talmudic humor

[cellio]

I heard a story the other day at minyan:

A rabbi has a long-time friend who's a gentile. One day the friend comes to him and says "Rabbi, we've been friends for decades and I've heard you talk about the talmud; will you teach me some?" The rabbi shakes his head and says "look, you aren't one of us, you haven't been trained in this, you won't think about it the way we do -- I'm sorry, but I can't teach you this". The friend persists, and the rabbi finally says "ok, tell you what -- I'll ask you a question, and if you can correctly answer it, we'll study some talmud together". The friend eagerly agrees.

The rabbi says: "Two men climbed down a chimney together. One of them was dirty and one was clean. Which one washed himself?" The friend responds "Oh that's easy. The one who was dirty washed himself."

The rabbi shakes his head. "No no, my friend. The one who was dirty looked at his friend who was clean and concluded that he was fine. The clean one looked at his dirty friend and rushed off to wash up."

"Oh please, give me another chance!" The friend pleads. "Ask me another question!"

"Ok," the rabbi says. "Two men climbed down a chimney together. One of them was dirty and one was clean. Which one washed himself?" The friend, having learned from the previous response, says "the clean one did, because he saw his dirty friend and assumed he was dirty".

The rabbi shakes his head. "No no. The dirty one looked in the mirror, saw he was dirty, and washed." "Wait," the friend objects, "you didn't say anything about a mirror!" The rabbi shrugs. "So it turned out there was a mirror."

"Let me try again," the friend begs. The rabbi sighs and asks again. "Two men climbed down a chimney together. One of them was dirty and one was clean. Which one washed himself?" The friend responds, "if there was a mirror or other reflective surface, the dirty man could see that he was dirty and he washed. Otherwise, each man looked at the other, so the clean man thought he was dirty because of what he saw and he washed."

The rabbi shakes his head once more. "How is it possible that two men come down the same chimney and one is dirty and the other is clean? Clearly this never happened!"

Comments

Artscroll's version

[moe37x3]

I don't know what the origin of this story is, but a version of it appears in Artscroll's Bedtime Stories to Make you Smile (and conveniently happens to be the sample pages you can see on their website), with the part of the gentile played by "a professor from the local university."

My kids have this book, and I take offense to this story, at least the way it's presented there. It promotes the "stupid secularist professor" trope. It presents the rabbi's conversational technique as gotcha/gaslighting, which strikes me as mean and damaging to rational discourse. Thus, it promotes such conversational technique normatively as a way to deal with secularists, which I consider odious.

In addition, it possibly promotes this style positively as a stereotype of Talmudic analysis, which seems unfair and malign to me. Talmudic back-and-forth will indeed sucker-punch the reader from time to time, but usually, most exchanges in the Talmud that seem logically silly on superficial reading make a great deal more sense when studied with the appropriate background and context. Perhaps tolerance for passages that appear illogical at first is an important trait for a would-be Talmud student, and perhaps this story is an amusing way to make that point, but in this story, I think it runs the risk of giving kids a poor impression of the Talmud.

In our copy of this book, I used whiteout and a pen to bowdlerize the text, replacing "rabbi" with "clown" and "Talmud" with "joke book." It's fine for my kids to get a smile out of the story, but I don't want them getting bad messages about Judaism.

[/triggered]

Re: Artscroll's version

[cellio]

Thank you for this thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback.

The version in that book seems to be trying to make the professor look bad, and now that you point it out, the rabbi takes the bait. I'm glad the version I heard didn't have that aspect, but I hadn't considered that it might give a bad impression of talmud. So *many* times I've been studying something that seems to say X, and then there's a response that says Y because of this new context that wasn't there originally, and then there's another response trying to reconcile X and Y, and then somebody else brings a *baraita* that says Z... and I never thought any of that was *bad* though it can be *confusing*. But maybe to the uninitiated it looks bad -- inconsistent, flaky, or fantastical, perhaps?

That's certainly not my intent, and I appreciate you raising the issue.

Re: Artscroll's version

[moe37x3]

I think the presence of the professor and his leaving "humbled" at the end make everything worse, since it makes it seem as if the story is presenting the rabbi's gotcha logic as somehow superior to whatever the professor's used to.

To be even more serious, the enterprise of trying to piece together what's really going on in a fragmented, multi-layered ancient text is one in which traditional Talmud scholars and academic Near East scholars could probably each teach each other a thing or two, when everyone comes to the table assuming good faith in the text and in each other.

I know you're not intending to paint the Talmud in a bad light, and I will make as many lighthearted comments about stuff coming out of left field as the next guy. I just really don't like the way this story was presented in the book, and to kids.

Re: Artscroll's version

[eub]

Ow, the version in that book is pretty nasty, making a big point of the professor's conceit and his ending up humbled. The version in this post does have the "I bet you can't answer this, and I'll make it impossible" structure, but that struck me as mostly a framing device for demonstrating differing and creative interpretations of a text.

Actually, come to think of it, I have an interpretation I like better than even a neutral framing device --

Look how the book version has the rabbi saying it's too hard for you, where the post version says you haven't been trained to think in the same way. And that way, I suggest, is exactly the multiplicity of interpretation. In the book it's you're getting it wrong, wrong again, you lose. In the post, the rabbi is on the surface saying no, no, but I like to think the rabbi is not actually grading his friend, he's teaching him by the whole sequence. The "no" is to the friend's assumption that there's a single answer. The professor goes away humbled, while the friend laughs and understands something.