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

they did so, a relatively uncomplicated thing until you found yourself dancing for a bride who looked like Popeye:

How do you dance before the bride? The school of Shammai says, “Describe the bride as she is.” The school of Hillel says, “[Say] ‘Beautiful and charming bride.’ The school of Shammai says, “And if she’s lame or blind, you say, ‘Beautiful, charming bride,’ when the Torah commands, ‘Keep far away from falsehood’” (Exod. 23:7)? The school of Hillel said, “According to you, then, if someone makes a bad purchase in the market, should you praise it to him or deplore it? You’ve got to say, ‘Praise it.’” On this basis, the sages have said that a person should always conduct himself pleasantly to others.

(KESUBOS 16B-17A)

In short, it doesn’t cost any more to be nice than it does to be mean, but it leaves everybody feeling a whole lot better. The Tosfos, twelfth-and thirteenth-century commentators on the Talmud, get to the heart of what being pleasant to others really means:

The bride as she is. [The school of Shammai says,] “If she has a defect, don’t mention it and don’t praise her, or else praise something about her that’s nice, such as her eyes or her hands, if they are pretty.” The school of Hillel says, “They should praise everything about her, for by listing [only] her good qualities, they imply that everything else is undeserving of praise.”

A “truth” that is told solely for the sake of causing harm, of putting someone in their place, or casting them in a bad light is nothing but a stick in the hands of a bully. As anyone who has spent more than ninety seconds in a schoolyard knows, a stick made of wood doesn’t inflict lasting damage unless you poke someone’s eye out; an unflattering “truth” can stick to a person forever. That’s why we’re told that “a mentsh should always be among the persecuted rather than the persecutors” (Bovo Kamo 93a). This doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to go out of your way to be victimized, but that you should aid and identify with those who are being ill-treated, rather than with those who are mistreating them.

An extreme illustration of the lengths to which you’re supposed to go in order to keep someone else from being shamed is found not in the Talmud or Midrash, not in a commentary or Hasidic story, but in a Danny Dill—Marijohn Wilkin classic first recorded by Lefty Frizzell. The narrator of “Long Black Veil” has been accused of murder. The killer who fled from the scene bore a marked resemblance to him, and the judge wants to know if he has an alibi. But “I spoke not a word, though it meant my life / For I had been in the arms of my best friend’s wife.” The narrator hangs for murder.

Think what you want about the narrator and his best friend’s wife, who might well deserve all the suffering that comes upon them; the narrator had enough concern for his best friend to spare him a lifetime of undeserved pain by letting himself be executed for a crime that he didn’t commit, rather than let his friend find out that his best pal and his best gal had both betrayed him. The fact that sparing his friend’s feelings also means protecting the reputation of his friend’s unfaithful wife is just icing on this moral cake, and the narrator’s inadvertent confirmation of the Talmudic statement concerning the relative gravity of both adultery and public humiliation is an unwitting interfaith bonus. The narrator, himself a persecutor, finally casts his lot with the persecuted.

In the rabbis’ failure to do likewise we begin to see the source of Bar Kamtso’s anger. Forgoing your own honor, suffering insuits lightly, is undoubtedly a noble quality. The Mishna tells us not to be quick to anger, but the Talmud tells us:

Those who are insulted but do not insult, who hear themselves shamed but do not respond; who act out of love and stay happy while suffering, of them Scripture says (Judges 5:31), “Those who love Him [God] are like the sun going forth in its strength.”

(SHABBOS 88B)

Rashi interprets “insulted but do not insult” as meaning that “others come to them in chutzpah, not they to others.” Not insulting is not always synonymous with sitting quietly. It is entirely laudable, even saintly, to decide that you will bear any insult. However, when you see one person insulting another and you are in a position to do something about it, you are obliged to stop it, even if you yourself would have put up with the same treatment. And that is what the rabbis did not do for Bar Kamtso. They sat and watched and refrained from what both the host and Bar Kamtso were far too ready to do. They did not get angry. They did not reprimand anybody; they sat and watched and went on with the party. And they soon paid the price for their negligence:

Whoever can forbid the members of his household [from committing a sin] and does not do so, is punished for their sin; if it is a question of the inhabitants of his city, he is punished for their sin; if it’s a matter of the entire world, he is punished for the whole world’s sin.

(SHABBOS 54B)

The rabbis attending the party could have forestalled the host’s sin but did not; they failed to upbraid him, fell short of their biblically mandated obligations as Jewish private citizens and of their duties as the legislators and preceptors—the governing elite—of the Jewish people. We already know the consequences; let’s see how a mentsh could have avoided them.

FOUR

What a Mentsh Does

I

THE RABBIS WHO failed to reprimand their