All cultures have certain shared values. Those shared values often express themselves in surprising ways. And those ways can be somewhat of a mystery to people outside the culture.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I wonder how well my non-Jewish friends understand our Jewish subculture. Sometimes I just tell them the following joke, and see if they laugh:<\/p>\n
Three rabbis were talking about their problems with mice in their synagogues. One rabbi said “We tried to put out mousetraps. But the very first Saturday morning, a trap went off right in the middle of the service. The whole congregation was upset that we had killed a living being on Shabbos. We figured we could just learn to live with the mice.”<\/p>\n
The second rabbi said “We thought we would do it right. We hired a fancy professional exterminator. He tried everything, but nothing worked. The mice just kept coming back.”<\/p>\n
The third rabbi said “We no longer have any problem with mice.”<\/p>\n
The other two were astonished. “How did you manage that?”<\/p>\n
He shrugged. “We just put out cheese everywhere in the synagogue.”<\/p>\n
“But how could that possibly help?” they asked, incredulous.<\/p>\n
“It was very simple,” he explained. “Every time a mouse wandered out to eat some cheese, we would Bar Mitzvah it. We never saw it again.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All cultures have certain shared values. Those shared values often express themselves in surprising ways. And those ways can be somewhat of a mystery to people outside the culture. Sometimes I wonder how well my non-Jewish friends understand our Jewish subculture. Sometimes I just tell them the following joke, and see if they laugh: Three … Continue reading “Three rabbis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20707"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20708,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20707\/revisions\/20708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}