The Holiness of Laughter
Rosh Hashanah, Second Day
September 28, 2003
This past year, I was sitting with an upcoming Bat
Mitzvah and her family in my study. I asked this young lady
what becoming Bat Mitzvah meant to her. She answered in a
particularly literary way. She began by saying that she was
ending one chapter of her life and was about to begin a new
chapter. I was intrigued by her literary response and more
than mature outlook on this important rite of passage. I then
said "well, how would you describe these chapters in your
life. She said I'm going from one stage to another. I'm going
from childhood to adultery.
Amazingly, not only did this happen once this year but
twice. The other time a Bat Mitzvah wrote this in her personal
autobiography that I have all the B'nai Mitzvah write. She
wrote how she was excited and happy to now enter adultery. I'm
not sure what's going on. It may be too many episodes of
Friends or Sex and the City. From time to time, I quote from a
young person's autobiography when I speak to them on the Bimah.
The kids know
this. After we somewhat explained that she meant adulthood and
not adultery, I had to almost swear that I would not read this
section aloud and I kept my promise. So where am I going with
this?
This is not a sermon on adultery. Neither is this a
sermon on adulthood or Bat Mitzvahs. The only reason why I
tell you this story is because it was funny and I wanted to
begin with something funny that might make us laugh. That's
what I want to talk about today. This is a sermon about
laughter. Of the many hours that I spent this past year with
B'nai Mitzvah candidates and their families, these are two of
the moments that I remember most. The content of the moment is
a bit shocking but I remember them more because they were so
funny and we laughed together. I believe there is holiness in
laughter and I believe that laughter can be holy; never when
we laugh at but when we laugh with. Laughter brings people
closer together. There is holiness in that. There is holiness
in people coming together. During my five years of rabbinical
school, there was one classmate that I was especially close
with and we remained friends for years after. He signed my Ketubah and I officiated at his wedding in his home town of
Reno Nevada. During the week of orientation in rabbinical
school, I remember laughing at something hilariously with him.
It cemented a long friendship.
Laughing together brings people closer together.
One of the sweetest sounds in this sanctuary is the
sound of laughter. I love it. Not only is it sweet, it is also
holy. There is holiness in laughter. There isn't a whole lot
of humor in the Bible. There aren't too many one liners.
Amongst Jeremiah and Ezekiel, you don't find the book of Henny
Youngman. Some say the Book of Esther is a comedy but besides
that book reserved for Purim there aren't too many funny
biblical references. That may be true but today the central
figure of our Torah reading is named nothing less than
laughter, Isaac, Yitzchak. Sarah who becomes pregnant for the
first time at the age of 90 says anyone who hears about this
will laugh at me and she's right. It could be the first line
of a joke. "A 90 year old woman gets pregnant," and you're
waiting for the punch line. Sarah becomes pregnant at the age
of 90 and she thinks it's so funny she names her son laughter
Yitzchak. Even in modern Hebrew today, if I say I laugh I say
Ani Tzochek. Laughter is
tzochek. Funny is Matzchik. The story we read today of the
binding of Isaac is itself no laughing matter. It is one of
the most serious and troubling narratives in the Torah but is
based on the central figure of laughter. Not only did Sarah
name her son laughter, she actually laughed herself when the
angels told her the news of her impending pregnancy. She may
have not found it so funny. It may have been a kind of nervous
laughter some commentators say. Or it may have been a
therapeutic laugh in response to her nervousness. Laughter, we
know is an antidote to stress. It is a stress reducer. If
anyone here went through the year without some times of high
stress stand up and introduce yourself. Not all stress is bad
of course but a lot of it is. It's bad for our health. Its bad
for the heart. Its bad for our immune system. Its bad and
laughter is good as a stress reducer. It may have worked for
Sarah. Being pregnant at the age of 90 is a lot of stress. She
carried her son full term and gave birth to her healthy little
boy laughter Isaac Yitzchak. It worked.
We tell jokes about things that cause us stress. Maybe
that's why Steve Allen said that at one time 80% of American
comedians were Jewish. We have had a lot of stress to reduce.
One of the secrets of our survival is our ability to laugh at
ourselves and at others. It helps to look the cause of the
stress in the face, laugh at it and fight back with a joke.
A Jewish girl who grew up in Brooklyn tells her father
that she is going to marry a native American and will be
living out west on the Indian reservation. Her father tells
her that if she goes ahead with the wedding, he wants nothing
to do with her and will have no contact with her ever again.
