Exodus and the Frog of War
The Bible has “seventy faces,” and some of them are humorous. Not all of them, not most of them, but if you are open to seeing them, some of them.
The recitation of the plagues at seder tables sometimes includes the throwing about of little toys that represent the ten plagues. But the Torah itself mixes in some humour in its account. Some of it comes from the spectacle of Pharaoh’s sorcerers competing with the Creator by showing that any plague He can do, they can do…”If God can turn the Nile into blood, so can we.” And they do. They are like boxers who show they can punch as hard as their opponent – by hitting themselves in the face.
The frogging of Pharoah is funny. There he is, the king of the most powerful of nations, the tyrant, being covered with frogs, and then relieved when living frogs are replaced by a pile of dead frogs. In the bible, the singular of “frog” is used at one point. The rabbinic commentators were alert to every nuance. Rashi speculated that the single frog was a proliferating piñata of an amphibian. When struck in anger, the frog exploded into more frogs.
In Exodus, like Shakespeare, like life, the world is a mix of experiences, some tragic, some comic, some both together. The frog episode in Exodus is one of the lighter touches in a mix. So is the fast-thinking response of the midwives, Puah and Shifra; when asked why they did not carry out Pharaoh’s genocidal orders, they respond that the Hebrew women are so vigorous and adept that they give birth before a midwife can even arrive.
There are entire books of the bible that have a strong comic element. Jonah is one of them. The trope of the reluctant prophet is carried to an extreme. He is not merely bashful in the face of a divine commission; he actually tries running away. The humor of incongruity often arises in the bible, because fallible and finite human beings confront an omniscient and omnipotent power. When asked where Abel is, Cain tries an evasive “am I by brother’s keeper?” The irony of thinking you cannot be seen by the all-seeing is reinforced by the irony of asking if there was some mistake about the job description; what, I was supposed to look after him?
Philip Larkin wrote a famous poem that states that was invented in 1964. We often tend to think that Jewish humor begins long after the biblical age, starting somewhere around 19th-century Chelm stories. But the Talmud is full of humour, some light, some dark – and even the earliest scriptures have their funny moments.
If we ask whether the “Jewish” humor of now is interconnected, I will offer several suggestions.
Jewish humor, from its earliest beginnings, tends to satirize the powerful. The ancient Israelites were often in exile, under oppression or threatened by external invaders. Jews have used “words like arrows” – the title of a collection of Yiddish proverbs – because biting words can be a challenge to oppression even when physical resistance is impossible. The words may sometimes be said under conditions of danger – such as when prophets confront their own ruling classes and kings.
Jewish humour can be black. In Exodus, the ancient Israelites found life in the desert difficult; they querulously asked Moses, “Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt?” Entire books have been written about the humor resorted to by the brutalized Jews of the Holocaust.
Jewish humour can be self-deprecating. The Bible is written by Jews, but it describes the Jewish people as often riven by internal squabbling land a resistance – admirable at times, dubious at others – about authority; Jews themselves created quips about “two Jews, three opinions” or “If God lived on earth, people would throw rocks through his windows”.
Jewish humor tends to be verbal. Some of the languages of the Jewish people have lent themselves to wordplay. Hebrew is based on a solid base of consonants around which different vowel sounds whirl. Yiddish is full of words whose sounds evoke their meanings, often in comical ways. The Jewish tradition reveres the word; the binding of the civilization is its texts, and millennia of commentators explore their more exquisite subtleties.
Jewish humor tends to be conceptual rather than slapstick. The sensibility is part of a Tradition that accepts that the Creator, who cannot be seen or touched, created the material world rather than being a part of it. Much biblical satire is directed at the belief that a human-created object can have a divine nature. The sacred objects of Judaism – scrolls of the bible, fringes on prayer shawls, mezuzahs on doors- tend to embody or remind us of messages about a higher reality and sacred commandments rather than possessing a magic power in themselves.
In an episode of the often brilliant, animated comedy “King of the Hill” the leading character, Hank, mentions that his divorced mom is now dating a Jewish man. His friends say, “Nothing wrong in that. Is he funny? Seinfeld is funny.” But not just Seinfeld, not just now. Our tragedies reflect and reenact our most ancient origins as a people. Now, then, one of our defenses, one of our consolations, one of the measures of defiance, was, like Sarah, the aged and childless wife of Abraham, to laugh in the face of dire absurdities. Sarah laughed, and God saw her laugh, and she denied laughing, and her son’s name, Isaac, was “he shall laugh” and his son’s successor Jacob earned the name “Israel”… “he shall struggle”. ” The laughter, the struggle, all part of the same story that began long ago and that we still live.