Thought for the Day No. 4, With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

Latest addition to the growing roster of occasional contributors to the Puumaja crew: the Rabbi Anders Weiss. This is an affectionate nod towards BBC radio 4's "thought for the day" which was broadcast every weekday morning, oftentimes with the delightfully named Rabbi Lionel Blue at the helm. Don't know if it still is, although I never got to hear it really anyway as it was the signal that I had to go and catch the bus to school...

"It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other. Live and let live. They laugh at us a good deal. That is just as it should be. Where the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection and Eros - cannot be friends - it is healthy that each should have a lively sense of the other's absurdity. Indeed it is always healthy. No one ever really appreciated the other sex - just as no on really appreciates children or animals - without at times feeling them to be funny. For both sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical; but the division into sexes enables each to see in the other the joke that often escapes it in itself - and the pathos too".

From "the Four Loves", pp 92-93, by C.S. Lewis, 1960.