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

or a field that’s just been plowed and you could die? Vos far a meshigas, what kind of meshugass, is that? What happens if you look at a tree in a field that’s just been plowed, and appreciate the entire scene? Will you die slower? Or sooner? And if you keep your eyes closed and hire a little child to lead you, are you gonna live forever?

If we recall that Torah scrolls tended not to be owned by individuals and that the so-called Oral Law (a term that seems to have been introduced by our old friend Hillel) really was oral for a very long time, that is, was not written down at all, the idea of studying while walking around and repeating things to yourself as if you were learning a part in a play does not sound quite so outlandish. Trees, fields, wistful vistas become no more than the wallpaper of the world: pleasant, necessary even, but background, nothing but background. Whatever you’re reviewing in your mind acts like Valdesolo and DeSteno’s string of numbers; it takes up just enough of your attention to keep you from injecting yourself into the scene before you. If, however, you drop the cognitive load that you’ve been shlepping along with you and suddenly project yourself (and your self) back into the surroundings, in which you now have an interest, you’ve reverted to a frame of mind in which you’re happy to make excuses for yourself that you would never allow for anyone else.

Up until surprisingly recently, books were expensive and not always easy to come by, and you couldn’t always count on being able to get hold of the one you needed when you needed it. Considerably more emphasis was therefore placed on memorization than is fashionable today; as recently as 1939, the ability to recite two hundred folios (four hundred very large pages) of Talmud from memory (and prove that you understood them) was the prerequisite for the entrance examinations for Chachmei Lublin, the Lublin yeshiva often characterized as the Harvard of the prewar yeshiva world. Those who couldn’t muster the requisite four hundred pages from memory weren’t even eligible to fail. I have been told that students admitted to the yeshiva memorized a further folio every day. While four hundred pages is an exceptional amount, the principle here is the same as it is in elementary school: you can’t get rid of this stuff—and God knows, generations of ex-yeshiva boys have tried. Twenty-four hours a day, it never leaves your mind, even if it isn’t always coming out of your mouth—and traditional study still has a very strong oral component.

It isn’t like this stuff is easy to understand; there’s a lot of cognitive constraint going on there. You can’t study twenty-four hours a day, but you can spend enough time thinking about something that is not you, that might have no direct bearing on your life—as we mentioned earlier, much of the Bible is about how to build tabernacles and offer sacrifices that none of us is ever going to see—to be able to step back and see your own behavior for what it really is. The daily study preferred by traditional Judaism is more than a means of acquiring information or strengthening your sense of belonging to the group; it serves as a constraint against cutting yourself any more slack than is cut for anybody else. It makes you aware of the all-important fact that refusing to make exceptions—especially for yourself or the members of your own little group—is the basis of all morality.

Hillel’s dictum strengthens this anti-exceptionalism by forcing you to judge everyone else by the standards you’d use for yourself. The leniency you’d grant yourself is automatically extended to others because you are forced to treat them just as you’d treat yourself. True, the use of the cognitive constraint only affects the accuracy and honesty of the way in which you assess your behavior, rather than the behavior itself, but the ability to remove the spectacles of self-interest and see your behavior for what it really is, is the first step to change. All education can thus be used as an occasion for mentsh-hood, as a path up from shmuckery.

IX

IF YOU FIND yourself saying, “I sure acted like a shmuck” often enough, you might eventually be moved to do something about it. But how often do you have to tell yourself what a shmuck you’ve been before you stop being one? How much time might elapse between that first tentative realization that you’re not really the life of the party, the office clown, Hugh Hefner Jr., or the Lord Jehovah’s security guard, and a decision to do something about it that doesn’t consist of trying even harder?

Recognizing the fact that you are a shmuck and learning how to stop being one if you’ve never been prodded by memories of Hebrew school or heard of any of the people mentioned in these pages, are what Harold Ramis’s film, Groundhog Day, is all about. I can’t improve on Roger Ebert’s summary:

The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.

Watching the movie, we see how Phil Connors, a shmuck of a TV weatherman played by Bill Murray, gradually begins the learning that Ebert mentions. It is never explained why he is stuck so tightly in February 2 that he can kill himself one day and then wake up on the morning of the same day on which he killed himself and live it all over again. He can live or die as he chooses, but he’ll be waking up at 6 A.M.,