Tag: humor

A Midrash

January 29th, 2026

I have a friend from our old synagogue named Jakob. He is an elderly gentleman. He is hard of hearing, but his thoughts run deep, and he is a very perceptive person. Jakob has taken a shine to my five-year-old grandson, Asher. He has in the past baked cookies for the boy. They were good. I had some of them. Recently, Jakob bought Asher a book. This is interesting because Asher doesn’t read yet, although he is quite competent at writing his name. My wife, Karin, read the book to Asher. It is a very short tale, and quite funny. Asher laughed a lot while Karin read to him, although he also found a couple parts to be rather sad.

The little book qualifies as a midrash about Noah’s ark, at least it does to me.

According to My Jewish Learning, a midrash is defined as:

“Midrash (מדרשׁ) is an interpretive act, seeking the answers to religious questions (both practical and theological) by plumbing the meaning of the words of the Torah. (In the Bible, the root d-r-sh [דרשׁ] is used to mean inquiring into any matter, including occasionally to seek out God’s word.) Midrash responds to contemporary problems and crafts new stories, making connections between new Jewish realities and the unchanging biblical text.”

The book is titled Meet at the Ark at Eight! by a German author, Ulrich Hub. The story is packed with absurdity and sprinkled with running gags and sly humor. There are very few characters in the tale. There are three rather clueless penguins whose antics somehow remind me of the Marx Brothers. There is an overweight, overworked, and overbearing white dove. Finally, there is Noah, who only makes a cameo appearance at the end of the story. As I mentioned, the book is hilarious, but it also delves into some serious questions.

There are people, especially among my Christian brethren, who are convinced that every story in the Bible holds a clear and concise moral lesson. This is of course nonsense. In the Torah the narratives are terse using a minimum of words. There is no extraneous verbiage. In fact, the person reading or listening to one of the stories will often have more questions than answers when it is over. The stories in the Hebrew scriptures tend to be a lot like life: confusing and ambiguous. They cry out for interpretation and additional details. Hence, the existence of the midrash, and of a little book about penguins on the ark.

Anybody who has read the story of Noah and actually pondered it, ends up with a kind of queasy feeling about God. The Lord does not come out looking good. Bad optics. Sure, He places the rainbow in the sky at the end of the show, but that is after He has totally trashed his creation. There is an unsettling question of justice in the Bible narrative. God decides that all of humankind, except for Noah and his kin, are irredeemably evil and worthy of destruction. Okay, God is omniscient, so He probably knows the moral standing of his creatures. But why kill almost all of the animals? What did they do wrong? Can a penguin sin? This topic comes up in the book. There are a number of odd theological questions that get broached in this modern midrash. Almost all of them make the reader smile.

I have time before Asher wakes up for school this morning. I am going to read the book again. It’s good. Asher recommends it.

Shoveling

December 1st, 2025

The winter storm started early on Saturday morning. It snowed for twenty-four hours straight. It wasn’t a blizzard. There was very little wind, and only a light snow fell most of the time. However, it snowed continuously hour after hour.

I went outside three times on Saturday to shovel snow from the driveway. I didn’t really mind doing that. I needed the exercise and the fresh air. Our grandson, Asher, came out with me twice to “help”. He had on his snow pants and thick winter coat. His knit cap with the pompom was on his head. He wore the scarf and mittens that my wife had made for him. The mittens are felted and look like frogs. Asher pushed around his little shovel until his cheeks got rosy and his hands got cold. He usually spread snow on areas that I had already cleared off. Then he went inside. I went inside with him.

The heaviest snow came during Saturday night. When I woke the next morning there were probably six inches of fresh snow covering the ground. Once my wife was up and ready to watch over Asher, I went back out to clear the driveway one last time.

At this point, it should be mentioned that I have a snowblower. A reasonable person may ask, “Then why the hell don’t you use it?”

There are a couple reasons for that. First, I have a dislike for machines, especially noisy ones. I worked for decades around extremely loud equipment (e.g. helicopters and forklifts). The aftermath of a heavy snow creates a sort of pristine and peaceful outdoor environment. I prefer to keep it that way even if I need to move some of the white stuff in order to drive our car. A snowblower makes a hellacious racket. Yes, it makes the work easier and quicker, but at a cost. A snowblower is only good for rough work. A person still needs to use a shovel to clean up the remaining mess.

My snowblower is an older, used model that was given to me for free. It can be a fickle beast. It often takes several tries to get it started. I do not have the aptitude nor the patience to troubleshoot a problem with a snowblower when it is cold and wet outside. I just don’t want to screw with it. I know how to use a shovel, and it works every time. It is simply less frustrating to grab the shovel and go at the piles of snow.

The driveway is clear until the next storm rolls through. By that time, my shoulders and back will be less stiff, and I will be ready to grab the shovel again. The snowblower can rest right where it is.

Graffiti

September 27th, 2025

Around the Waldorf school on Brady Street there is always some graffiti scribbled on buildings and signs. In the bathrooms of some of the coffee shops on the street there is often more writing than there is blank space on the walls. Sometimes, there is even graffiti written on top of other graffiti. The graffiti in the neighborhood near Asher’s school is not excessive, but it’s always popping up no matter how many times the messages or drawings are erased or painted over. After a while, the words or symbols become invisible to the people passing by them. That is, unless they are somehow thought provoking in an unusual way.

Occasionally, graffiti can be thoughtful and literate. I took a piss in a bathroom where somebody had taken the time to write down a quote by Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. It was about what it means to be brave. They wrote:

“The true meaning of courage is not whether or not you are afraid. It is whether or not you do it anyway.”

I was impressed by that.

Most graffiti are boring. Cryptic gang symbols are of interest to only a small subset of people. To me, and probably to many other folks, the images mean nothing. I have a Catholic Worker friend who told me once that national flags are just glorified gang symbols. I think he’s right. A flag is a kind of graffiti. It sends a message or tries to do so. For some individuals a flag may have deep emotional meaning, but for others it’s just a colorful rag flapping in the breeze. A couple houses in the area fly Palestinian flags. Those particular forms of graffiti are obviously important to the residents of the home, but they may offend or signify nothing to the person walking underneath them. An American flag can have the same effect.

Sometimes graffiti is political in nature. On the Brady Street bridge protesters love to write things on concrete with colored chalk. They sometimes write, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” I have also seen the statement, “Israel: your victim card has expired.” The slogans are eye-catching, but they probably only interest the people who already agree with what is written. The comments in chalk are mercifully temporary. A good rain erases it all and cleans the slate for the next author.

Graffiti can have religious messages. “Jesus saves” is an example of that. I have seen entire verses from the Bible written on the sidewalk. This kind of graffiti can be inspiring, or it can be very negative. Or it can be both, depending on views of the person reading the message.

Graffiti is too often obscene. That seems to be part of our culture. There was a time when if somebody wrote the word “fuck”, it grabbed the attention of the observer. That is no longer true. I, at least, am too jaded to give that sort of thing a second look.

There is one unique specimen of graffiti that I see every time I pick up Asher from school. All it says is,

“Entropy will triumph!”

That always makes me smile. It reads like a radical manifesto from a science nerd. Of course, the statement is true. In the physical world, things tend to move from order to disorder. This is not true in every case, but in the end the universe will probably suffer heat death, a state where there is only thermal energy and there is total disorder. The universe won’t go out with a bang. It won’t even go out with a whimper. So, the person who used a Sharpie to scrawl this message obviously knows something of thermodynamics, and they also have a dry sense of humor.

Thermodynamics has three basic laws:

The first law, also known as the law of conservation of energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.

The second law states that the total energy of an isolated system can never decrease over time.  

The third law states that as the temperature of a system approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a perfect crystal approaches a constant minimum. This law implies that it is impossible to reach absolute zero in a finite number of steps, and it proves insight unto the behavior of systems at very low temperature.

(Note: these laws were found in Wikipedia).

What does all this mean? I once found a version of the three laws that was translated into layman’s terms. It said,

  1. You can’t win.
  2. You can’t break even.
  3. You can’t quit the game.

That pretty much is what the graffiti artist was saying. I like that.