Hey Waiter…There’s God in My Soup! Learning Kabbalah through Humor by Sam “Simcha” Krause with Terry Krause; ISBN 978-1-553-4537-2980-9, ©2010, $16.00, 98 pages
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — Jewish tradition holds that Moses received three things from God on Mt. Sinai. First, he received the Written Law, known as the Torah and Five Books of Moses. Second, he received the Oral Law, which the rabbis edited into a written book known as the Talmud about sixteen hundred years later. Finally, Moses received the Kabbalah, the secret wisdom of Judaism.
For most of the history of Judaism, the rabbis dissuaded the masses form learning about Kabbalah. In the Talmud (Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 14b, Jerusalem Talmud Hagigah 2:1), the rabbis told the story of four learned men, sages of their generation, who entered paradise (a euphemism for the study of Kabbalah). The four were Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuya, and Rabbi Akiba. Ben Azzai looked, that is, he studied the esoteric wisdom, and died. Ben Zoma looked and went mad. Elisha ben Abuya looked and cut the shoot, meaning that he became a heretic (and to this day his name is often not mentioned. He is simply called Acher, the “other one”). Only Rabbi Akiba entered in peace and left in peace. The moral of the story is this: unless you are as wise as Rabbi Akiba, don’t even think about undertaking the study of Kabbalah.
With the formation and rise of Hassidic Judaism in the eighteenth century, more and more of the information hidden under the rubric Lurianic Kabbalah, that is, the Kabbalah as taught by Isaac Luria, a sixteenth century Jewish mystic from Safed, has been revealed to the general public. No longer would the supernal world be accessible only to a limited few.
For anyone who has tried, learning Kabbalah takes considerable time-consuming work, particularly since many of its concepts are foreign to normative Judaism. The study of Kabbalah for Sam Krause is laughable. Krause, a former comedian and twenty-year student of Kabbalah successfully conveys many of the major philosophical ideas of Kabbalah through humor in his book, Hey Waiter…There’s God in My Soup. Heinrich Heine wrote that “seriousness shows itself more majestic when laughter leads the way,” and Krause uses a joke the way many rabbis use a biblical quote to begin a sermon—as a thought starter.
For example, in the chapter that teaches the concept of the Ayn Sof, Kabbalah’s Infinite God, Krause starts with a joke that commences with “What’s green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?” When asking, “What is our purpose down here on earth?” He opens with a one liner, “God sneezed. I didn’t know what to say to him!”
Much of the material in Hey God revolves around relationships as viewed through the eyes of a kabbalist. What is our relationship with God? With each other? Where does marriage come in? Krause conveys his answers through a comic beginning, which evolves into serious and meaningful prose.
Hey God is a seeker’s findings. As such, the reader acquires the distilled results of the studies of a twenty-year student of Judaism’s esoteric science. Hey God is a good starting point for understanding some of the topics that Kabbalah proposes to answer and broad-brush strokes of what are those answers. Best of all, you may rest assured that as a result of reading Hey God, you won’t die, go mad, or become a heretic. In fact, you don’t even need to be a Rabbi Akiba to enjoy reading this work.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached through his website, www.fredreissbooks.com.