All of the following bits of Zen-like wisdom are derived from David M. Bader’s book, “Zen Judaism”. Some of these (in italics) have been modified by me. I’ve posted several other examples of zen-wisdom/ humor, e.g this. Most every piece of real wisdom appears as a joke, IMHO.
I bought a copy, then modified some as I saw fit. He’s holding a bagel.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, show him pictures of the grandchildren.
One may take a vow of fasting, or of celibacy, a vow of silence or to avoid sleep is out of the question.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Be here now, be someplace else later; is that so complicated?
Accept misfortune. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?
Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, Danish.
Self abnegation is not easy. It takes much effort, and then what have you got?
The words, “there is no self,” can be terrifying. Still they’re not as bad as, “may you grow like an onion with your head in the ground.”
Bring the Buddha to your table, and on Passover, the prophet Elijah. That’s about as many invisible guests as anyone needs.
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.
The world does not speak. It does not blame or take sides. The world has no expectations, and it demands nothing of others. The world is not Jewish.
Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.
Seek not the outer enticements. Dwell not in the inner strife. Try to find a nice place in the suburbs with good schools.
Practice a livelihood that does not harm yourself or others, choose an occupation furthering love and compassion. Ask about the health plan, too. No freelancing.
Let go of pride, ego, and opinions. Admit your error and forgive those of others. Relinquishment will lead to calm and healing in your relationships. If that doesn’t work, try small claims court.
For the wary Pilgrim, a Zen poem: thousands reach the gateless gate from many paths; once through, they dwell serenely between heaven and earth; enjoying golf, line dancing, Yiddish lessons, and aquacise. Come see our model units at Century Village.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Do this and achieve peace. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Go then and wander for the good of the many, for the welfare of the many, out of compassion for the world. Teach what is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. Don’t forget to write, and always wear clean underwear. You never know when you could end up in the emergency room.
Robert Buxbaum, March 24, 2025. Other books by David Bader include “Haikus for jews”, “The book of Murray”, and “How to be an extremely Reform Jew”. Bader claims to have achieved complete and perfect emptiness, although two hours later he often feels full again.
Jewish education is a mess according to the Times. Most anyone outside it, who’d look in would agree: Ancient books, pre-science outlooks, anti-inclusive, and taught in a garble of languages, Yiddish, English, Aramaic, Hebrew. The New York Times has runs regular editorials claiming that Jewish education robs children of a future, or an entrance to society, producing adults who know nothing of geometry or higher math, or modern history, incapable of voting intelligently in today’s elections (they often vote Republican). The Times’s experts, are often the products of this education, but claim to have risen above it, only because of extra work. As a proof, they often cite the Talmud as a source of useless knowledge of ancient Jewish law, rejected Bible history, and only the most basic views of math. By way of a response, I’d like to quote something I’d heard in synagog a couple of weeks back:
“I’m so glad that I learned geometry in school, and not taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.“
The speaker was an accountant, and the point of the joke is that there is no parallelogram season. There is a tax season, though, and tax law follows a bizarre logic that is not geometric, but is somewhat talmudic. As for the useless languages, they are all in use, both as spoken languages and written languages, no less useful than Latin, and certainly more alive. There are currently 5 yiddish-language newspapers being published in New York alone, see below. They compete with each other for readers, while competing also with the Times, the Post, and with another ten or more Hebrew and English journals, several of them Jewish, either published on paper or as web-journals. People read them, though the Times prefers to ignore their existence.
There are five newspapers published currently in Yiddish in New York. The Forward (Tony Curtis and duck) and the Vort are left-leaning, the Algeminer, the Blat, and the Zeitung, are more right and center. There is a readership. Why a duck?
And that brings us to the subject matter, Talmud. Much of Jewish learning is Talmud, either distilled or pure, study of a set of books written between 1000 and 2000 years ago in Israel, Babylon, and France mostly, with commentaries from Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Germany, and Poland. Those who learned talmud tend to find it useful. The legal organization and approach resonates to them in the understanding of taxes, contracts, building, damage assessment, marriage, ethics, even in dealing with alcoholism. Talmud is so useful that it’s common for working, orthodox Jews to continue their learning it throughout their lives. A common practice is to learn a page every day in synchrony with other Jews. Today’s page, when I started writing this post, was Nazir 10. It includes a talking cow, just the sort of section that the Times likes to cite to show the uselessness of it all. I’ll forgive their lack of understanding, but not their laziness for not even bothering to try to understand.
