When one of my children was about ten years old, he became a juggler. Well, sort of.  He practiced, and dropped, and practiced, and dropped, until three balls became four and he really was getting good at it. He was good, and he knew it, and I like to think that I had the sense to say so.

Then, out of nowhere, he decided that he was going to be a magician. There was no Chinuch Roundtable at the time, so I don’t know how to explain the hows and whys, nor the reasons he switched and what we were to do about it.

Newly inspired, one Chanukah, he arranged a show for the (immediate, nuclear) family. Chairs were set up. A tablecloth was draped over a table. There was a sort of program, and even a younger sister as a helper. Then the tricks began. Well,  sort of. They poshut did not come off. The coins refused to vanish. The cards were regrettably the ones we saw him try to hide, and somehow, the cut rope did not come together. Sadly, the handkerchief that was supposed to become something else stayed a handkerchief with great dignity. Everyone clapped much too hard, the way that families do.

Maybe for lack of parenting skills, I said the wrong thing afterwards. It was the first thing that came to mind: “Maybe you should stick to juggling.”

I was rightfully chided by my wife, but the sentence and its theme have followed me around ever since. It has become a kind of mantra in our house, and I think of it far more often than I would like to admit, usually when I hear someone step out of their “zone” and into a place where they perhaps don’t fit, used when one suddenly switches from the thing they are good at into the thing they aren’t.

I thought of it this week when I read who had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

For those who wisely don’t follow this pageantry of hypocrisy, let me remind you what this prize is and why it was established. It is awarded each year in Oslo, Norway by a committee of five, and it is considered, by the measure of the world at large, the highest honor a human being can receive for the cause of peace. The laureates’ list reads like a roll call of the conscience of the century. The ceremony is held with a medal, a diploma, and a sum of money that would make an executive director dream of a bonus for hundreds of rabbeim or maybe even a new building. Frankly, it’s not klein gelt. But more so, when the committee speaks, the world holds its breath. Whoever walks away with it, for that year at least, becomes the spokesperson for the cause of world peace, the world’s official peacemaker, the gentile’s view and version of Aharon Hakahein, lehavdil alfei elef havdalos.

This year’s recipient is Navanethem Pillay, a South African jurist who, until last year, chaired the UN commission that accused Israel of genocide. Israel’s foreign ministry responded with a line I won’t repeat here, other than to say that it invoked a man who is not usually invoked as an applauding critic and the foremost spokesman for anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish propaganda. His name is always followed by a “yemach shemo.” I’m not saying that I always take much faith in official Israeli spokespeople, but, sadly, they do know the slippery slope that merges the genocide story into the global Jewish plot to take over the world, et al.

I’m not a political columnist, and I would be the first to tell you that I make a poor one. I’m just a man who reads a few columns here and there and decides to comment in another column. But it got me thinking about the prize itself, why it was founded, and where it is heading. So I’ll leave the argument over her record to those who have the credentials for it. I want to talk about the prize itself, because the story behind it is stranger than the story in front of it.

The prize is named for Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and the inventor of dynamite. That is not a small detail. The man who gave the world the most lethal tool of his age is the man whose name now stands for peace. The two are not unrelated, as it turns out.

The story, as it is usually told, goes like this. In 1888, Alfred’s brother, Ludvig, died while vacationing in Cannes, and a French newspaper, confusing the brothers, printed an obituary for the wrong Nobel. The headline, as the story goes, went, “The Merchant of Death is Gone,” and the article added that he had grown rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before. Well, Alfred Nobel sat down at his breakfast table and read his own eulogy.

The obituary, mind you, was a mistake. Alfred was alive. But he was shaken, and he wanted to be remembered otherwise, and so he set aside his fortune to reward those who advanced peace. The prize was made to correct a headline.

So here it is. Mr. Nobel was horrified to be remembered for the wrong thing. He tried to fix his legacy so that it would never be misread. That’s why I laugh, albeit sardonically. He wanted to be remembered for promoting peace, and his award has legitimized a person whose life mission is to create a narrative that will only promulgate hate, lies, and violence toward Yidden. Instead of being shaken by his own obituary, they are handing the prize to one who would have liked to see an obituary on the Chosen People.

Which brings me, not unnaturally, to the Dor HaMabul and, of course, Sedom.

For an entire world to be so corrupt as to have only one man and his family find favor in the eyes of Hashem seems preposterous. But that is how it went. The corollary, of course, was Sedom, but perhaps with an Avrohom in the world, that depravity could not have spread worldwide and was limited to a few cities. But Sedom did not just behave badly. They legislated it. Kindness was a crime, and those who enacted it could be punished for it. They did not see themselves as villains. They saw themselves as a functioning civilization with laws and judges, and Lot, remember, sat at the gate among them as a judge. They probably gave out Nobel prizes as well. The depravity was not an aberration. It was the talk of the town.

That is what frightens me about our own time. Not that the world has lost its mind, but that the mind has lost its world. When a lie is repeated often enough, it is first tolerated, then adopted, and finally honored. It is awarded a medal. And the person who stands up and says, “Wait, this isn’t normal,” is the one who looks abnormal.

Which brings me to a story I’ve told before but never needed as much as I do now.

In the early 1940s, a man was committed to an asylum. After months of treatment, the doctors pronounced him cured and told him that he could go home. He refused. “I will not leave,” he said, “unless you sign a paper stating that I am sane.” Having already declared him well, they saw no reason not to.

Not long after, he went for a job interview and answered every question brilliantly. Then he leaned forward and said, “You’ve asked me about myself. May I ask you a question?”

“Certainly.”

“Sir, are you normal?”

The interviewer was taken aback. “I certainly think so. Why do you ask?”

The applicant reached into his jacket and produced his paper. “You see, sir, you only think you’re normal. I have a certificate.”

I used to laugh at that story. But it speaks to me quite clearly now. We need and have the document. Eidus Hashem ne’emanah machkimas pesi — the testimony of Hashem is faithful; it makes the simple wise. The word eidus means a testimony, a certificate, a document that testifies on your behalf. The Torah is the document that says what is normal, and it does not change when the world’s opinion does. When Noach built the teivah, the world derided, but he had the document. When all the world stood on one side, Avrohom was called ha’Ivri, the one on the other side, and he was not apologizing for it. They thought they were normal. We had documents.

It is no longer enough to feel normal. Everybody feels normal. The people of Sedom felt normal. The Oslo committee, I’m sure, feels very normal this week. Feeling normal was never the test. The test is whether you have something outside yourself, something that doesn’t flinch when the room applauds, to check your feelings against. I would like to be the man who carries that certificate in his jacket and doesn’t need to take it out. But I know myself, and I suspect that most of us need to take it out more often than we think.

So enough with Mr. Nobel and his “Peace Prize.” Maybe he should have stuck to dynamite.

Indeed, the Merchant of Lies lives on.

Just saying.