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

nature of the person to whom they did it will determine the future of their relationship, but there’s almost sure to be a period of frostiness before relations can return to whatever is normal.

A real mentsh, though, will see shmuckishness looming, and more often than not—which is the best that we can ever hope for—will know how to avoid it. It’s like in old cartoons, when a character steps off the edge of the cliff, pauses for a second, then turns into a lollipop with the word sucker on the wrapper in great big letters; a mentsh sees the cliff coming up and is smart enough to avoid it. In her mind’s eye she envisions a gift-wrapped penis with the word shmuck emblazoned on the wrapper and knows what it is that she wants to avoid. This kind of negative visualization—the ability to see what you don’t want and take steps to prevent it—is one of the cornerstones of mentsh-hood, and we’re about to see how dire the effects of not practicing it can be. The rabbis’ failure to act in the case of Bar Kamtso not only lays the groundwork for all of subsequent Jewish history, it also gives us considerable insight into how a mentsh is supposed to behave.

Whoever these people were, however learned they might have been, they were clearly no mentshn, and their learning was a sad waste of time. There’s an old Hasidic joke about a young man who comes to a famous rebbe, a Hasidic leader, and says, “I’ve been through gants shas, the entire Talmud, six times,” to which the rebbe replies, “And how much of the Talmud has been through you?” No matter what these men knew, it had had no effect on anything but their memories. Their failure to intervene in this instance, their inability to recognize that throwing some nobody out of a party—no matter how big a makher the host was—was indeed some skin off their ass, led to the destruction of an entire civilization. They weren’t the only guilty parties, but that’s what shmuckery is like; it’s highly, highly contagious.

The violation of mentsh-hood committed by the party-giver, the one that the rabbis were so remiss in not protesting, receives more serious treatment in the Talmud than any sin short of murder, despite the fact that this particular transgression is never mentioned directly anywhere in the Bible. It begins with the host’s first approach to Bar Kamtso.

The host’s treatment of Bar Kamtso begins with verbal disrespect and ends in physical contempt. While no one can force him to like Bar Kamtso any more than Bar Kamtso might like him, they both have a moral obligation to control their feelings and make sure that the strength of their dislike yields to the fact of the other man’s humanity. Negative feelings about another person do not make him any less human, no matter how much you might dislike him. “What makes your blood redder than his?” asks the Talmud (Pesokhim 25b). What makes you more intrinsically worthy than he is?

You’re supposed to back off and “let the honor of your fellow be as dear to you as your own,” as the Mishna enjoins, without being quick to anger if he fails to show you the same consideration (Ovos 2:10). This is a fancy way of saying, “Other people have the same feelings as you do, and something that would piss you off will probably do the same to them”:

This statement is a first step and support and a remedy to keep a man from becoming angry with his fellow, for his fellow’s honor will be as dear to him as his own, in accordance with what is written in Scripture, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). If you hurt your hand, you do not say, “One hand has injured the other, so I’ll let the other hand injure this one.”…If you get angry, it is impossible for you not to affront the honor of your fellow.

(MIDRASH SHMUEL to Ovos 2:10)

Loving your neighbor as yourself is the biblical forerunner of all those pop songs in which the singer, to quote Smokey Robinson, tells the sung-to, “I don’t like you, but I love you”: you don’t have to like your neighbor, but you do have to love her, that is, make the same excuses for her and accord her the same consideration as you would for yourself.

Liking is one of those matters of the heart that are always concealed from others, and no moral code or system of ethics can make you like somebody. They can, however, tell you how to act toward people, whether you like them or not. You can treat somebody decently without liking them at all; that’s why good manners and courtesy are known in Hebrew as derekh erets, literally, “the way of the land”—that’s “way” in the sense of “custom”—a term that also covers such activities as earning a living, acquiring the skills by which to do so, and sexual intercourse—all the things that create and sustain a functioning civil society. Interestingly, in Yiddish the same term comes to mean “respect, giving due consideration to the honor of your fellow, loving him as yourself.” It’s all classed as “the custom of the land” because it’s the custom of every land, the only way in which any group of people is able to live together in relative harmony.

You can’t be forced to like a person, but you can be prevented from mistreating someone for having a personality or skin color or haircut that might strike you as disagreeable. There is at least an even chance that they feel the same way about you, which is why the Bible makes love the answer. Biblical love, the love decreed in Leviticus, insists that you cut your neighbor the same slack as you cut yourself, that you make as much of an exception of him or her—of everybody, that is—as you’re willing