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

to the odd individual life; and Zechariah ben Avkilos causes the destruction of an entire civilization. To use mitzvahs for your own advantage—even if the advantage is only a deep feeling of self-pride—is to turn them into transgressions, which produce nothing but further transgressions, further instances of wrongdoing.

The Talmud goes on to detail the consequences of Zechariah ben Avkilos’s disastrous scruples. In discussing the siege of Jerusalem, the rabbis explain how three men of extraordinary wealth pledge enough necessities to keep the city going for the next twenty-one years. The local zealots, who want to fight the Romans rather than make peace, burn the storehouses and deliberately bring about a famine; Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai manages to sneak out of the city and get an audience with the emperor, who agrees to grant any request that he might make. And what does Rabbi Yochanan ask for? The same old roll with butter that we saw with Bontshe Shvayg. “Give me [the town of] Yavne and its wise men [i.e., the Sanhedrin],” he says, “and the dynasty of Rabban Gamaliel and doctors to cure Rabbi Zadok.” And the rest of ’em can all go to hell.

Imagine that Hugo Chávez has used his petrodollars to buy the whole of the United States, except for New York, which he has placed under siege. A well-known public intellectual smuggles himself out of the city and gets to Chávez, who agrees to grant him a boon. Instead of asking for New York, the public figure says: “Give me New Haven and its sages; the Kennedys, including Arnold Schwarzenegger; and a cardiologist to look after Dick Cheney.” A grateful America would most surely salute:

Rabbi Joseph or Rabbi Akiva said, “[God] turns wise men back and makes their knowledge into foolishness” (Isa. 44:25). Yochanan should have said, “Let them [Jerusalem and its people] off this time.” But he didn’t think that he would be granted so much and that if he were to ask for it, not even a little would be saved.

(GITIN 56B)

Yochanan’s “Give me Yavne” should have been preceded by “If you won’t give me Jerusalem.” While it is entirely possible that the Vespasian of the Talmud (who shouldn’t be identified too closely with the Vespasian of history) would never have given Yochanan all of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, Yochanan had a duty to ask for it. His instinctively narrow focus on himself and his colleagues looks even worse when compared with the bargaining that Abraham engages in to try to save Sodom from the wrath of God—who’s supposed to be a lot scarier and more powerful than any emperor—in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis. Abraham takes his life in his hands by asking, and he does so five times. Zechariah ben Avkilos and Yochanan ben Zakkai are too self-absorbed to do anything but give up before they’ve even tried: each is willing to sacrifice the general welfare to the interests of his own reputation or friends or idée fixe. As the Talmud tells us further:

[Simeon bar Yochai and his son] had been hiding in a cave for twelve years when Elijah the prophet appeared at its opening and said, “Has no one let Bar Yochai know that the emperor has died and that his death sentence against Bar Yochai has been annulled?” They went out and saw that people were plowing and sowing, and Bar Yochai said, “They forsake the eternal life and occupy themselves with a transitory life,” and every place on which he and his son cast their eyes burst into flame immediately. A voice came out of heaven and said, “Did you come out of there to destroy my world? Get back in your cave.”

(SHABBOS 33B)

[When they came out again twelve months later, they had learned their lesson.]

These people aren’t really wicked; they’re much more dangerous than that. The wicked can be brought to judgment and punished; these others continue to refract everything through their own desires and are unable to see clearly once their immediate interests come into play—which is, regrettably, always. They’re shmucks, well-meaning shmucks who might just as well be wicked for all the good that they do.

THREE

Extending the Shmuck

I

THE TALMUD AND the rabbinic literature associated with it have a great deal to say about the kind of shmucks whose own interests are their only interest. The Mishna, the earlier part of the Talmud, completed around the year 200 but drawing on much older material, gives quite a detailed portrait of the kind of person whom we would call a shmuck. The term that the Mishna uses is “golem.” While science-fiction and fantasy fans are familiar with the golem as a proto-robot, the rabbinically animated forerunner of Frankenstein’s monster, the word did not acquire this meaning until relatively late in its history. Golem started out as something considerably different.

The word is first found in the Bible, where it occurs in Psalm 139, verse 16: “Your eyes saw my golem.” The Revised Standard Version translates golem as “unformed substance” the Jewish Publication Society Bible has “unformed limbs” the idea of formlessness or lack of definition is paramount, and harks all the way back to the primal matter at the beginning of Genesis, where the earth is without form and void. This idea of something raw, unfinished, undifferentiated becomes the chief meaning of the word in ancient postbiblical writings. According to the Talmud:

The day [of Adam’s creation] lasted twelve hours. In the first hour, his dust was gathered together; in the second, he became a golem; in the third, his limbs were stretched out; in the fourth, his soul was tossed into him.

(SANHEDRIN 38B)

The golem here is a featureless lump with no identifiable characteristics whatever, not even limbs. More important, though, it has yet