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

Almost as sartorial is the remark of Pinchas of Koretz, a close disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. “Since I have tamed my anger,” Pinchas once said, “I keep it in my pocket. When I need it, I take it out.”

Di Uzida is doing something similar with jealousy and ambition in the passage that we’re looking at. Accepting the presence of these impulses and then figuring out a way to use them in a kosher manner is typical of the rabbinic approach to human nature, which can hardly be called idealistic, and Di Uzida is in fact playing off a well-known saying that claims that jealousy and lust and ambition run the world. He is saying that it is easier to rechannel evil impulses and make them good than to conquer self-satisfaction, the shmuckish idea of being better than others simply because you’re yourself.

Regrettably, snobbery of this type has been endemic to Jewish community life for centuries and the idea of the mentsh seems to have developed at least in part as a corrective to such ideas of yikhes—pedigree or lineage—as a guarantee of human quality. The yakhsn, the big shot from the prominent family, would immediately see himself as the ish in the situations described by Di Uzida, simply by virtue of his social position and money. Yiddish characterizes this kind of person in a proverb: “Es shteyt im nisht on tsu redn mit zikh aleyn, he’s too good to talk to himself.” The mentshly ideal is there to remind all of us that no matter how much we might strive, we can try but we never arrive:

“Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20). In the name of the rebbe from Lublin, it was said that what is meant here by “justice” is that if someone is convinced that he has attained the perfection of justice and that there is nothing more for him to do in this area, Scripture gives him sound advice: Pursue justice, that is to say, keep on chasing after it and never stay in one place and say that your having always acted justly up until now is enough. Real justice consists of pursuing it always, by day and by night, without any rest or relaxation. In his own eyes, a person should be as a newborn who has yet to accomplish one single thing.

It’s a typically Yiddish way of looking at the world: moral progress is based on finding fault with your own current level of attainment. Rather than kvetch about the people out there, the mentsh learns to kvetch about himself to himself, and then do something to try to decrease his level of dissatisfaction. A mentsh is never 100 percent sure of himself because a mentsh knows his own fallibility and is always aware of the possibility of failure. In a place where everybody has learned to like themselves just as they are, a mentsh keeps trying to improve himself and his relations with others.

VI

THOSE OTHERS CAN be a bit of a problem, though, and a mentsh is well aware of the fact that not everyone else is a mentsh. You can be pleasant to people without necessarily believing in them, and the path from credulous naïveté to a balanced assessment of the character and motivations of the people whom you encounter is the road that leads from childhood to maturity, from the trusting shmuckery of the people who begged Bernie Madoff to take their money to the nuts-and-bolts skepticism of Harry Markopolos, who sat down and did the math as long ago as 1999, and was ignored until Madoff himself ’fessed up.

The transition from genial sap to full-fledged mentsh is what Billy Wilder’s classic film, The Apartment, is all about. Released in 1961, it provides a more caustic look at office life in the Kennedy era than the recent television series Mad Men, which almost does the impossible by managing to romanticize the whole gray-flannel-suit, three-martini-lunch way of life—everything that Elvis and the Beatles and the millions of hippies who turned into yuppies in the ’80s and ’90s did their best to rebel against, lifestyle-wise.

The film stars Jack Lemmon as Charles “Bud” Baxter, an accountant for Consolidated Life of New York, where, as one of 31,259 employees, he works on the nineteenth floor, section W, desk 861. Baxter, who is not married, has an apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street. For the past six months, he’s been lending his key to married co-workers who need somewhere to take women who are not their wives, sometimes scheduling them railway style, one after the other, on particularly busy nights. All of these co-workers are higher up on the corporate ladder than Baxter, and they all promise to put in a good word for him with Mr. Sheldrake, the head of personnel.

They’re not friends of Baxter; they aren’t paying him for the use of the apartment, they don’t even remember to pay him for the liquor and food that he supplies. He acts like an errand boy and they treat him like one; he’s the kind of a guy who just can’t say no.

It started innocently enough when one of the guys in the office had to go to a banquet in the city:

His wife was meeting him in town, and he needed someplace to change into a tuxedo—so I gave him the key and word must have gotten around—because the next thing I knew, all sorts of guys were suddenly going to banquets—and when you give the key to one guy, you can’t say no to another and the whole thing got out of hand.

“Out of hand” hardly does it justice: Baxter sometimes sits outside in the rain while one of his superiors has sex in his apartment. He’s angling for promotion; what he gets is contempt. He’s described as “some schnook that works in the office” his place is “some schnook’s