Nazir 10 begins by saying: “If a cow says, ‘I will be a Nazir (that is, I will give up wine for a month) if I stand up’. Then, if it gets up, one school of rabbinic thought (Bais Shammai) says he is a nazir. Another school of thought (Bais Hillel) says he is not a nazir.” The page goes on to speak about taking doors, but I’ll stop here after the first 2 sentences and will try to explain what the Times does not care to examine.
Notice that cows are female, and they typically don’t speak, but here you find a “he” who might have to give up wine. This “he”, this male, is understood to be a person looking at the cow, likely a person with an alcohol problem. He sees a cow lying on the ground (in the mud figuratively) and identifies it to himself. That is, he sees himself lying in the mud. He thinks it’s impossible for the cow to get up because he imagines that he himself can not get up. (This is just the Talmud’s way of discussing things). According to Bais Shammai, the person is understood to have said to himself, “if that cow can get up, I will take it as a sign that I can get up, and I will take it on myself to avoid wine and wine products for a month.” Now, according to Bais Shammai, if the cow gets up, the man is obligated to stop drinking for a month.
“I love television, and find it very educational. When someone turns it on, I go read a book.” G. Marx
Bais Hillel says he is not obligated at all. They say that a drunk who wants to change, must do more than be inspired, he must make a real verbal commitment. He must verbally obligate himself to give up drink. We follow this latter opinion, but learn Bais Shammai’s view too, because there are important ideas about self-identity.
Those are just the first two lines of the page. In secular school, you learn stories too, sometimes stories with talking animals, but these are usually modern stories, where the challenges are external, bullying say, but in a sense such stories are sanitized. The internal demons are removed, and these are often the hardest to battle. Even dealing with external problems is often pushed on an external authority, a teacher usually. You are considered to be too weak to deal with a problem. Sometimes that’s true, usually there is at least some part you could deal with. The lack of self-obligation leaves modern school stories flat. Few kids enjoy them, or feel they get anything from them. A result in Detroit is that schools have <50% attendance. Kids leave barely literate with appalling math skills. We blame the teachers and the subject. It’s the book: Sally has 15 tomatoes and wants to give 4 to a friend, how many will she have left? is this relevant? Does this excite?
Talmud teaches some logic, some math, and some geometry, but only for measuring distances and volumes, the application that geometry was named for (geometry = measuring the earth). They learn the rest as needed, and often learn quite a lot.
As Groucho Marx said: “My education is self inflicted.”
The products of Jewish education become successful, often in business, hiring their better-educated brothers. Some become lawyers, accountants, writers, businessmen, or psychologists — more than our share in the population — or mathematicians and scientists. Some even excel in academics or journalism. The Times does not mention this.
Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx
My three children all went to Jewish, religious school and got the education that the Times calls abuse. So far, my son (31) has two masters degrees, both in artificial intelligence/ computer science. My older daughter (28) is getting her PhD in Psychology, and my younger daughter (23) is working on her masters in epidemiology. I suspect they benefited from the education. My suggestion to the Times, is in another Marx quote: “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”
Robert Buxbaum, March 1, 2023. “History may not think with its feet, but it certainly doesn’t walk on its head.”– Karl Marx, the less-funny, Marx brother. Jewish educated, he became a journalist.
I’m writing a book about reverse psychology; please don’t buy it.
This one’s not by Rappaport
The judge said I had to keep 6 feet away from my ex-wife. So I buried her under the patio.
Robert Buxbaum: the above 3 jokes are from Jack Rappaport — He sometimes sells jokes. April 13, 2022. The ones below are from Gahan Wilson, and the one at right, I don’t know.
Large chunks of Michigan shut down for the prime days of hunting season, from the middle of October to early November. About 8% of the state gets a hunting license each year, some 800,000 people, all trying to “Bag a buck.” Michigan is an open carry state for rifles and holstered pistols, something seen recently in the state capitol, I’d say this was an illegal example since there is also a brandishing law, but it gives a sense of things here. About 29% of the state owns at least one gun, and usually more. There are about as many guns as people. Getting bullets, on the other hand, is near impossible, both for handguns and for most rifles, shotguns excluded.
A lot of the attraction of hunting is that you get to eat what you kill. Mot people do this or donate it to a food back. Hunting is also cheaper than golf. Rural farmers also hunt to protect their crops from crows, squirrels, rabbits, rats, snakes, and raccoons. This is legitimate hunting, in my opinion, even though you typically don’t eat crow. Some people do hunt bear, but that’s a different story (I like to be dressed). It’s possible that the bullet shortage is just a hiccup in the supply chain, “supply and demand” but it’s been going on for 12 years now so I suspect it’s here to stay.
