Boris the Terrible Celebrates Rosh Hashanah

(and is foiled)

Once upon a time, there was a wicked man named Boris The Terrible, who really hated Jews. He hated everyone else too, but he lived in a town full of Jewish people, and Boris owned the only kosher food store in the entire town.

Rosh Hashanah was coming up, and every year, Boris The Terrible made every effort to ensure that the Jews in his town would have a terrible year. But even anti semites need to make a living. Boris still had to run his store and provide the people in the town with food for the holiday, especially the simanim, the significant foods for Rosh Hashanah. Boris hated selling the simanim.

The only thing that made Boris happy was knowing that running the store gave him lots of opportunities to sabotage the Jews. For example, instead of wishing them a Shana Tova, which means, "a good year", he would yell "Shana" and quietly whisper "Ra'ah" instead of "Tova", wishing with all his heart that his Jewish customers should have a bad year. That only lasted one year. He was afraid they would notice if he tried it two years in a row.

(As an aside, Boris actually got really good at this, and would even yell the ending with the correct grammar, depending on whether it was a male, more than one male, a female, or several females. Boris didn't care much for other people, but he loved correct grammar.)

Boris gleefully came up with new ways to sabotage the Jews every year. One year, he sold them honey dipped in applesauce, instead of apples dipped in honey. That year, all the Jews had to dip an apple into honey that had already been dipped into applesauce. Boris rubbed his hands with glee imagining their dismay if they ever found out what he had done. But that year, there was an especially large crop of apples. It hadn't worked.

One year, Boris sold parsnips instead of carrots, because he didn't want their merits to increase . He explained that a vampire had sucked the juice from all the carrots, and the Jews had to make do with parsnips that year. But he didn't know that the root of "pru" in Hebrew means to multiply. That year, the Jews only had triplets.

Boris didn't even want the Jews to have access to leek or cabbage. He did not want it to be His will, Hashem, their G-d and the G-d of their forefathers, that their enemies should be destroyed. That wouldn't be good for Boris the Terrible! Boris refused to order leeks and cabbage for Rosh Hashanah, and only supplied onions, so that they should have a year filled with crying. The Jews happily fried the onions and had a delicious dish and a delicious year.

Of course, he did the same for beets, which go along with a prayer that their enemies should be removed. Boris the Terrible did not want to be removed. He even removed canned beets from his store year-round, so that nobody would ever have beets. He rubbed his hands gleefully every time someone came to his store and asked for beets, leeks and cabbage, happy that they wouldn't be able to pray for their enemies to be removed or destroyed.

Dates, as one of the seven species special to the land of Israel, could not be avoided. Some enterprising Jew would figure out how to get them without him, as no Jewish table could be complete with out fruit from the land of Israel. So Boris sold only pitted dates, and hoped that the Jews would swallow lots of watermelon pits that year. That year, Boris fell into a pit.

He also couldn't avoid pumpkins, which he needed for Halloween. But Boris definitely didn't want any evil sentences for the Jews to be torn up, and of course he didn't want their merits to be proclaimed before G-d. So Boris sold pumpkins as Jack-o-lantern kits, hoping to trip up at least one Jewish child into celebrating Halloween.

On Rosh Hashanah, Jews eat pomegranates. Pomegranates are one of the seven species that are special to the land of Israel, and he knew the Jews would pray that their merits should increase like the seeds of a pomegranate. Boris carefully cut every single pomegranate in his store open, and removed some seeds. There were still plenty of seeds left. That was frustrating.

The last year of his life, Boris the Terrible decided to mess with the fish. Boris didn't want the Jews to be fruitful and multiply like fish. He didn't want them to be like a head and not a tail, either. So that year, he sold them only fish tails, which he labeled fish heads. Thinking of their reactions when they opened up their packages of fish at the Rosh Hashanah meal kept Boris happy that year, until he died that Yom Kippur.

Ivan the Terrible, Boris's son, inherited the store from his father. Ivan decided to follow his father's tradition. But Ivan had no idea what was normally sold, and he thought that the Jews needed the tails which his father had sold that year. So that year, Ivan sold only fish heads. Then everyone got tired of dealing with Ivan and Boris, and they started ordering their groceries from New York, and the store went bankrupt.

Shana Tova Umesuka!