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Unless you're older than I think you are, you probably think a telegram is a text sent with the secure messaging app favored by Terrorists.
Long before there was text messaging, if you wanted to send an urgent message, you sent a brief note by telegraph (aka "wire"), and it arrived as a crinkly piece of brownish paper with type in all caps. Think of a cross between a text message and a Wireless Emergency Alert. Receiving a telegram might trigger eager excitement … or dread. That leads to the old joke: What is a Jewish telegram?
START WORRYING. DETAILS TO FOLLOW
Are Jews hardwired to worry? I don't think so. It's not hardwiring. It's hard living. And it's not just history.
We're living the history here and now. Don't try going on the subway today — or to an Ivy League university — wearing a yarmulke.
Lawrence J. Epstein, author of The Haunted Smile, said Jewish comedians "offered audiences consolation through laughter in times of distress. They played a game of wit, allowing audience members to laugh at language, at unexpected turns of logic, at improbable situations. … The comedians gave their audiences a weapon, characteristically satire, to confront life's unfairness."
Jewish humor is bittersweet. Often more bitter than sweet. But it's different from gallows humor — grim and ironic wit in a desperate or hopeless situation.
Jewish humor is grim and ironic wit in a desperate yet hopelessly hopeful situation. Not gallows but galus (exile)humor. A sandwich of sliced suffering on wry, seasoned with tears.
A classic Jewish joke illustrates the concept:
A few old Jews get together every morning at a café in Tel Aviv. As they sip their coffee, they discuss the world situation, which is usually depressing. One day, one of the men says, "Well, I'm still an optimist."
One of his friends wasn't buying it. "If you're so optimistic, why do you look so worried?"
"You think it's easy to be optimistic?"
When I was leaving New York for my second attempt at aliyah, in 1995 (I'm on my third try now), my leftist boss asked me, "Is where you're moving disputed territory?" I told him, "Anywhere a Jew lives is disputed territory."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know, but it's true. Anywhere a Jew lives, somebody wants him dead." If you're Jewish, you have to be crazy not to be paranoid.
Jewish anxiety is more personal than doomscrolling — compulsively reading bad news. It's more like dread scrolling — being afraid to open a message because of what bad news it might contain.
Sometimes, though, you just have to shrug it off. When a friend told me, "I'm deathly afraid of losing my memory," my mind-jerk reaction was, "Forget about it!"
Back in the '60s, there was a small hotel on King George Street in Jerusalem. When the owner saw the high-rise Plaza Hotel coming up behind his, he said, "Where are they going to get so many bed bugs?!"
(Just for the record — I met friends and relatives at that hotel. I've never heard anything about any bed bugs. And I knew the owner, with his edgy humor. He got a kick out of bugging people.)
Another fellow I know was getting bugged. Literally. Not only was he itching all over from bug bites, even worse, he was getting virtually quarantined by some friends, as if bed bugs were a deadly variant of COVID.
Exterminating bed bugs doesn't come cheap. So, he was relieved to find out that the only bugs inhabiting his bed were mosquitoes that came in for a landing.
OK, why did he decide that they were not mosquitoes, but bed bugs? Conclusions are risky landing sites.
They're never safe to jump to. (Whenever I put leftover food into a jar, my wife always tells me, "First make sure you have a top." Too often, I leaped before I looked. The landing was often jarring.)
The most famous case of jumping to a wrong conclusion was the knight errant Don Quixote. (Funny how errant means both wandering and straying off course. In this case, it was both.) In the 1600s novel, our hero was approaching windmills and he told his sidekick they were "thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives, and with their spoils we'll start to get rich. This is righteous warfare, and it's a great service to G od to rid the earth of such a wicked seed."
His sidekick tried to reason with him, but he rode headlong into calamity. From that encounter, we still have the expression "tilting at windmills" — attacking an imaginary enemy. And it also gave us the term "quixotic" — overly and irrationally idealistic. There's a medical expression that became popular in the 1950s — "zebra." It means a rare disease or diagnosis. It became part of a proverb about not jumping to wild medical conclusions when there's a more likely simple answer: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
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Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.
Previously:
• Are Jews really hardwired to be miserable?
• The Time Machine
• One big happy dysfunctional family
• Why Pay Less If You Can Pay More?
• Are We Having Font Yet?
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
• There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew
• Asking For It