Michigan, was once a Republican, pro-gun stronghold. It has swung Democrat and anti-gun for the last few years. Bulletes have been scare for about that long, at least since the Obama election or the Sandy Hook shooting. Behind this is a general trend of urbanization and class-action law suits. At this point, few sporting stores carry guns or bullets, and those that do, tend to hide them in a back room. Amazon carries neither bullets nor guns, and the same holds at e-bay, Craig’s list, and Walmart on line. Dunhams still sells guns but the only bullets, when I visited today were, 17 caliber, 227 and duck-hunting, shotgun shells. Gone were normal handgun calibers: 22, 25, 32, 38, 45, 357, and 9mm. The press seems OK with duck or moose hunting; not so OK with anything else.
The salesman at Dunham’s said that he had moved to bow hunting, something that’s becoming common, but it’s incredibly difficult even with modern bows. I can rarely hit a non-moving target at 50 feet on the first arrow, and I can only imagine the frustration of trying to hit a moving target after sitting in a cold blind for days waiting for one to appear whose distance and placement is unknown, and that might disappear at any moment, or attack me then disappear.
Part of the problem is that arrows travel at only about 250 ft/s, or about 1/6 the speed of a bullet. Thus, an arrow fired from 50 yards takes about 0.6 seconds to hit. In that time it drops about 6 feet and must be aimed 6 feet above the deer if you hope to hit it. A riffle bullet falls only about 2 inches, about 1/36 as much. Whaat’s more, though an arrow is about three times heavier than a hunting bullet, its slow speed means it hits with only about 1/10 the kinetic energy, about the same as hunting with a 22 from a handgun.
There are those who say the bullet shortage will go away on its own because of supply and demand. That’s true until the government steps in in the name of public safety. Though recreational marijuana and moonshine are both legal, government regulation means that prices are high and supply is limited, with a grey market of people buying high and selling higher. I’m seeing the same with ammunition; there is tight supply, a grey market, and a fair number of people trying to reload spent ammunition using match-tips for primers. Talk about white lightning.
I’m not crazy about the COVID isolation, but there are up-sides that I’ve come to appreciate. You might too. Out of boredom, I was finally got into meditation. It was better than just sitting around and doing nothing.
It’s best not to look at isolation as a problem, but an opportunity. I’ve developed a serious drinking opportunity.
And it’s an opportunity to talk to myself. I told myself I’ should quit drinking. Then I figured, why should I listen to a drunk who talks to himself.
A friend of mine was on drugs, but then quit. Everyone in his house is happy, except for the lamp. The lamp won’t talk to him anymore.
The movies are closed, and the bars, and the gyms. It gives me another reason not to go to the gym.
Did you know that, before the crowbar was invented, crows used to drink at home.
The real reason dogs aren’t allowed in bars: lots of guys can’t handle their licker.
There’s time to spend with my children. And they look like me.
I like that I don’t commute. Family events are over zoom, funerals (lots of funerals), meetings, lectures. They come in via the computer, and I don’t have to dress or attend. No jacket, no pants… no travel …. no job.
My children are spending more time with us at home. We have virtual meals together. I discovered that I have a son named Tok. He seems to like my dad-jokes.
My wife is finding it particularly tough. Most every day I see her standing by the window, staring, wondering. One of these days, I’ll let her in.
I asked wife why she married me. Was it for my looks, or my income, or my smarts. She smiled and said it was my sense of humor. 🙂
My wife is an elementary school teacher. She teaches these days with a smart board. If the board were any smarter, it would go work for someone else. It’s necessary, I guess. If you can’t beat them, you might as well let the smart board teach. I think the smart board stole the election. It began by auto-correcting my spelling. Then it moved to auto correct my voting. The board is smarter and better than me (Hey, who wrote this?)
I’ve learned to love masks, though some of them are hot.
You’d think they’d reduce the number of administrators in the schools, given that it’s all remote. Or reduce the price of college. It would be nice if they’d up the number of folks who can attend. So far no. Today the Princeton alumni of Michigan is sponsoring video-talk by Princeton alumnus, George Will. I wanted to attend, but found there was limited seating, so I’m on the waiting list (true story). By keeping people out, they show they are exclusive. Tuition is $40,000 / year, and they keep telling us that the college is in service of humanity. If they were in the service of humanity, they’d charge less, and stream the talk to whoever wants to listen in. I have to hope this will change sooner or later.
Shopping for toilet paper was a big issue at the beginning of the pandemic, but I’ve now got a dog to do it for me. He goes to the store, brings it back. Brings back toothpaste too. He’s a lavatory retriever. (I got this joke from Steve Feldman; the crowbar joke too.)
I don’t mind that there are few new movies. There are plenty of old movies that I have not seen, and old TV shows too.
