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

Jews instead of the nation. One of the more convoluted expressions of this attitude that I’ve encountered was the relief expressed after 9/11 by many Democrats whom I know that Joe Lieberman had not become vice president, after all; they were afraid that the presence of a Jew in so high an office—any Jew—would only have complicated an already horrible situation.

When “bad for the Jews” so often equaled carnage or expulsion, “good for the Jews”—which almost nothing ever was—became an ironic rhetorical question that meant, “That’s all very nice, but I really don’t care.” For years now I’ve yearned to be a judge on some reality television show, one of those in which people sing, dance, or do whatever else they do in order to become celebrities, just to make “So, it’s good for the Jews?” into a nationally popular catchphrase.

Again, as an expression that satirizes the Jewish preoccupation with other Jews and with how we’re all perceived by the people around us, “good for the Jews” is a less serious version of the one unvarying and inflexible rule that characterized Ashkenazic Jewish society until very, very recently: it is incumbent on every member of the community to behave in such a way as to help maintain the community from within while doing nothing intentionally to increase the enmity from without—always to act in a way that is good for the Jews. While the latter part of this rule was sometimes taken as a warning against Jewing it up too much in public—nisht far di goyim, “not in front of the gentiles,” has been a byword for a very long time and has certainly been used by less tolerant members of the Jewish community to promote a particularly small-minded, petit bourgeois, Grundyish version of our culture—the former part helps to explain the development of mentsh-hood as a community ideal.

The schools in which mentsh was used to translate the Hebrew words mentioned above were part of a society that operated as a countercultural parallel to the larger Christian society around it. They were there to educate their students for adversity, to impart not only the facts and ritual knowledge necessary for the proper practice of Judaism, but also a notion of the kind of life to which acting on this knowledge was supposed to lead. A society in a near-constant state of macro-emergency had to be sure that it was at least able to cope with the micro-emergencies that constitute so large a part of any individual life.

One of the most important ways in which it did so was to emphasize history in a way that ignored the passage of time and made every contemporary Jew a participant in the mythic events that brought the nation into being. Every participant at every Passover seder for a good couple of millennia now has read a quotation from the Mishna and the rabbinic commentary that accompanies it:

In every generation, a mentsh [odem in Hebrew] is obliged to see himself as if he, too, had come out of Egypt. As it is said: “And you shall tell your son on that day, ‘This [the seven days of eating matzoh] is because of what the Lord did for me when I left Egypt’ [Exod. 13:8].”

(PESOKHIM 10:5)

The Holy One, Blessed Be He, not only delivered our ancestors from Egypt, but He also delivered us with them, as it says: “In order to bring us, to give us the land that He had promised to our ancestors” [Deut. 6:23] [my emphasis].

As if our current suffering weren’t enough, we’re supposed to internalize the torments of our forebears and suffer them, too. And why? Because one day, we believe, the suffering will stop and everything will be hunky-dory, and as long as we continue to think of ourselves as escaped slaves who are really here only by the grace of God, we’ll be damned sure never to treat others the way that others might have treated us. We shouldn’t take such prosperity as we have for granted, nor should we complain too much about our current plight, whatever it might be—we who have gone out of Egypt have lived through plenty worse and should never forget it. We should also remember that it was mercy that got us out of there, not any particular merits of our own.

So strong is this latter feeling that the Bible commands the Jewish people to respect their enemies and erstwhile oppressors, which could explain why so many Jewish Community Center parking lots are full of BMWs and Audis: “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were an alien in his land” (Deut. 23:8). Badly as they might have acted, their bad behavior is not allowed to negate their good deeds in any way. As Rashi, whose eleventh-century commentary is still the inevitable accompaniment to any kheyder-level reading of the Bible, says, “Do not abhor an Edomite—completely, even though you might be justified in abhorring him because he came to greet you with a sword [see Numbers, chapter 20]. Do not abhor an Egyptian—entirely, even though they threw your male children into the river. And why not abhor them? They gave you lodging in your time of need.”

We are commanded to take the merits of our enemies into consideration and to give credit even to those whose virtues we would prefer to ignore. You don’t have to like them, but you have to admit that you owe them. The principle is given more general application in the Talmud, which quotes the proverb, “Do not throw a rock into a well from which you have drunk,” in connection with this biblical verse (Bovo Kamo 92b).

This sort of consideration for others, the constant reminder that they and their needs are just as real as you and yours, lies at the very root of the way in which Jewish people are supposed to