'the enunciation of the rabbis'

Mother, Rabbi Warshaw is a fat, pompous, impatient fraud, with an absolutely grotesque superiority complex, a character out of Dickens is what he is, someone who if you stood next to him on the bus and didn't know he was so revered, you would say, "That man stinks to high heaven of cigarettes," and that is all you would say. This is a man who somewhere along the line got the idea that the basic unit of meaning in the English language is the syllable. So no word he pronounces has less than three of them, not even the word God. You should hear the song and dance he makes out of Israel. For him it's as long as refrigerator! And do you remember him at my bar mitzvah, what a field day he had with Alexander Portnoy? Why, Mother, did he keep calling me by my whole name? Why, except to impress all you idiots in the audience with those syllables! And it worked! It actually worked! . . . "I-a wan-tt to-a wel-come-a you-ew tooo thee sy-no-gawg-a." Oh God, oh Guh-ah-duh, if you're up there shining down your countenance, why not spare us from here on out the enunciation of the rabbis! Why not spare us the rabbis themselves! Look, why not spare us religion, if only in the name of our human dignity!

—Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

The Feeling of Being Needed on Earth

"Oh, this business we've got now--it's been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren't being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was.  Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II.  Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production--know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines.  And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true.  Even then, half the people or more didn't understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making.  They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego...

"Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic.  At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth--hell, dignity."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)