People should strive to learn how to improve themselves and act intelligently. Maimonides said that human intelligence is a gift from God to help them make decisions in life, and not that God directly helps people. It is their God-given intelligence that can help them. Maimonides also said that we can learn from everything God created, to which I agree.
We can learn from our own body. As we will see later in this book, Elias Canetti taught that even the human body teaches lessons. Humans learned how to make a knife, spears, and arrows from the nails on their index fingers, and bows for arrows from their thumbs. The earlier rabbis taught that we can learn much from animals, even ethics from ants. Maimonides said. “The truth is the truth no matter what its source.”
I am convinced that we can learn from all writings, even jokes, a few of which I have I included in this book. If people took a little time after hearing a joke to wonder why we laugh, what is it about a particular joke that provokes laughter, what we can learn from it, and its lesson may apply at other times, I firmly believe that in this way people can bring about improvement in ourselves and society.
Sometimes, after these jokes I suggest thoughts to ponder, which hopefully might encourage the reader to think of an idea.
In addition to jokes, I included other essays to make us think and improve ourselves, some serious, and others humorous. Chapters at the outset of the book are concise. Later chapters are more extended. For example, I have several chapters in which I address the subject of statistics in a somewhat humorous fashion. All science is based on statistics. Our lives are based on statistics. However, statistics only tell us the possibility of the truth, not the certainty of it. What should we learn from this? What causes us to laugh?
Frequently, laughing shows our joy or happiness in overcoming an embarrassment, confusion, or an obvious conclusion. Why would a joke such as, “Why did the chicken cross the street? To get to the other side” trigger us to laugh? Is it because we did not know the answer before it was given and were surprised in its simplicity?
What does that teach us?
Laughter is also considered an evolutionary mechanism that helps build social bonds and regulate human relationships. What does that teach us that we can apply to other occasions?
A laugh or a smile can make you feel better in difficult times. I found that in the rare times that I am sad, if I force myself to smile, my body may respond in kind to the point that I have a brighter outlook.
The above is from the introduction
