WHAT IS THE GREATEST JOKE?

After just being convicted, a guy is sentenced to prison. On his first day there, he hangs around with his cellmate who promises to show him the ropes. At mealtime, they both pick up a tray of food and find a place to sit. Shortly thereafter, some guy in the dining hall stands up and yells "NUMBER 34!". Suddenly the entire place goes into an uproar.

Some guys are laughing and clapping and others are rolling around on the floor. Not long after another guy stands up and yells "NUMBER 5!". Again, the place goes into an uproar.

The new inmate is puzzled by all this and asks his friend what was going on.

"Well", said the friend, "since we are cut off from society, we rarely get to hear any new jokes. Since we've all heard them so many times, we have them all numbered. So, if someone wants to tell a joke they just shout out the number rather than repeat the entire joke since we've all heard them before".

The new inmate ponders this for a moment and decides it is probably a good system.

Anyway, all through lunch this continues, people shouting out numbers followed by fits of laughter. Finally, the new inmate decides that this may be a good way to make friends with everyone at the prison so he stands up and yells "NUMBER 12".

To his surprise and shock, no one laughs. In fact, the place remains dead quiet. Slowly he sits back down wondering about what has just happened. He turns to his friend and asks why no one laughed.

The friend replies: "Well, I guess some people can tell a joke and some can't".

I hope you had a most meaningful and healthy Passover holiday. My holiday was certainly not the same without services and greeting all of you at Chabad.

I continue to pray for the day that we will all be able to go to services and programs together, and wish a speedy recovery to all in need. If there is anything I can do to make this unprecedented time easier for you, please do not hesitate to  reach out to me. 

Coming from the most unique Passover we have experienced in our lifetime, going straight into Shabbat can seem a bit overwhelming. Some of us are alone and desperate for company; others have seen too much of family and are craving some alone time. But still, Shabbat is here and it has an important message for us.

The weekly Torah reading is called “Shemini”—the eighth day and we also bless the new coming new month of Iyar. In Judaism seven represents the regular cycle of things: seven days of the week, seven years of the Shemitah cycle, tefillin is wrapped seven times, the bride circles the groom at a Chupa seven times, and so on. Seven means normal, typical, while eight means beyond the norm, going a step further.
We find ourselves in unusual times, where everything we have been used to is no longer relevant. We have begun learning to adjust ourselves to the unusual, going beyond our comfort zones, to living a life of “eight” one way of doing that is with laughter.

What is it that creates laughter? The merging of paradoxes.

What makes the best joke? An unpredictable punch line. The joke-narrative is leading in one direction, and then suddenly, the punch line catches you off guard, and you burst out laughing. This is also the skill employed by every comedian in his comedy routines.

What defines a sense of humor?

The ability to look at conventional events in unconventional ways.

When you hear a human being talking, you don't even break a smile. When you listen to a parrot communicating verbally—a function not reserved for birds—you marvel in disbelief. Conversely, when you observe a bird standing on a high wire, you don't bother to look again; however, when you behold a human being walking a tightrope, you gaze in astonishment. It generates delight and you break out in a smile.

What is the greatest "joke" of all? What is the most surprising and unexpected phenomenon in the world?

Human integrity and holiness. Human transcendence.

A person is naturally beastly and self-centered. Selfishness and egotism are inherent to our nature. Consciously or subconsciously we always want to know one thing: What’s in it for me?!

We are, in other words, dry-land creatures. If we were submerged in our source, we would experience our singularity. We are all fragments of Divine light. When you look at an ocean, you know there may be thousands of species, but they are all united by a singular blanket of water. The diversity of sea life is eclipsed by the unifying water bed. Conversely, in the dry land, you see the distinctions. Each of us feels lonely. I am to myself. You are to yourself. I think about myself. You think about you. Now, when this beastly dry-landed human being says "no" to his or her nature for the sake of a higher truth, the person has created the greatest comedy of all time.

What is life? it is about your soul surprising your chemicals.  Chemically, I am supposed to in this time be depressed, angry, sad, miserable, confrontational, insecure, envious, hateful. And yet I surprise myself. I create an unexpected punch line. I believe G-d has a plan even now, in my core Divinity, wholesomeness, goodness, happiness and unity.

This week there was a funeral of a Jew in Israel. To me, this man—just like hundreds of thousands of other survivors—represented in the most profound way this power of laughter born of transformation, the power of G-d laughing with us.   

But I will not tell the story myself. I will allow a non-Jew to tell the story. George Deek is a Christian Arab, who lives in Israel and works for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This Thursday, Mr. Deek shared the following story on his Face book Page.

I quote him:

Yesterday I went to a funeral, and that was my birthday celebration. Not because I enjoy funerals, nor because I hate birthdays, but because this was the funeral of one of the most inspiring people I ever knew – my music teacher, Avraham Nov.

 Avraham was born in 1931 and he spent the first years of his life in East Europe. His childhood did not last long. When he was 8 years old, the Nazis rounded all the Jewish kids to take them away. His mother gave him a package – a toothbrush, a towel, and his violin. She made him promise that no matter what happens “do not let anyone take this package away from you!”

As he stood in the line of children entering the trucks, a German soldier took away all their belongings. When he reached Avraham he grabbed his package, but Avraham refused to let go, just like his mother told him. The soldier pulled the package high up and Avraham refused to leave it, hugging it with his legs in the air, yelling and screaming. A Nazi officer rushed to see what happened. The soldier explained that the kid won’t let go of his package.

The officer smiled at Avraham and asked: “what do you have inside there?”

- “A violin”

- “Can you play?”

Avraham opened his package and played six German folk songs. Avraham later said he never in his life played as well as he played back then. The German Officer listened to his music silently, and in the end, he ordered two of his soldiers to take Avraham to his house in the camp, and get him food and clothes. While members of his family were murdered, Avraham played music for friends and guests of the SS Officer.