She went ahead with the wedding and tried to contact her
father repeatedly but with no response. After a few years she
gave birth and she thought this might melt her father's icy
heart. She got through to her father and said "Pop, I have a
little boy and I just want you to know we gave him a Jewish
name." With some note of interest the father says "what is
it?" She says "Whitefish?" Why are we laughing? In 1960, this
joke may not have been too funny. It might not even had been a
joke. The rate of intermarriage was about 4%. In thirty years,
we were told the rate of intermarriage went up 48%. When the
1990 Jewish demographic study reported the intermarriage rate
at 52%, it caused those of us concerned with the Jewish future
incredible stress. It is hard for us to talk about this
publicly because it causes so much stress and
discomfort to many sitting and listening. We just learned that
we didn't have to be so stressed. The number really was never
52%. It was really 43%. Ten years later, we're told it went up
to 47%; bad but not as bad as the 52% we thought it was. The
truth is we need more than jokes to respond to this problem.
You may know that Jackie Mason is an ordained rabbi.
There is an intelligence and rabbinic quality and sometimes an
edge to his humor. Some years ago, he ended his Broadway show
by thanking people for making him such a big hit. He would
tell the story of how he was originally a rabbi in a synagogue
but as he found himself having a hard time believing in what
the service was all about, he found himself telling more and
more jokes. He got to the point where the crowds were getting
larger and larger, gentiles started
showing up and he started charging a cover and a minimum. He
finally left the pulpit and went to Broadway via Ed Sullivan
and the Borsht Belt. He confessed that the humor was in place
of belief, but it doesn't have to be. The humor can support
the belief. For me, the humor is not in place of the holiness
but part of the holiness.
Part of the holiness of the humor regarding belief is
that it says as serious as this is, I'm not taking this overly
seriously. I'm not taking myself overly seriously. That
ability to temper our seriousness is holy. When I'm alone with
myself and my own thoughts, I take life and life's matters
overly seriously. I recently read that children laugh on
average 200 times a day and adults 26 times a day. I don't
have time to measure how many times a day I laugh but I don't
even think it is 26 times. How many times a day do you laugh.
I am sometimes envious when I see the passengers in the next
car laughing in such a carefree way while I'm focusing on some
issue that's troubling me. I should make it a new years
resolution to laugh more this year. Though there's not a lot
of humor in the Bible, there is this verse in
Proverbs 17:22 A joyful heart is good medicine, a broken
spirit dries the bones. To prevent osteoporosis, laugh. We
should watch more comedies and find people with whom to
laugh. There is a danger of taking ourselves, our beliefs and
life too seriously. Fanatics, it seems to me, see nothing as
funny.
Taking ourselves less seriously, we have a day built
into our calendar when we are to be sure we don't take
ourselves so seriously. It is Purim, our version of Mardi
Gras. There is something on Purim, not ever practiced at Ohev
Shalom called Purim Rabbi. In the Yeshiva, this is the one day
when the students would and could poke fun at the men they
otherwise revered. An elderly woman says to the rabbi after
one service, Rabbi your sermon today as always was terribly
boring, long winded and meaningless. The rabbi somewhat
stunned by this usually kind woman's harsh comments says "Dear
lady, do you really mean that?" She says "Oh no, I'm just
repeating what every one else is saying." Just so you don't
think Cantor's are immune, at the annual congregational
meeting, the Cantor got up and reported "My voice is insured
by Lloyds of London for a million and a half dollars." An
elderly lady towards the back of the room was heard to say "I
wonder what he did with all the money."
I would like you each to now do something medically
good for you. Think of something that brings you a joyful
heart. What was the most joyful experience you had this past
year? It may have been funny, contained laughter or just plain
joy. I'll share mine with you.
