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

all overlooked on their initial examination. “How did you find it?” they asked Landau. “It’s almost impossible to see unless you’re looking for it.”

“The truth is that I still haven’t found it,” said Landau. “But when the Rebbe wanted to hear my opinion after everybody else had already examined it and found it perfect, I figured he wouldn’t be asking unless there was something wrong. Now show me the flaw.”

Landau’s ability to think his way through such problems made him skeptical of many rebbes who claimed miraculous powers. One day he was sitting in a wagon with a bunch of Hasidim on their way from one town to another, when they passed a group of gentile children playing in a field by the side of the road. Landau stroked his beard and put an otherworldly expression on his face. “That boy,” he said, pointing to one of the kids, “that boy is an orphan.”

The Hasidim asked the driver to stop the wagon. A couple of them got out, went over to the children, and asked after the welfare of the boy’s parents. The boy told the Jews that they were dead.

The Hasidim reported back to the passengers in the wagon, and all were amazed by Landau’s ability to see into the child’s soul and discern his nature. Where other rebbes would have sat back and allowed themselves to be praised, visualizing the way the story would look in a posthumously published volume detailing all the miracles he had wrought while on earth, Landau denied having any supernatural abilities at all. “I saw that he was wearing a grown-up’s hat and I asked myself, ‘Where would a child get a hat like that? From his father. And why isn’t his father wearing his hat? He must have no further need for it. Why doesn’t he need it? If he’s sick, he’d hold on to it for when he gets better. Therefore, he must be dead. And if the boy’s mother were still alive, the sight of her husband’s hat falling over her son’s ears would probably be too much for her to bear, so I concluded that she must be dead, too.”

These stories demonstrate the kind of seykhl that leads to mentsh-hood; it is rooted in learning to understand the needs and feelings of others through a dialectical process that is the same as the one used to study the Talmud and similar texts. While the yidisher kop, the “Jewish head,” might sometimes seem to go out of its way to complicate the simple while simplifying the complex, the judicious employment of this sort of reasoning, divorced from any shmuckish desire for show-offy pyrotechnics, goes a long way toward helping a mentsh make the right decisions, especially when the proper course of action might not be immediately obvious.

IV

PUTTING YOURseykhl to good use is the basis of the next remark in Di Uzida’s commentary, which also seems to originate with Isaac Abarbanel: “Indeed, if we follow the path of seykhl, the meaning of ‘In a place where there are no mentshn’ is: people who have not conquered [or: subdued] their evil inclination. Do not learn from them. Rather, exert yourself to be a mentsh. For there is no mentsh other than he who subdues his evil inclination.”

Our seykhl tells us not only that self-discipline makes a mentsh, but that there is more to a mentsh than we might have thought. The remark about subduing your evil inclination is based on a statement found later in Ovos: “Who is mighty? He who subdues his evil inclination” (Ovos 4:1). The word translated here as “mighty,” gibbor, also means “valiant, courageous person; hero.” It is the epithet inevitably attached to Samson’s name in Hebrew and Yiddish, and would probably have been attached to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s had he made any movies in Yiddish.

The idea of heroism in this context is appealing; the notion of struggling against overpowering odds and finally vanquishing the most obstreperous aspects of your personality has something very attractive about it. The idea that being a mentsh is a victory over selfishness and temptation, over all the shmucks who are dancing around you in a ring, chanting, “One of us, one of us,” is difficult to resist. It is the vindication, the triumph of the moral self-reliance that the mentsh has developed.

Di Uzida brings this section of his commentary to a close by departing from Abarbanel and citing “an aged sage” who told him:

In a place where there are no mentshn, i.e., where there are no people other than yourself, in a hidden place where there is no one to see you or know what you are doing. Do not on that account say, “I will sin; who’s going to see me, who’s going to know?” Even in a place where there are no people and you are in private and all alone, you must exert yourself to be a righteous, upright, and trustworthy person.

Rather than threaten divine retribution in either this world or the next for violations of mentshly behavior, Di Uzida takes the more stoic (some would also add, more mature) approach: act like a mentsh even if nobody but you will ever know the difference. Not only is mentsh-hood its own reward, but a mentsh can almost be defined as a person who does the right thing even though no one is looking and there is no possibility of ever being caught. Redundant as it sounds, just being a mentsh is the whole point of being a mentsh. As long as you think about getting caught, you’re still thinking like a bit of a shmuck.

This indifference to the possibility of getting away with something makes hash of the kind of ethics games that used to be popular at parties, the ones where you have to decide which of two hypothetical courses of action to follow. You’re told that you can bring lasting peace to the world by pushing a button that