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

but only because she needs help, he stops being a shmuck. It’s the first unselfish thing he’s done in the whole movie. To spare Miss Kubelik any further shame, he lets Dreyfuss assume that he was the reason that she tried to kill herself, so that when the doctor begins to talk about being a mentsh, Baxter is finally in a position to understand. By the end of the movie, Baxter has gone from being the kind of personality-free team player that selfish executives dream of to being the kind of player that you’d actually want to have on your team.

VII

Finding something outside of yourself on which to focus is crucial to developing into a mentsh. Jewish tradition seems to have stumbled upon this secret a long time ago when it started to make study into the main nonpraying activity of the religion. Though confined mostly to males until quite recently, the democratization of study became a crucial factor in the survival of post-Temple Judaism and it remains so even today. As far back as the book of Joshua, the Lord commands, “This book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth, and you shall meditate on it day and night” (Josh. 1:8). Eventually, study became an integral part of synagogue attendance—a daily event for most Jewish men in Eastern Europe. Aside from those bits of the Bible and rabbinic literature that have been incorporated into the liturgy itself (and often tend to be rushed through without much thought), lessons in Talmud, Midrash, legal texts, and the like would be given after the afternoon and evening services by the local rabbi or better-educated laymen, who could open the texts up for people who couldn’t have got through them on their own. Societies for reciting Psalms, studying the Mishna, and so on, were common in larger centers and were often organized on occupational lines: the Shoemakers’ Mishna Society, the Water-Carriers’ Psalm Group, and so on.

Male social life in many places consisted of evening trips to the local synagogue for communal prayer and organized study, generally seasoned with healthy portions of local and international news and gossip and often topped off with a shot of whiskey or vodka. Groups of this type tended to be made up of people who didn’t study during the day and weren’t always capable of doing so without help—workers, artisans, the non-elite members of the community. Gathering in this way did more than fulfill the halachic obligation to attend communal prayer whenever possible; it also served as a shield against the scorn and contempt of the more snobbish sections of the community described above.

The “common people” in the bes medresh—the synagogue—were doing exactly what the big shots did, and a minyan is no respecter of persons: everybody from the age of thirteen years and a day is equal. There is no big or small, no number one or number ten; the right to lead the service has more to do with who is in mourning or marking the anniversary of a family member’s death than with any particular status in the community. The daily minyan is an oasis of temporary equality, a kind of circumcised Round Table in the service of an invisible king. And if the cool kids, the Mr. Sheldrakes of the local Jewish community, didn’t think it was good enough for them, the hell with them, especially after the rise of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. As A. J. Heschel has pointed out:

[The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism] considered practical mitzvahs in the light of a person’s complete personality. Nobility of character was just as important as piety. While he certainly did not deprecate the practical mitzvahs, he felt that the most important thing consisted of what a person was in his essence.

Mendel of Kotzk, the last of the Baal Shem Tov’s great successors, elaborated on this theme in a slightly more pointed manner:

“Derekh erets, good manners, take precedence over studying Torah.” As the introduction to a book reveals the essence of the book, so do a person’s manners reveal the essence of his learning.

Has he really understood it, that is, or has he only absorbed a lot of facts, learned to expatiate on all kinds of concepts that have no actual bearing on the way that he lives his life? This is the kind of question that goes well beyond the problem of how people understand the books that they read. Because the line between Jewish study and Jewish prayer is often quite fine, failure to act on the moral and ethical principles set out in more academic contexts can call the depth and even the sincerity of one’s commitment to the prayer book into question. Every Orthodox Jew, for instance, recites the following before retiring to bed every night:

Master of the Universe, I forgive everyone who has angered and annoyed me or who has sinned against me—my body, my money, my honor, or anything else pertaining to me; whether willingly or unwillingly; intentionally or unintentionally; in speech or in deed; in this incarnation or another. I forgive everybody, and may no person be punished on my account.

“I’m saying this prayer because I have probably done the same, angered or annoyed or sinned against any number of people today without even realizing that I’ve done so. I stand as much in need of their forgiveness as they do of mine.” The Baal Shem Tov and the Kotzker Rebbe want to know how many people really mean it and how many are reciting it only because it is printed in the prayer book and they’re not the sort of people to skip over anything in the book: what’s in the book ends up in their mouths, whether they’re really listening to themselves or not.

The disconnect between a compulsion to say the words while paying little, if any, attention to what