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

they mean has been around for quite a while. One of the problems that has vexed Judaism for at least two millennia already is the ease with which you can turn into a Zechariah ben Avkilos, someone who is so busy observing the rules that he forgets to look at their real purpose and thus forgets to observe himself.

In order to combat any tendencies to this type of behavior, early Hasidism counseled action:

There is a line in the Psalms: “Turn away from evil and do good” (Ps. 34:15 [in the Hebrew]). The Hasidic interpretation of this verse is, “First do good and then turn away from evil. By doing good, you estrange yourself from evil.”

Zechariah and the rabbis at the banquet with Bar Kamtso were quite good at turning away from evil; they seem to have had more trouble with the part about doing good. By fulfilling only half of the injunction, they effectively ignore evil and pay no attention to wrongs that do not seem to be of any direct concern to them.

They don’t seem to notice that their failure to act degrades whatever learning they have and turns their positions into hollow mockeries of the real thing. Each becomes what Yiddish has labeled a tsaddik in pelts, a holy man in a fur coat, that is, a pious fraud, a little tin god, someone whose piety is a matter of outer appearance rather than inner reality. The idiom, still quite common, has been given a popular interpretation that is usually attributed to Mendel of Kotzk: a real tsaddik, a real holy man—tsaddik can also mean a rebbe, a Hasidic leader—warms the hearts and minds of the people around him; the tsaddik in pelts, the fraud in the fur, traipses about in a beautiful coat that keeps nobody warm but himself.

There are thus no mentshn at the banquet, nothing but shmek of various sizes. This lack of mentshn points to an apparent contradiction in Hillel’s statement that none of the commentators seems to have mentioned: if you’re in a place where there aren’t any mentshn, then you’re not a mentsh, either. Hillel is thus talking to all of us the way Dr. Dreyfuss talks to Baxter in The Apartment. Right now you might still be a shmuck, but if you put your mind to it, use the brain you were born with, you can change yourself very quickly. Once you start to act like a mentsh, you’ll turn away from thinking and acting like a shmuck.

You need only three things that we all learned about in The Wizard of Oz: a brain, a heart, and some guts. You don’t need separate rules for every contingency that might arise, you need one rule that’s flexible enough to deal satisfactorily with any contingency that might arise.

FIVE

How to Do It Like a Mentsh

I

THE BEST SHORT example of the state of being that we’re trying to avoid, the most outstanding instance of overt, utterly unself-conscious shmuckery that I’ve heard in a long time came to me by way of the Austin, Texas-based tuba and bass player Mark Rubin. Reminiscing about his first tour with a real southern bluegrass band made up of real southern white gentiles, Rubin—a native of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where his father, however, was director of the university Jewish students’ center—recalled a conversation that the guys in the band held for his benefit. It concerned the morality of getting a little action on the road when there was somebody waiting for you back home. The question was: where does innocent fun stop and real cheating begin? Each member of the band had his own opinion, starting with hand-holding.

“Kissin’,” said one, “just plain old kissin’.”

“Bare titty,” said another.

It was a six-man group and they’d gone into graphic technical detail before the last member finally weighed in. “As far as I’m concerned,” Rubin swears that he said, “it isn’t cheating unless you get caught.”

Nobody since the dawn of time—and I’m including Moses, Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, and Dr. Phil in this reckoning—has ever been able to stop more than a small part of humanity from thinking this way. The best that anybody can do is to stop themselves and, if they’re lucky, influence the people around them, especially their children, to do likewise. We need a formula or a system, something transferable that doesn’t depend upon a particular person’s character or good nature. We’re looking for something that anybody can do, that doesn’t require too much theoretical knowledge or impose too much of an intellectual burden; something that can be used by everybody and taught to anybody, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they believe, and can give any of them the power to be a mentsh in a place where there are no other mentshn. We’re looking for a way to conduct ourselves that has the potential to make a statement like the following obsolete: “Pray for the welfare of the state. If not for fear of it, we’d have swallowed each other alive” (Ovos 3:2).

While this might look like the usual vulgar, law-and-order Hobbesianism that pops up on television commercials during campaigns for get-tough governors and crime-smashing DAs, it’s considerably more complex than that and touches on a theme that hasn’t yet been mentioned but cannot really be ignored any longer: the idea that too many shmucks can wreak havoc on democracy and that loss of mentsh-hood makes self-government a joke.

The Mishnaic statement above is attributed to Rabbi Chanina, the Deputy of the Priests, who lived at the same time as Zechariah ben Avkilos and Rabbi Yochanan, whom we saw asking for the town of Yavne at the end of chapter 2. Like them, he saw the Temple destroyed; unlike either of them, Chanina was a Temple official and the Temple was where he spent most of his time. Although