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

Your friend meant well. You know it, even though you’re feeling even worse than you were before. He knows your taste in music, but he did for you what somebody, as it turns out, had done for him. And for him, it worked. So tonight he started with himself and extrapolated to you. He should at some point have asked, “Is this really the right time to try to broaden a friend’s musical horizons? Had someone brought me a bunch of operas in my hour of need, how would that have made me feel?” But he didn’t. He brought what he would have wanted.

Pretty trivial, no? Take it one notch higher and see what happens, though: a group of missionaries who know what’s best for you. There isn’t a man or woman among them who doesn’t consider Jesus the greatest gift that they’ve ever received, and they’re determined to make a gift of him to you, too, whether you really want him or not. The one thing that they themselves would want more than anything else on earth is to be saved, and now that they have been, they’d like to see you saved, too. Imagine that they run the government, imagine that anybody who turns down this gift will have to leave the country; her belongings will stay, but she will have to go. And she is you. The gift they have is so great and is going to make you so happy that they know that once you’ve agreed to accept it, you’ll thank them for having been so remorseless in their efforts to get you to take it. After all, you were unwilling. And now, if you’d just step onto the pyre…

It didn’t happen every day, it didn’t happen everywhere, but it still happened. Hillel’s idea wouldn’t allow it to happen.

VI

NOT ALL JEWS listen to Hillel any more than all Christians want to convert the rest of the world to Christianity. Hillel, however, claimed that his principle was also the basic principle of his religious faith, and later commentators, Rashi among them, have explained the negative turn of phrase by pointing out that while we’re massively capable of doing things that anger God, there’s little we can do to help Him. In Jewish terms, the idea of treating God the way we’d like to be treated ourselves is both heretical and silly. Rashi takes the word that is usually translated as “fellow” literally and understands it as “friend.” Our friend is God, and Rashi manages to get Hillel’s statement to mean that we should go out and learn what God hates and then avoid it.

Less pietistic opinion holds that the main thing that Hillel is saying here is that morality and ethics precede halacha. Yet the story about Hillel and the potential convert might not be quite as straightforward as it appears at first sight. The heathen who comes to Shammai is one of a number of heathens who ask Shammai to convert them and who end up being chased away. In this case, the man says that he will become Jewish if Shammai can teach him the whole Torah, which Shammai seems to understand as Torah in the sense of a scroll containing the five books of Moses, while he, the heathen, stands on one foot. Shammai, who is quoted as saying, “Receive everybody with a cheerful countenance” (Ovos 1:15), but is nowhere recorded as having said, “Do as I say, not as I do,” says nothing. Instead, he pushes the heathen away with the measuring rod that he’s holding.

The heathen then goes to Hillel, who appears to understand Torah in its wider, less confessionally oriented sense of “law, teaching, doctrine.” Hillel converts him and then utters his famous sentence. When Hillel characterizes it as “the whole of the Torah in its entirety”—think of Torah as a one-word version of Keats’s “all ye know on earth and all ye need to know”—there is certainly a dig at Shammai here, an implied command to the inquirer to forget about that man who was threatening you with his yardstick; the real Torah is about those things that have no limits to their measure, and he clearly got none of it from Shammai.

Note also that Hillel’s rule is fulfilled almost as soon as it is revealed. “Don’t do to others,” he tells the proselyte, and then, “Go, learn.” It’s a subtle but unmistakable way of letting the ex-heathen know that the interview is over. “How would you like it if people kept barging in on you with smart-ass questions? You wanted an answer, you got it. Now go do something with it.” Of course, Hillel doesn’t make a big deal about it, just sneaks it quietly by without ever ruffling the smile on his face.

Hillel is no Kris Kringle or Casper the Friendly Ghost, nor do you have to be one if you want to be a mentsh. There’s a difference between a good person and a Goody Two-shoes. A mentsh is accommodating, but is never a sap; a mentsh can get annoyed, but won’t become annoying. A mentsh is a real person who lives in a real world, where he spends far too much time dealing with shmucks while fighting not to become one himself. He’s smart, tough, worldly, and honest. Remember, Hillel was Hillel when he was still chopping wood and nobody was asking him for anything but kindling. Raymond Chandler’s description of his ideal detective—of Philip Marlowe, really—might be a bit idealized, but it certainly hits all the main points, except for the all-important fact that he can just as easily be she:

He must be a complete man and a common and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying. He must be the best man in his world and a