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

deal with the peculiar burdens placed upon them by their covenant with the Lord. Too many people are looking for the easy way out, for a way to fulfill the commandments with the least possible amount of effort. But that isn’t the way that it’s supposed to be:

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, Where does Scripture let us know that a mentsh [odem] is not supposed to say, “I have no desire to wear linen mixed with wool; I have no desire to eat pork; I have no desire to have forbidden sexual relations,” but should say instead, “I want to do all these things, but what can I do when my Father in Heaven has ruled otherwise?” We know so because it is implied in the verse, “I have separated you from the peoples, so that you might be mine” (Lev. 20:26); that is, one separates oneself from transgression and accepts the yoke of heaven.

(SIFRA, KEDOSHIM 9:12)

It’s exactly what’s going on with the Egyptians in the biblical quotation: you want to hate them, but heaven or your conscience tells you that you have to do otherwise. The only way that you’re going to know what that heavenly voice is trying to tell you is to go to school and learn what the Torah tells us.

IV

THE REST OF this book is designed to provide the relevant parts of that education both for Jewish people who might not have received old-style, ethically centered instruction in Judaism and for people who aren’t Jewish at all but are interested in learning new techniques for making everybody’s lives a little bit better. We need to have a look at a couple of more aspects of traditional Jewish society, though, in order to be able to understand that education in context and see how and why it developed into something of universal utility and application.

As everybody knows, the Jews have no pope. There is no synod or council, no official hierarchy of rabbis that can make rulings that are binding on all Jews everywhere. There has been no Sanhedrin, no Jewish Supreme Court, for seventeen hundred years, and the Elders of Zion are merely an anti-Semitic wet dream. The truth is that if enough people oppose all rabbis on a given issue, the people are going to win every time. Such beloved Jewish customs as saying Kaddish in memory of a departed relative or waving a chicken around your head three times on the eve of Yom Kippur met with considerable rabbinic opposition at different times and places, yet are accepted today in even the most orthodox circles, which are where most of the chicken-swinging takes place. Judaism is based on consensus rather than decree, and as such has historically tended to follow the middle path between extremes of opinion.

Take the mezuzah, for example, the case holding a small scroll of biblical passages that is affixed to so many Jewish doorposts. In discussing whether it is to be hung horizontally or vertically, Moses Isserles, author of those parts of the Shulkhan Arukh, the authoritative code of Jewish law, that set the rules for Ashkenazic (rather than Sephardic) Jews, says explicitly:

The truly punctilious follow both opinions by placing it [the mezuzah] on a diagonal slant.

(SHULKHAN ARUKH, YOREH DEAH 289:4)

The earlier authorities who argued for a strictly horizontal or strictly vertical orientation are outside in the cold together, while we punctilious Ashkenazim warm ourselves by the fire of a compromise that satisfies none of the original disputants but has been sanctified by the simple passage of time.

Think of life as a birthday party for your younger brother or sister. As a four-year-old, you’re young enough to get some kind of consolation present, if only to keep you from getting too jealous, but you still don’t get the party that you’d like to have for yourself. Your kid brother or sister gets a party and presents, but they’re still upset that you, whose birthday it most emphatically is not, get anything at all, and they are insisting that any presents go to them, the birthday kid. Your parents point out that neither of you has any reason to whine: you both have more than you did before the party, and only a baby expects 100 percent.

Normative Judaism has no place for babies. Until such time as they became able to deliver the balance of power in Israeli elections, zealots and ideologues were stringently ignored; the community as a whole was familiar enough with Jewish history to know that zealots and ideologues were responsible for the loss of our country and our apparently endless exile. Post-Temple Judaism is therefore uniquely accommodating, so much so that it has turned the passive-aggressive compromise into a veritable art form. It isn’t that everybody gets what they want, it’s that nobody gets what they want, but everyone doesn’t get it in roughly equal measure.

The Talmud speaks quite openly about the difference between such biblical regulations as the prohibition against pork, which are never going to change, and those of a more purely social nature that could tear a society apart if applied, and finds plenty of room for fine-tuning the latter. So, in a well-known passage that is frequently quoted by anti-Semites bent on proving that the Talmud is the source of all evil, we are told that “Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said, ‘Money makes bastards kosher’” (Kiddushin 71a). “Bastards” (mamzeyrim in the original) has nothing to do with birth outside of wedlock; it is a legal term used to describe children born of incestuous or adulterous unions who are, strictly speaking, allowed to marry only converts or other bastards. Rabbi Joshua is talking about wealthy mamzeyrim whose money has allowed them to marry into “pure” families, despite the hereditary defect that they are supposed to be carrying. Rashi, who is the foremost commentator on the Talmud as well as the Bible, says, “They have been absorbed into the