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 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.”
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.”
The third rabbi said “We no longer have any problem with mice.”
The other two were astonished. “How did you manage that?”
He shrugged. “We just put out cheese everywhere in the synagogue.”
“But how could that possibly help?” they asked, incredulous.
“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.”
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