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

will cause the death of an anonymous peasant in China. You won’t know anything about the person you kill—no name, no region, no nothing. You’ll push a button here and he or she will drop dead over there. No one will know that the death was anything but natural. It will be just one of however many million deaths take place there every year, and no one will know but you.

In return for this action—it’s so far removed from you, motivated by considerations that have so little to do with the usual reasons for murder that it can hardly be classed as such—you will improve the lives of every man, woman, and child on earth. All you have to do is press a button and kill—or maybe only think that you have killed; how will you ever really know?—an anonymous peasant. If you don’t do it, the next outbreak of rape and violence in the Congo, probably no more than fifteen minutes away, will be entirely your fault. What would you do?

A mentsh would flip you the bird and refuse. The first question that he or she would ask is the one that we saw last chapter: What makes my blood redder than the Chinese peasant’s? Why can’t I cause the death of an anonymous hedge fund manager instead? What would I think if somebody approached a Chinese peasant with a similar offer for killing an American peasant, and the anonymous American peasant was me? Or my son? Or my daughter? Would I be willing to take a knife and cut my child’s throat, if I had a guarantee that the death of the child would redeem the world?

No way, no fucking way—that’s what a mentsh would say. Her seykhl would tell her that this is a sucker question: a promise of achieving the impossible, or the nearly impossible, at no cost to anyone who isn’t somebody else, has to be a con. And as we’ve all learned from W. C. Fields, you can’t cheat an honest man. An honest man or woman knows that you don’t get anything for nothing and that tiny investments cannot be guaranteed to yield massive returns. A mentsh, or a mentsh who bothered to pursue the conversation and wanted to score some points, might offer the questioner a counterproposal: “I’ll press the button and take a life. No problem. The benefits far outweigh any of the drawbacks. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the anonymity. It’s cowardly, unworthy of such a noble enterprise. I’ll do it, but instead of the Chinese peasant, let me push the same button and kill you instead.” A mentsh who had reason to believe that the offer, impossible as it might sound, might be real, would say, “Forget about the peasant. Kill me.” And a real mentsh might even mean it; mentshn have certainly died for less.

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A mentsh is wise to more than the ways of the world, though; he is also wise to himself. In taking account of ish in the sense of “important person, person of substance, leading citizen, The Man,” Di Uzida raises the kind of emotional issues that make many moralists uncomfortable:

In a place in which there are already prominent people and eminent scholars, there is no need for you to be cautioned to try to be an ish and become as wise as they are, because jealousy and ambition will force you to try to be an ish. But in a place where there is no ish, you might let yourself go and not try to be an ish because you see yourself as greater and smarter than anyone else around you. Since you are greater than anyone else in the place, it will look to you as if you’ve already attained such perfection as is necessary. Therefore it says, “I’m warning you to try to be an ish in such a place. Do not be wise in your own eyes.”

(PROV. 3:7; my emphasis)

A mentsh, remember, doesn’t get rid of his evil impulses, he subdues them and puts them to work for the good. Pride, lust, anger—they all have their place. The trick is learning how to keep them there. Despite the bad press that anger gets, there are sources that speak about how to put it to good use. Jewish tradition acknowledges that anger can play a useful, and even a beneficial, role in human life, as long as it is confined to the kinds of occasions mentioned by Maimonides, who said one “should get angry only about something that is worth getting angry about, in order to keep such a thing from happening again.” This is the anger of prophets, social reformers, and shmuck-fighters all over the world. With adjustments for scale, it should have been the anger of the rabbis at the host’s treatment of Bar Kamtso.

While older Jewish sources are quick to condemn anger, they don’t have too many practical ideas about how to control it. Later literature is a little more inventive. Yekhiel-Meir of Gostynin, a nineteenth-century rebbe, wouldn’t get angry at anybody on the same day as they annoyed him. Rather, he’d tell them the next day, “You got on my nerves yesterday.” The admiring tone in which this story is related suggests that no one ever slapped him for doing so.

A better Hasidic story tells how Faivel of Grojec, who went on to become a prominent Polish rebbe, came to his teacher, Rabbi Isaac of Warka, who was already a prominent Polish rebbe, and complained about his father-in-law’s refusal to subsidize his studies. Rabbi Isaac said, “You have every right to be angry, Faivele. But if you’re going to get angry you have to change your capote,” the long black coat that Hasidim still wear. Rabbi Isaac sent out to get Faivel another suit, and as soon as Faivel put it on he said, “Nu, Faivel, get mad.” Faivel stood there like a golem made of