Know Thyself and Laugh

A sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Sometime in the Winter of 2002

Know Thyself

This ancient commandment – oops – it isn’t really one of the big ten – yet it still sounds with truth over centuries.  I was adhering to the spirit of that commandment when I invited you last week to take part this week in the race game.  It’s okay – don’t worry more than you were designed to.  There is a story about a learned rabbi standing before his classroom of hopeful students.  The rabbi says –“Today we begin our study of liars.  How many of you read chapter 25, as assigned, this week?”  Of the class of seventeen fifteen hands rose in the air.  “Good,” says the rabbi, “We can begin there – since there is no chapter 25.”  It is good to laugh – it is good to laugh at ourselves, it is good to laugh together – and in the nuances of humor we can learn about ourselves as we really are.

I am not going to ask for a show of hands – because I did promise there would be no test – god knows – life is enough of a test – but I will remind you about the race game.  Rev. Dr. Thandeka wrote about in her book, learning to be white, had asked a white colleague of hers to spend a week not taking race for granted – using phrases like – my white friend or my white doctor.  The game is designed to make the player more aware that, as white people we are really raced – given a race – that everyone has a race assigned by culture – as white people we have the privilege of forgetting about that in so many places – but our race is a badge we wear and cannot remove.  While at Barnes and Noble this week I picked up a book I thought might be satirical or something – it was called Driving While Black.  But it was not light- hearted -- it was a real support book for those individuals who have been racially profiled – a guide book to understanding if one might have been -- and an accounting of this practice. 

Anyway, I should have elaborated because what I hoped we would each do during the week was to be conscious of the ways that race is used – what we worry about or don’t because of our race – and perhaps not just race – But identity -- ethnic origins -- religion – or gender – or affectional preference all our myriad differences.  Race – or our relationship with it, gender – all of these things are constructed – built by spoken and unspoken social consent – and even more deeply our identities are like lenses like those at the optometrists office that are clicked down one after another until there are a bunch mediating your vision of the world – but race, gender, religion, etc etc are also lenses – ways we are seen and see ourselves – ways that we know ourselves and know ourselves in the world. Click, click click.

            W.E.B DuBois had put it this way – the African American is gifted with second-sight in this American world, which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”  That white world looking upon the African American.  Identity comes to us reflected through the mirror of culture.  This means different things to different people.  Like, how in the movies, vampires have no reflections.  How much of your family history is reflected in the holidays or the customs of the culture that surrounds you, how much do the behaviors in your inherited past are positive aspects of this culture, are you even able to trace your history at all.  How have you felt in other countries – new places?  Acceptance, welcome, invisibility, assimilation – identity.  How do we know ourselves – and therefore love ourselves – for that is the prerequisite before we can love one another?  How?

In hope or despair so many of us – most – by force, by necessity, or by an illusory dream have arrived here.

            There is a passage in Neil Simon’s play Broadway Bound in which a mother tells her son about her grandparent’s arrival in America:

The mother says:  My grandfather had to pick up my grandmother so that she could see the Statue of Liberty… this is what they dreamed of.  Their whole life.  To get to America.  And when they saw that statue, they started to cry.  The women were wailing, the men were shaking, everybody praying.  You know why?

The son answers: Because they were free.

The mother responds: Because they took one look at that statue and said,  “That’s not a Jewish woman.  We’re going to have problems again.”

The son retorts:  That would be a riot.  A Jewish Statue of Liberty.  In her left hand, she’d be holding a baking pan, in the right hand, held up high, the electric bill.

How do we know ourselves, keep ourselves in tact and then do what humans do – what all of life does every moment?  Respond, adapt, learn, grow, and evolve.  Generations arrive and change the world – individuals struggle with identity.  Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, once said “Man’s life is nasty, brutish, and short” – or words to that effect – certainly one time I am not racing for gender equity.  It sounds awful – makes me uneasy – and I do not fall into the camp of those who believe that we are the sole masters of our own fates, though I am sure that the quality and length of life are in some limited degree in our hands – not completely – but just enough to keep us on our toes – or on our feet.  May make our arches ache.  But here we are.  I am more persuaded by the words of Woody Allen – a master of comedy and more a fool than the most foolish Chelmikker when it came to knowing his own boundaries and those of others. Anyway, Allen said “Birth is a fatal disease.”  At least in this he was wise.

