Chelm is a town in southeastern Poland, known for the oft-repeated tales of foolishness of the town’s elders. Its population was largely Jewish, and the stories about them were a staple of folk entertainment among the Jewish population there, from the 16th or 17th century forward.
What makes the elders especially foolish is that they believe that they are wise—replete with a repository of axioms which shape an inability to face reality, and a lack of critical thinking that makes them captive to the wildest self-delusions when confronting a problem. As one who grew up among them, Tevye the Dairyman, might say, “Oy, such schmendricks, it’s a wonder they could find their way home for the Sabbath dinner.”
The stories about them are a central feature of Jewish folklore, an example of the self-reflective irony inherent in the great tradition of Yiddishkeit. An ability to poke fun at the often self-defeating response to problems—big or small, real or imagined—facing the Jewish population of the shtetl, and to laugh at their sometimes self-defeating solutions, helped sustain them during times of harsh repression and brutally oppressive conditions.
This ironic humor helped shape the identity of Eastern European Jews, giving them what one scholar of the Yiddish tradition described as “an ability to laugh through one’s tears.”
Let me provide one simple example, not from Chelm, but from the great writer Sholem Aleichem, writing of how Tevye the Dairyman dealt with the most difficult and intense discussions of family problems around the dinner table. With tempers flaring over a seemingly insoluble dilemma, he used a rare moment of silence to change the subject.
“Any news,” he asked, “about the cholera epidemic in Odessa?”
In the interest of self-disclosure, I should note that there are some in my extended family who believe that we are descended from the Wise Men of Chelm. I don’t know, it could be true—perhaps that explains why, in reporting each day on the absurd policies from a modern-day Chelm—Brussels—I am able to sustain a stubborn optimism, believing that one glorious day—hopefully before the arrival of the Messiah—such self-important mavens will blush at their Chutzpah in asserting they are “leaders of the Coalition of the Willing,” and be able to laugh at their foolishness—before they provoke World War III.
Maybe events in Brussels yesterday will shatter their self-consoling beliefs that they represent the pinnacle of “western liberal democracy”! Their outright thievery of Russian sovereign assets was prevented by determined opposition from Belgium, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the course of 16 hours of intense wrangling. The best they could get is a questionable arrangement for a $90 billion loan, backed by what? Who knows?
