Jewish humor has four main characteristics:
- It is always about something that is real – either pleasant or unpleasant. The point of the story is always more than the point of a simple joke. It’s not slapstick. It is subtle. The response to Jewish humor more often a nod of recognizing a truth than outright laughter.
- Jewish humor tends to be anti-authoritarian and ridicules those who think so highly of themselves due to their position or place. “It kicks pomposity in its pants.
- “Jewish humor frequently has a critical edge. Often its thrust is political–aimed at leaders and other authorities who cannot be criticized more directly. A special feature of Jewish humor is the interaction of prominent figures with simple folk and the disadvantaged, with the latter often emerging triumphant. In general, Jewish humor characteristically deals with the conflict between the people and the power structure, whether that be the individual Jew within his community, the Jew facing the Gentile world, or the Jewish community in relation to the rest of humanity.”
- Finally, Jewish humor mocks everyone. “It frequently satirizes religious personalities and institutions, as well as rituals and dogma. At the same time, it affirms religious traditions and practices, seeking a new understanding of the differences between the holy and the mundane.”
Everyone from Sigmund Freud to Mel Brooks have studied and analyzed Jewish humor. Freud actually wrote a book on Jewish humor titled, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” and concluded that Jewish humor was simply a way to survive a world that was oppressive and life threatening.
Mel Brooks said, “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” But then he went on to say, “Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh – because if you don’t laugh you’re going to cry and never stop crying – that’s probably what’s responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh. Comedy is protest. Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.”
Jewish stories of humor in Scripture are almost always ironic in the way things are twisted around at the end of the story. They almost always include an oppressor or a villain who is punished in the end – sometimes killed. There is often divine intervention on behalf of the person or group. The Jewish hero always outwits, outsmarts, outmaneuvers and beats the odds. We seldom laugh today because we have been taught not to but we can at least smile when we see the humor in what the Scripture is telling us about God’s people when he is not berating them for being unfaithful. If we cannot laugh we can at least cheer.
Think about the following stories in the Old Testament and see if you can identify the themes of irony, outwitting the villain, anti-authoritarian and God intervening on the part of the main character of the story.
Abraham and Pharaoh regarding the deception about Sarah
Jacob and Laban
Moses and Pharaoh in Egypt
Jacob and the Shechemites when they all agree to be circumcised
David and the Philistines when he pretends to be mad
Esther and Haman who dies on his own gallows
Elijah and the 400 prophets of Baal
Samson and the Philistines
Mice defeating the Assyrians – the most powerful army in the world
The Red Sea swallowing the Egyptian army
We are going to look at a cycle of three stories this morning. Stories sometimes come in cycles to emphasize the truth of what they are saying. Look in Luke 15, for instance. There you have the story of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the lost boy. They are all about the same point of truth and here in Daniel we can say the same about these three stories.
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Chapter 2
Not only is the king all powerful but he is unreasonable as well. He wants his dream interpreted but he will not say what the dream is. All the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers together cannot tell the king what his dream was and they certainly cannot tell him what it means. In their words, “There is not a man on earth who can do what the king asks! No king, however great and mighty, has ever asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or astrologer. What the king asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men.” Do you see the irony in this? No one can do this – only someone superhuman.
And the king is so upset that he commands that all the wise men of Babylon – including Daniel – be put to death. But Daniel with wisdom and tact petitions the king to let him interpret the dream – which he does after God supernaturally gives him the correct interpretation.
How does the story end?
“Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell prostrate before Daniel and paid him honor and ordered that an offering and incense be presented to him. The king said to Daniel, “Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery.
Then the king placed Daniel in a high position and lavished many gifts on him. He made him ruler over the entire province of Babylon and placed him in charge of all its wise men. Moreover, at Daniel’s request the king appointed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego administrators over the province of Babylon, while Daniel himself remained at the royal court.”
Do you see those elements of irony, outwitting against the odds, supernatural intervention and successfully standing up to authority – even out of control authority.
Look at the second story in Chapter 3 – The Fiery Furnace
The king has become even more unreasonable after Daniel’s proclamation that his is the golden head of the statue and that he is the king of kings whom God has given dominion and power and might and glory; in your hands he has placed mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold.
Even after the king’s declaration that “Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries..” he makes an image of gold – not just a head but an entire image – ninety feet high and sets it up and proclaims through his herald, “Nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.” His conversion doesn’t last very long, does it? As soon as he has time to think about the golden head he takes it a step further. It’s not enough to be kings of kings. He declares himself Lord of Lords. He is not only out of control, narcissistic and dangerous but determined to eliminate any who oppose him.
However, here is the new element of the story that was not in the first. “At this time some astrologers came forward and denounced the Jews. They said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “May the king live forever! Your Majesty has issued a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music must fall down and worship the image of gold, and that whoever does not fall down and worship will be thrown into a blazing furnace. But there are some Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—who pay no attention to you, Your Majesty. They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up.”
What is new? It is not an accusation against Daniel and his friends as men or even as strangers to the land but as Jews. There is a Jewish conspiracy against the king. If this part of the book was written in the 6th Century BC then this kind of thinking and hatred has been around a long time. It’s always about the Jews who are threats to the security of the nation and the ruler.
This is part of an article from an account of the white nationalists demonstrations chanting “The Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville several years ago.
