The Yiddish-German words “shoen vergessen” are the punch line of the only joke I’ve ever been able to remember, and remember it I did when I read Rabbi Josh Franklin’s essay “Rethinking God” in The Star on Sept. 26.

Left on a vast plain, we humans instinctively look, at a minimum, for the horizon to place ourselves relative to the sun’s path. The slab sides of mountains are immaterial as our eyes trace the ridges, which are but lines where the ground and the sky meet.

My surname is not common, but it is notorious. One of the real-life mobsters portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “The Irishman,” is named Russell Bufalino.