Playing the violin for this Nazi and his guests for years, allowed him to remain alive in the home of the SS monster.

When the war ended, the world seemed upside down. One can only imagine how fearful he must have been. It would not have been surprising if he would’ve spent the rest of his life in sadness. He had every reason to sit and grieve. He had reason to be angry. He had every reason to demand revenge. He lost everything dare to him.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Avraham immediately engaged in a flurry of activity, with one goal in mind: building a future. He looked forward, not backward.

Avraham came to Israel, he got married, built a family, and started teaching what saved his life—music. He became the music teacher of hundreds and thousands of children all over the Holy Land.

In the early 1990’s he began teaching music to Arab children at the Christian Orthodox Scouts Orchestra. I was seven years old, and I became one of his first students.

I was his student for about 10 years, and he became my friend for almost 30 years. We had hours upon hours of conversations, arguments, laughs and sharing ideas. Never small talk – there was nothing small about anything Avraham did. He opened a marketing business when he was in his 60's. He taught himself computer skills at the age of 70 and studied Chinese online. He became a mentor to business people, gave speeches, and he kept talking about new technologies and innovations.

He taught me the flute and then the clarinet, but he also taught me a few lessons that I will carry for the rest of my life – that only by building a future, can you mend a difficult past; that true leadership requires offering hope, and rejecting victim hood; that with the right mindset, the ruins of the old can be the foundations of the new; that when there’s nothing, everything is possible if we only dare dream it.

Avraham’s daughter Sara told me yesterday at the funeral of her father, that the last thing he did in his life, on his very last day, was to play music.

G-d blesses your soul Avraham, and as long as it is good in the world, your violin will never stop playing the music of hope.

Avraham Nov never stopped playing the music—the music that saved his life. In this, he embodied the spirit of an entire generation of Holocaust survivors who learned to defy the impossible and generate so much laughter and love over the last seven decades.

The best way to capture what has occurred is via a Talmudic description.

The third chapter of the biblical book of Daniel describes the Jewish exile to Babylonia. The king of Babylonia (present-day Iraq), Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE had three Jewish attendants, Chananyah, Mishael and Azaryah. When they refused to bow down to a Pagan idol which he erected for people to worship, the king had them thrown into a burning furnace to be burnt alive. Yet miraculously they emerged unscathed. From that moment on, their names are not mentioned any longer in the Tanach as part of Jewish life in Babylonia.

The Talmud asks this question:

What happened to the three sages? The Talmud offers three explanations. The third was offered by Rabbi Yochanan: “They went up to the Land of Israel; they married, and they gave birth to sons and daughters.”

The Talmud states this as a novelty because it was no small feat. When people have a near-death experience, and they are saved by a hairs-breath, the trauma often leaves them paralyzed and immobile. They can’t function normally in the world. Here, three Jews were plunged into the burning furnace because of their loyalty to the G-d of Israel. What did they do afterward? They did not withdraw; they did not give up on life and on Jewish destiny. They returned to the Holy Land from where they were exiled, they got married, and they brought a new generation of Jews to the world.

The generation which exited the gates of the Nazi hell rebuilt the Land of Israel, literally and figuratively—rebuilding Jewish life the world over. Second, most of them got married, and third, they chose to give birth to a new generation of Jews.

And this is the greatest miracle in human history.

We often lament about our parents and grandparents, who survived the Holocaust, often did not lead the most emotionally functional lives. Children of survivors have suffered from the silence, from the repressed pain, from the mid-night screaming and from the obsessive protection and expectations of their children.

But what we sometimes fail to realize is that after the hell they have been through, that was expected. The miracle is that most of them fought courageously to lead normal lives—to find loved ones again, to raise families, to trust, to be happy, to celebrate life. And because they did it, we are here today.

All we, the next generation, can say is: Wow! From the ashes, they recreated life.

Every morning he would stand outdoors for 30 minutes watching the school buses in the Borrow Park section of Brooklyn picking up the children and taking them to school. He would stand on a corner of 13th Avenue and just gaze at those little kids running on to the buses.

Boro Park is home to a few hundred thousand Jews of every Chassidic group and denomination. There are hundreds of Jewish schools in that neighborhood and no shortage of school buses from diverse schools picking up different children. This man stood staring at these buses every morning.

The onlookers thought he was an old, lonely, bored man, perhaps half-senile, who had nothing better to do but stand outside and watch the traffic. This was his way recreation, in the absence of golf courses. But one day someone approached him and asked him why he did this each morning.

This was his response. I was in Auschwitz. I lost all my children there. I watched thousands of transports of Jewish children arriving there with their mothers. Within the hour, their young, fragile and adorable bodies were shoved into ovens. I watched it all… I saw it all… and I could say nothing. I could do nothing. The only thing I did was swear that one day I would take revenge.

Now I take my revenge, every single morning… As I stand outside each morning and watch hundreds of children, with their yarmulkes on their heads, their payot rolling down their cheeks, running on to the bosses to take them to yeshiva, to go learn Torah all day—and I got my revenge. Just to hear the sounds of children laughing and screaming and to watch their glowing faces as their mothers kiss them goodbye, is for me the greatest victory of good over evil, of purity over despicable profanity.

I have gotten my revenge.

 Each day G-d reminds us of the great purpose of human life: to transform darkness into light, pain into laughter, tears into productivity. To connect, bond, and align ourselves with our truest purpose and deepest core.

Let’s create a new reality, where we continue to care for everyone, especially the less fortunate, where we continue discovering the silver lining in everything around us, and of course the ultimate new reality, the coming of Moshiach and the final redemption!

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky