The following is a transcript of Episode 4 of the TEXTing Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Welcome to TEXTing, where we consider issues relevant to Jewish life through the lens of classical and modern tour texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain. TEXTing is generously sponsored by the Walder Charitable Fund and Micah Philanthropies. If you’d like to follow along with today’s text, you can find the link to our source sheet in the episode description. 

Many Israelis and Zionists around the world are feeling a sense of absurdity at the current situation, whether because of what we might call external challenges, like popular support for, or the enabling of Hamas, negligence or outright hostility for mainstream institutions, or what we might call internal challenges like the divisions among Jews themselves, ranging from far left to far right, and many are coping with the absurdity through humor. And specifically satire. 

Likely many of our listeners have seen a video or two from Israel’s sketch comedy show, Eretz Nehaderet, which has been offering satirical sketches since the beginning of the war, making fun of everyone, and I do mean everyone, during this ludicrous time. Truly, the best way to ruin a joke is to try to explain to people why it’s funny, and yet, today I want to learn a rabbinic text that uses satire as a tool for resilience and coping, a way to make the world more ridiculous than scary, a way to sharply undermine views that one sees as, well, absurd, and we’ll think about how some of this rabbinic passages contours relate to our own turn to satire and parody today. 

My chavruta this week for thinking about these issues is someone who is currently writing a book on humor in rabbinic literature, my teacher, Dr. Christine Hayes, one of our regular guests on the show. Chris is a person who is very serious and very serious about rabbinic humor. Chris, welcome.

Christine: Thank you, Elana.

Elana: Can you tell us why you’re writing a book on rabbinic humor? I might understand this if you were like a Yiddishist or a historian, but as a Talmudist, what’s the function of humor for the rabbis?

Christine: Oh, absolutely. I have often been struck in my study of both the Bible and rabbinic literature, that both of these are profoundly counter-cultural texts. They really posit a worldview and values that stood at odds with so much of the surrounding culture, and there’s an incongruity there.

And humans have two reactions to incongruity. Either it distresses us and we work really hard to get rid of it and to say, no, there’s no incongruity here. We’re all the same. Or they think it’s funny and they enjoy it and they even double down on it, and continue it and expand it. And it’s become clear to me that that’s what the Bible does. There’s a lot more that’s funny in the Bible than we realize, and that’s what the rabbis do. I think they enjoy incongruity and the enjoyment of incongruity is one definition of humor. So I decided to write a book on laughter, humor and play in rabbinic literature. I think so much of rabbinic literature, even the parts people think of as serious are really part of a playful embrace of incongruity. 

One kind of way to cope with incongruity is through a humor that has a sharp edge to it, right?

Elana: Oh, we love the sharp edge. 

Christine: Yeah. And that’s mockery, that’s satire. And there’s plenty of that in rabbinic literature and that comes from the fact that the rabbis lived in a certain state of incongruity. The rabbis lived in the post destruction period. They lived under foreign rule. Sometimes they coexisted peacefully, but plenty of other times their community really suffered intense persecution, outright attacks, and physical destruction, particularly in the West, and after the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, when the physical safety of Jews was increasingly precarious, less so in Sasania Persia, which is where the Babylonian Talmud is produced, but even there, of course, Jews in Sasania Persia were not masters of their own fate. They did experience periods of persecution from time to time. 

And these situations are just tailor made for the kind of humor that we call punching up. Right, where the little guy, the oppressed, outwits those who are in power and humans just universally delight in these stories, so it’s not surprising we find stories like that in rabbinic literature. The humor of the marginal or the oppressed is certainly there.

Elana: But it’s so interesting because right now using humor, it means you feel that you’re beleaguered, right? You can have an army that has tremendous might and still feel and be beleaguered. And I think that’s sort of a difference between their context and our own. It’s not a complete lack of power. It’s not having power to change the things that you really want to change.