This fellow is the new head of Biden’s COVID-19 task force. He’s got a science-based plan for over-population and the disease.
I like that people are leaving New York and LA. It’s healthy, and saves on rent. Folks still travel there, mostly for the rioting, but lockdowns are nicer in Michigan.
More people are hunting, and hiking, and canoeing. These are active activities that you can do on lockdown. The old activities were passive, or going out to eat. Passive activities are almost a contradiction in terms.
We’re cooking more at home, which is healthier. And squirrel doesn’t taste half bad. If I live through this, I’ll be healthy.
I’m reading more, and have joined goodreads.com. I’ve developed a superpower: I find can melt ice cubes, just by looking at them. It takes a while but they melt.
A lot more folks have dogs. And folks have gotten into religion. Wouldn’t it be great, if after death we fond that dyslexic folks were right. There really is a dog.
Let’s love the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse.
There was an election last week. My uncles voted for Biden, which really surprised me. They were staunch Republicans when they were alive. My aunt got the ballot and convinced them. She was a Democrat when she was alive.
Before COVID, the other big crisis was global warming. Al Gore and Greta Thunberg claimed we had to shutter production and stop driving to save the planet. COVID-19 has done it. The next crisis is over-population. COVID is already curing that problem — not so much in China, but in the US, Europe, and South America.
Just As a final thought, let’s look at the bright side of the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse. Take Monty Python’s advice and Always look at the bright side of life.
Do you know how you go about thinking the unthinkable?
With an ithberg, of course.
Robert Buxbaum. April 12, 2016. I thought it was time for another “dad joke.” Besides, the Titanic sank on April 14th. I spend a fair about of time thinking the unthinkable. On a vaguely similar note:
After Boris died, everyone gathered at his funeral.
The minister started to speak: “He was a model husband, a decent man, a terrific father..”
The widow then makes a motion for her son to come to her.
“What is it mother?” he whispers.
“Dear, go check the casket, I think we’re at the wrong funeral…”
Before Passover this year, an individual went to the rabbi of our town for a private meeting to tell him about the problems facing various people. He said, there was one particularly pathetic case where a family could lose their house. They had borrowed $5000 from a particularly nasty lender who would throw them out in the cold if they didn’t pay up soon.
Our rabbi was touched, and said he would do what he could to raise the sum. He would even contribute $100 of his own. As the fellow left, he had just one question, ‘How do you come to know this is going on? Are you a relative, or particularly close friend?” “No,” said the guest, “I’m the lender.”
Another story of Jewish charity: a neighbor of ours takes incredible care of her husband, She spends quite a lot, regularly to get his nails done professionally. She says it’s worth it to know that his coffin is secure.
Finally, I must admit that I’d wanted to marry my ex-wife, who I had divorced previously — sort of an act of kindness. But she would have none of it. My ex said I was only marrying her for my money.
At college, my chinese room-mate wanted to make a surprise birthday dinner for his girlfriend.
….. But someone let the cat out of the bag.
Then there was the fellow who broke into the Fortune Cookie Factory with a hammer and broke virtually all the fortune cookies — as many as he could find — in an act of wonton destruction.
Robert E. Buxbaum, October 29, 2015. Every now and again I post jokes– and then I analyze them to death (it’s funny because ….). Recent ones include an Italian Funeral joke, a fetish lawyer joke, and things on, engineers, dentists, pirates, surrealism. Just click the “jokes” tab at right for the whole, unsightly assortment.
First, the joke about the fetishistic lawyer: He got off on a technicality.
It’s funny because …. it’s a double entendre, a multi-word, sexual homophone (no insult to the homophone community). It also relates to a fact as true and significant as any in life. What a person considers enjoyable, fun (or not) depends mostly on what’s in his mind. Whether judging sexy or scary; pleasant or disagreeable, it has relatively little to do with a physical reality, and is mostly in the imagination of the person. As a result, the happiest people seem to be those who embrace their inner weirdness. They try to find jobs that they are good at, that allow them to take perverse pleasure in their own weird way within the bounds of a civil society.
Einstein in fuzzy slippers outside of his Princeton home; take pleasure in your own weirdness.
Einstein, at left, seems to have enjoyed doing physics, playing the violin, and wearing odd clothes: sweaters, and these (pink) fuzzy slippers. the odd clothes didn’t detract from his physics, and may have even helped him think. Boris Spassky (the Russian chess champion) was asked which he preferred: sex or chess, he said: “it very much depends on the position.” Do what you like, and like what you do. As the old joke goes, “I don’t suffer from insanity: I enjoy every moment.”
Parallel lines have so much in common.
