Gimpel the Full

In almost any culture, through the study of its folklore, we are almost certain to find the story of a wise fool(Hamlet, Tom Sawyer, Claudio, Don Quixote, Van Gogh, Forest Gump). The moral of most folktales stories involves a paradox regarding the philosophical value of being dull, or pretending to be dull. So is Gimpel a fool or is he so innately wise to know that pretending to be a fool is advantageous?

Let's theorize an experiment. If we set a table in the middle of a crowded park, and place a bowl of strawberries on it with a sign "Free samples," it won't be long before people start to take one strawberry at a time first. Invariably several of the first samplers, will come back, and on their second approach surely they will take more than one strawberry. What this experiment would demonstrate is the curiosity of human nature, and the almost irresistible tendency to take the most advantage of a situation where the participants have nothing to risk.

So, in Gimpel's predicament, we was declared by the villagers' general consensus to be someone easy to take advantage of( a fool?). It was also a general consensus to place a prank on him, ever better and more confusing than the last one.

The point I am trying to get across is that Gimpel was a gullible, sensible person, not a fool (the strawberry). It was probably the surrounding of his upbringing; the lack of parental guidance; or just a resolute spirit not to blurt his vision of honesty with the mundane trifles that made him so docile. He understood early in life his karma, and decided to go along with it. The villain here is the rest of the world; even the Rabbi leant on him. There was no a single person who came to his defense. He was the village's unwilling jester. They wanted to ridicule him as much as possible, or to laugh at him if someone else did the same. Like the people in the experiment, the villagers were never satisfied. It was not enough to fool Gimpel, they wanted him to express certain sorrow, to pay certain price, which he never did, at least not in public. It was his content that really annoyed people. Ergo the fools were the one teasing Gimpel, because they overlooked the peace he had found long before they stopped laughing.

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