There’s an old Eastern European Jewish folktale that goes like this: When God created the world, he put the souls of all the world’s fools into a sack and asked an angel to carefully distribute them. This was an important task. Every village needs its idiot. After all, it’s healthy to have a few people around who are resistant to reason. They keep things interesting when times are good. And when times are bad, they keep things going: if human beings only did what made sense, we’d have called it quits ages ago. So the angel went here; the angel went there. But on a small hill in Poland, the angel tripped. The bag burst open and all the remaining souls fell out. Ah, what a disaster! What a failure of sacred trust! The result was that Chelm, the town at the hill’s base, was left fool-flooded and wit-less. Religious life, town politics, business, and even family quarrels in Chelm have been guided ever since by the unique logic of the world’s most pure and undiluted nonsense.
What a great story!
Let the holy tom-foolery begin!