My wife and I had dinner this evening — along with Keith Thompson, Elder Robert Dudfield, and the prominent Australian Jewish leader and interfaith activist Jeremy Jones — at the Zahli Modern Middle Eastern Restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. It was an enjoyable evening. Jeremy Jones is a great raconteur who is both exceedingly well connected (he had met earlier today with people from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference) and exceptionally well traveled. We’ve both visited Jerusalem very often. And we discovered that we’re both very fond of anecdotes about the quick wit of Winston Churchill.
He is an observant Jew who observes the kosher laws, but he told us a couple of funny jokes about Jews and pork that I will pass on before I forget them:
1.
A rabbi goes into a restaurant alone and, having looked around and ensured that nobody is watching, orders ham. It’s served in magnificent style, an entire pig with an apple in its mouth. Just as he’s about to dig in, though, a member of his congregation walks into the restaurant. Shocked, the man cries out, “Rabbi! What are you doing?” Thinking quickly, the rabbi responds, “I ordered an apple. How was I to know that they would serve it like this?”
2.
A Jewish man sits down in a restaurant to a hearty meal of ham, which he thoroughly enjoys. Unbeknownst to him, though, his rabbi is walking by outside the restaurant and observes him through the window. Unable to believe what he’s seeing, the rabbi watches as the diner, reputedly a devout and observant Jew, devours the completely unkosher meal. Finally, he walks into the restaurant and chides the satisfied eater for consuming pork. “How much of it did you see?” the guilty Jewish man asks. “I watched you eat the entire meal, from start to finish,” replies the rabbi. “Good!” responds the man at the table. “So it was all done under rabbinic supervision!”
I was amused by the fact that the two young women who waited on us, while they looked Middle Eastern, turned out upon questioning to be from Colombia and Brazil. It reminds me of the time that I went, alone, to a small fast food joint in West Los Angeles called “Falafel King.” The cooks and the guys behind the counter were all clearly Arabs. So, after I finished and was walking out, I commented to them in Arabic on how good the food had been. They looked at me as if I were from Mars and speaking gibberish. They were all Latinos, of course, from Central America.
How’s that for plain evidence of the close relationship between Mesoamerica and the Middle East? Proof of the Book of Mormon, if you will.
Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
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