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

host for his treatment of Bar Kamtso transgressed yet another of the fundamental principles of the ethical and legal system they were supposed to represent. This one had been formulated a century or so before the destruction of the Temple by Hillel the Elder, who was among the most influential and certainly the most popular of all the rabbis mentioned in the Talmud: “In a place where there are no anoshim, try to be an ish” (Ovos 2:5). Anoshim is the plural of ish, and as we saw in chapter 2, ish is one of those Hebrew words for “human being” or “person” or “man” that comes out as mentsh in Yiddish.

It’s an unusual injunction. Rather than tell us that we should be mentshn and be done with it, Hillel demands that we try to be mentshn. This is not the usual way of religious or moral instruction. Imagine the Ten Commandments in a similar style: “Thou shalt try not to murder; thou shalt try not to commit adultery; thou shalt try not to steal.” That one word, “try,” would make guilt a thing of the past, depriving the commandments of any useful purpose. “God, I tried! How I tried!” would point to exoneration instead of frustration, and the exoneration would have to be universal. If we are to understand Hillel’s statement, we need to see it in its original context:

He used to say: A bor is not afraid of sin and an ignoramus cannot be pious. An overly timid person cannot learn and an irascible one cannot teach—and not everyone who does a lot of business gets smart. And in a place where there are no mentshn, try to be a mentsh.

(ovos 2:5)

The Mishna opens with two descriptions of how contrary extremes of behavior lead to the same bad ends. In the first case, we are told that the bor has no fear of sin and the ignoramus lacks piety, that is, is not punctilious in ritual or ethical observance. The Hebrew word bor has no precise equivalent in English. Maimonides defines it as a person who is “wanting in both intellect and character, that is, lacking both wisdom and morals” (Commentary on Ovos 2:5). A bor isn’t afraid to sin; he is too crude, too socially and intellectually uncouth for the idea of transgression to have much meaning for him. Instead of right and wrong, he sees the world in terms of want-this, not-want-that. He does what he wants to because that’s what he wants to do, and lets nothing theoretical get in his way.

The ignoramus—am ha’aretz in Hebrew (Yiddish: amorets, with the accent on the or)—is literally “the people of the land,” a way of describing what we would call “the folks on Main Street,” “the great unwashed,” “plain people,” “the salt of the earth,” or, to put it into Aramaic, “Kamtso bar Kamtso—Nameless McNobody.” Just plain Bill and Jane. Good, decent folk who only know what they read in the paper. In strictly Jewish terms, an amorets doesn’t know enough to be able to understand the details of the commandments and is therefore unlikely to perform them properly, no matter how sincere or well intentioned she might be.

With respect to knowledge, let’s not forget that the newspaper or Web site or blog that is the amorets’s chief source of information is sometimes edited by the rabbis who ignored Bar Kamtso at the party, sometimes by Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, and sometimes by a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The heart of the amorets is in the right place, but without a reasonable store of general knowledge and a mind trained to interpret and use this knowledge, she can easily go off in the wrong direction without realizing that she has done so: once again, think of well-meaning southern whites a generation or two ago who had no use for the KKK but never really questioned the morality of segregation, either.

The next pair of opposites is a little more straightforward. The overly timid student is too shy to speak up, too scared to ask questions if there’s something that he doesn’t understand, while a bad-tempered teacher makes all of her students overly timid: they’re so afraid of an outburst of temper that they sit and nod and pretend to understand, rather than risk being yelled at or embarrassed.

Hillel’s descriptions point to the social and religious consequences of these different types of unproductive behavior. The bor and the amorets both make moral or ethical behavior into a matter of accident rather than choice. While it’s possible for both to act ethically, it is difficult—if not impossible—for either to do so for ethical reasons. Since the bor does whatever he wants, he doesn’t care if his actions are sinful or virtuous; the amorets doesn’t always know, and doesn’t even know that she doesn’t know.

The bor, for instance, has twelve beers in an hour, starts his car, and drives off in search of a toilet. The amorets knows that driving after drinking twelve beers is very dangerous; she therefore has only six in the same hour, gets into the car feeling well in control of herself, and starts to drive. If she’d known about the .08 percent law, she would have obeyed it, but she’s so ignorant that she’s never heard of it. She understands the principle of not driving while impaired, but doesn’t understand enough to know when, precisely, impairment begins. Both the bor and the amorets are driving while drunk, but they’re doing it for different reasons: the bor doesn’t care, the amorets doesn’t know.

Likewise, those who succumb to fear of questioning and those who instill that fear both help to diminish learning and wisdom, thus preparing the ground for future crops of bors and ignoramuses. They sow seeds of noncultivation. Hillel’s description of them is followed by a codicil that should be the motto of every MBA program on earth: “Not everyone who does a lot of