There is a “subtler but deeply ideological meaning to this chant,” rooted in the fear referred to by white nationalists as the “great replacement” or “white genocide.” The Charlottesville chant is expressing centuries-old fears that Jews, in league with peoples of color, are engaged in a nefarious plot to destroy the white Christian civilization.
David Lane, a white supremacist convicted, among other crimes, of conspiring in the 1984 machine-gun assassination of the Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg in Denver, did much to publicize this idea. “The Western nations,” he wrote, “were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy … [that] above all things wants to exterminate the White Aryan race.” His 14-word goal, today a central plank of white nationalist ideology, declares that “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Alex Linder, a neo-Nazi who operates the racist website the Vanguard News Network, has written that Jews merely pretend to be white “in order to shame, discredit, blame, mock, harass and otherwise discomfit and discredit white people and the white race.”
The chant “Jews will not replace us,” Lipstadt explained to the court, serves as the white nationalist response to these fears. To avoid “catastrophic takeover,” it calls upon white people to “band together, arm themselves and go on the offensive,” she noted.
Today’s antisemites likewise believe in a vast Jewish-led conspiracy that seeks to undermine all that they hold dear. The cry “Jews will not replace us” reflects this fear and, according to Lipstadt, served as “one of the motivating underpinnings of the Unite the Right rally.”
In a grisly way, it is ironic that The Holocaust Day of Remembrance was this week. As you know, there are many people who actually deny the reality of the Holocaust and say it is all part of a global Jewish plot to perpetuate the lie of anti-semitism. Many of those same people read this story in the book of Daniel in their churches and fail to make the connection between this and the Holocaust.
They fail to recognize the deep fear and sense of threat many people feel about Jews and they discount the thousands of years of Church history that has labeled Jews as “Christ killers” and agents of Satan himself. Some of our worst crimes have been pogroms led by Christians against Jews. We’ve been taught to somehow despise the Jews and still love Israel. This is not new and is not just from the pulpit or conspiracy media. These are the words of Adolph Hitler:
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.”
This poison is still in our system and while we think of this story as ancient history because it is in Scripture it is replayed over and again in actual history. “But there are some Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon – Shadrach, Mecham and Abednego – who pay no attention to you, O king, They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up.”
So, the king orders the furnace to be prepared that will be seven times hotter than the usual and commands some of the strongest soldiers in his army to tie up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and throw them into the blazing furnace. “The king’s command was so urgent and the furnace so hot that the flames of the fire killed the men who took up Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego.”
We know the ending, don’t we? The king looked into the furnace and saw a fourth man who looked like a son of the gods walking around with the other three in the fire unbound and unharmed.
Then Nebuchadnezzar said, “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God. Therefore I decree that the people of any nation or language who say anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego be cut into pieces and their houses be turned into piles of rubble, for no other god can save in this way.”
Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the province of Babylon.
Who ends up being cut to pieces and their houses being turned into piles of rubble? Who ends up being promoted? Whose God ends up being praised?
Is there any humor in that? Not a joke but irony and an unexpected turn of events ending in a promotion for these Jews and punishment for their adversaries as they are exposed for the fools they are.
Finally, the third story in the cycle is Daniel in the den of lions in Chapter 6.
Notice, Daniel is not put in the fiery furnace for whatever reason. It may be that he was so favored by Nebuchadnezzar that he was exempt even though he was one of the group of Jews. But this is a new king – Darius the Persian – who has conquered Babylon and finds Daniel so exceptional that he plans to set him over the whole kingdom. Again, the powerful figures in the court, satraps and administrators, who are jealous of Daniel, conspire against him. They know there is nothing in his character they can use because he was, in their own words, so trustworthy, incorruptible and competent that they could never find any basis for charges against him.
So, what do they do? Again, they attack him as a Jew and ‘one of the exiles from Judah” because of his practice of praying three times a day toward Jerusalem to God. They manipulate Darius into making a decree that no one who worships any god or man except Darius will be thrown into the lion’s den. By now, we can guess what happens, can’t we? Daniel is discovered praying and even against the better judgment of Darius is thrown into the den of lions as the satraps and administrators begin to congratulate themselves.
But, again, there is the twist of divine intervention and Daniel is unharmed. “My God, sent his own angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in his sight.”
“At the king’s command, the men who had falsely accused Daniel were brought in and thrown into the lions’ den, along with their wives and children. And before they reached the floor of the den, the lions overpowered and and crushed all their bones.”
And then the king declares,
“For he is the living God
and he endures forever;
his kingdom will not be destroyed,
his dominion will never end.
He rescues and he saves;
he performs signs and wonders
in the heavens and on the earth.
He has rescued Daniel
from the power of the lions.”
Do you see all the several elements we talked about here in this story? Do you see the opposition, irony, deliverance and humor in it? It’s all there in each of the three stories.
Daniella Levy wrote in By Light of Hidden Candles, “It is not only about exile and oppression and suffering. It is the story of thriving, of triumph, and of great faith. It is the story of a people that laughs in the face of deepest despair, that stubbornly clings to life and to joy even in the face of horror and death. We take our pain and turn it into poetry. We take our misfortune and transform it into opportunity.”
It is humor that sees God as ultimately triumphing even through the mouths of pagans. It is humor for us as Christians that sees and accepts the hardships and trials but recognizes that no man or system is ultimately more powerful or just than God and that even those who despise the Jews and conspire against them will one day bow their knee to a Jew named Jesus.