How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

There is an equally unambiguous example of this indefinite usage at the beginning of the second chapter of I Kings, when the dying King David charges his son, Solomon, and says:

I am going the way of all the earth; be strong and be an ish. And keep the charge of the Lord your God to walk in His ways and keep His statutes, commandments, ordinances, and testimonies as they are written in the Torah of Moses, so that you may prosper in whatever you might do and wherever you might turn.

(I KINGS 2:2–3)

I have yet to see an English translation that doesn’t render ish here as “man,” yet nothing that Solomon has to do in order to be an ish is anything that a woman could not have done just as well, even in biblical times. Therefore David Kimhi, a prominent medieval exegete and grammarian, explains that ish in this verse means “being diligent, controlling yourself and subduing your baser impulses,” an interpretation echoed roughly seven hundred years later by Rabbi Meir Weisser. Weisser, better known as the Malbim, was chief rabbi of Bucharest for a short time, turned down a chance to be chief rabbi of New York, and spent a good deal of time explaining the differences in meaning and nuance between apparently synonymous Hebrew words. According to him, ish is often used “to designate generality, not gender”—everybody, not just certain somebodies—and can refer to someone who “exercises control.”

Odem and ish crop up frequently in the Bible and Talmud, often in exactly the kind of moralizing passages that we’ve just seen: the mentshly ideal is not something that was confined to any particular segment or group in Yiddish-speaking Jewish society. The idea was the common property of all Yiddish-speakers, regardless of their religious or political attitudes. It originated in the basic curriculum that was common to the entire Yiddish-speaking world, then took on a life of its own outside of the classroom among grown-ups who had studied there as kids. These people were rich and poor, bright and dull, old and young, male and female, conservative and liberal. They might have suffered at the hands of people—Jewish and otherwise—who were not mentshn, but they never lost their respect for mentshn with whom they might disagree about everything except the necessity of being a mentsh.

Although the idea of mentsh-hood is rooted in religious education, religious practice itself is far from crucial in determining whether or not a person is a mentsh. At one time, traditional observance was taken for granted if you were speaking about a Jew and, of course, dismissed out of hand if you were not. Otherwise, neither faith nor unbelief tends to matter very much, so long as the person in question is a mentsh in other respects. A venerable Yiddish proverb states, “Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew.” Equally venerable and even more pointed is, “A goat has a beard, too, and it’s still just a goat”: that is, better a mentsh who isn’t religious than a religious person who isn’t a mentsh. Since the days of the Prophets, we’ve been told that if you don’t observe the commandments that govern relations between people, God isn’t going to be too impressed by the care that you take in fulfilling more ceremonial obligations.

An image of the day-to-day mentsh, who might or might not be rich, religious, or intelligent, is found in the book of Kings, where we are told that during the reign of Solomon, “Judah and Israel dwelt in safety, ish under his own vine and under his own fig tree” (1 Kings 5:5, in the Hebrew), that is, each person under their vine or fig tree: their own, not their neighbor’s; their own, with no eye to acquiring someone else’s and no thought of enlarging their vineyard or orchard at the expense of anyone else. Substitute “job” for “vine” and “bank account” for “fig tree” and you’ll see that it isn’t as easy to sit contentedly as the Bible makes it sound; a mentsh, in short, is someone who does his best to treat other people as well as he treats himself.

III

THERE IS AN old joke that sums up the traditional Jewish attitude to almost everything. In the version that was going around when I was a kid, a little boy runs up to his zeyde, his grandfather, and says excitedly, “Zeyde, zeyde! Did you hear? Sandy Koufax just shut out the Twins and won the World Series!”

The grandfather looks at the boy with world-weary rue and says, “So? It’s good for the Jews?”

This is internal satire, of course, Jew-on-Jew mockery of the Jewish preoccupation with survival and the occasional tendency to judge everything against narrow communal standards of “good for the Jews” or “bad for the Jews.” It’s a typical—and justified—concern on the part of members of any unpopular minority group, made into a cultural touchstone by people who were always an unpopular minority. I can still remember the first words that I heard from a grown-up when the news reached us that President Kennedy had been assassinated: “Please God, don’t let it be a Jew [who shot him].” I heard the same thing when George Wallace was shot. The fear in both cases was something entirely separate from the attitude of individual Jews to the people who’d been shot; there was a pervasive dread that the entire Jewish community would be held responsible, should the shooter turn out to be Jewish.

The history of the Jews in the West has been defined by the Christian notion of collective guilt, and Jews remain sensitive to the idea that all of us will be blamed for the actions of any of us, or that one of us in a position of power will be accused of acting in the interests of the