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

business gets smart.” Thinking only of business won’t give you any purchase on brains. You can breeze through the financial pages and still be an amorets. Not everything is a matter of business, and approaching every aspect of life as a question of profit or loss will make you stupid in nonmoney matters; overriding concern for your own advantage brings only the narrowest of benefits.

After all these categorical statements, Hillel makes an abrupt change in sentence structure and issues a command: “In a place where there are no anoshim, you should strive to be an ish yourself.” In a place where everybody is like the people just described, it’s up to you to be the exception. You must be the ish.

We’ve already noted that ish can mean “person in charge, person who exercises control,” and the passage that we’re looking at here is a perfect example of the way in which it can be used to mean both “control over others” and “control over himself.” While the bor is generally considered the human equivalent of a vacant lot—the major commentators point out that the basic meaning of the word bor is “fallow or uncultivated field,” the dry raw material of the clay golem—members of the other three categories are poised on the edge of various forms of self-defeating shmuckery. The amorets’s defective knowledge of how to control what leads to a parody of self-discipline, while the shy person’s fear produces self-repression rather than self-command. By being too scared to ask the necessary questions, he effectively turns himself into an amorets when he has every opportunity not to be one. His irascible counterpart, who doesn’t control her temper at all, condemns her terrified students to a similar state of amorets-ism.

An ish, on the other hand, is a person whose demonstrable authority over himself lends his advice and opinions a certain weight with others. This kind of ish can likewise be called a mentsh in Yiddish—a person of respect, without any of that phrase’s Mafia connotations—and what Hillel is saying is, “In a place where there are no mentshn”—think “elders” in the sense of “respected authorities”—“try, make an effort, put yourself out, even if you’d prefer a life of cozy retirement, to be a mentsh.” If there isn’t a Man, it’s up to you to be The Man, even if you are a woman.

To go back to Bar Kamtso and the banquet, then, there is no guarantee that the rabbis would have been able to stop the host from treating Bar Kamtso so badly, but they had a moral obligation as mentshn, as fellow humans, but even more as community leaders, to stand up and protest, to let the host know that he was out of line. Since neither Bar Kamtso nor the host can be described as a mentsh, it was up to the rabbis—not necessarily all of them, but any one of them, just one—to get up and do something. None of them tried, and their crisis of mentsh-hood changed the course of world history.

II

THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE analysis of this dictum of Hillel’s is probably that of Samuel di Uzida (sometimes transcribed as Ozida, di Ozida, Uzida, or Ucedo), a sixteenth-century rabbi whose Midrash Shmuel was among the most popular and widely circulated commentaries on Ovos, the Mishnaic tractate in which Hillel’s statement is found. This might not sound like much, kind of like describing it as the best-known footnote to something so insanely obscure that it’s never even come up on Jeopardy!—“I’ll take Rabbinic Apothegms for two hundred, Alex”—but Ovos, often called Avot, “Fathers,” or Pirkei Avot, “Chapters of Fathers” (it’s a question of Ashkenazic, as distinct from Sephardic, Hebrew), is the most widely read of all the sixty-three tractates of the Mishna. Its six chapters are studied in a rotating cycle on Saturday afternoons between Passover and Rosh Hashana, and at one time most men and boys—the same people who had attended the Hebrew schools described earlier—had at least some familiarity with it, even though many of them would not have been able to construe a single page of any other part of the Talmud. Its Hebrew is generally uncomplicated, its contents ethical rather than legalistic, its style generally pithy and quotable. The Saturday-afternoon study sessions soon led to Ovos’s being included in prayer books, which often came with Yiddish translations for the benefit of those with little or no Hebrew. If there was any part of the Talmud that uneducated people of either sex might have been expected to know, it was Ovos.

Di Uzida’s commentary—full of practical advice in easy Hebrew—was vastly popular in Eastern Europe. Rather than a unified work reflecting the ideas of a single author, it is a collection of observations from other sources that served as a sort of Reader’s Digest version of commentaries on tractate Ovos. Di Uzida’s examination of the sentence that we’re looking at features a lengthy quotation from the fifteenth-century rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, who says, among other things, “In a place where there are no anoshim”—no mentor types—“to teach you and spur you on to do the things that you are supposed to do, you yourself must spur yourself on.”

Abarbanel touches here on one of the most important qualities of a mentsh: self-sufficiency. A mentsh must not only be able to rely on his own judgment and intuition when he has no one to turn to for advice, he also has to be self-motivated in acquiring the knowledge and insight that he needs to make these decisions. He has to have the confidence to act independently, especially when those around him are behaving like shmucks and urging him to follow suit. If you behave with kindness and consideration only when you’ve got your personal values trainer and a cheerleading squad to support you, you’re doing tricks, not good.

As Abarbanel goes on to say, “In a place where you can’t find wise and intelligent people to teach you, you have to teach yourself.” If there’s no one