            So – the real question is given this limited time how can we make the very most of it?  Drive life into a corner and know its meanness or its glory as Thoreau wanted to.  Of course, I advise that the first answer to this question of making the most of life is by coming to church every Sunday and often – to look inward, to know what is sacred through the lenses of the heart and mind.  But next to that – I offer you that we can explore the deep territory of identity – to know ourselves – and as we find ourselves then to find one another and really be able to embrace the depth and fullness of one another.  And I tell you what -- I believe that it takes humor to do this – in fact I would venture to say that humor is one of the ways that humans consciously develop – not only learn – but survive and evolve.  Now there are sermons that could be offered on many aspects of humor – Freud wrote around fifty dense pages on it alone.  But, God, he was so neurotic – I think it obscured for him the power and revelation of humor.  In the nuances of humor and the turns of phrase and the doubling back of meanings we explore who we are and who we have been like navigating the convolutions of the brain tracing and laughing – clear back, sometimes, to our ancestors.  So it is to my ancestors I turn – the Landaus, the Robbins, the Kanevskys – Jews and I found a trail of humor – that could lead me into myself.  So – pardners – let’s take this terrain together – it’s alright – it’s good, important that you take a few side paths – we’ll find each other again – after all – if we had the time to cantor back far enough we would find our way to the common mother and the few, original, sources of life.  For me the path I follow has to lead me through a long, long, line of Jewish humor.  I can’t pretend to know the real nuance or the deep sense of African American humor, native American humor, Irish, Japanese, Mexican – we have brought new voices, new eyes – early in our history there was a thing called Vaudeville – taken from the French – Voix De Ville – the voices of the streets – the town – the people.  Jews could find work in vaudeville – their ancient self-deprecation found a home – a home they would outgrow.  Vaudeville was not high theater – it was a place where the immigrant struggles of many people were reflected by Jewish humor.  There were some truths that echoed across these newly arrived cultures and peoples.  Through laughter the people found their voices, released their tensions – took in the holy and cleansing breath of laughter and could return to the complex New World of which they were a new part.  The New World…

And, I suspect that every people has its Chelm the metaphorical home of innocence or stupidity – in Italy it is Cuneo, in Germany – Schildburg, in Holland – Campen.  Chelm – it is really a strange pretend, proto-creation story.  A quirky Eden.  The stories of Chelm are often funny but it is a little like laughing at Adam and Eve before they tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  Actually the character you could chuckle at in that story is the lord, he is like a parent with a first child – “look,” he says, I have made for you a garden.  Moreover, everything is yummy and just for you.  Just not these two trees.  Remember – not these two trees – anything but these two trees. – Forget about them.  Like – what trees?”   I can just see these two fresh birthed innocents sitting around.  I have this cartoon on my refrigerator with these two Buddhist monks meditating side by side.  And the one monk says to the other ---“Are you not thinking what I’m not thinking?”  So it must have been kind of like that for Adam and Eve – “Hey – are you thinking about those trees?”  “Me neither.”  But in truth we have to know – we can love the innocents of Chelm but we would not choose to move there.  And we have to have knowledge, expectation, understanding to find humor.  We’d still be living in Chelm if it had not been for Eve.  At least according to some stories. 

Ruach – the Hebrew for the holy breath.  Cleansing, renewing, rebirthing.  Humor is a profoundly religious process – after all – it often pulls us deep into our frailties and temptations, our secret vices – and the vices of the world.  Why should I use these stories – because they are in us – when we can laugh with them – perhaps we gain greater freedom to understand what breath is in us – no matter how secular we are.  I began, I confess, yes – I did not grow up on the Bible.  I only knew a little bit.  But when I began to study it I realized that it pervades the world –our interior worlds.  Sometimes I raise it to a conscious level because awareness is freedom.  But there are other stories – stories that illuminate our frailties and temptations -- humor that draws the human heart into a glaring light. Like you know the joke – “Patinkin has been to the doctor and it turns out he has an Oedipus complex – says one woman to another.  The other woman answers – “At least he loves his mother.”  Or the story about the man who brings his brother to the psychiatrist.  “Dr.” the man says, “it’s my brother, I am so concerned – he thinks he is a chicken – what can I do?”  The Psychiatrist replies, “ how long has this been afflicting your brother?”  The man answers, “Maybe five or six years now….”  And the psychiatrist explodes, “this is your brother --why didn’t you bring him in any sooner?”  The man – a bit chicken hearted himself, says, “I needed the eggs.”  Virtues, vices, hopes, fears.

Jews have always been bearers of the humor that translates reality -- in the US alone more than 80% of professional comics have been Jewish.  I think that this tradition reaches back to the prophets and to Jesus himself.  Let’s face it – the man who said – it is easier for a camel to fit through the head of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God was a man with a sense of humor – challenging and funny.  A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about parables – and that what Jesus said was that the truth hidden in the parable was there for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.  To quote my friend Chris perhaps the ability to see the ongoingness of revelation must come with a twinkle in the eye.”  Missing the ancient cadences, nuances, set ups and the new cultures of and mixed histories of 2000 year seems likely to cloud the work of interpretation.

In the US one trips everywhere over the roots of Jewish humor, for Jews have always been the most vocal in the desert.   And in this new desert, Jews found their way out of isolation – not whining about the over abundance of manna –“ not manna again!” but through vaudeville – turning complaints to laughter and fear to pride.  Each one of us here will cover some different terrain.  Jews were able to find a voice in vaudeville – but allowed access or not our rainbow of prophet-comics are ever those brave and foolish enough to speak out the history, struggles, depths various as each one of us – in this not so melted pot – though I have been seeing a resurgence of fondue dishes.  In a place where so many people arrived the struggles of Jews spanned differences – mostly –not always but mostly – and found resonance in the hearts and experiences of generations of diverse struggling immigrants.  And when the United States was given the Statue of Liberty even her famous words – chosen over the words of Walt Whitman or Mark Twain – were written by a Jew -- Emma Lazarus. “Give me your tired , your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” – sounds somehow different when offered with a yinglish inflection.