Christine: True, right. And that is a kind of power, right? That’s why I like to use the phrase, “They weren’t masters of their own fate.” And to some extent that’s true even today with a place like Israel, which has an army and has a lot of power and a lot of political capital in certain places in the world, but isn’t necessarily the master of its own fate for a variety of reasons. People are not living the life they wanna live,

Elana: So let’s get to our narrative. We’re looking at Bechorot, the Talmud Bavli, Bechorot, 8B to 9A, and our protagonist is Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya. He’s gonna take on the intellectual elite of his day, the sages of Athens, he’s going to try to outwit them, expose as absurd their whole way of reasoning. Why? Well, because as Chris said, the Romans were ascendant and the Jews were living in the aftermath of destruction. Even if this is set in the Babylonian Talmud. So let’s see what happens in the narrative and how it speaks to our coping me mechanisms that we use today. Do you want to start us off Chris?

Christine: Sure. So this story really has two scenes, and in the opening scene, we first have a conversation between Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya and the Emperor. It’s one of about 15 stories we have in the Babylonian Talmud. And just to your point. This is in the Babylonian Talmud, even though it’s all set in the land of Israel and dealing with a Roman empire and with Greek wisdom. We don’t find too many stories in the Babylonian Talmud mocking the Sasanian Persians some, but I think this is sort of a coded language, right.  

So here’s the dialogue. The emperor said to Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya, how long is a snake pregnant before it gives birth? He said, Seven years. I love the way he just comes right back with boom, seven years.

Elana: Obviously. Doesn’t everyone know it’s seven years?

Christine: And the emperor said, but didn’t the sages of the Athenian school mate them and the female gave birth in three years? Right, counter example. And this is empirical science. And Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya said, those were pregnant beforehand already for four years. And the emperor says, but they had sexual relations, right? And presumably pregnant animals don’t do that. 

So Rabbi Yehoshua says, oh no. Snakes have sex like humans, they have recreational sex too, even when they’re pregnant. And the emperor said, but aren’t the Athenian sage as wise men, right? Wouldn’t they know this if that’s the case. And Rabbi Yehoshua says, oh, we are wiser than they are. So the emperor says, well, if you are wise, go and defeat them and bring them to me. And Rabbi Yehoshua says, how many are there? The emperor said, 60 persons. So Rabbi Yehoshua says, make a ship for me, containing 60 compartments. Each compartment containing 60 cushions, and he did this for him.

So we already get a sense before the second scene that there’s a plan in Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya’s mind. But he’s really very slippery in this scene. You know, he says seven years. And he’s presented with empirical evidence that it’s only three years. He does what in classic Talmudic debate we call an okimta, which is when you solve a contradiction by saying that one of the positions applies only in a certain circumstance, right? So there’s not really a contradiction. Oh, yes. Well, that snake gave birth after three years because it was already been pregnant. It had been pregnant for four years, leading to this rather comic exchange about the fact that snakes like humans have recreational sex, not only to impregnate one another, which is, which is fascinating.

Elana: And look, I think this is a very typical experience for people. Somebody asks you something and you answer based on what you know from your communal norms, from your sources of information, and you’re so sure you just say seven years, like of course that’s, everybody knows that, and then you get challenged and you say, well, I have an explanation for that challenge.

Then the person who asked you, they realized that they’re challenged and they say, well, what about my sources of information? I thought my sources of information were great. So now it’s time for a showdown between the sources of information. Tell me. Who’s right? M-S-N-B-C or Fox News? Tell me. Who’s right? What I learned in my day school about Israel, or what they taught me on the college campus?

That’s what we’re talking about here. The sources of knowledge and authority. It’s authority for knowledge. It’s trust.

Christine: And not being able to necessarily share the same basis for their knowledge, because what we haven’t said is that in the passage just before this, we learned that Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya arrives at the number seven through a textual exegesis. There’s a verse in Genesis, the curse of the snake when he does some interesting and complicated math on the basis of that to arrive at the number seven. It’s not based on empirical evidence. This is Torah. This is, his source of information is exegesis of Torah. 

