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.
Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction
What a great story!
Let the holy tom-foolery begin!