Sometimes in this world of blogging, a subject just pops into my head and I just have to write about it. And then again there are times when a brilliant title for a blog post comes into my head and I have to contrive something to fit it. Luckily, these are few and far between, but this afternoon at work a strange train of thought led me to think "If I wrote in my blog about someone mistakenly thinking I'm Jewish, I could call it 'Gentile Ben'!"
You know, like the TV series 'Gentle Ben', about the bear, that most of my readers probably won't have even heard of. Maybe it isn't so brilliant after all. But it's too late to stop now. Anyway, it has happened to me on a couple of occasions, for whatever reason. Possibly my insistence on wearing a black hat and beard, although you'd have to be kind of short-sighted or ignorant to mistake that for a Hassidic getup. The last time I can remember was in a pub with my brother some time last year - we were loudly trying to remember the lyrics to all the Don Williams songs our father always used to force us to listen to on car journeys. Unusually, rather than clearing the room like it usually does, this motivated a guy to come and join us, and the drunken conversation went on for some time until he mentioned that he was assuming we were Jewish. Apart from the vaguely semitic appearance, he pointed out that we're called Ben and Joseph, which had never occurred to me before. It comes from our mother being a fan of 'Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat', believe it or not.
Another occasion, because I'm determined to pad this ill-advised contrived theme out to a full blog entry, was at the World Memory Championship in Malaysia in 2003. In fact, twice over the weekend. One of the organisers asked me on the Friday night whether I observe the shabbat, and offered to try to arrange things around that for me. I'm not sure what that would have involved, exactly, since the competition runs over three days, one of which was a Saturday, and I'm pretty sure any strictly orthodox Jew would consider taking part in the competition at all to constitute work. And Jan Formann also mentioned that Jewish people have a great sense of humour, which I tried to take as a compliment anyway despite the misunderstanding.
Just because a guy wears dresses, doesn't necessarily make him a woman... For the record I never gave much thought about your ethnicity, or religion, I'm all too perplexed on how the "Ben System" really works -- perhaps the mystical powers of your recall don't reside in the system, but in your magic hat.
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