"Now be in order, gentlemen. I have the floor this time. This is my chance to get killed. Not to the point? But there are many points to this, and if I have deviated from one I was only getting so much nearer the other. I was trying to show what good this scoffer and sycophant has done, and to point out the value of the jest. God created the world and he saw what he was 'up against,' so he smiled, and thus humor was born. After awhile the divine flashlights from on high began to play hide-and-seek in the unlit chambers of the human brain; men became possessed of the sense of humor, and this was the awakening and dawn of civilization. The lightnings of the mind which suddenly reveal the multitudinous contradictions of life, the mental illuminations which cause the immediate recognition of the incongruous, the flash which makes you see all in a moment, the wide view which makes the universe as small as the lantern in your hand, the whimsicality of thought forever creating unsuspected analogies and unexpected comparisons, the sense of proportion which reduces all things to what they are, or should be, truth seen through the falsehoods, the sureties discovered through the absurdities, the exactness of things measured through their exaggerations, miracles of instantaneous reasoning and feats of ingenious deductions, the intellectual rapid transit between the sublime and the ridiculous, which keeps you from going to either extreme, the magic charm which keeps you above the abysses of the stupid, small and great, the bright footlights to the tragedy of life--such, in brief, is humor. And what else is there that is so powerful to prevent extravagances, to check excesses, to arrest all sorts of frenzies, to curtail abnormal credulity, to sober all kinds of intoxications? In the Ghetto, as everywhere else, humor is the saving presence; it makes existence tolerable, and preserves the sanity of the little journey to the grave. It was dark and dismal and dreary and dingy in the Russian Ghettos, and life had the color of last year's snow, and it all seemed like a funeral procession in a sultry, rainy weather; from without we were harassed by our enemies; from within we were harried by our friends, our guardians of sacred law and traditional superstition; it was sad and sorrowful, and so we jested. God sent us some sunshine in the form of such scoffers and outcasts as Motke Chabad, and we laughed. We laughed and forgot to weep. Humor is essentially pathetic, but the absence of it is tragic. Did we not laugh a little we could not have lived. Humor, my friends, is the redeeming grace. If you have ever been very serious in life, why, you can laugh it down. What shall we do to be saved? Cultivate a sense of humor.