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

waking up to the same damned day or aspects of his unsuccessful campaign to get into Rita’s pants. Eventually, though, his ulterior motives recede and then vanish altogether, and he is left with the skills that he had to teach himself in order to look like the kind of man that Rita would want. Instead of messing with people because he can, instead of looking for opportunities to get away with things, Phil now begins to seek out opportunities to give away the things that the people around him need: help, consideration, advice, even money.

Connors is still doing things because he can, but the “because” has been redirected from himself to others, and has taken on a new meaning. Where “Because I can” used to be the little devil that sits on Tom Hulce’s shoulder at the party in Animal House (also co-written by Harold Ramis) and tells him to “Fuck [the girl who’s passed out], fuck her brains out,” it now means Elwood P. Dowd inviting strangers to join him and Harvey, the six-foot-three invisible rabbit, for martinis at Charlie’s Place. Instead of “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want,” “Because I can” has come to mean, “What can I do to help you?”

For the first three-quarters of the movie, when Phil does nothing except what he feels like—get drunk, get laid, try to commit suicide without coming back to life a few hours later—none of his actions appears to have any consequence: he wakes up at 6 A.M. on Groundhog Day no matter how high a cliff he plunged from the day before or how many bullets tore through his body. He lacks the insight to see that he could make things less tedious and instead acts like a kid who doesn’t want to wash because he’s only going to get dirty all over again.

And nothing would have changed, he might well have been stuck that way forever, had Rita not led him to see his predicament as an opportunity:

Sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes. One to be a great journalist. One to, I don’t know, go back to school, study art, or auto mechanics. One just to take care of all the busywork, you know, pay the bills, get my car tuned up. One to be the wild woman of Borneo. One to be Mother Teresa. Maybe it’s not a curse, Phil. It all just depends on how you look at it.

The next February 2, Phil brings her and the cameraman coffee, starts taking music lessons, begins to do something. Rita’s wish list is all about herself, but once Phil adapts it to himself, it leads him farther and farther out of himself, deeper and deeper into the lives of other people. And all of them, Phil and the others, start to look like they might be happy. Or happier than they were. Thinking about others, really thinking about them and not just pretending, seems to be the best way of advancing yourself and getting what you want. Not only does everybody win, but you save yourself the trouble of ever having to fabricate another excuse for letting somebody down.

“A mitsve,” my mother would have told me, “firt tsi a mitsve, one good deed leads to another good deed, as one transgression does to the next.” I don’t know if she knew that she was quoting Ovos when she said this or if it’s just something that she thought she’d always known, but one good turn certainly deserves another in any language. Phil Connors ends up doing a lot of things for a lot of people and not only gets himself out of a horrible rut by doing so, but he manages to get all the stuff that he wanted for himself by doing things for others. Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they’ll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That’s the way to show them. That’s how a mentsh gets revenge.

Notes

INTRODUCTION:Don’t Be a Shmuck

“I’ve got this thing”: “Excerpts Paint a Sordid Picture,” The Globe and Mail, December 10, 2008, p. A14.

ONE:What’s a Shmuck?

“A combination of fool”: Max Weinreich, Di Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Shprakh, vol. 4, p. 318.

“The real exile of Israel”: Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 2, p. 315.

“There was once a prince”: A. J. Heschel, Kotsk: In Gerangl far Emesdikayt, pp. 206–7.

TWO: What’s a Mentsh?

“Having been told of a man who died”: Y. K. Kadish, Siakh Sarfey Koydesh, vol. 2, p. 27.

“If a boy is Bar Mitzvah”: Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl, p. 352.

“The professional rabbi”: I. A. Agus, “Rabbinic Scholarship in Northern Europe,” in Cecil Roth, ed., The Dark Ages: Jews in Christian Europe, 711–1096, pp. 189–90.

“A Iew wolde noght se”: William Langland, Will’s visions of Piers Plowman, do-well, do-better, and do-best /Piers the Plowman, George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., passus ix, 84–90.

THREE: Extending the Shmuck

“Stiffed us…for the helicopter bill”: http://www.thirteen.org/sci-enceandnature/ethics-criminals-and-mt-everest-panel-discussion, retrieved October 30, 2008.

FOUR: What a Mentsh Does

“Rabbi Leib Dimimles”: Louis I. Newman, The Hasidic Anthology, p. 127.

Yekhiel-Meir of Gostynin: Y. K. Kadish, Siakh Sarfey Koydesh, vol. 2, p. 103.

A better Hasidic story: Ibid., p. 104.

Almost as sartorial: Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 1, p. 128.

“Justice, justice”:Kadish, Siakh Sarfey Koydesh, vol. 1, p. 129.

“His wife was meeting him”:The Apartment, screenplay on IMDB, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Apartment,-The.html.

“DR. DREYFUSS: I don’t know”: Ibid. I’ve omitted stage directions, preserved original spelling of mentsh, and the typo in its second occurrence.

“[The Baal Shem Tov]”: A. J. Heschel, Kotsk: In Gerangl far Emesdikayt, p. 37.

“Derekh erets, good manners”: Y. Y. Artan, Sefer Emes ve-Emunoh, p. 44.

“There is a