How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  How to Be a Mentsh

  (and Not a Shmuck)

  Michael Wex

  In memory of my mother

  Contents

  A Note on Spelling and Terminology, with a Prologue to Any Further Kvetching

  Introduction: Don’t Be a Shmuck

  One What’s a Shmuck?

  Two What’s a Mentsh?

  Three Extending the Shmuck

  Four What a Mentsh Does

  Five How to Do It Like a Mentsh

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Michael Wex

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Note on Spelling and Terminology, with a Prologue to Any Further Kvetching

  I

  MANY PEOPLE READING this sentence have already looked at the cover of this book and snorted derisively. “Ach, du lieber! I knew it all along. The kvetch-guy, the big expert, the Grand Poobah of Yiddish, should give Dan Quayle a call and ask for lessons in spelling. Mentsh, my eye. Everyone knows that the word is spelled mensch.”

  And if we were all speaking German today, it would be. A bagel and schmeer would be spelled Begel und Schmier, lox would be Lachs, and we’d think of all three as wholesome Teutonic delicacies straight from the Vaterland—because a Mensch, one of a certain age, at least, would be a solid citizen whose service in the Wehrmacht or on the home front had helped Germany conquer the world. The kind of mentsh described in this book would probably be a thing of the past; and I, were I lucky enough to be alive, might have written a book—as underground as any bestseller can be—about a language that was born to quetsch.

  Let’s not belabor the obvious, then: Yiddish and German are two separate and very different languages that use different alphabets and reflect wholly different ways of thinking. If you’re worried about what mentsh is really supposed to look like, imagine a cover that reads:

  How to Be a and Not a

  The authentic Yiddish mentsh has no truck with any ABCs. The best we can try to do is come up with a substitute as close to the original in sound and meaning as possible. Unlike the German Mensch, the Yiddish mentsh has a definite t-sound between the n and the sh; unlike the German, it isn’t German, though it could certainly be described as Germanic. The Yiddish mentsh sounds no more like Mensch than the German ist sounds like the English is. Where is and ist mean the same thing, though, we’ll see over the course of this book that the Yiddish mentsh differs from Mensch even more in meaning than in spelling or pronunciation.

  The Latin-alphabet mentsh is also an internationalism, the transliteration sanctioned by YIVO, the Académie Française of the Yiddish-speaking world, for use in all languages that employ the Latin alphabet. To use Mensch in its stead is to deny Yiddish-speakers the right to ensure that their language is represented with a maximum of accuracy in other languages. Mentsh was even used instead of Mensch in Yiddish transliterated in Germany before World War II, and people who can get their heads around the idea that Beijing renders the name of the Chinese capital more accurately than Peking shouldn’t have any problem with mentsh.

  The second Yiddish word in the title presents no such trouble; it isn’t really German at all and has nothing to with the German Schmuck, which means “jewelry.” While Yiddishists might have preferred to see shmuk instead of shmuck, I felt in this instance that the latter spelling came closer to satisfying everybody—my favorite way of satisfying nobody (see Chapter 2)—especially because shmuck is used a bit differently in this book from the way it is used in Yiddish. Although mentsh can be used of both men and women in Yiddish, the Yiddish shmuck applies only to males. On the basis of the same principle that allows etiquette, the French for “label” or “price tag,” to mean nothing but “good manners” in English, I have extended the reach of shmuck in English to cover people of either sex who don’t know how to behave. One need only compare the French con—a “c-word” that also means jerk of either sex—to see the same principle at work on the other side of the anatomical divide.

  In the same spirit, shmek, the correct Yiddish plural of shmuck, is used interchangeably with shmucks, a highly anglicized version of the same idea.

  II

  SOME TERMS THAT come up fairly often in the book might not be immediately familiar to people who have not attended a Jewish day school. The Talmud, for instance, consists of two sections. The earlier one, completed around 200 C.E., is called the Mishna. The Mishna was compiled in Hebrew and consists, for the most part, of attempts to organize and interpret the practical applications of the Bible’s commandments. The part known as either the Gemara or the Talmud (the latter name has come to be used for the whole collection) was finished about three hundred years after the Mishna. It is mostly in Aramaic and consists, loosely speaking, of commentary on the Mishna. There are two different Talmuds, compiled in two different places and containing much divergent material. These are commonly known as the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Historically, the Babylonian has been the more important. In the few citations to the Jerusalem Talmud in this text, the word Yerushalmi precedes the name of the tractate from which the quotation has been drawn.

  The Talmud became essential to Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. The destruction of the Temple and the accompanying loss of Jewish political autonomy mark the beginning of Judaism as we know it, a religion characterized by exile and dislocation. Until the year 70, Jewish practice revolved around offering sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud and its way of thinking helped to change a religion focused on a specific location into one that can be taken anywhere with no loss of intensity or authenticity. As I have written elsewhere, “Acceptance of Talmudic authority marks the real difference between Jews and the rest of the world.”

  Midrash is a collective designation for various types of homiletic interpretation of the Bible. Although the main midrashic collections were compiled during the Middle Ages, the material contained in these collections is often of considerably greater antiquity.

