The elders of Chelm are not unstable

I woke up with a bit of verse in my head, from some of the original poetry of virtuoso translator Allen Mandelbaum:

The elders of Chelm are not unstable.

First they construct a total table.

Chelm is a Polish city proverbial for its comically foolish Jews, butts of the Jewish equivalent of Polack jokes. This made me think of the very stupid people I interacted with in my dream "Among the giants." I had thought of them as "goyish" -- an adjective that only makes sense if Jewishness is assumed as a baseline --  and one of them had asked me about some sort of ritual gesture used by Hasidic Jews. The "elders" reference also ties in with the mention of Presbyterianism (from presbyter "elder") in the dream. Specifically, one of the giants was trying to explain what Presbyterians understand by St. Paul's phrase "the word of wisdom." The Wikipedia article on Chelmer jokes is titled "Wise Men of Chelm" and it even identifies "the first book title which mentions both 'Chelm' and 'wisdom.'"

Unfortunately, I had misremembered Mandelbaum. There are no elders. The correct lines -- from Chelmaxioms: The Maxims, Axioms, Maxioms of Chelm (1977), one of the works I had in mind when I mentioned (in "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's") having read "an awful lot of awfully Jewish stuff" -- are:

The men of Chelm are not at all unstable.

First they build themselves a total table:
a robust rhombus sawed from eucalyptus . . .

My error -- remembering presbyters where there were none -- is the converse of Bill's. He had commented on the significance of the Pentecostal reference in my dream, when in fact the reference was to Presbyterians.

Looking up the reference in Chelmaxioms now, I noticed some other lines:

The men of Chelm do not despair:

they lift their lances in the air

and leave them there.

This reminded me of Bill's "Brittany Spears" thing. If we read the verb leave in the sense of frondescence, it also suggests the Rider-Waite suit of Wands.

The carpenters of total tables

tremble at the thought of flaw;

at each evasive edge they chant

the vast and versal Chant of Awl.

They sang without a part of speech --

until they fell on two more phemes

and alternated /all/ and /awl/

and found the peace we cannot reach

Carpenters and homophones were recently featured in "Of sealing wax."