Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Sometimes I think we are living in the world of Chelm, a place that was famous for its collective genius in solving life’s daily problems.

According to one story, a Sage from Chelm decided to go bathing in the lake, where he almost drowned. When he cried out for help, other swimmers quickly came to his rescue. After he safely got out of the water, he made a solemn oath: “I swear never to go into the water again until I learn how to swim!”

Here’s another story about Chelm. In the town of Chelm, the shames (synagogue caretaker) used to go around the village and wake people up for the daily morning minyan. Well, this time of the year happened to be winter, and Chelm was blanketed with snow.

Every time it snowed, the people would complain that, although the snow was so beautiful, they could not see it in its pristine state because by the time they got up in the morning, the shammes had already trekked through the snow. The townspeople decided that they had to find a way to be woken up for minyan without having the shammes making tracks in the snow.

The people of Chelm hit on a solution: they got four volunteers to carry the shammes around on a table when there was fresh snow in the morning. That way, the shammes could make his wake up calls, but he would not leave tracks in the snow.

Why are these stories important? Perhaps it is because the Wise men of Chelm serve as a metaphor for how seemingly intelligent people often come up with the most stupid solutions to life’s thorny problems.

Now, back to the present:

In our country’s war against terror, our airport security guards are turning stupidity into an art-form. I am not referring to the singular occasion when somebody does something stupid. For example, this past week, a gravely-ill 95 year old woman was forced to remove a wet diaper at an airport so that the security screeners could be cleared for the flight.

One of my congregants’ happens to be an old-retired police chief, and his wife told me that when they went to the airport security, they felt something peculiar and asked him what he was wearing. He replied, colonoscopy bag. They wanted to force him to strip, but fortunately a supervisor wisely recognized the stupidity of this request and let him aboard.

If I were writing for Saturday Night Live, I would never have enough material to use based on some of these amazingly stupid stories.

Most of you ought to know that Israel would never check your grandmother like they do in this country. Israel, never has a problem because it does a very effective job with profiling—something that the American government is reluctant to do, less they be singled out as discriminating against Muslims. Israel is the number one expert in counter-terrorism, and they can certainly school our TSA agency!

Officials at Ben Gurion International Airport interview everyone in line before they’re even allowed to check in.

And Israeli officials profile. They don’t profile racially, but they profile. Israeli Arabs breeze through rather quickly, but if you have a passport with stamps from Iran, Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq, you will get questioned. The Israelis are very thorough in how they cross-examine its travelers.

Rather than spending money on new machines displaying your body in its natural naked splendor for others to see, there are better ways to ensure the safety of all of us—especially as we travel in a holiday season.

Now as critical as I am of the Obama Administration, the TSA security measures have been in force since GW Bush. I wonder: Doesn’t anyone in our government have even a modicum of common sense? You and I know the answer to that question . . .

And now you know, the rest of the story . . .