Years ago, a member of the church who worked for us said “I’m a thief.”

I hope he meant “before you hired me”–but he said “You have to understand our system. My boss pays me so little that my family would literally starve if I didn’t steal from the organization. So I do. He knows I do it, and he wants me to do it so I’ll be afraid of him, and so I can’t tell HIS boss what HE is stealing.”

Stealing and bribery are pervasive in Communist society; it was a system of interlocking thievery that is only slowly being dismantled. When I arrived in the former Soviet Union in Ukraine, salaries were five or ten dollars a month–and all you could steal. Things the government wanted you to have were heavily subsidized, so rent was a dollar a year, but it still wasn’t enough to live on. Stealing and bribery became an art form. » Read more: A dollar an hour and all you can steal

In addition to their well-known contributions to American culture and etiquette, the Three Stooges occasionally help me remember a difficult Hebrew word.

If you took the usual high-school language classes, you ain’t seen nothing yet. French, Spanish, German and even Latin are nowhere near as complex as Hebrew and are much easier. Consider one single word I ran into. Deuteronomy 28:64 starts out with the word Vehephitsekhaw. The V means and but the added e converts the following verb tense into its opposite–a past tense becomes a future tense. It also tells you that the next word is a verb, which helps, because at first it looked like a noun with the word the attached onto the front. (One of the many reasons why Hebrew is so hard is that many words are so confounded long. Onto the front of a word they’ll stick a conjunction, a preposition, the definite article and a verb prefix; and then on the back they’ll have the personal ending AND a direct object. You can get a whole sentence in one word! And as long as the words are, some of the letters disappear so you can’t find them in the dictionary!) » Read more: How the Three Stooges helped me translate the Old Testament