Now, what good is that gonna do? If you’re talking to the Roman Emperor, you can’t point, you can’t point, well, you don’t watch M-S-N-B-C. I can’t point to that as an authoritative source for you. So we’re really dealing with, you know, a deeper level of sources. He doesn’t even bother to bring up where he gets the number seven from, and so he’s punting and trying to, you know.

Elana: Well also, when people don’t bother to mention the sources, it’s because they just trust those sources so implicitly as obviously this is right, meaning, I don’t have to tell you this is where I got it from. And in fact he’s so confident that he says, build me a ship, I’m gonna show you,my source, which I don’t even have to tell you what it is, my source is right.

Before we get to what we’re calling scene two, a few other things happen. You know, he makes his way over to where the sages of Athens are gonna be. He makes his way in sort of in a series of sort of James Bond-like moves. He outwits the guards inside and outside. The sages of Athens, are in this sort of vaunted, vaulted place of guards and he outwits everybody and is able to make his way in. Once he makes his way in, he says, I’m a sage of the Jews and I’m here to learn from you, which of course, not really what he’s there to do.

Christine: Nope.

Elana: So they say, okay, if you’re here to learn from us, we’re gonna ask you some questions. And he says, very well, if you defeat me, do whatever you wish to me. But if I defeat you, come eat bread with me on my ship. He’s already ready to take them back. So what we’re calling scene two are the questions that they ask, the riddles that they ask to debate him.

Now, there are a lot of questions here. There are a lot of riddles here, but we’re gonna read a few of them. And I wanna for our listeners, I wanna sort of bring out the types of questions that we’re seeing here. Or really the types of answers that Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya is gonna give, because that’s where the satire comes in.

Some of the questions that they ask, Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya reveals to them that their whole premise is wrong. The whole premise of the question is absurd, and being able to show that absurdity is not, I’m gonna play by your rules. I’m gonna tell you that your rules are absurd. They make no sense. They’re illogical. So that’s some of what we’re gonna see here, right?

Another type of what we’re gonna see here are what I would call double standard questions. They’re gonna ask him, go do something that they know he can’t do, and he’s gonna turn around to them and say, okay, if you want me to do that, then you do something else, which is impossible for them to do, right? And we see this all the time in satire right now. You’re asking me endanger things in ways that you would never, ever, ever do. How dare you. But you turn it into a joke and a mockery, right? 

And then the third is you’re asking me to do something that’s impossible. It’s not that you wouldn’t do it, it, it can’t be done. It just, it can’t be done, right? So I wanna look at some of those questions with these three categories in mind. 

So here’s a great one, and I would put this under, your premises are false.

They ask Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Chananya, trying to stump him: Milcha ki sarya, when salt becomes unsavory, meaning when salt goes bad, b’mai malchi la, how do you salt it? Meaning when salt becomes bad, how do you or preserve it so that the way you would salt something else to preserve it, you can now preserve salt from going bad. 

So amar lahu, he says to them, oh, that’s easy, b’silta dechudnita, you just use a placenta of a mule. What? And they turn to him and they say, wait, what a placenta of a mule? U mi icha silta d’chudnita, a mule is not female. Does a mule have a placenta? He turns to them and says, u’milcha mi sari, does salt go bad? 

Meaning, they start with him and say, how do you solve a problem like salt going bad? And he says, salt doesn’t go bad. What kind of ridiculous question are you asking me? The premise of your question no sense, right? 

And here’s one from, you’re asking me to do something that you can’t do or would never do. Ready? They say to him, build us a house in the sky. Okay, so pronounces the name of God and thus suspends himself in the air, right? So he’s doing some real magic here. And hangs between heaven and earth. Then he says to them, you know what? Bring me some bricks and clay from down there and I’ll build you that house you’re talking about. 

