Poor us, the Israelites*
David Plotz has been writing a running blog-commentary on the Bible over at Slate for a while now. In his latest installment, Plotz claims to have discovered the source of all Jewish humour in the Book of Numbers, wherein the Israelites, having once again been thwarted in their march to the Promised Land, fall to pieces and wonder why they left Egypt in the first place.
“What’s with the histrionic fatalism of the Israelites?” Plotz asks. “Whenever Moses or his people run into the slightest spot of trouble, they wail the 1500 B.C. equivalent of, ‘Kill me now!’ or ‘I wish I were dead!’ (In Chapter 11, for example, Moses cried to the Lord, ‘If you would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg you.’) I hope my fellow Jews won’t take offense, but it seems to me that this is a distinctively Jewish form of complaint. The kill-me-now joke is one of the great foundations of modern Jewish humor – the mother who sticks her head in the oven when her son drops out of medical school or dates a Christian girl, for example, or the entire oeuvre of Woody Allen. (I’ve never heard the Christian or Italian or Asian-American equivalent of this kind of Jewish black humor.) I suspect the Torah is the Rosetta stone of this exaggerated fatalism. What began as genuine, if melodramatic, anguish in Exodus and Numbers has, over thousands of years, and by millions of irreverent yeshiva boys, been tweaked into comedy.”
Plotz also draws some interesting parallels between the plight of the Israelites and the current horrors of the Middle East.
(*Apologies to the late, great Desmond Dekker.)
Related links:
Read David Plotz’s Bible blog
