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

including your bitterest enemy. What happens, then, if your enemy hates you so much that he refuses your help and tells you to go away? He’d rather watch the donkey die than feel indebted to you for anything. And now that you’ve offered to help, he hates you even more; now that he’s turned down your offer, you hate him even more and want to get back at him for making a fool of you in public. And that’s about as far as “do unto others” can take you. It’s still a fairly long way, but it cannot get you inside of someone who doesn’t share your values.

Hillel doesn’t demand any insight into others. He already understands that our knowledge of anybody else is a hit-and-miss proposition at best, especially when it comes to those matters of the heart that are always concealed from everybody but the subject. Treating others as if they shared all of our innermost tastes and feelings and longings—as if they were us, that is—can easily turn into an exercise in egotism that is ultimately not very different from giving them orders about how to think, feel, and live—because we, of course, know better. Knowing how we’d want our desires to be fulfilled doesn’t tell us how others would like to look after theirs. Proceeding as if we already knew what they want could be perceived as patronizing, or even offensively paternalistic.

The story of the convert is there to show why a person should always be as unassuming as Hillel; the one about the bet to make him lose his temper shows just how mild he was. The guy who made the bet is deliberately violating the “do not do unto others” rule in order to win a substantial sum of money. It’s unlikely that he would want Hillel hanging around his house, yelling out his name, and asking him stupid questions, especially not when he was trying to do something that needed to be finished fairly quickly.

Hillel, who might not have guessed that the guy was acting on a bet, refuses to take the bait. Instead of yelling at the guy or dismissing his questions or even telling him to come back at another time when he wouldn’t be quite so busy, he submits to the summonses and questions with grace and forbearance, answering them to the best of his ability and ignoring any personal insults. Remember, he started out as a woodcutter, near the bottom of the social scale, so poor that another Talmudic passage claims that dead people who plead poverty as an excuse for not studying are asked by the heavenly court, “And were you poorer than Hillel?” (Yoma 35b). During his time as a penniless shlepper, which is supposed to have lasted well into middle age, he must have been spoken to in just the same way as the bettor talks to him: “Is there a Hillel here?”

Hillel doesn’t let it get to him, though. He won’t speak that way to another person. He takes the questions at face value, answers them as well as he can, and is quite willing to sit and answer any remaining questions that the guy might have. And it’s that—refusing to treat the bettor like the shmuck that he is because Hillel doesn’t like to be treated like a shmuck—that finally drives the guy over the edge. He knows that he’s acting like an asshole—hell, he’s doing it on purpose, and it’s driving him crazy that Hillel seems to be immune to it. If he can’t get Hillel to behave like a shmuck, he’ll have to give up all that money. Finally, though, he loses it and finishes by cursing Hillel: “May there not be many like you in Israel” is a fancy way of saying, “May you have no disciples or descendants, may you fail as a teacher and die without issue.”

Anybody would have been forgiven for losing his temper over such a remark, but Hillel takes it in stride and asks the guy why he feels that way. Once he finds out, Hillel merely lets him know that he’ll lose his four hundred zuzim on every subsequent attempt, because he’ll never get Hillel to lose his temper.

Hillel can see that the money is a side issue; it’s about control, management in contemporary terminology, specifically, the management of emotion and inclination. By telling the guy that he would only lose more money by continuing to try to anger him, Hillel is saying that now that he understands what’s happening here, don’t expect him to do the “benevolent” thing and lose his temper in order to help the other guy get his four hundred zuzim. Indeed, such faux benevolence would only encourage further shmuckery on the bettor’s part.

V

HILLEL KNOWS WHAT he doesn’t want, and will thus never deliberately do anything to cause another person to lose his temper: the pique that has no chance to happen is the one that leads to harmony. While we are often at a loss to describe our desires in any but the most general terms, there isn’t anyone who’s not a maven on what bothers them; it’s why so many stand-up comics can open routines by saying things like, “You know what I hate?” Everybody knows what they hate and can describe it in as much detail as their linguistic capacities will allow. Hillel takes that knob of displeasure and makes it the basis of his ethics. “Do not do what is hateful to you” takes us immediately to a nexus of kvetch, a nodal point where your aversion comes together with your fellow’s, and on which the whole idea pivots. Hillel is telling us to put that kvetch to work for us, to proceed from certainty rather than supposition, and begin by refraining from what hurts us or what we dislike or what causes us pain: if you don’t like to have your own toe stepped on, don’t step on anybody else’s; should they want