It's certainly better to laugh, than cry.

I think though, the Jewish sense of irony and perspective is more a function of the diaspora, than the religious premise of monotheism. That separation from what one holds dear. Given Europe existed as a bunch of warring kingdoms for the last couple thousand years, make that since the dawn of history, the Jewish role became to be an integral part of the network, holding and connecting all these nodes together. The traders, lawyers, bankers, intellectuals, doctors, even comedians. The ones that can see from the outside.

The power of monotheism is that it binds people together in a larger whole and is essentially tribal, in origin. That individuals are like cells to the communal body. Consequently Jews could retain trust and faith in each other, even though they were dispersed. Which enabled that networking.

Now the absolute, in a physical sense, is equilibrium. Absolute zero. The point between positive and negative. As such, it is a property of space. Consider that in Special Relativity, the frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. As opposed to one moving at the speed of light, where the clock is stopped and the ruler shrinks to zero, because no other motion is possible.

Yet the other property of space is infinity.

What fills space is energy and the forms it expresses.

Consider that as a wave of energy passes through a medium(of other energies and forms), it creates fluctuations/ripples. So as the energy expands out, the fluctuations rise and fall. Consequently the energy radiates out toward infinity, while the fluctuations settle back to equilibrium. So the energy, conserved as the present, goes past to future, while the forms rise and fall, future to past.

So the core of the node is the equilbrium at the center, while the essence of the network is infinity, spreading out forever. Without that outward pull to balance it, the node falls into the black hole, the eye of the storm, at the center.

Now as these biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the forms and patterns being generated. Extracting signals from the noise, so that mentally we think of reality in terms of order and chaos, not energy and form.

Naturally we think of order as good and chaos as not so good.

Now much of life is about extracting useful order, from tools, to social organizations, to piles of money. Yet they have an obnoxious habit of fading into the past, to be replaced by more noise. One primary responseis to keep distilling that order down to ever more concise, stable and solid forms. From religious absolutism, to math, to stores of wealth and various other things we hold dear. Yet when we distill things, we simply have the most stable, not necessarily the essence. More the skeleton, than the egg.

Consequently life is about juggling that yin and yang of desire and judgement. Transcendence and order.

The problem for Judaism and Israel is that this dichotomy between order and energy has evolved somewhat separately, because they have been a people without a homeland. They have surfed the wave of the development of the modern world, while retaining this core tribal essence that has been sustained as a religion, rather than having to undergo the testing of also being a political process, fluctuating through cycles of convention and regeneration. Now that they have their homeland back, they just have to clear out those who filled the vacuum, like it was a couple thousand years ago and all will be right. But things have grown more complicated and integrated in that larger world. Consequently they grow more isolated, while graviating into a rightwing core, that feeds back into more isolation.

I'm just putting this out there as as a logical argument, feel free to refute or add to it.