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

around offering sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud and its way of thinking helped to change a religion focused on a specific location into one that can be taken anywhere with no loss of intensity or authenticity. As I have written elsewhere, “Acceptance of Talmudic authority marks the real difference between Jews and the rest of the world.”

Midrash is a collective designation for various types of homiletic interpretation of the Bible. Although the main midrashic collections were compiled during the Middle Ages, the material contained in these collections is often of considerably greater antiquity.

Rashi is the acronym by which Rabbi Shlomo Yitskhoki (died 1104) is known. He is the author of the best-known and most influential commentaries on both the Bible and Talmud, commentaries that are printed alongside the text of both works and studied as a virtual part of them in traditional religious schools.

The Shulkhan Arukh (“The Set Table”) is the title of a legal code by Rabbi Joseph Karo (died 1545) that has become authoritative for Orthodox Jews of every stripe. It serves as the basic rule book of halacha, as Jewish law is called in Hebrew.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Introduction:

Don’t Be a Shmuck

THIS IS A book about happiness, your own and that of others. It’s a book about living decently without preaching about it or turning into a Goody Two-shoes like Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. It is based on an idea of what it means to be fully human, an idea developed by people who have been labeled as subhuman on more than one occasion. It’s about how to care for yourself by thinking about others.

It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what religion you follow, or if you follow any religion at all. The principles outlined in this book will work for anyone who makes the effort to put them into practice, and as we’ll see, the most important one of all originates in a piece of advice that a rabbi gave to a gentile. Although some of the explanations of Jewish tradition that follow might sound a little esoteric or out of the way, they’re here to show how theory was turned into practice. I first learned the basic ideas treated here at home and heard most of them from my mother, who didn’t know one page of Talmud from the next, but had pretty clear ideas about what it means to be a mentsh. The same ideas, often expressed in the form of proverbs, have also been passed down by millions of other Jewish mothers over the course of many centuries.

The saying that I probably heard most often was, “It’s never too late to die or to get married.” My mother, who lived to be forty-eight, didn’t have much to say about dying, but getting married was a whole other matter. How is getting married like dying? It happens every day, she would explain, but isn’t as easy as it looks. If you do it right, getting married means deliberately putting yourself into a position in which it becomes impossible for you to think of yourself as the center of your world, as more important than somebody else, ever again. As far as she and millions of other Jewish parents across the generations were concerned, getting married is a kind of shorthand for growing up and assuming responsibility, for voluntarily relinquishing the comfortable but ultimately sterile self-absorption that only children, who don’t have to look out for themselves, and the single, who look out for nobody but themselves, can really afford to maintain. As the movie version of Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn has it:

LEE J. COBB: You’re a bum.

FRANK SINATRA: Why am I a bum, Dad?

LJC: Are you married?

FS: No.

LJC: Then you’re a bum.

This is why the Yiddish-speaking world refers to unmarried men and women, no matter how old they might be, by terms that also mean “adolescent” or “youth”—someone not quite grown-up. They might have matured physically, but they haven’t taken the final step into maturity: they’re bums.

When a Yiddish-speaker says that it’s never too late to get married, they’re saying that it’s never too late to learn that the only thing that’s really special about you is the ability to set your own self aside once in a while, to make somebody else more special than you are. “It’s never too late to get married” means that it’s never too late to learn consideration, the art of thinking about others because they’re worthy of being thought about. If it’s never too late, you’ve always got a chance to wise up and become a mentsh, whether you actually get married or not.

Of course, the longer you leave it, the harder it gets and the less likely it becomes. That’s where becoming a mentsh differs from dropping dead. There are people out there, millions of them, who act as if they still believe everything that their mothers told them in the first six months of their lives: they’re the nicest, most beautiful, most promising and intelligent bags of flesh ever to walk the earth, and anybody who can’t see it is foolish or wicked—and certainly jealous. Who could dislike someone to whom Jesus himself would have been sending daily Facebook friend-requests, had his Father in Heaven only hearkened to his pleas to be born a couple of millennia later, just so Mary could get him a laptop for Chanukah (since Christmas wouldn’t be such a big thing yet), and lonesome baby Jesus could log on and find that one special person whom he knows, really knows to be the real thing—the smartest, nicest, most beautiful and talented of all his little sunbeams—and ask to be their Facebook pal, and when they finally pay attention and answer and write on his wall, let’s just say that Jesus learns the meaning