31/5/96
Snippets
From a Busy Life
(Or:
Leftovers From Column Ideas That Went
Nowhere)
My latest book is coming along
nicely. ג€The Jewish Bibleג€ should hit
the stands as soon as I find a publisher.
It is an important work, and
a courageous one. It strives to correct
a serious flaw about the Bible, namely,
that it's just not Jewish enough.
I know the original has a loyal
readership, and those people like it
the way it is, and they get really riled
at attempts to reform it. I suppose
I could get stoned or excommunicated,
and posters might go up all over Mea
Shearim and Bnei Brak forbidding good
Jews from speaking to me or marrying
my children.
Not that I'd want to be subjected
to all that, but hey, this is academia,
bear the truth and damn the consequences.
(With any luck, maybe nobody
will read it.)
According to my research, in
a properly Jewish Bible, Eve would not
eat the forbidden fruit, because she'd
be worried what the goyim would say.
A Jewish boy doesn't kill his
brother. The worst Cain might have done
was not to invite Abel to his son's
bar mitzva, a snub worse than death.
Joseph's coat of many colors
should have been black, because that's
what real Jews wear.
The Tower of Babel is strictly
a Gentile tale. First of all, the Chosen
People don't pile bricks. If all the
project's engineers and architects and
investors were suddenly stricken with
multilingualism, the story would jive
much better. But even then, we communicate
just fine with our hands.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth? That's not for us: nobody would
ever need a lawyer.
Does Job, even once during his
tribulations, ever consult a therapist?
And Noah, good Jew that he was,
builds his ark like he's baking a cake.
He follows God's instructions to the
letter. That is not how we do things.
A really Jewish Noah would take down
the details and immediately start to
compromise, certain he could do better
for cheaper.
You know how we are: in the Diaspora
we dreamed of a state of our own; now
that we have it, we pine for the Old
Country. ג€The Jewish Bibleג€ corrects
this anomally: "By the rivers of
Zion, there we sat down and wept, when
we remembered Babylon."
Our most quintessentially Jewish
biblicals, Abraham and Moses, are given
senselessly unfair orders: Abraham must
kill his son; Moses is barred from Israel
after shlepping for 40 years to get
there. And do they argue?
So you get the idea. The Good
Book no longer realistically reflects
the People of the Book. My version will
change all that. And the movie will
star Rodney Dangerfield, not Charlton
Heston, who looks so goyish.
DEAR
NEXT-DOOR Neighbor,
I've had it with you. Either
you get rid of your noisy son or I will
write terrible things about you in my
newspaper column.
The guy in apt. 56
MY
WIFE'S lawyer would like it to be known
that all references in But Seriously
to "wife" refer to a second
wife, not the current one.
(The only thing wrong with my
marriage are the irreconcilable religious
differences: my wife refuses to worship
me.)
I
HAD an idea for a column: I start a
new political party. It was supposed
to be a zany spoof of what really goes
on, which is zanier than anything I
could have thought up, so I figured
it had to be so insane that it
would be hysterical in comparison to
the real thing. So I began working on
the idea, and after a while I thought,
hey, wait a minute, this is too farfetched
as a column. So I scrapped the
idea as humor, and I'm going to use
it to get elected.
IF
YOU think I'm being too harsh on our
elected zanies, ask yourself how any
humorist could do better than MK David
Magen.
The day he formally announced
he was joining David Levy's now-extinct-party-in-the-making,
Magen wowed the nation with this incredible
pronouncement: "We will be an academy
of democracy. Other parties will come
to study our methods. No one here will
be promised anything, and no one will
get a free ride. Everything will be
dependent on merit." (He might
have added that their party promises
to keep its promises, eliminate both
taxes and the deficit, make peace with
Syria without giving up the Golan and
bring the Messiah.)
Yes, ladies and gentlemen! He
is talking about the very David Levy
-- and his coterie of rejects -- whose
political culture is so distinguished
that he inspired David Levy jokes.
But let's get back to Magen,
for the best is yet to come. The story
in the Post ended with this: "Magen
dismissed a Mina Tzemah opinion poll
... which indicated that the new Levy
list would have a hard time passing
the Knesset threshold [of 1.5 percent].
Magen had a poll commissioned by Levy
showing, he claimed, that the list could
win 24 seats."
He didn't say two seats, or four,
which would have been nervy enough:
he said twenty-four seats! That's
20 percent of the Knesset, or theoretically
one out of every five voters in the
country. Well, how many people do you
know who would have voted for this bunch?
Heck, Levy couldn't even get 24 people
to join his list!
Don't you wonder how a person
can stand up and say such things without
embarrassment?
MAGEN
IS not so objectionable ג€“ if you compare
him to boxer Mike Tyson. This gentleman,
like you and me, just wants to be paid
fairly. He pocketed $30 million from
his last fight. It wasnג€™t enough.
"I think I deserve
more money. I'm not at all happy with
the $30 million," said Tyson, who
grew up in a poor neighborhood. "No
one cares if my children starve or my
children are on welfare. No one is gonna
help my children." He said he would
quit boxing rather than suffer the indignity
of being underpaid. "No one's given
me any justice... It's just not fair."
He has made well over $50 million in
less than a year since leaving prison
on rape charges.
Now if every human on Earth kicked
in $1 to reward this man for his contributions
to society, perhaps he'd be -- aw, forget
it.
IN
THE first three years since this column
first appeared, we've received a flood
of readers' letters, running at a rate
of 1-0 against. My editor has suggested
a reasonable compromise: the column
should be replaced by a full-page bank
ad, but I get to write it.
MY
KIDS are changing so fast I can't keep
up with it. Like the other day.
Their make-believe sessions always
end with everybody getting married.
I don't try to reason with them anymore,
I don't argue, but whoops, they just
outgrew a stage of childhood suddenly,
and I didn't even notice.
They were putting on a puppet
show for my wife and I, and it was dragging
on a bit, with no end in sight. "And
they all got married," my wife
offered helpfully, "and they lived
happily ever after."
Nomi threw her a look. "How
can they get married?" she said,
gesturing to the puppets with a mixture
of indignant irritation and disgust
that she has such dumb parents. "She's
a little girl, he's an old man, and
that's a zebra."
FOR
REASONS too sad to go into, my children
are not allowed to play with their best
friend, a shy little sweetie named Hagit.
But five-year-olds will not be denied,
I've found.
During another fantasy session,
my girls started by choosing heroines:
"I'm Pocahontas!"
"I'm Cinderella!"
"I'm Hagit!"
TO
THAT old bat who says the last thing
she wants to read is all the cute things
my kids say: well, that's why this column
is the last thing in the magazine. I
don't care if you are a shareholder,
as long as they let me write this stuff
I'll kee
