My accomplishment for this Rosh Hashonah dinner

[drwex]

At dinner last night I managed to make a Jewish joke that was only understood by the one Gentile at the table.

We were discussing the power of Hamotzi to serve as a generic blessing, covering all foods.

I explained that "It's like the final 'else' clause."

This caused my non-Jewish brother-in-law to laugh out loud and as the only other programmer at the table, well, everyone was just looking at the two of us oddly.

Comments

LOL

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

That's good.

[bluegargantua]

So is there a Jewish equivalent to a try-catch-finally sequence?

later
Tom

Not exactly

[drwex]

There's no error involved. it's just a catch-all that covers any cases you haven't explictly handled above.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

This is *judaism* we're talking about here. There is no "finally", only an infinite sequence of "catch"s.

Erm, not quite

[drwex]

See my response to selenite below.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

maybe *that*'s where the phrase "catch-22" comes from... :>

[points.livejournal.com]

More of a 'default:'.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

So has anyone come up with a Can't Happen (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/can-t-happen.html) prayer?

Do you really want the answer

[drwex]

In theory the sh'ma is supposed to be the last thing one says (which is why one says that prayer before going to sleep in case one dies in one's sleep) but that's more of a FINAL clause I guess.

Re: Do you really want the answer

[selenite.livejournal.com]

My undergraduate time conditioned me to only ask questions I wanted an answer to, as someone would always come up with something for even the most rhetorical ones.

[mangosteen]

But... She'Hakol is the generic one.

is it?

[drwex]

for food?

Re: is it?

[davidfcooper.livejournal.com]

Yes, for food. See the yeshiva blessings quiz passage (in which the students had to identify the correct blessing for different kinds of foods) in Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament (http://www.shalomauslander.com/book_foreskins_lament.php)

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

A (gay male) friend of Norman's was explaining why he wasn't into computer games, even though he's a professor of Computer Science. He said, "Gay trumps geek."

I think maybe in your case, geek trumps Jew. :-)

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

*groans*

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

It made me laugh!