches,” says the mohel. “I’m a mohel.”
“You’re a mohel?” says the man. “So vuts vid the clock in the front vindow?”
“If you vas a mohel, vut would you have in the front vindow?”
Mohel Joke #2: So the mohel dies and leaves his widow a big box of all the foreskins he ever snipped. His bereaved wife goes to a leather shop and says to the leather smith, “I vant you should make for me a keepsake of my late husband, the mohel. I don’t care what you make, only that you should use all the skins. Understand? All of them.”
“Soitanly,” says the leather smith. “My condolences. Come beck in a veek.”
So she comes back a week later and the leather smith presents her with an elegantly crafted change purse.
“This is very nice,” she says, frowning at the little thing, “but I specifically said you should use all the skins.”
“I did,” says the leather smith. “Rub that thing a few times and it toins into a steamer trunk.”
Mohel Joke #3: Thirteen baby boys are born in the village on the same day, and eight days later, the mohel—with his operating room on the second floor of an old building—is working fast, tossing the foreskins into a box by the window. In his haste, he tosses one of the little skin rings too hard and it flies out the window and flutters down into a passing convertible, right onto the lap of a young Jewish gal on a date with her boyfriend. She picks up the foreskin and says to her suitor, “Vut is dis?”
“Try it,” he says, winking at her. “If you like it, I’ll give you a whole one.”
fin
When I was seven I became interested in learning to tell jokes. My father and mother never told jokes, and the jokes I heard at school rarely appealed to me, but I was mesmerized by the way my Uncle Bob told jokes.
Uncle Bob, my father’s brother, was of great interest to me for many reasons. He was the survivor of a terrible car accident that had left most of the right side of his body paralyzed, and he moved and spoke with great effort, sometimes taking several seconds to express a single word. He was a chain smoker, and his relationship to cigarettes was endlessly fascinating to me.
To get a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, to extract a cigarette from the pack, to get the cigarette between his lips on the functional side of his mouth, and then to light the cigarette with a lighter, was a tremendously difficult and time-consuming undertaking for Uncle Bob, an undertaking I watched with rapt attention hundreds of times.
There were so many ways he might fail at this endeavor, so many precarious moments along the treacherous course from pack to mouth to lit, yet Uncle Bob rarely failed in his efforts—his first toke of every new cigarette thrilling to me. He did it!
Along with his constant smoking, Uncle Bob was a heavy drinker and a habitué of bars where he learned many of the jokes he told us, my father and I. Many of Uncle Bob’s jokes were set in bars and involved drunks, and though I didn’t understand why his jokes were supposed to be funny, I loved the construction of his little stories: establishing the setting, introducing the main character or characters, building the story to a climax, and delivering the punch line.
I also loved Uncle Bob’s reaction to his telling of a joke. He would deliver the punch line, and then, whether anyone laughed or not, he would slowly open his mouth and emit a bellowing sound, more groan than laugh—his face turning red and his body shaking with mirth.
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So about twenty years ago, I got a call from the brother of a friend who was to be the master of ceremonies at a Chamber of Commerce gala, his first time performing for a large audience. My friend had told her brother that I was not only a good joke teller, but that I could teach other people how to tell jokes. The gala was only two days away and this brother of my friend was desperate to learn a few jokes he could tell to loosen up the crowd.
For some reason his request brought to mind a series of psychiatrist jokes, which I proceeded to tell him. When he stopped laughing, he asked if I would repeat the jokes very slowly so he could write them down. I did so, and when he had the jokes written out, he told them to me. His timing was not good and he kept putting the emphasis on the wrong words, but after a half-hour of coaching, he started to get the hang of how to tell these particular jokes. I suggested he keep practicing and call me the next day, which he did. After one more telephone coaching session, he performed at the gala and got some big laughs, or so he said.
Here are the jokes I taught him in the order he delivered them.
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So a guy goes to see a psychiatrist. When the hour is up, the psychiatrist says to the guy, “I think you’re crazy and should be locked up.”
And the guy says, “Hey wait a minute. I want to get a second opinion.”
And the psychiatrist says, “Okay. You’re ugly, too.”
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A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office with a chicken on his head.
The psychiatrist looks at the guy and says, “What’s all this about?”
And the chicken says, “I don’t know. I woke up this morning and there he was.”
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A guy goes to see a psychiatrist and says, “Doctor, my wife thinks she’s a refrigerator.”
The psychiatrist asks, “How long has this been going on?”
The guy says, “Four days and three nights.”
“Well,” says the psychiatrist, “give it another few days and if she still thinks she’s a refrigerator, bring her in and I’ll talk to her.”
“The thing is,” says the guy, “I haven’t been able to sleep and I’m going crazy.”
“You’re worried about her,” says the psychiatrist, nodding. “That’s only natural.”
‘Well, it’s not so much that,” says the guy. “It’s that she sleeps with her mouth open, and you know that little light that goes on when you open the refrigerator door? It’s on all night.”
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Which reminds me of another psychiatrist joke I didn’t teach him because it wouldn’t have been appropriate for the Chamber of Commerce.
Two psychiatrists are having lunch, and one of the psychiatrists says, “So… the other day I was having breakfast with my mother and I made quite the Freudian slip.”
“Do tell,” says the other psychiatrist.
“Well… I meant to say, ‘Mom, would you pass the butter.’ But instead I said, ‘You bitch, you ruined my life!’”
fin
Speaking of funny stories, if you haven’t seen my first attempt at a music video, a kind of musical parable, here is the link to Eva Waltzing on YouTube.