Man Plans, G-d Laughs: A Blizzard Instead

There’s a Yiddish saying that many of you know: “A mensch tracht un Gott lached!” “Man plans and G-d laughs!” It rhymes in Yiddish but falls flat in the translation. So I decided to do something about that. Here goes: “Man plans and G-d deadpans.” Yes? No? How does the term “Deadpans” differ from straight old “Laughter”? OK, so we know what laughter is, but “deadpan?” Maybe not so much. The definition of “Deadpan” according to Wikipedia is “dry humor, or the deliberate display of emotional neutrality or no emotion, commonly as a form of comedic delivery to contrast with the ridiculousness or absurdity of the subject matter. The delivery is meant to be blunt, ironic, laconic, or apparently unintentional.”

Well, I really think this could work. The only bump in the road is the “apparently unintentional.” We have plenty of sacred irony and G-d has been known to be laconic too, as in “Hi there, I am G-d, who took you out of Egypt, you mustn’t have any other G-d's before me, and I gotta go but don’t worry, Moses here will fill you in on the rest.” There’s an easy tweak though by simply swapping out “apparently” with “seemingly,” but only with the addition of the explanatory note below.

OK, so back to this. What prompted this rant was the PLAN we had to resume weekly Shabbat services. This week. As you might have guessed, that’s being pushed to next week due to the incoming storm. As if Covid hasn’t been the perfect storm. So yes, there’s more than enough irony, absurdity, and ridiculousness to go around.

But the flipping of these two words was in order to uphold the notion that when it comes to G-d, there’s a reason for everything. While we can't fathom why G-d would see fit to celebrate the peaking of, and tapering off of, the spread of Omicron (why does the word Microsoft keep popping into my head every time I say Omicron?), in this region at least, with the first blizzard in four years, we are welcome to speculate.

I’ll go first. Perhaps the shifting of our attentions away from the blizzard of disease that has blanketed our lives to a good old-fashioned blizzard that doesn’t contain any known biohazard, might be precisely the distraction we need to lift our spirits and forget about life for a while.