Can they bring bring him those bricks and clay? No. They’re saying to him, do something, do something that we know you can’t do. And he actually does it. And he turns and he says, now you try to do something that you can’t do. You can’t bring me bricks up here. Right. And I know that you’ve identified that when they’re asking this, these questions are not coming out of nowhere. These are questions that are mimicking some literature that the rabbis are aware of, right?

Christine: Yeah. Yeah.

Elana: This is Aesop?

Christine: Yeah, there are two ancient works. There’s a work The Life of Ahikar and then based on that was a work The Life of Aesop. These were really popular, sort of folk tales and we have copies of them. The Life of Ahikar, a copy’s been found in the Jewish colony at Elephantine from the fifth century, BCE. They are riddle contests, usually with a king and an advisor. And some of these self-same riles are used. Build a castle in the air, build a house in the sky, salt being unsavory. Some of the other riddles, we’ll see, they’re taken straight out of these. So these were popular riddle tales that were told throughout the ancient world.

Elana: Or another one, they say, where’s the center of the earth? He has to point out to them, the center of the earth. So he points with his finger, he says right there, and they say, well, how can you prove it? And he says, well, why don’t you bring some ropes and we’ll measure it, which obviously they can’t do right? 

Or we have a pit in the field. We want you to bring our pit the town. You can’t bring a pit. You can’t move a pit, right? So he says to them, okay, no problem. Make me some ropes made of bran flour and I’ll bring it. You can’t make ropes made of right, meaning that’s the, the back and forth where he says, you can’t ask me to do something when you can’t do it. It’s wrong. It’s a double standard. And he says it in a funny tongue-in-cheek way. 

But the truth is, if you imagine this as kind of a less kind of competitive, everyone’s on the same playing field and we’re kind of having a nice debate club situation, and you move it into the realm of some of the questions and some of the challenges that people are giving have serious consequences, and you need a way to show them, what you’re asking me to do, you would never do, and do you do that with the utter seriousness of Elyon Levy or do you do that with the satire of Eretz Nehaderet?

Christine: It’s also in some ways more effective. If you say to me, do X, build this castle in the air, and I say, are you crazy? I can’t, no way that can’t be done. They say, aha, you can’t do it. Right? Then it falls back on me. But if I say, sure, happy to. Why don’t you hand me the bricks while I’m up here? Right. Then you’ve put the onus back on them, they are confuted from within. The way I like to say it is that the rabbis don’t beat them at their own game. They blow up the game, they beat the game. It’s like you can’t. Catch us this way. Right. We’ll just say sure, and turn it back around on you. And then now you are the one, the burden’s on you to try to do something impossible and you have to confess it’s impossible.

Elana: How much are you just comforting yourself and how much are you actually convincing those who might be on the other side?

Christine: And these are the two different purposes of humor. I mean, especially satire, right? And it really kind of depends on the audience what the purpose or the function of it is. I mean, today, so many of our satires really are viewed by the targets of the satire. That’s why some of the targets get really upset and petulant and they punch back, you know, I was mocked or ridiculed by Stephen Colbert, and they punch back, you know?

The other kind of satire is covert and hidden, and it’s directed to an internal audience. And that’s what we have here in stories that are written in Hebrew and Aramaic. It’s directed towards an internal audience and it is still critiquing the powers that be. And so the purpose there is relief. It’s a way to cope with a less than perfect reality and just get up the next day and continue. 

Elana: The joke is Chris, in our first episode of TEXTing, that you and I did together, we were talking about crying. That was, the focus was crying. And now we’re talking about laughing. And it’s really interesting to consider that actually crying and laughing are different responses to the same issue. 

Christine: Right. Right. They can serve the same function Right.

Elana: Yeah, and sometimes when you have a good cry, there’s some relief there too. And sometimes when have a good belly laugh, there’s some relief there too, right?

Christine: Right. Absolutely. 

