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

where the right thing to do is clear. If you should thus find yourself confronted with a less cut-and-dried dilemma, you’ll know what to do and will recognize the evil impulse when it comes to you in the guise of a lawful and sometimes even laudable activity.

There’s a story about how a poor widow once went to Rabbi Aaron of Karlin (died 1772), saying that her daughter had been engaged for two years already, but her fiancé was about to break off the engagement because he still hadn’t received the fifty-ruble dowry that he had been promised. Rabbi Aaron, yet another great Hasidic leader (there aren’t many edifying tales about the crummy ones), went over to his dresser, took out fifty rubles, and gave it to the woman.

An hour later she was back. The wedding had already been arranged, but the poor girl had no wedding gown and her mother didn’t have the five rubles to get her one. Rabbi Aaron went over to his dresser, much more slowly this time, took out five rubles, and gave them to her:

A Hasid who happened to be present asked, “The fifty rubles I understand; providing for a bride is one of the biggest mitzvahs there is. But the five rubles for the dress? Wouldn’t it have been a bigger mitzvah to buy ten pair of shoes for orphans?”

“I had the same idea,” said Rabbi Aaron. “Better to buy ten pair of shoes for poor orphans than a silk wedding gown. But then I started to wonder where this thought was coming from—the good inclination or the evil one—and I decided that it was the evil. If it’s coming from the good inclination, I thought, why was he silent about it until now, when the woman came to beg for money for the gown? Why didn’t he tell me to buy shoes for the orphans yesterday? So I figured that this must be coming from the evil inclination, and I don’t take advice from the evil inclination.”

There are two matters to consider here. Providing for the bride without providing her a gown is only doing half the job. There’s a well-known axiom to the effect that once you start on a mitzvah, you’re supposed to see it through to the end, and though Aaron doesn’t mention it explicitly, this is the basis on which the girl’s mother has had the apparent chutzpah to come back so soon for a second donation. On a less obvious level, Aaron is self-aware enough to know that if he doesn’t pay for the dress, he’s not going to use the money to buy shoes for the orphans: he’ll think about it, put it off, think about it some more, put it off again, and then forget all about it.

In the usual scheme of things, shoes for orphans will always outrank a fancy dress, even if it’s a bridal gown. In the present context, though, the shoes are a distraction, a way of not fulfilling an obligation that you’ve undertaken by convincing yourself that you’re wriggling out of your duty for the sake of something better; that you’re cheating in a kosher way.

In Yiddish, this is called a kosher khazer fisl, a kosher little pig’s foot, the legitimate-seeming enticement to something that really isn’t kosher at all. The idea goes back to the description of the pig in the eleventh chapter of Leviticus: “And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed, but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you” (Lev. 11:7). If you look at it the right way, the pig can pass for kosher. A well-known Midrash talks about how the pig lies on its back, to make sure that you can see its hooves, and says, “Eat me, I’m kosher” (Genesis Rabbo 65:1).

The evil inclination stuck out a kosher pig’s foot in the form of the orphans’ shoes, but Rabbi Aaron is too smart to go for it. When seykhl meets emotion, it can teach even the heart to think.

III

AS WE CAN see with Rabbi Aaron, a thinking heart is a wonderful thing, but it has to have something to think about. The favorite traditional subject is controlling the evil inclination in order to develop a capacity for mercy toward people and animals alike, those we don’t like just as much as those we do. Very broadly speaking, these are the two major characteristics that distinguish the mentsh from the shmuck; they’re also what makes it possible for shmucks to change their behavior and turn themselves into mentshn, or for mentshn to fall off the wagon, so to speak, and take the long plunge into shmuckery. The shmuck isn’t really evil; he’s just got a heart that acts before it thinks—mostly because it rarely thinks, and when it does, tends to do the wrong kind of thinking. It can’t really distinguish between what it should be doing and what it feels like doing.

According to the Midrash, “Whoever is soft when he should be hard will finish by being hard when he should be soft” (Ecclesiastes Rabbo 7:24). The example it gives is King Saul, who first disobeyed God’s orders and spared Agag, the king of Israel’s bitterest enemy, Amalek, then balanced out this misguided kindness by having eighty-five Israelite priests put to death because of a mistaken suspicion that they were in league with David to overthrow him.

Saul was mentally ill; the average shmuck is simply out for herself and thinks that acting like a conscienceless jerk might be the best way to do so. The problem is that amoral behavior tends to have long-term benefits only for those who really are amoral and whose consciences really won’t have anything to say. As the Baal Shem Tov once described it:

A poor man asked his rich brother: “Why are you wealthy, and I am not?” The other answered: “Because I have no scruples against doing wrong.” The poor brother began