The Arrogant Monkeys

Once there was a tribe of monkeys who thought they were so clever. God saw them and wanted to warn them, so he cut off their beautiful tails. They being the arrogant monkeys they were just congratulated themselves on how fine they looked without tails and what fine monkeys they were. They didn't learn anything. But learned to hang from branches with their hands and race through the trees.

So God punished them by taking away their trees and surrounding them with lions, panthers and bears. And now they were very afraid because monkeys without trees have nowhere to run when the predators come. So they banded together and stood up all the time to watch for the predators and learned to throw rocks at them. They learned to fight off predators with sticks and stones and after a while they started congratulating themselves on how tall and strong they were and were even more arrogant at being able to stand straight and look far away for enemies. They hadn't learned a thing.

So God punished them by giving them all scabies and taking away their fur. So they learned to use their sticks to kill animals and wear their skins or build shelters from them. And they began killing things for sport and taking animals and making them do their work for them. Once again they hadn't learned a thing.

So God sent fire to them to burn their huts and burn their food. But the clever monkeys took the fire and kept it and even learned how to make fire from rocks and sticks. They started cooking food and eating it. And they lived like locusts on the land eating what they chose and using the fires to keep predators from eating them. They congratulated each other on their wisdom and learned to sit around the fires jabbering at each other and to call that talking. They became very dangerous. Not just to themselves but to all the animals and plants of the world. At that point they began calling themselves humans.

God next tried flood. But one of them built a giant boat and brought his livestock and goods on it. And after this the strange monkeys got even more arrogant.

God had tried fire, and rain, flood and earthquake, but at length after all these punishments God showed them a poisonous rock. And told them never to gather all those rocks in one place. Being the arrogant monkeys they were the monkeys of course gathered the rocks in one place and they called it Fukushima. Naturally the rocks grew very hot and melted and killed all the monkeys. And God was very sad and he wasn't sure what to do because they killed everything else too.

Shana Tova.