For several weeks now, the Israeli stock market has had no management. The chairman of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has resigned. The CEO resigned a week earlier. The TASE executive vice president has resigned as well. And so it happens that an important financial institution is functioning entirely without its senior echelon -- and no one senses the difference. If I understood the Israel Securities Authority correctly, it is actually functioning better without its management.
The finance minister has previously admitted that he does not have the first clue about economics. But the Finance Ministry seems to be functioning just fine. The Bank of Israel currently has no governor, but business is as usual.
For the duration of an entire term, we did not really have a functioning chief Ashkenazi rabbi. Could anyone tell the difference? And no one has been able to find a single senior citizen in Israel who can point to any difference in their lives without a minister for pensioners' affairs.
In the American financial media, and later in Israel as well, it was customary to hold competitions between various investment advisers. Each one received a sum of money with which they were to buy and sell stocks over a predetermined period. When the time was up, they would compare their gains and see who made the biggest profit.
Then another element was added to these competitions: a so-called "monkey" or investor who chose his investments based on guesses or pure chance. In one instance, an actual monkey was given a spreadsheet, and the stock that the monkey touched was the one that was purchased. Never was there a case in which the "monkey" came in last. In most cases, the monkey came in somewhere in the middle.
We have a long list of institutions -- mainly financial but not exclusively -- that function very well without a handsomely compensated management team. Often, they function even better that way.
Which brings us to the story of the tribe of cannibals who one day decided to travel to America. They built a boat and sailed to Florida. The tribal chief went looking for work, and managed to get the entire tribe hired at a factory as assembly-line workers. The chief signed a contract with the CEO of the factory, and it was decided that the two would meet once a month to exchange directives.
The tribe began working on the assembly line, and once a month, the chief and the CEO held a meeting. At one such meeting, some six months after the tribe began working at the factory, the CEO asked the chief, as a matter of fact, if he had any idea where the Hispanic cleaning lady, who had cleaned the CEO's office, had disappeared.
"She is not one of us," replied the chief. "I have no idea where she went."
That day, the chief convened all his tribesmen and screamed at them: "We have been here six months and we ate directors, vice presidents and engineers, and no one ever noticed. So why did you have to go and eat the one person the CEO would miss-!"
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A footnote should be added here: There is one particularly bored individual who checks my column for stories like the one recounted above, to monitor whether I have told them already in previous columns. He then posts his conclusions online. He has already found two instances. Well, I admit that I have written about the cannibals here before. Mainly for his sake, but also because the next story will provide additional insight into the topic of unnecessary people, let us go to the writings of Alter Druyanov, may he rest in peace.
Druyanov tells the story of a Jew who received a license to collect taxes. One day, he approached the head of a yeshiva and asked him to select one exceptional student to serve as a husband.
"How much dowry will you be paying for your daughter-" asked the yeshiva head.
The tax collector answered: "Rabbi, I have only sons. I do not have a daughter."
"Then what do you need a husband for-" wondered the yeshiva head.
"I am a man of means," replied the tax collector. "What harm can it do to have a decent husband around the house-"
Who is racist now-
The mayor of Upper Nazareth has been accused of racism because of his call to keep the city Jewish. By that logic, aren't those who demand an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria to preserve the Jewish character of the entire country even bigger racists-
What do the stars say-
The unnecessary senior officials take us all down a path of certain decisions. The issue arose after it was reported that the candidate for the post of Bank of Israel governor, Leo Leiderman, consulted an astrologer before deciding to withdraw his candidacy, something one does not normally expect a central bank governor to do.
But, in fact, plenty of businesspeople consult spiritual figures, and that is no less irrational. Israeli tycoon Nochi Dankner used to consult Rabbi Yaakov Ifergan (known as the X-Ray because of his supposed abilities to diagnose people's problems) on a regular basis. But ever since he ran into financial trouble, we no longer hear how the X-Ray is responsible for all his success. Which brings us back to the monkey from the investment competitions:
One day, a monkey walks into a bar and sees a man drinking whiskey at a booth. He jumps on the table, urinates into the man's glass, and runs away.
Flabbergasted, the man stands up, approaches the pianist in the corner and asks: "Excuse me, do you know the monkey that urinated into my whiskey glass-"
The pianist looks at the man, thinks for a moment, and says: "No, but if you hum a few bars maybe I'll recognize it."
The Mossad pilot
For the umpteenth time, an Israeli has once again been arrested for posing as a pilot to receive sexual favors from women. Once a month, someone is arrested for posing as a Mossad agent, a senior military officer or an ambassador, and one Rosh Haayin resident even posed as a NATO commander. His wife believed it.
Though the law prohibits such impersonation, and without justifying this kind of behavior even one iota, I have to say that these people serve an important purpose. They expose a certain void within all of us. Which brings us back to the glory days of the late Romanian ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu, a man from whom we should all certainly learn:
One day, Ceaușescu went out on a nature hike for several days. He took his wife, Elena, with him, and left his mistress, Ildiko, at home in the palace.
With Ceaușescu gone, one of the ministers, Istavn Barabs, arrived at the palace and knocked on the door. Ildiko opened the door, and the minister said: "I need Ceaușescu urgently."
"Ceaușescu has left for a hike, and he cannot be reached until tomorrow morning," Ildiko replied.
"There is an emergency," Barabs said. "I have to perform a cirboli right away."
"If you must, then do it," Ildiko said.
The Romanian minister did what he did and left.
When Ceaușescu returned, he asked Ildiko if anything out of the ordinary had happened while he was gone.
"No," Ildiko replied. "Everything was as it always is. Even the visit by the honorable minister Istavn Barabs, who had to perform an emergency cirboli, was completely routine."
"Cirboli-" wondered Ceaușescu. "What in the world is a cirboli? How do you even perform such a thing-"
Ildiko answered: "He did is exactly the way you always do it, except you always take your shoes off beforehand and he didn't."
One last question
How is it that Leiderman chose an astrologer who couldn't foresee that consulting with him would make Leiderman's candidacy collapse-
טעינו? נתקן! אם מצאתם טעות בכתבה, נשמח שתשתפו אותנו