Slap Happy Jewish New Year

In this 85th episode of No Hair, All Heart, host Mookie Spitz dives into the chaos, contradictions, and comedy of the Jewish New Year—and what it means to carry a tradition you don’t believe in. 

The show opens with the strange math that declares this to be the year 5,787, a number that collapses once you pit it against science, fossils, and cosmology. From there, the rant spins through the peculiar mechanics of the lunar calendar, with its leap months and shifting holidays, before landing squarely in the personal: Mookie’s own childhood, Hebrew school, and a father who survived the Holocaust and demanded that tradition be passed along whether or not it made sense.

The core of his rant is the clash between scientific wonder and rigid religious dogma. Mookie recalls being the fat kid with glasses in the back row, raising his hand to ask how the universe could be a few thousand years old when fossils proved otherwise—only to be told, red-faced, that “God put them there!" That absurd answer, and the years of rote memorization that followed, turned Hebrew school into a prison sentence punctuated by moments of rebellion: green bagel fights in the synagogue basement, Playboy centerfolds plastered across the rabbi’s office, and the mad dash home to catch Star Trek.

But beneath the comedy is something heavier. The Holocaust looms in the background, shaping a father who insisted his son carry the faith as a matter of survival and continuity. The tension between skepticism and loyalty, myth and identity, runs through the episode until it finds its metaphor in an unlikely place: Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The “gold watch” Butch risks everything to recover is meaningless on its own—a piece of metal—but freighted with history, pain, and tradition, it becomes the hinge on which destiny turns. For Mookie, Judaism often feels like that watch: irrational, absurd, sometimes laughable, but still inescapably powerful in the way it binds generations and gives shape to memory.

By the end, what emerges is not just a rant but a reflection on what it means to be Jew-ish: skeptical of theology yet bound by story, tradition, and identity. With irreverent humor, personal confession, and cultural critique, Mookie shows how myth and memory—even when they feel like nonsense—carry a strange kind of gold. The episode is equal parts catharsis, comedy, and cultural archaeology, offering listeners a brash but deeply human exploration of why we keep carrying the “watch,” even when we swear we’re done with it.

Send the host a text! Let him know what you think

Support the show