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

you to do so, they’ll probably be quick to tell you. Hillel is putting forward an approach that might be called preventative ethics, an ethics designed to minimize strife and misunderstanding by reducing the size and number of potential problem areas.

The beauty, indeed the genius, of Hillel’s idea is that it allows us what Christianity would call our fallen state; it lets us start acting like mentshn right now. It takes the egotism that has been with us since Adam and Eve and makes it work for, rather than against, us and our development as human beings. By doing exactly what most moralists are always telling us not to do—thinking of ourselves—we become paradoxically able to start considering others and doing things that benefit them as well as us.

This is the beginning of mentsh-hood. You have to go beyond sympathy for another person, even beyond empathy, and on to real identification. Rather than simply imagining yourself in their position, you imagine a complete reversal of positions: you give them your choices, your power, your ability, and you assume theirs. Then you decide how you might want to act toward them. You put yourself aside, get as far inside the skin of the other person as you can (we all know that you’ll never be able to go all the way), then figure out what’s wrong with your original solution and zero in on possible causes for complaint. You identify any grounds for kvetching and do your best to rectify or eliminate them in advance. Rather than doing to someone else that which you’d have them do unto you, you are—by gradually eliminating all the negative and unacceptable courses of action—doing what they would have you do to them. And that, of course, is the object of the whole exercise: treating other people as well as you treat yourself, not necessarily as you treat yourself.

Without the capacity to do this, the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves is not really intelligible. If, however, we engage in this kind of imaginative sympathy often enough, we’ll come to understand others better and better, make fewer and fewer mistakes in interpersonal relations, and be better able to avoid being victimized by shmucks.

Isn’t this still pretty much what Jesus says, though? And if it is, then what makes it so all-fire Jewish? Jesus mentions the so-called Golden Rule twice in the Gospels, once in Matthew and again in Luke. In the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, the passages are as follows: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12); “And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31). The version in Matthew is clearly a paraphrase of Hillel’s statement, right down to the comment about the law and the prophets. Does the difference in approach, the difference between “do” and “don’t do,” really make that much of a difference?

In many day-to-day situations, the answer is no. Either one will get you to hold the door open for the lady with all the packages or the gentleman with the walker. Either will teach you to say “please” and “thank you,” or remind you to send a salami to your boy in the army. The difference makes itself felt in bigger things, larger issues that go beyond simple courtesy or physical help. Imagine, for instance, that you’re depressed. You’ve lost your job and are working as a telemarketer; your spouse has divorced you and taken the kids, whom you can now see for no longer than an hour at a time and only under supervision at nine A.M. on alternate Sundays. You had to sell your collection of Charlie Parker bootleg acetates to help cover your legal bills, and the rest of your vast jazz collection followed soon afterward. You’re forty-five years old and living from paycheck to paycheck, when you’re working at all—and the minimum wage that you’re earning doesn’t even cover your basic expenses. You have no organic illness, no history of emotional problems; it’s just that your life has turned to crap and it’s really bumming you out.

A friend of yours went through something similar a few years ago and is eager to help. He’s back on his feet now; he’s got a new job and a new relationship, his kids have even petitioned the judge to grant him increased access time. Things had been bad, though, as bad as they are for you. He’s coming over tonight and has promised to tell you how he was able to cope, how he got through all of this and came out okay.

Good as his word, he turns up. Better than his word, he’s got a small package, nicely gift-wrapped, that he hands to you. “Here it is,” he says, “the only things that kept me sane.”

You open the package eagerly. This is the closest thing you’ve seen to a present in who knows how long. There’s a card on top with an encouraging message, you pull away the last of the wrapping paper, and there they are, two boxed CD sets, brand-new and still in their shrinkwrap. “Here you go,” he says. “I’m pretty sure they’ll do you as much good as they did me. I really hope so.” A tear wells up in one of his eyes.

You look down and there they still are: Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits, Vols. 1, 2, and 3, and Troubadour, a two-disc boxed set of Donovan’s greatest works. You think you’re going to puke. Maybe you’ll burst into tears, or into the mad laughter of a woman who goes to traffic court and finds herself shunted off to the gallows.

“Why don’t we put ‘Mandy’ on and think about the kids?”

You want to scream, you want to yell, you want to kick your well-meaning friend in such a way as to make future children impossible. Instead, you sit there and listen to “Mandy.” And