Elana: Let alone, sometimes you can kind of bypass people’s natural defense mechanisms through humor, where you can kind of break through some of the external armor that people have.

So we have, the premise is absurd. We have, you’re asking me to do something you would never do. And now we have, you’re asking me to do something impossible. And that comes in the form of the following question. 

Aytu lei trey bei’ei, they brought him two eggs. They asked him, hey dezagta achumatei, v’hey dezagta chivuratei. Which one of these eggs comes from the black hen? And which one of these eggs comes from the white hen? Which of course, how is somebody supposed to know that?

Aytu lehu ihu. So what did he do? He brought his own props. Trei gvinei, he gave them two pieces of cheese, two blocks of cheese, amar lahu, he said to them, tell me which one is from the black goat and which one is from the white goat. Meaning, it’s not possible, what are you talking about? 

And kind of the pairing that goes with it is their next question, which is, if you have a chicken that died in its shell, where does its soul exit? So he says, what do you mean? From wherever it entered, it exits, meaning you don’t know where it entered from, and I don’t know where it exited from, because it’s impossible to know if you think that the soul needs an actual physical place to enter and exit. Right? So this is a different, this is kind of of a different order, meaning it’s not possible.

Christine: And it also kind of deflates their question, because it can sound very philosophically wise or astute to talk about where the soul enters or exits, you know? And he says, oh, the same way, the same way it entered, it’s gonna exit. There’s, he just sort of deflates this high sounding, high-minded conversation, and I think kind of exposes it as sort of pseudo wisdom, speculating on things that we honestly can never know about. You know, famously the rabbis say, you know, there’s certain things we really can’t know about. Just concern yourself with what we actually can,

Elana: You know what it reminds me of? There’s a scene in the movie Django, which is about slavery, right? And the slave trade. And in that scene, someone who goes around buying slaves their freedom is speaking to a, a very, what’s the word I’m looking for? Notorious slave owner and plantation owner. And this plantation owner is explaining to him the science of how you can tell if a skeleton comes from someone who’s black or someone who’s white.

Christine: Oh, good Lord.

 

Elana: Science. And then this abolitionist, essentially, points to a book on the slave owner’s shelf and he says, do you know who wrote that book? And he says the name of the author. He says, do you know that the author of that book was a Black man? And it kind of just exploded this whole thing as a seudo science. 

Christine: That’s great. That’s great.

Elana: So the way he ultimately beats them is he gets them to actually destroy their own edifice. And this is gonna take us to, you know, what happens now that the satire and the parody that he was able to use against them face to face, where it leads to his ultimate empowerment. And maybe you wanna take that final shot of that?

Christine: And he, and they haven’t learned anything. They remain just as arrogant, even though they’ve been defeated and he plays on that, he’s able to use that arrogance, that hubris. So, the final scene begins, aytinehu kol chad v’chad ki chazi shaitin b’starki, so he brought them, and when each one saw the 60 pillows or cushions that were in his room, remember we have 60 different rooms on the ship, each one has 60 cushions. Amar kulehu, so each one thought to themselves, oh, my colleagues are going to be brought here to me here, the other 59 cushions, because I’m the most important. So course I have a chamber, my own room, and they will be all summoned before me. So he’s relying on their arrogance to give them a false sense of security that each one is being treated in a special way and off they sail. 

There’s a little bit of trickery on the way. He gathers a little dirt from their native soil. He takes a little water from an interesting whirlpool that they encounter. But when they get back to Jerusalem and he presents them to the emperor, the emperor sees that they’re depressed. And the emperor says, these are not they. These are, we all know that Athenian sages are really arrogant people, and these guys just seem sort of ordinary and depressed. And so Rabbi Yehoshua takes some of their dirt, he throws it on them, and they grow very haughty towards the king. And he’s like, ah, yeah, these are the guys. I recognize them now.

Elana: What is the dirt? 

