First of all, we want to express our deepest thanks to the hundreds of readers who’ve sent Tom get well wishes and prayers and cures for Parkinson’s disease and amulets and special incantations and potions and crystals and charms and most of all your kind and caring love in his time of struggle.
Your words and the compassion that motivates them have given Tom a new and humbling sense of the breadth and scope of the love people have for him. We apologize for not being able to respond to all these letters, but to each of you we send our love right back and with it our common prayer that the God of healing will heal Tom speedily and in our time.
In this year-end retrospective, we also want to apologize for any bad advice we may have given and hope you understand that we only know a fraction about the problems you’ve so graciously shared with us and only have a fraction of the wisdom necessary to advise you. In fact, we must all work our way, with God’s help, through the night of despair that engulfs all of us at some time in our lives.
What we hope our column has done is to at least put your problems into a spiritual context and given you some measure of hope to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, and that you are truly loved by a God who is the worker of many miracles.
And . . . if the advice we’ve offered hasn’t reached or annulled your pain, we’ve included two jokes in this column that definitely have real and undeniable value and might justify the time you’ve spent reading our endless advice to parents with ungrateful children.
At the beginning of each new year and the end of the old year (which usually come near each other), we select the best joke from among the hundreds people tell us at the hundreds of chicken and pea dinners we attend. Our criteria are simple and cut out most of the jokes we hear:
1) The joke must be clean; 2) the joke can’t be of the “have-you-heard-the-one-about-the-priest-and-the-rabbi” variety because almost always in these jokes, the priest wins, and this makes Marc angry; 3) the joke must really be funny, not just “funny for a clergyman.”
For example, here was last year’s God Squad Joke of the Year:
“The Yeshiva University Crew Team (actually that’s the whole joke right there) lost to the Harvard Crew in a 2-mile race by about a mile and seven eighths. The president of Yeshiva University called in the coach and said, ‘Mendel, I don’t ever expect us to beat Harvard, but I cannot accept losing so badly. Unless you can get better results, you’re fired!’ A week passes and Mendel rushes into the president’s office yelling, ‘I got it! I found their secret! I went to Harvard and hid in the bushes and watched them practice. I know their secret.’ ‘So what is it?’ asks the president, with great interest. ‘Well . . .,’ says Mendel breathlessly, ‘they have six guys rowing and only one guy shouting.”‘
And now for this year’s winner — a rarity — a funny resurrection joke:
“Mr. Goldberg and his family are visiting Israel when suddenly, and without warning, his mother-in-law drops dead of a heart attack near the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem. The funeral director approaches the grieving Mr. Goldberg and says solicitously, ‘I am so sorry for your loss, but we must make burial arrangements for your mother-in-law. The good thing is that you are here in Jerusalem and for $500 we can bury her in holy ground in the holiest city right near the holy of holies on the Temple mount. Of course, if you decide to ship her body back to the States, we can arrange for that but it will cost $5,000.’
“Mr. Goldberg ponders his choice and then says to the funeral director, ‘Send her back to the States.’ The director pauses and agrees, and then before he leaves, asks Mr. Goldberg, ‘Excuse me, but could you explain to me why you would spend $5,000 when you could bury her in holy ground in Jerusalem for just $500?’ Goldberg looks at him and says, ‘Well, I heard that once a Jewish person died right near here in Jerusalem and on the third day he rose from the dead and came back to life, and frankly — I can’t take that chance.”‘
Happy New Year from the God Squad!
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(Concerned about a religious, ethical or moral issue? Send questions to godsquad@telecaretv.org, or visit www.askthegodsquad.com)