This past year, one of the days of greatest joy for us
and also much joyful laughter was Samara's Bat Mitzvah on
Shabbat B'reysheet. I have celebrated hundreds of Bar and Bat
Mitzvahs with you but only this past year did I know from your
perspective what joy it can be. I told the story when I spoke
to Samara about the first and second times we met. The first
time we met was after my second date with Janie. We had spent
the afternoon on the beach and when we returned to Janie's
apartment I was somewhat
disheveled. Samara had grown up in an Orthodox synagogue and
an Orthodox Yeshiva and so had a certain image of a rabbi. She
walked around me a few times, looked at me up and down. This
was ten times more intimidating than meeting someone's father
for the first time. And then Samara said "Are you sure you are
a rabbi." At that moment, I wasn't so sure myself. I don't
think she still believed it totally but on our next date, my
second time meeting Samara she figured she'd take advantage of
this moment. This time this six year old didn't walk around
me, by this time she had me wound around her. She looked me in
the eye and asked "If you
marry my mommy can I have a dog?" I figured, what harm could
it do to say yes." We now have a dog named Oliver. I told
these stories at Samara's Bat Mitzvah. I wanted this service
to be filled with the holiness of laughter. I knew these
stories would bring some laughter that day. They also brought
a dog into our lives. I was working on this talk one morning
about five weeks ago. It was at this point writing this sermon
that August morning, Janie called me from upstairs ... to
clean the carpet. We now have a dog named Oliver.
Samara spoke that day a bit more seriously on being
created in the image of G-d. It was a wonderful D'var Torah
but as I look back on it a year later we may have left out one
point. A professor of Religious History Conrad Hyers, studied
humor and spirituality in Eastern and Western cultures. He
writes "Rarely do you ever find anyone suggesting that part of
the image and likeness of G-d is a sense of humor. Yet, when
you think about it, seriousness is what we share with the
animals." In laughter we laugh alone. Laughter and a sense of
humor seem to be uniquely human. Approaching it
from this angle, there are intimations of some important
connections between humor and faith." With laughter we connect
with each other. I love this idea that with humor, we can even
connect with G-d. Can G-d have a sense of humor? Janie
reminded me of the Yiddish expression Men tracht un gut lacht.
Man thinks and G-d laughs. Maybe we can come to laugh
together.
The biblical book of Proverbs teaches "a joyful heart
is healing." It just so happens that the cover of the
September issue of "Readers Digest" reads "Need a Laugh? How
Laughter Heals. A number of controlled scientific studies have
been done on the therapeutic power of laughter and the
contemporary correlates of the biblical teaching. Believe it
or not there is a national association of Applied and
Therapeutic Humor. Dr. Patch Adams understood how laughter can
be healing. Today, children's' hospitals have clowns that make
rounds. My oldest step daughter Jordana who is the managing
editor of the Muhlenberg Advocate an on line paper, which you
can find at
www.muhlenbergadvocate.com,
reminded me when I told her that I was working on a sermon on
humor that she had written an editorial on humor in the
spring. Let me quote her "Laughter lowers your blood pressure,
reduces your risk of heart disease, increases your pain
threshold and even burns calories. Missed your therapy
session? Some tickling could do the trick. Laughing improves
your mental health." People take an aspirin a day to prevent
stroke and heart attacks. One sitcom
a day with red wine might work well too. Today, we are
presented with the daunting words Mee yichyeh, u'mee yamut,
Who shall live and who shall die. Give me whatever edge you
can to get into that first group this year. University of
Maryland cardiologist Michael Miller said at an American Heart
Association meeting "We know that exercising, not smoking and
eating foods low in saturated fat will reduce the risk of
heart disease, perhaps, regular, hearty laughter should be
added to the list." The writer Norman Cousins introduced us to
this idea in his groundbreaking book Anatomy of An Illness. He
had been suffering from a painful and crippling arthritic
disease. He would daily watch episodes of Candid Camera and
Marx Brothers Films. "I made the joyous discovery that ten
minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and
would give me at least two hours of pain free sleep" Cousins
wrote.
It doesn't happen at every service but often there is
joyful laughter heard in this sanctuary. It is laughter at no
one's expense. It is laughter that is neither risqué or off
color. It is what Patty Wooten calls in her book
Compassionate Laughter: Jest for Your Health. It is
laughter that raises the level of holiness of our gathering.
As much as singing, praying, brings us together laughing is a
bonding. What do we wish each other this time of year? We wish
each other health, happiness, sweetness, prosperity. I wish
you much laughter. I wish
you much laughter and less stress. I wish you much laughter
and good health. I wish you much laughter and feeling close
to those with whom you laugh. I wish you laughter that shares
one of a child's 200 laughs a day. I wish you laughter that
comes from something great and so totally unexpected like
finding out your pregnant at the age of 90 but not exactly
that. I wish you 26 or more laughs a day.
I wish you much laughter this coming year.
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