Christine: You know, I wonder if that’s just drawing on older, ideas already, even from biblical tradition about being on the soil and the soil, soil being connected to, character and taking some soil with you in order to be connected still with the character of the land.

Elana: Meaning it reminds them of who they are, a sense of sovereignty, they’re not on a faraway land anymore, they’re right back outside their sages of Athens academy. 

Christine: Right, you’re confident when you’re at home. You’re confident when you’re on your home turf, right? We say home turf. So he gives them some of their home turf. And so, you know, it inspires them to behave in their typical, arrogant way. And now the kings had it. He says, whatever you desire, do with them.

So, aitinahu maya, he brings some water that he brought from that whirlpool. Pours it into a vessel, and he says to them, fill this and depart. And they fill their pitchers and then they pour the water into this vessel, but it keeps being absorbed. And they go on filling until ketafayahu, uvalu lehu, v’azul, until their shoulders become dislocated or worn out. And they finally perish, which is, borrowed from a Greek story, where we have women who are punished by having to pour water endlessly into a trench that’s never filled. But here it really, is a metaphor for just the futility of all their effort, their pseudo wisdom, which is just in vain, you know, it achieves nothing. And yet they’re so arrogant and so proud. And, you know, and so much of Greek philosophical culture did Divinize reason, right? The divine was reason, was logos. Philosophers were often held to be, somewhat divine in character.

Elana: The only way that Rabbi Yehoshua Be Chananya wins, or can win, is by bringing these people low. Is there another option or it’s, that’s just what it is? It’s a zero-sum game right now. And I’m gonna mock you and you’re gonna mock me. And may the best comedian win. Like, obviously by comedian, I actually mean philosopher, I actually mean purveyor of certain ideas in the world. 

Christine: You know, we have plenty of stories from other works of Jewish literature that depict debates in a more serious vein, where the Jewish figures might be challenged by philosophers and so on, and they’re asked questions about their views of God, or the law, and they will answer in a serious fashion, but they always have to do it on the terms of their interlocutor, right? You think our law is not rational or reasonable. Let us show you all the ways in which it is rational and reasonable. Let us show you all the ways that we live up to your definition of what is a good or a reputable law or set of values or religion. We’ll show you on your own terms.

And sometimes, you don’t wanna do that. Sometimes you don’t wanna have to sort of say to repackage yourself in the other person’s terms to say, well, we’re just as rational as you are. And to say, you know what? We’re not. We’re different. And we are not gonna convince you necessarily of the value of what we are. But we don’t wanna sell ourselves out and win your approval by pretending to be something we’re not.

So maybe we’re at a stalemate, and that incongruity is painful and makes us cry sometimes. But sometimes we laugh because if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry. And so sometimes we just double down on the incongruity, the fact that we’re standing on opposite sides of a big chasm and maybe are not able to accept each other’s premises or values, and we can cry about that, or we can laugh.

Elana: Well, that’s incredibly powerful. And so to the people that are listening here, I hope that we’ve given you a little bit of insight into the role that humor is playing right now, and the role that it can play, and specifically satire and parity, and that that’s actually a source of resilience for people, whether it’s exposing a double standard internally, or exposing a double standard externally, whether it is exposing an impossible certainty that is being demanded, internally, or externally, all of these things are functions of the satirical genre. So thank you so much, Chris, and we look forward to learning with you all again. 

Christine: Thank you. Thank you. It was fun.

Elana: So thanks for learning with us everyone, and special thanks to my chavruta this week, Christine Hayes. TEXTing is produced by Tessa Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman with production assistance from Tamar Marvin. M. Louis Gordon is our senior producer. This episode was mixed by Ben Azavedo at Bear Cave Audio with music provided by Luke Allen. 

You can now sponsor an episode of this show. Follow the link in the show notes or visit she hartman.org/TEXTing. We will acknowledge your gift on a future episode. We’re always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes. So if you have a topic you’d like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. 

For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next time, and thanks for listening.​