The risks of poking fun at our deepest spiritual ambitions

There are few things riskier nowadays than being perceived as Someone without a Sense of Humor. The only thing worse is being seen as someone who doesn’t get the other guy’s sense of humor. “You humorless, moralizing, dour, holier-than-thou killjoy, you. Don’t you understand I’m just kidding, having a little harmless fun?” So I’m aware of the dangerous territory I’m entering, willing to take a bullet, as it were, for the greater good of the Jewish People.

Torah Jews have something of a complex relationship with humor. We have a well-placed concern over engaging in leitzanus, which is un-Jewish, prohibited behavior, as stated by Chazal (Megillah 25b), and depending on its topic, humor may also involve lashon hara, halbanas panim, and other prohibited types of speech.

As practiced by comedians in the world at large, humor has a deservedly negative reputation for involving foul language, wildly inappropriate material, character assassination, and more. This makes us dubious, for good reason, about the possibility of truly wholesome humor.

Yet humor fills a basic human need. Walk into a large room of any sort, filled with people conversing, and you’re likely to observe a great many of them smiling and laughing, sharing a humorous moment, a quip or anecdote, seeking to elicit a smile or laugh from the other.

Perhaps we Torah Jews, aspiring to lives filled with the pursuit of meaning, have a particular need for a way to lighten up now and then. We’re busy doing serious things, and that’s precisely as it should be, because life is serious. But the line between serious and somber, between intense and plain tense, is a thin one and too easily blurred. There’s a need to strike a balance, living life earnestly and seeking to extract every moment’s precious potential, while maintaining an upbeat, relaxed disposition (at least after 9 a.m. or that first cup of coffee, whichever comes first) and being able to laugh at ourselves and accept our limitations.

Humor, then, can be a very effective tool for staying psychologically healthy and self-aware and humble, all things we Torah Jews heartily endorse. It can help us take life seriously while not taking ourselves overly so.

The Orthodox media features a good deal of humor writing and much of it is virtually indistinguishable from what appears elsewhere, save for its frum context and references. When writers choose topics with universal resonance, finding the humor embedded throughout the everyday life experiences of us all, they’re able to successfully navigate the terrain.

There is, however, another genre of uniquely frum humor. This one zeroes in on the perceived idiosyncrasies — a more genteel word for inanities — of frum life, seeking to mine the seemingly endless stream of laughs to be had therefrom. Its talented practitioners have a keen eye for the outlandish and their hilarity wins a devoted readership.

This is the kosher version of the wisecracking comic who, from his perch on a comedy-club stool, surveys the silliness in the world all around him, taking it apart piece by absurd piece to his audience’s delight. The writing in this genre falls on one side or the other of the fine line between sarcasm and irony, some with a sharper edge than others, but none of it overtly cynical, which is wonderful.

But this type of humor has always discomfited me, and I’ll try to crystalize in words why that’s so by way of something that happened just this evening. Following the Motzaei Shabbos Maariv, someone in shul announced, “Kiddush Levanah!” and out we all headed. Huddling together in the chilly November air, we peered heavenward, straining to find the sliver of moon we’d been promised, but there was none to be had in the now-clouded skies above.

It was a funny scene, people running this way and that, hoping to catch a glimpse of a gleaming lunar orb playing hide-and-seek with us earthlings. (Most people went right back inside, but those who lingered a bit longer were rewarded when the moon suddenly emerged for just long enough to recite the brachah.)

And then I began to view the whole thing through a humor columnist’s eyes. Even without an entire shul being brought outside for a no-show moon, I realized, there’s so much “material” there: the jumping at “K’sheim she’ani rokeid k’negdeich”; looking for the three guys with whom to exchange a “Shalom aleichem”; the post-Kiddush Levanah dancing by the more chassidically inclined (or who know that the Rema cites it in Orach Chaim 426:2).

I don’t know if a frum humorist has yet gotten around to “doing” Kiddush Levanah, with its potentially high quotient of funny. But I, for one, would never, ever touch it as a topic of humor. That’s because it’s not just one of those things Jews do, a Mosaic analog to rolling Easter eggs or a Thanksgiving turkey dinner with all the trimmings. It’s Kiddush Levanah. It’s a kabbalas Pnei haShechinah. It’s an affirmation of the nature of the Jewish People, its history and its destiny. It’s steeped in meaning, both revealed and hidden, and even if, like me, you don’t know much about those layers of meaning, you surely know the most important thing of all — that it’s a mitzvah, an act the Master of the Universe has commanded you to perform. Doing it sets off cosmic reverberations throughout all the Worlds, and earns the doer everlasting life.

When you open a Nefesh Hachaim, or a Yesod v’Shoresh HaAvodah or any number of chassidish seforim and see how they describe what a mitzvah is and what’s actually happening when a Jew performs one, it makes it virtually impossible to ever again think about it through a comic prism. One begins to see those Jews running around looking for the moon behind the trees in a very different light, their temimus evoking not laughs, but awe. It suddenly dawns that these Jews are doing what we’re here in This World to do and it’s the whole rest of the vast, zany world that’s acting rather strangely.

I know — most of us aren’t yet Nefesh Hachaim Jews. But in my experience, we all nurture a dream of becoming one someday. Yet, as our community grows in affluence and being a frum Jew in Galus America becomes ever more comfortable, and the partitions separating us from the society beyond become ever more porous, one of our greatest challenges is ensuring that our Yiddishkeit — the Toras Emes the Creator gifted to His Chosen Nation — doesn’t slowly morph into nothing more than a lifestyle. A thoroughly frum lifestyle, to be sure, replete with all the most heimish, mehadrin trappings of ritual and custom and celebrations and foods and all the rest, but a lifestyle nonetheless, a sociological phenomenon supplanting a monumental spiritual odyssey.

But a steady diet of dissection of Jews’ religious life, combing one area after another in search of their giggle-producing oddities, has a cumulative effect on its readers, and not a good one. It can make people feel self-conscious in their avodas Hashem when they ought to be filled with nothing but unself-conscious pride and joy.

And it ever-so-subtly darkens the aura surrounding our mitzvos, because we give that kind of treatment to trivial lifestyle choices, not to the things in life that truly, deeply matter to us. This brand of making sport won’t turn us into acid-tongued 19th-century maskilim, but it sure won’t help produce the Nefesh Hachaim Jews we wish our children (if not us) to become, either.

None of this is to say that the rhythms of frum life don’t provide grist for humor, because surely they do. There’s no reason, for example, for not tilling fertile ground like the foibles of the shidduch scene or how we do simchahs or Chol Hamoed outings or any other topic that’s simply a feature of contemporary frum living with no particular significance in halachah or hashkafah.

Reasonable minds can differ over where to draw the lines of acceptable social commentary. But can we agree on the need for them to be drawn?

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 784. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com