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

to make of yourself; or ideally, as you would have made of yourself if you happened to be a shmuck—which keeps you from holding others to unreasonably high standards.

The verse in which this commandment is found also contains a couple of others: “Do not take vengeance or hold a grudge against your countrymen; you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). The Talmud defines the difference between taking vengeance and holding a grudge:

If you say to someone, “Lend me your scythe,” and he says, “No,” and the next day he says to you, “Lend me your ax,” and you say, “You didn’t lend to me, so I won’t lend to you”—that is vengeance. And what is holding a grudge? You say, “Lend me your ax,” and he tells you, “No.” The next day he says, “Lend me your garment,” and you say, “Here it is. I’m not like you, who wouldn’t lend to me.” That is holding a grudge.

(YOMA 23A)

Simply giving the other person the garment doesn’t make you a nice guy; it does not cancel out the hatred that you’re nursing in your heart. Essentially, what the Bible is saying is:

Don’t act like a baby.

Don’t conceal hatred and harbor grudges.

Find the same justifications for people who deal with you as you would find for yourself in dealing with them.

Try not to hurt them any more than you would try to hurt yourself.

The “I am the Lord” at the end of the verse is God the Father’s way of saying, “I really mean it. Don’t make me come down there.”

In the Talmudic story that we’ve been looking at, Bar Kamtso asks to be cut some slack by offering to pay for the party, but the host is so intent on keeping his house and his banquet Bar Kamtso-free that he acts as if Bar Kamtso’s presence were somehow Bar Kamtso’s fault. He tells Bar Kamtso to leave, then lifts him from his seat and throws him out of the house, despite Bar Kamtso’s plea for dignity. Indeed, a midrashic version of the same story actually has Bar Kamtso say to the host, “Do not put me to shame, and I will pay for the feast.” To which the host replies, “You are not invited” (Eikho Rabbo 4:3). The outcome, of course, is exactly the same.

Public humiliation of this type arouses the same horror as murder or idolatry in classic Jewish literature, and strictures against causing embarrassment to others are among the most emphatic in Jewish culture. One person’s loss of face can lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of shaming and vengeance that spreads from person to person, community to community, like any other plague, until it infects the whole of society. Because embarrassing someone in public violates a moral, not a penal, code, vengeance is often the only way to punish an offender. We’re dealing with a crime that can sidestep any legal system and for which the perpetrator is rarely convicted:

Shaming one’s fellow in public is like spilling his blood. Rabbi Nachman bar Yitzchok said: “Well spoken! I have seen the red go out [of a person’s face] and the pallor come in.”

(BOVO METSIYO 58B)

The idiom translated here as “shaming one’s fellow in public” literally means “to whiten his friend’s face in public,” which makes Rabbi Nachman’s comment a lot easier to understand. The idea, of course, is that someone is so mortified by what has been said or done to her that she is quite literally appalled: she turns white, loses something from her face.

Treating people in this way is considered so serious a breach of proper human relations that it is marked out for special treatment in Hell:

Everyone who goes down to Gehenna comes back up, except for three who descend but do not return. And these are: he who sleeps with another man’s wife; he who shames his fellow in public; and he who saddles his fellow with a disparaging nickname.

Isn’t that the same as putting him to shame?

They mean even a nickname that he’s already used to.

(BOVO METSIYO 58B)

While the chief Talmudic commentaries seem to be more worried about how long it takes for those who do not reascend to reascend—this is not the typo that it might look like—such concerns do not affect the basic idea that each of these sins involves people who have held others up to mockery, ridicule, or spite, and are unlikely to repent for having done so. These sins are all deeply rooted in the “because I could” way of thinking, the one that we translated a long time ago as “fuck you” they tend to take something away from the victim without affording the perpetrator any real gain. Neither adultery, face-whitening, or name-calling involves any physical harm; they are ways of undermining the victim’s self-image and social standing, and of violating his self-respect, which they can damage or even destroy. Adultery, perhaps surprisingly, is not considered the worst:

It is better for a man to be suspected of adultery with another man’s wife than for him to shame his fellow in public…an adulterer is executed by strangulation, but has a portion in the world to come, whereas one who shames his fellow in public has no portion in the world to come.

(BOVO METSIYO 59A; see alsoSANHEDRIN 107A)

It is better for a person to throw himself into a fiery furnace than to shame his fellow in public. Whence do we know this? From Tamar, as it is written (Gen. 38:25), “When she was brought forth, she sent to her father-in-law.”

(BOVO METSIYO 59A)

The idea of flinging yourself into a fiery furnace before shaming someone else in public—even when this someone else might have done something shameful—is mentioned on three other occasions in the Talmud (Brokhos 43b; Kesubos 67b; Sotah 10b),