lgf's link about one more Hebrew University bombing victim made me think of a wonderful eulogy I had just read for Ben Blutstein, one of the Pardes students who was killed, and prompted some comments on the peculiar humorlessness of Islam.
Please read the eulogy (which is also for Marla Bennett), and think about Ben's loving yet irreverent attitude towards his religion. Although Ben was part of an especially inventive Jewish movement, this is a mainstream Jewish attitude , which Thomas Cahill, author of The Gifts of the Jews, describes from an outsider's POV :
"I had been reading the Bible all my life--in English, Latin, and Greek--but always with Christians, either Catholics or Protestants. When Christians read the Bible, they tend to look for an authority, a priest or minister or biblical expert, who will tell them how to interpret the passage under consideration. Then, the interpretation delivered, they are anxious to move on to the next passage. Jews treat the Bible like a comfortable old couch (it is, after all, their family history). They don't care about moving on and they are willing to discuss and debate a given passage endlessly. Out of this elaborate give-and-take a different kind of authority arises: a shared authority, a genuinely communal authority."
Cahill was a visiting scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but he's describing every Torah study I have ever participated in. Irreverence and tinkering (which go hand in hand) are not threatening when you have that comfort level.
Now. Where do you see this kind of playfulness in Islam? Sufism, and that's about it. And mainstream Muslims have usually wanted to run Sufis out of town on a rail.
So while "Jewish comic" is practically a redundancy, "Muslim comic" is an oxymoron. Well, not quite. There are Muslim comics (all American or Canadian, of course), and in the months following 9-11 they got together with Jewish comics and did some shows. Not only that, they seem to have adopted "the same vein of nebbishy, underdog humor that became the trademark of Woody Allen and his imitators."
I don't know about you, but I find the idea of Jewish humor infiltrating Islam pretty subversive. Maybe VOA should hire these guys to broadcast their routines to Riyadh?
*sigh* Now it's 2 AM, so I'm not going to try to get to minyan this morning. **Grump** See what this blog made me do!
<< Home