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

larger community on account of their wealth, which has allowed them to be ‘purified’ in the sense that in future the Lord will no longer separate them from the mainstream community because too many mainstream families will have attached themselves to them.”

In other words, reality wins every time. When the consensus of reasonable people opposes a prescribed mode of behavior, the prescription is adjusted accordingly. Indeed, it is forbidden to pass any law or decree that is certain not to be observed (Bovo Kamo 79b); instituting such a law will only bring about disrespect for the lawmakers, whose more reasonable rulings will end up being ignored as well, and turn fundamentally law-abiding people into sinners. Even the most teetotaling of rabbis would have advised against Prohibition.

V

IN SUCH A system, where the fait accompli is ultimately more powerful than any argument, care has to be taken about which faits become accomplis and the way in which they become so. Traditional Jewish society operated on the basis of a number of shared assumptions and beliefs, and what we now think of as religious behavior was as much a sign of ethnicity—of where you belonged—as anything else; men got up in the morning, put on prayer shawls and phylacteries, and recited the morning prayers, not because they were religious but because they were Jews and that’s what Jewish men do in the morning. Think of Jewish life as a game of sandlot baseball with the Shulkhan Arukh as the rule book. There’s no real umpire, no ref of any kind, because everybody is assumed to know how to play. Local traditions, lot-specific variants of the standard rules, are explained as the progress of the game demands, and woe to any neighborhood kid who tries to sneak by to go to the library or the movies; once the game gets going, they have no choice but to play.

Being Jewish in the traditional society of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe was a twenty-four-hour-a-day affair, something that determined every aspect of your life. The various codes of Jewish law, culminating in the Shulkhan Arukh, ran your life, and their rules extend far beyond the realm of ritual. The first four chapters of the Shulkhan Arukh are called: The Law of Getting Up in the Morning; The Law of Getting Dressed; Behavior in the Washroom; Laws of Hand-washing. The Shulkhan Arukh tells you how to get out of bed; how to put on your clothes; how to go to the toilet; how, when, and where to have sex; who not to have it with; and many other things that outsiders might consider either inconsequential or matters of strictly individual preference.

Most of the Jews who performed these activities in strict accordance with the book’s demands had probably never seen a copy and would not have been able to understand it if they had. These practices were passed along as the natural way of doing things, something you learned as a kid and continued to do for the rest of your life, teaching them to your own children in turn, and so on down the generations. The most you were likely to know was that if the Shulkhan Arukh doesn’t tell you how to do what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

The motive underlying this apparent mania for codifying even the minutest details of human behavior, the real purpose of all this regimentation, is a desire—an obsession, really—to make every conceivable activity that isn’t sinful or criminal into something more than itself, to invest it with meaning and purpose beyond its own performance and confer dignity even on something as lowly as taking a crap. The blessing that accompanies this activity explains how people have been created with “holes upon holes and orifices upon orifices,” and that “if one of these were to rupture or another to be stopped, it would be impossible to remain alive and stand before [God] for even a single hour,” that is, we couldn’t continue to be ourselves if the Lord were to deregulate our physical functions. Everybody knows this, but a Jew was never allowed to forget it. Jews have always known that other people don’t approach all of these activities in a similar spirit, but such lack of knowledge in no way detracts from the essentially meaningful nature of the activity itself.

Pausing to make a bit of a fuss over everything—what Yiddish calls a tsimmes—also helps to remind us that there are more important things than our own immediate needs or petty desires. The discipline of having to make a short blessing before you eat and a very long one afterward, no matter how hungry you are or how much of a rush you’re in to get back to work, reminds you that you are not the center of the universe and that the universe, in turn, does not exist solely to satisfy your desires.

Classical Jewish culture is all about weighing and measuring, putting things in their proper places in proper proportions. As a religion based on mitzvahs—commandments that prohibit some activities and make others obligatory—Judaism is above all a religion of action, of performance and activity. While the outside world might look at being Jewish as a state of being—something that you are—the internal attitude of the culture is somewhat different.

From the Jewish point of view—the one that matters—being Jewish is a matter of how you think and what you do. Being born to a Jewish mother or converting anytime thereafter is simply the admission ticket to a lifelong party in which the dancing never stops. Judaism is something that you do all the time, and it draws virtually every human activity into the same vortex of permission and prohibition. So the daily prayer service opens with a couple of statements adapted from the Talmud that tell us what we’re allowed to do ad libitum, as much as we want to, and also lets us know which commandments will help us heap up treasure in heaven even though