A Bittere Gelechter: Gallows-, Galus-, and Grief-Humor

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Pull up a chair. We have to talk.

I don't want to burden you with my pain. More importantly, I don't want to hurt you. So, if you are dealing with your own grief — or if you're especially sensitive — please click elsewhere.

If you're still with me, let me fill you in.

I started eating bitter herbs early this year. After Tu BiShvat — in mid-February — I got word that my brother Nota (Rabbi Nota Schiller, zt"l, dean and founder of Jerusalem's Ohr Somayach) was taken to Shaare Zedek hospital with an infection and was not responding.

Two years earlier, my wife (aka Peshe) dropped everything and, the day after Purim, flew to see her sister, Rivkah, a"h, who had been brought to Shaare Zedek with pancreatitis, then slipped into a coma and went septic. The prognosis was dismal.

But b'chasdei Hashem, the Divine's kindness and her family flying in and pulling together to give her support every day — and with the heroic efforts of the doctors and nurses at Shaare Zedek — she miraculously bounced back and was eventually moved to rehab in Maale Adumim. A few months later, she was able to start walking again.

With that experience in mind, I optimistically booked a ticket for two and a half weeks. I was also reminded about how both my brother and my sister-in-law had been asking when we were moving back to Eretz Yisrael. Peshe and I kept telling them that we're working on our aliyah, but the obstacle course is slow-going.

My daughters picked me up at the airport and drove me straight to the hospital. My brother, Nota, was not conscious, but it was not a coma. However, on top of the infection, he had a stroke, which complicated the situation.

The next day, I called my sister-in-law Rivkah and said I want to come see her, but I don't know when I'll be able to. She said, "You have to be with your brother. I'm davening (praying) for him every day."

But a few days later, my daughters took me to Maale Adumim, where a nurse told us, "She's not here." That Shabbos, she had another attack of pancreatitis and they took her to Hadassah Mt. Scopus. We went to Hadassah and things looked really grim. But she managed to ask how my brother was and to say she's davening for him.

Meanwhile, thank Heaven, Nota had started to come around. After days of struggling, he opened his eyes and was eventually able to speak a little, although with some difficulty.

At one point, he groaned. I asked, "What's hurting you?" He said, "I'm uncomfortable." I trotted out the old joke: "A Jew gets hit by a car. A paramedic puts a pillow under his head and asks, 'Are you comfortable?' The Jew answers, 'I make a living.'"

Nota actually laughed. Leo Rosten was right when he said, "Old jokes are like old friends."

Soon, Nota was able to eat a little pureed food; and he wanted to go home. One of his sons said he can go home when he feels better. He insisted, "I feel better. Who decides?"

The one to decide was Dr. Gavriel Munter, director of internal medicine of the department at Shaare Zedek. (Years earlier, Dr. Munter was the great sage, Rabbi Elyashiv's, doctor.) I asked Dr. Munter when my brother could have some scotch. He said, "When he can have some, I'll come drink with him."

They never had the drink. Nota passed away the just before Purim.

Meanwhile, my daughters told my wife she'd better come fast. But she got a call just before boarding the plane that her sister had already passed away. I wasn't allowed to go because I was in middle of shivah (the week-long Jewish mourning ritual), but my wife made it to Jerusalem just in time for the funeral.

Meanwhile, my son, Meilech, came from Lakewood, N.J., and, because he came to the shivah for my brother, he was at his aunt Rivkah's funeral and shivah. So he wound up consoling both of his parents. But he also came with other news. Six weeks earlier, during sheva brachos for my granddaughter, Meilech's daughter, Rochel Leah, my brother Binyamin, zt"l, had passed away.

Meilech, ybl"c, asked whether to tell me and the Amshinover Rebbe, shlita, said not to. The entire family maintained the conspiracy of silence. After I found out, I got an extra rip in my jacket, and in my heart. Then one of Binyamin's sons felt safe to call me.

I told him I was sitting shiva on the family plan.

My nephew gasped and said, "Uncle Mordechai. Only you could find a joke in it!"

Frankly, by that time I was numb. My system had short-circuited. The only way I could cope was to take refuge in humor.

A few weeks later, when my wife saw that I didn't take along enough clothes for Passover, I told her, "I came prepared for two and a half weeks, not three lifetimes."

OK, so maybe you're thinking, is that even normal?

Viktor Frankl, the esteemed psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor thought it was not only normal, but a key to survival even under the worst circumstances. As he put it:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

More specifically, Frankl wrote: "Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds."

Humor is also built into the Jewish psyche. In his autobiography, Der Koyekh fun Yiddishn Humor (The Impact of Jewish Humor), Shimon Dzigan wrote, "I told jokes, and everything inside me wept." Even more so, it's part of my DNA.

Before my father passed away, he gave my brother Nota his watch. Nota refused to take it. Dad handed it to him again and said, "I know what I'm doing. Nobody gets out of this world alive."

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Mordechai Schiller is a columnist and award-winning headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared.