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

or “fraud” in speech: neither party to the conversation tells the truth, and each is lying in order to get their own way. The Talmud explains the idea of cheating in speech:

What does it mean when Scripture says, “Do not wrong one another” (Lev. 25:17)? It refers to wronging in speech. If someone is a penitent, do not say to him, “Remember your former deeds.” If he is the child of converts, do not say, “Remember what your parents did.” If he is a convert himself and comes to study Torah, do not say, “Can a mouth that has eaten cadavers and carrion, abominable, creeping things, come to learn the Torah that came forth from the mouth of the Almighty?” If someone is afflicted, if he is visited with illnesses or has buried his children, do not speak to him as Job’s friends did: “Is your fear of God not your confidence? Isn’t the integrity of your ways your hope? Recall, has an innocent person ever perished?” (Job 4:6–7). If donkey drivers come seeking grain, do not say, “Go to X, who is a grain merchant,” when you know well that X has never been in that business. Rabbi Judah said, “Do not pretend to be interested in making a purchase when you have no money, for this is something that is concealed in your heart, and with respect to things that are a matter of the heart, it is written ‘and you shall fear your God’” (Lev. 25:17).

(BOVO METSIYO 58B)

The snake tricks Eve by asking a leading question disguised as an exercise in information gathering, but before she becomes the first poor shmuck in the world, the credulous dupe who ends up suffering because she’s bought a bill of goods, Eve unwittingly helps the serpent along. She tells him that God has commanded her and Adam “not to eat of it [the tree] or touch it, lest [they] die” (Gen. 3:3). God said nothing about touching, only eating; Eve’s attempt to go one step beyond the commandment, to make the prohibition more stringent than it was—to be more religious than God, as it were—becomes the efficient cause of her downfall. Rashi tells us that “the snake pushed her into the tree and said, ‘Just as touching it didn’t kill you, neither will eating from it.’” As the Jerusalem Talmud asks in a slightly different context: “What the law has forbidden isn’t enough for you? You’ve got to go and forbid yourself other things, too?” (Yerushalmi Nedorim 9:1).

Well before Rashi, the Midrash seized upon Eve’s unwarranted “touch” to comment: “Don’t make the fence any bigger than it needs to be, lest it fall over and destroy the plants [that it’s supposed to be protecting]” (Genesis Rabbo 19:3). By adding what she probably thought of as insurance, all Eve managed to do was give the shlang yet another opening to screw her. As Rashi says, “The snake’s words made sense to her. They pleased her and she believed them” believed them because she wanted to believe them, because they seemed to be in line with what she already wanted.

The serpent is a shmuck in the sense of being gratuitously mean or nasty. He knows full well the consequences of eating from the tree, but hopes that once Eve’s eyes have been opened, she’ll give him a tumble, either out of gratitude or because she’s finally noticed his natural charm. For the sake of a little snake-on-lady action, he is willing to risk the future of everything on earth.

Eve falls under the heading of one who is “gullible, easily duped, naive,” but not without a powerful belief in her own intelligence. She is the first person to engage in one of the most quintessentially shmucky of activities: thinking herself clever while behaving like a complete screaming fool. Adding a needless and dangerous prohibition is only the first mistake she makes. Rashi asks why she gave the fruit to her husband after she had eaten from the tree. Why risk his anger or sacrifice the intellectual advantage that she had just gained from eating the fruit? Because, he says, she was afraid that “if she died [from eating the fruit] and he were to remain alive, he would marry somebody else.” Better he should die, then. No one but the two of them anywhere on earth, and already she’s jealous.

It doesn’t end there, of course, because Adam also eats the fruit, and when God asks him if he has eaten from the forbidden tree, Adam doesn’t bother with a proper answer. “The woman that you put with me gave me,” he says (Gen. 3:12), and “you” should be printed in italics: “You gave her to me; she made me do it and you made her make me, Mr. Omnipotent. So it isn’t my fault, it’s your fault.” Rashi, echoing the Talmud (Avodo Zoro 5b), says: “Here he denies the kindness” that God had done him by giving him a companion. It isn’t so much the ingratitude itself but the refusal to accept any responsibility for his own actions that makes Adam such a shmuck here. He’s quite content to land Eve in more trouble, as long as he can get himself off the hook.

Not a terribly auspicious start for human life, and things get worse as early as the beginning of the next chapter, when Cain and Abel prove that the fruit, if you’ll pardon the expression, doesn’t fall too far from the tree. While the Bible has Cain kill Abel because he is jealous that God preferred Abel’s sacrifice to his own, there is a tradition that links their rivalry a little more closely with the character traits already demonstrated by their mother. According to the Midrash, the two boys divided the world up between themselves, then argued over whose half the Temple was going to be in. The Middle East hasn’t changed since the beginning of time; the story of Cain and Abel constitutes the