September 2017 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

Why Did The Chicken

If you are a Jew and it is the night before Yom Kippur you cleanse your conscience, you let go of all the stupidities you have committed during the year. You atone. Put crudely this means that you find a scapegoat, like “The Devil made me do it”, or “Hillary Clinton”. If you are a frum Jew you do it by swinging a live chicken three times over your head. This transfers the swinger’s sins to the chicken. The practice is called Kapparot. The chickens come to the market stuffed into narrow crates. That is cruel, but we must remember that until recently all chickens spent their lives stuffed into narrow crates. Only lately are we invited to buy free range eggs, for example, eggs laid by hens who are raised on meadows where they can run and scratch for worms. I support that idea, a laudable step toward improving our collective attitude concerning the treatment of animals. But back to the business at hand.

People who are not Jews are called Goyim. The Goyim are sinful, too, but they don’t have an efficient mechanism to deal with that. They mistreat their chickens just as cruelly, and not just on Yom Kippur but all year long, before they chop them up and package them for the supermarket. It is a disgusting business either way and all my vegetarian friends agree. And the Goyim’s sins do not go anywhere, to boot.

The more merciful Jews practice Kapparot by swinging a bag of money around. Same result: the sins are transferred to the money. I do not know what happens to the swung money. It gets spent, I suppose. As for the sin-contaminated chickens, some are eaten, I learned. Those are the lucky ones. Many end up on the garbage pile.

I have an idea. What if we were to convince all the Chicken-Kapparot people to switch and become Money-Kapparot people? Picture this huge banner I have designed: JOIN US FOR YOM KIPPUR – COME AND HELP US SWING MONEY – SUPPORT CAGE FREE KAPPORES. This should go over well and would be good news, at least for Jewish chickens. And it might be an incentive for the rest of us to become more humane.

And then again it might not work because the practice is such an age old tradition and age old traditions are difficult to replace. Unless, of course, people see an advantage in doing things differently. We have witnessed such dramatic changes in our lifetime. We used to go to the store to buy something and then took it home to keep. We do not do this anymore. We now do it the other way around: first we buy something at home and then we take it to the store for a refund. We also used to use a special kind of very dirty green paper called money to pay for things. We don’t do this anymore, either. We may still go to the store occasionally but we pay by sticking plastic in a little box that is full of electronics. It reads our credit card, debits our account, and says “brrr!” when it is done

Now if a few overhead swings of a bag of coins can make a year’s supply of sin particles disappear I see no reason why a few electronic nano vibrations administered to a credit card by a scanner should not have the same effect. We would no longer have to swing anything over our heads. Instead there could be a scanner in every synagogue. Sinners would be encouraged to insert their card and just wait for the “brrr!”. It would be so simple, so easy. Not just Jewish temples, but churches would probably find this attractive as well. Malls, banks and other places of worship would, I trust, be delighted to offer such an extra service for a small fee. Before long the entire nation, in happy coexistence, will be seen chipping away at their sins.

The only problem remaining, some will say, are the jobs lost. Thanks for bringing this up, but this is the beauty of my plan: there are four thousand temples in the U.S.; each temple will install at least two scanners; it is common knowledge that one of them will always be out of order; former once-a-year pushcart operators will be retrained and turned into full time scanner fixers. I tell you, all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. I did not say that, however. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss said it first.

Please scroll down for more

In Praise of Martha

The curtain opened, first a little bit and then all the way. But this was not the Opera, just my hospital room. And there stood Martha in her uniform, broom in hand and a bucket at her feet, a member of the housekeeping team. She was delighted to find me sitting in a chair and able to speak. All the men in the adjacent rooms were still on their beds snoring, having just recently been rolled in from the operating room. “I can practice my English?” she inquired. Sure, I said and welcomed her.
As she went around the room sweeping up tissues, bandages, and debris, she saw my Kindle and wanted to know what it was. I told her that it was my library and that I had stored on it over a hundred books. When she heard that she forgot all about speaking English and asked in Spanish what kind of books they were. Books in all languages, I told her, even Spanish books. By some curious coincidence I had a Spanish story on the screen, The Lazarillo de Tormes, a little masterpiece of 16th century Spanish literature. I showed it to her. “Tormes? Tormes?” she said, “Where is that?” Somewhere in Spain, I suggested, because I did not know.
I thought I was facing a very simple God-fearing loveable housewife of the old school. Until she burst out laughing: “You remind me of Don Quijote!” I am over six feet tall and I look gaunt with my bare legs sticking out from under the hospital gown. I could not help it, but I had to laugh out loud at the thought of how I might look. “That’s a lot better than being compared to Sancho Panza,” I replied in mock offense. To most of the people I know this would have been a non-joke. After all, how many of us speak Spanish. But Martha and I laughed tears. In a miraculous instant Miguel de Cervantes whose name, by the way, was never mentioned that morning, had created a bond. I will probably never see her again, never find out what makes her tick, but that is alright. She did not just clean my floor. She helped nourish my damaged heart. How is that for wholistic medicine!
(c) 2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credit: Chess.com
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE

Humor in the Hospital?

My first breakfast in the hospital was oatmeal cooked in unsalted water. I was in shock. “Come on. Eat at least a little of it”, my wife pleaded. “It IS nourishment, as you always told me when I had broken my hip”. The irony was dripping from her tongue. I was not amused. There are limits to what you can laugh about in the hospital, right?

Not true, though. There is a lot you can only laugh about. Read the rest of my story! Trust me. But first I must tell my physicians and nurses, if they have not found that out yet, that we patients, their bread and butter, are often a little weird. Let me rephrase this. We are rather like dogs. We do what we are told, for the most part. But then we can also hear frequencies that are out of human range. In other words, we notice things you would not dream of.

Take the picture on the wall by my hospital bed, for example. It is not just standard hospital decoration. This picture actually moves. When you lie in that bed and look up at that ocean scene the canvass slowly bulges toward you, like a huge bubble about to burst. You look away, of course, and the bubble recedes. But then it starts bulging again, but this time the bubble takes on the shape of a big rectangular box. And the TV, I notice, has now been wrapped in several layers of black garden netting such as orchard men use to keep the birds out of the cherries. Now you can argue with me all you want, but I tell you only what I see, what there is. And I am not alone in this. I have heard of people who swear that they saw their TV set covered with ants.

But to continue with my story. Yesterday Joe, my surgeon’s PA, announced that we were going to pull the drainage tube. In the hospital such things signify progress. Full of anticipation, I watched the entire procedure. This is what happened. There was a bed in the middle of the room. On it lay a carcass (me). Joe entered, dressed in a dinner jacket and white shirt. He brought with him a length of reddish garden hose which he placed on a little table and covered with a cloth. Then he pulled up his sleeves to show that his hands were empty, waved a wand over the little table, and pulled away the cloth. The garden hose was gone!

In mock-surprise he looked around and then focused on me (the carcass), stuck his hands into my belly, and began pulling out hose, hand over fist, like a fisherman dragging his net ashore. What he pulled out looked like uncooked Italian sausage. He gathered it all up, humbly accepted the applause, and then he was gone.

I also should have applauded but I was too tired. I will clap next time, however. I am sure he will do it again because the fun never stops among the Asclepians.