            From vaudeville through radio, through the new media of television and film Jewish comedians shared their struggles with acceptance, difference, and assimilation.  The Marx Brothers would hide Yiddish humor in their movies – little phrases that could go unnoticed except by a Yiddish speaker watching.  Like a scene in which Groucho says – along the river those are all levees.”  And Chico says – “that’s the Jewish neighborhood?”  Groucho answers, “We’ll Passover that.”  It seems to be to be a way of testing the limits of a dominant culture – not always directly but steadily.  Like many Jews the Marx Brothers were largely secular Jews – like my own parents – so maybe that why I respond so to his humor – at his son, Arthur’s Jewish wedding ceremony Groucho went up to the man performing the marriage and said “Is it true that you fellows breed like Rabbis?”

            For the most part Jewish humor was dialogue with the dominant culture.  Gracie and George -- How far could humor go – how far could it take the Jewish people?  As a child I was annoyed with Jack Benny’s self-portrait as a skin flint – a tightwad – it seemed to so conform to prejudices – but his radio debut – in 1932 meant something very different to people struggling with the Great Depression – they were not alone.  But it was still treading the edges – Benny never tried to assimilate – he was vocally Jewish and set a pattern for comedians to speak out on political issues – but he was tapioca in comparison with the strong stuff that Lenny Bruce served.  And what Lenny Bruce offered was not kosher – nor even necessarily Jewish – but simply a sharp social critique – hard, pushing against and beyond the limits of censorship and going wild.

And yet there was this thread that would cross cultures and somehow strengthen the tapestry of American humor and life.  Or at least fray it in ways diverse people could understand.  Comics – like Woody Allen traded on their Jewishness – because Allen’s search for identity echoed the searches of a generation or two across diverse social and religious line.  My nerdy non-conformist boomer generation could all too easily relate to Allen – he said “I was thrown out of college my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final – You know – I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”  His search looked clumsy and foolish and he crossed the line when he disappointed Americans on a deep moral level – I know that I want humor to bring us further along.

I sang full heartedly along with Tom Lehrer in the sixties and my early teens:  “Oh the Cathlics hate the Protestants and the protestants and the Hindus hate the muslims and every body hates the Jews – but during National brotherhood , national brotherhood week New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans coz its very chic – be kind to people who are inferior to you its only for a week so have no fear  -- be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.” In high school I was a weekend Nanny – just like Fran Fine – for the younger brother and sister of a classmate of mine in the private girls school I attended.  One fourth of July I was taken to a famous country club in Somerset county to watch the children during the festivities.  At the door of the club the mother – my employer – said “You know they don’t usually allows Jews in here – but we got special permission since your’re our help.” And a couple of generations before Groucho Marx had wanted to join a country club so that his child could swim in the pool – told that the club did not allow Jews to swim in the pool Marx asked – look – the kid’s really only half Jewish – maybe you could allow him in up to his waist.”

We are slow to learn –even after the holocaust and again and again through September 11  that our progress is simply onward – the upward is in our hands -- a matter of human choice and humor.  We -- or any people of faith and service should evolve differently than other animals – self-consciously.  In his essay the United States of lyncherdom, Mark Twain wrote that, with the horrendous lynchings, we ought to bring our Christian missionaries home where civilization had failed – people willing to face martyrdom and a lynching mob to bring white people back to their Christian senses. Humor is a form of conscious evolution – or can be.  Laughter loosens – frees the body and the mind.  Emma Goldman said “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”  I suppose I would amend that – how many of you have ever been to General Assembly – amendments take time and are frequently pretty comical – anyway I would amend that to – “If I can’t laugh, I don’t want to be a part of this evolution anyway.”  Or any religion for that matter.

Certainly we – Unitarian Universalists – must be a part of this evolution – last night at home we talked about whether evolution is forward and progressive.  I am more inclined to think of it as simply onward – the direction – feeble and powerful as we are – is up to us – to those who can both laugh and lead.  You know the joke about the differences between Unitarians and Universalists?  That the Universalists believe in a god too good to damn humans and the Unitarian believe they are too good to be damned by God.  Do we have the sacred and fresh breath we need – can we laugh and move and evolve. There is the old UU joke about the klan handbook that gives the instructions that if you should need to burn something on the lawn of a Unitarian Universalist – it should be a question mark. 

But there is a story that really illustrates what I want to say –

The Dalai Lama

The Pope and

The Rabbi

I guess I would hope that Unitarian Universalists will learn to know and laugh at ourselves and to understand that a future is possible not because of hope but because of action and understanding.  I would hope that we would have seen this problem coming through research, been working on it already and would be offering an interfaith ceremony to honor all our many identities and to celebrate at last – learning at last that our race is against ourselves and that, as long as evolution goes on – we may as well face the music and laugh.