There once were two young brothers, eight and ten years old, who were exceedingly mischievous. Whenever anything went wrong in the neighborhood, it turned out that they had had a hand in it. Their parents were at their wits’ end trying to control them.
One day they heard about a rabbi in town who worked with delinquent boys. The mother suggested to her husband that she ask the rabbi to talk with the boys and he agreed.
So the mother went to the rabbi and made her request. He agreed, but said he wanted to see the younger boy first and alone. So the mother sent the younger to the rabbi.
The rabbi sat the boy down and sat across from him behind his enormous, impressive desk. For about five minutes they just sat and stared at each other. Finally, the rabbi pointed his forefinger at the boy and asked, “Young man, where is God?”
The boy looked under the desk, in the corners of the room, all around, then said nothing.
Again, louder, the rabbi pointed at the boy and asked, “Where is God?” Again, the boy looked all around but said nothing.
A third time, in a louder, firmer voice, the rabbi leaned far across the desk and put his forefinger almost to the boy’s nose, and demanded, “Young man, I ask you, where is God?”
The boy panicked and ran all the way home. Finding his older brother, he dragged him upstairs to their room and into the closet where they usually plotted their mischief. He finally said, “We’re in bi-i-i-i-g trouble.”
The older boy asked,“What do you mean, big trouble?”
His brother replied, “I’m tellin’ ya, we’re in big trouble. God is missing and they think we did it!”
From Alan King’s Great Jewish Joke Book, by Alan King