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

is all that’s really needed—is taken as a nonverbal way of saying, “Go fuck yourself.” The day will probably come when you need nine other people to help you say Kaddish, and you, too, will have to depend, not on the kindness of strangers, but on their sense of reciprocal obligation. That’s why the Talmud says all Israel are responsible for each other: not only a certain class, not just the good ones, but everybody without exception.

VI

THE OBVERSE OF this approach to life, the other side of the coin, is that everybody becomes responsible for anybody’s sins. This is a problem faced by all minorities; if just one of their members does something stupid or vicious, the victims and witnesses and people who hear about it are liable to decide that such behavior is typical of the whole group. In light of the traditional Jewish view that the Children of Israel are supposed to behave in a way that does credit to their Creator, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to discover that Judaism refers to such behavior, the kind that makes a whole people look bad, as khilel ha-shem, “defamation or desecration of the name of God.” The idea is that non-Jews will take a look at someone like Jack Abramoff or the Rubashkin family of Postville, Iowa—flamboyantly Jewish people guilty of breaching the most fundamental laws of human decency—and conclude that they are the logical outcome of the Jewish way of life and belief.

Such Orthodox malefactors provide us with a fine example of what can happen when a culture loses touch with itself, when it forgets why it is doing the things that it does. All you have to do is open a Bible to see that the Jewish legal system consists to a large degree of a series of often incomprehensible prohibitions. As Maimonides, paraphrasing a Talmudic exposition of the same idea (Yoma 67a), explained almost a thousand years ago, there are two types of commandments:

Mishpotim, ordinances, are commandments with reasons that are obvious and benefits that are immediately apparent, such as the prohibitions against theft and bloodshed and the obligation to honor one’s father and mother. Khukim, decrees, are commandments without any clear reason. Our sages said: “I [God] have decreed these things for you and you have no authorization to enquire into the reasons for them.” Our evil inclinations kick against them and the nations of the world try to gainsay them: for example, the prohibitions against pork or eating meat with dairy and the commandments concerning the cow with the broken neck and the red heifer and the scapegoat.

(MISHNEH TORAH,Laws Concerning the Misuse of Sacramental Objects 8:8)

These commandments—which don’t really affect an omnipotent and omniscient deity one way or the other—offer us a sort of training in the control and redirection of our impulses and desires. They teach us how to think of others just as soon as we think of ourselves. Remember what Rabbi Elazar said: “I really want to eat pork and sleep with Moabite showgirls, but…” There are no brownie points for someone who says “feh” to roast suckling pig and makes barf noises when entering a gentlemen’s club; you might just as well refrain from murder because the sight of a corpse makes you faint. The point behind not doing what you want to do has to be that you want to do it; when you don’t do what you want to do, it isn’t because you have suppressed your desire, it is because you have surpassed it:

Rav said: The commandments were given only for the sake of refining humanity. For what does God care if one person slaughters from the front of the animal’s neck and another does so from the back? You must admit then that the commandments were given only to refine humanity.

(GENESIS RABBO 44:1)

Done properly, what sets Judaism apart from other systems of belief is the idea that it ain’t what you don’t do, it’s the way you don’t do it. If you didn’t do it but think you did, you’re as guilty, morally, as if you’d done it:

When Rabbi Chiya bar Ashi’s wife overheard him praying to be delivered from sexual temptation, she said, “Why is he saying such a thing when he’s been too old for us to have relations for years now?” One day when he was studying in his garden, she fixed herself up, changed her clothes, and walked back and forth in front of him a couple of times. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am Khorusoh [a famous prostitute] and I’m on my way home from work.” He asked her for sex. She said, “I’ll take the pomegranate that’s on the little branch on the top of that tree as payment.” He leapt up, got to the top of the tree, and gave it to her.

When he came home, his wife was heating the oven. He got inside. “What are you doing?” she asked. He told her what had happened, and she said, “That was me.” He paid her no mind until she showed him the pomegranate. He said, “Nevertheless, I intended to do something forbidden.” Rabbi Chiya suffered over this for the rest of his life until it finally killed him.

(KIDDUSHIN 81B)

While this is the real, acted-out version of the sin that Jesus called “adultery…in his heart” and that got Jimmy Carter into so much trouble when he ran for president, it is also the plot of many a comedy and could be looked on as a sort of proto–Woody Allen script. Not only does Rabbi Chiya never seem to notice any resemblance between his wife and the best-known hooker in town, but the old man’s leap to the top of the tree and subsequent hop into the oven are rife with cinematic possibility.

The point, though, is that as far as Chiya is concerned, he cheated