Epilogue

Abstract

To complement the tale of the frogs who met on a mountain, told in the Introduction, here’s another tale about cooperation and foolishness on a summit. Like Kyoto and Osaka, Khelm is an actual place (a small town southeast of Warsaw, Poland), but in Eastern European Jewish folklore it has become a legendary town of fools. Once they decided to remove a large boulder from a nearby hilltop. The entire population gathered there. They started laboriously to drag down the heavy stone. When they were halfway down, a stranger passed by and burst out laughing: ‘Why are you dragging it? Give it a shove, and it will roll downhill on its own’. Seeing the sense in his advice, they laboriously dragged the boulder all the way up to the hilltop, gave it a shove, and it rolled all the way down on its own (Weinreich, 1988). Now that this book is ‘halfway down’ to the printer’s press, perhaps our publisher has functioned like the wise stranger when insisting on including an editor’s conclusion to nudge the book on its course. In any case, I shan’t drag it all the way back by summarizing the chapters. Instead, I’d like to pick a particular thread out of the emergent themes, and will briefly amplify one or two of its aspects.