Have you heard the one about the San Francisco rabbi traveling in Australia?
Well, the rabbi, Sydney Mintz of Reform Congregation Emanu-El, is in the city of Sydney trying to make a collect call.
Operator: “What city are you in?” Mintz: “Sydney.” Operator: “What’s your name?” Mintz: “Sydney.”
The operator replies: “No, that’s the city. What’s your name?” After insisting repeatedly it’s an impossibility, the operator gives in: “You’re Sydney from Sydney!”
Mintz, who occasionally played local comedy clubs before becoming a spiritual leader at Emanu-El nearly a year ago, raises her voice to top off the anecdote.
“Nobody ever names their kid Sydney in Australia. It’d be like `Hi, my name’s Detroit. I live in Michigan,'” she said.
At first sight, Mintz — tall and sharply dressed — appears sedate, hardly the class clown. She waits to disclose her comedic bite until the perfect moment strikes.
“People who know me take 50 percent of what I say and believe half of that. I tend to exaggerate when I do comedy,” Mintz said.
The next best moment to catch her routine will be on Tuesday at Emanu-El’s lecture series on comedy. She’ll deliver punchlines on the topic “Some of My Best Jokes are Jewish.”
Mintz had a knack for comedy before she heard the call of the rabbinate. She honed her standup while working at Camp Tawonga near Yosemite. After entertaining the Tawonga family camp crowd one day with a routine, she was approached by an audience member with a possible gig.
“The guy said I was hysterically funny,” Mintz recalled. “He was a producer for a comedy show on cable. He asked if I considered having a future in comedy and if I’d like to come to his show. That was my brush with fame.”
She tried performing at a few clubs, but the smelly, smoky bar-comedy circuit was enough to repel her from a career in stand-up. Yet when she enrolled in Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, she didn’t hang up the mike.
While taking her studies seriously, poring studiously over the Talmud and the legal labyrinth of halachah, Mintz also injected some levity into the program. At talent shows she did impersonations and toasted the lighter side of the tradition:
“A woman brings her fiancé, a Torah scholar, to meet her parents. The father asks the young man how he plans to afford a house. The young man replies, `God will provide.’ What about supporting children? The reply: `God will provide.’ The father, reporting back to his wife, says: `He has no job and no plans, but the good news is he thinks I’m God.'”
Mintz has also built up a repertoire of jokes on Jewish food, and relations between men and women. But she stops short when joking impinges on personal lives.
“Jewish law says you can never humiliate anyone publicly,” said Mintz, who will never offer a joke on so-called Jewish-American princesses since it would demean women. “It’s not about making fun of someone, but making fun, period.”
Since becoming a rabbi, Mintz has found humor to be an asset. It helps her smooth out awkward jams, especially when non-Jews think she has two first names, “Rabbi” and “Sydney,” or ask why she wears such a strange little hat.
And it helps her on the job — “working the dome,” she said, referring to Emanu-El’s rounded ceilings.
“People don’t come to a rabbi for standup comedy, but there’s a very human quality when you can laugh with your rabbi,” she said. Humor has become one of her “rabbinic tools.”
Still, she hasn’t neglected the weighty duties of the rabbinate, as evidenced by the stacks of books in her study.
Comedy and duty complement each other, she has found.
“I take seriously the fact that comedy is ingrained in our tradition,” Mintz said, noting that some of the most spiritual rabbis in the old world had a large funny bone. “Humor has been a coping mechanism for Jews. Once people start laughing, they open up.”
Such humor does not appeal to all rabbis, Mintz said, but that’s OK, since no one rabbi appeals to every Jew. “With many different kinds of rabbis, there are many different ways to relate,” she said.
A little irreverence can even help the reverent. Especially, Mintz said, for those who feel their lives are inundated with “Jewish telegram” service messages saying: “Start worrying…Details to follow later.”