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

his title, “Deputy of the Priests,” makes him sound rather like the Barney Fife of animal sacrifice (older readers might prefer to imagine Chester, as played by Dennis Weaver, on Gunsmoke: “Bullock’s ready, Mr. High Priest”), Chanina’s job was closer to that of vice president or first runner-up; he had to be ready to stand in for the High Priest, should the latter prove unable to perform his duties for any reason.

Chanina lived at a time when relations between Rome and Judea were approaching their nadir, and the savagery with which the Romans put down the revolt that lasted from 66 to 73C.E. aroused negative comment in Rome itself. Meanwhile, the Jews seem to have been as busy fighting each other as they were with struggling against the Romans, with the happy result that there were at least two separate wars going on much of the time, one against the Romans and one against ourselves.

In the midst of all this, Chanina was an outspoken peacenik. In Sifre, a collection of midrashic commentaries on the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, he is quoted as saying, “Peace is great, for it outweighs the whole work of creation” (Sifre, Naso, 42). In the remark quoted in Ovos—again, considered so worthy of preservation that it was included in the Harry Potter of rabbinic literature, the one work that people who don’t read rabbinic literature read, enjoy, and reread—his mention of “the state” must have caused the jaw of anybody who heard him say it to drop. Chanina is talking about Rome here, and instead of saying “the state” might just as well be saying “the enemy,” or even “the empire,” with all of that term’s Star Wars implications.

Although we don’t know whether he made this statement before or after the destruction of the Temple, his comment on the nature of Jewish society at the time strikes a realistic, if not terribly hopeful note. “Swallow each other alive” implies that internecine troubles arise simply because they can; no excuse is necessary because an excuse can always be found. As long as people behave like cannibalistic children, they’re going to need to have a teacher in the room at all times, and if subjection to a foreign power is what it takes to make them behave—it’s bad, but it beats the alternative.

If Cain can kill Abel in a dispute over the location of a Temple that was nowhere near to being built when the population of the world numbered only four, just imagine how their descendants will act when they’re able to assemble armies. Chanina was saying what everybody at the time already knew: if we weren’t going to submit to Rome, we’d have to submit to whatever gang of criminals or ideologues was in power this week, wreaking vengeance on people for living in the wrong part of town, going to the wrong synagogue, or having different ideas of how to prepare for apocalypse. The guys who burned the food supplies were determining foreign policy. Imagine Jim Morrison in command of the Continental Army instead of George Washington: when “No one here gets out alive” is a recruiting slogan, you can’t place much faith in a lasting victory.

When a guy like Chanina, for whom peace ranks on a level with bringing the world into being, says that the thousands of Jews killed by the Romans during the revolt in Judea were a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers who would have been killed if they had had free rein to kill each other, you can probably take his word for it. Whatever the historical status of the story of Bar Kamtso and the banquet, Chanina’s contemporaneous remark confirms its picture of Judean society, especially the Judean elite at the time, and has plenty to say to us today.

If we’re all such shmucks that we’re better off as the subjects of despotic conquerors than as free members of an independent commonwealth—for the simple reason that our shmuckery makes community in any meaningful sense of the term impossible—then we’re doing something very wrong. The tragedy here is that there really was a remedy immediately at hand, in the hands, indeed, of the rabbis at the banquet, but everybody was so busy trying to get what he felt was coming to him—power, vindication, his own way—that the welfare of everybody else was quickly forgotten. No matter how dire the situation, the competing factions continued to commit the cardinal Jewish social sin, the one that marriage and procreation are supposed to make impractical, if not impossible: they kept on putting themselves and their own narrow—you could even say sectarian—desires ahead of the general welfare.

II

IF EVERYBODY INSISTS on being the cantor, there is no hope of a minyan: as long as having your way is the most important thing in the world to you, you can’t really help but feel resentful and envious of anyone who gets their way when you do not. Unless they hold public office and you’re able to wait four years and hope you can be elected to replace them, there usually isn’t much you can do about it except sit and stew and plot their demise.

In that sense, envy can be described as the egotistical sin par excellence, the most thoroughly selfish of all, because its sole meaning, its only goal, consists in harming someone else. Aristotle defined it as “pain at another’s good fortune,” and where most other sins—pride, avarice, lust, even anger—involve getting or taking something for oneself, the essence of envy lies in depriving someone else.

The obsession with the evil eye in so many otherwise disparate cultures bears witness to a deep appreciation of the all-too-central place of envy in so many human characters. Children, babies even, will cry and even hit to get something that they want only because someone else—often someone of similar or smaller size—has it. Perhaps it’s a legacy of Cain and Abel fighting over the location of the Temple, but the pleasure