By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Interfaith humor is not so much ribald as it is refreshing and inclusive, inviting people of different faiths to smile or chuckle in a friendly way across the aisles that often separate them. President Obama kept it short and sweet recently in speaking to Christian faith leaders at the White House.
“I will once again resist the temptation to preach to preachers,” Obama joked at the start of the annual Easter Prayer Breakfast in Washington.
Obama also hosts an annual Passover seder with family, aides and friends at the White House. This is America!
“We will enjoy the company of friends and loved ones, re-tell a timeless story, and give thanks for the freedom we are so blessed to enjoy,” Obama noted in a written statement, referring to Pesach.
American presidents really try hard to recognize pluralism — religious pluralsim — and the weeks when Passover and Easter overlap is always a good time for this. It’s also a good time for a little interfaith humor, as I found out when I sent an email to a Christian newspaper columnist, Bill Tammeus, jokingly asking him that if last year’s humor holiday of Thanksgiving-ukkah — when Hannukah and Thanksgiving overlapped — could there be a new addition to this kind of humor by making up a new holiday, maybe for next year, called Eastover, or perhaps Passter.
Bill, who retired but not retired, like all good writers, picked up our email exchange without missing a beat and suggested that one could call the search for the afikomen as a “Pesearch” – with a nod to the Hebrew word for Passover, Pesach.
”The Passter hunt for eggs would be a Pesearch,” he suggested with a wink.
So there was some room for humor here, after all and I then wondered if there might be any of Eastover/Passter jokes for future years about, say, the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea or what some of the Four Questions might be under the new umbrella. Or if a colorful matzoh ball roll on the White House lawn might entertain an interfaith group of kids.
Bill and I, of more or less the same age, hit it off almost immediately on the email machine, with Bill writing that he liked my humor and ”feistiness” and adding: “And it has nothing to do with the fact that my first wife (of nearly 27 years) was a Bloom, although of the Methodist branch. I wonder how the Methodist Blooms might be connected to the Jewish Blooms.”
Bill then told me that he writes about what the one Jewish family in his hometown of Woodstock, Illinois had to endure — as the one Jewish family there in those days — in a book he has authored titled Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans.
In another email exchange, I asserted that we shouldn’t really refer to the two Biblical testaments as the “old” and the “new” — as if the “old” were moldy and outdated, and the other “The New and Improved Testament.” It shouldn’t be suggested that the newer one had superseded the older one.
But Bill told me that “[The Old Testament] is a phrase I rarely use because I agree with Rabbi Jim Rudin that it’s a mostly insulting phrase, although my friend and scholar Amy-Jill Levine, who is an Orthodox Jew, disagrees. Imagine that — two Jews disagreeing about something!”
By the way, Mr Tammeus blogs at the “Kansas City Star Faith Matters” site and is a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter and The Presbyterian Outlook. And he appears on Twitter at @BillTammeus.
Bill sent me one more humorous note, and I found myself, not only chuckling but laughing out loud at the computer screen:
“If I forget, if you write a short piece for the San Diego Jewish World on interfaith humor and out recent exchanges, remember to toss in that special day on which Christians do wordplay on a favorite book in the Hebrew Scriptures — Psalm Punday.”
I doubt Passter or Eastover will ever catch on, since neither term has the catchy humor of Thanksgiving-ukkah, but it was fun to think about it with Bill Tammeus and to enjoy a laugh or two. Or three.
Your thoughts, oh ye of many faiths?
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Danny Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com … San Diego Jewish World seeks sponsorships to be placed, as this notice is, just below articles that appear on our site. To inquire, call editor Donald H. Harrison at (619) 265-0808 or contact him via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com