  Rashi is the acronym by which Rabbi Shlomo Yitskhoki (died 1104) is known. He is the author of the best-known and most influential commentaries on both the Bible and Talmud, commentaries that are printed alongside the text of both works and studied as a virtual part of them in traditional religious schools.

  The Shulkhan Arukh (“The Set Table”) is the title of a legal code by Rabbi Joseph Karo (died 1545) that has become authoritative for Orthodox Jews of every stripe. It serves as the basic rule book of halacha, as Jewish law is called in Hebrew.

  Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

  Introduction:

  Don’t Be a Shmuck

  THIS IS A book about happiness, your own and that of others. It’s a book about living decently without preaching about it or turning into a Goody Two-shoes like Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. It is based on an idea of what it means to be fully human, an idea developed by people who have been labeled as subhuman on more than one occasion. It’s about how to care for yourself by thinking about others.

  It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, what religion you follow, or if you follow any religion at all. The principles outlined in this book will work for anyone who makes the effort to put them into practice, and as we’ll see, the most important one of all originates in a piece of advice that a rabbi gave to a gentile. Although some of the explanations of Jewish tradition that follow might sound a little esoteric or out of the way, they’re here to show how theory was turned into practice. I first learned the basic ideas treated here at home and hear
d most of them from my mother, who didn’t know one page of Talmud from the next, but had pretty clear ideas about what it means to be a mentsh. The same ideas, often expressed in the form of proverbs, have also been passed down by millions of other Jewish mothers over the course of many centuries.

  The saying that I probably heard most often was, “It’s never too late to die or to get married.” My mother, who lived to be forty-eight, didn’t have much to say about dying, but getting married was a whole other matter. How is getting married like dying? It happens every day, she would explain, but isn’t as easy as it looks. If you do it right, getting married means deliberately putting yourself into a position in which it becomes impossible for you to think of yourself as the center of your world, as more important than somebody else, ever again. As far as she and millions of other Jewish parents across the generations were concerned, getting married is a kind of shorthand for growing up and assuming responsibility, for voluntarily relinquishing the comfortable but ultimately sterile self-absorption that only children, who don’t have to look out for themselves, and the single, who look out for nobody but themselves, can really afford to maintain. As the movie version of Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn has it:

  LEE J. COBB: You’re a bum.

  FRANK SINATRA: Why am I a bum, Dad?

  LJC: Are you married?

  FS: No.

  LJC: Then you’re a bum.

  This is why the Yiddish-speaking world refers to unmarried men and women, no matter how old they might be, by terms that also mean “adolescent” or “youth”—someone not quite grown-up. They might have matured physically, but they haven’t taken the final step into maturity: they’re bums.

  When a Yiddish-speaker says that it’s never too late to get married, they’re saying that it’s never too late to learn that the only thing that’s really special about you is the ability to set your own self aside once in a while, to make somebody else more special than you are. “It’s never too late to get married” means that it’s never too late to learn consideration, the art of thinking about others because they’re worthy of being thought about. If it’s never too late, you’ve always got a chance to wise up and become a mentsh, whether you actually get married or not.

  Of course, the longer you leave it, the harder it gets and the less likely it becomes. That’s where becoming a mentsh differs from dropping dead. There are people out there, millions of them, who act as if they still believe everything that their mothers told them in the first six months of their lives: they’re the nicest, most beautiful, most promising and intelligent bags of flesh ever to walk the earth, and anybody who can’t see it is foolish or wicked—and certainly jealous. Who could dislike someone to whom Jesus himself would have been sending daily Facebook friend-requests, had his Father in Heaven only hearkened to his pleas to be born a couple of millennia later, just so Mary could get him a laptop for Chanukah (since Christmas wouldn’t be such a big thing yet), and lonesome baby Jesus could log on and find that one special person whom he knows, really knows to be the real thing—the smartest, nicest, most beautiful and talented of all his little sunbeams—and ask to be their Facebook pal, and when they finally pay attention and answer and write on his wall, let’s just say that Jesus learns the meaning of Xmas at last.

  There are people, lots of people, who act as if they’re Jesus’s Christmas present and resent anyone who dares to disagree. You don’t have to look too far to find them. The number of people and institutions destroyed by Bernard Madoff gets bigger by the day; the economy has tanked as a result of unrestrained greed on Wall Street and an unrestrained desire on Main Street to get something—especially a house—for what looked to a sap like nothing.

  Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor whose attempt to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat is being reported on the radio as I write this paragraph, is practically a poster boy for the attitude that I’m trying to describe. “I’ve got this thing,” he said—the FBI has him on tape—“and it’s fucking golden. And, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not going to do it.”

  Governor Blagojevich is just following the advice of so many “be as rich as you want” gurus. He’s thinking outside the usual governmental envelope, and is hardly the only guy in contemporary America who’s trying to monetize the resources at his disposal. The merchandise might not be typical, but his attitude is hardly unusual: as a society, as a culture, we seem to have lost sight of the difference between getting our due and getting our way. At one level or another, whether it’s got to do with basic manners, corporate greed, or good old-fashioned political corruption, this confusion seems to lie at the root of the all too common “because I could” justification for harmful and stupid things popularized by Bill Clinton.

  “Because I could” is “fuck you” in disguise. We might think that we’re self-actualizing, when we are really self-centered and mean, with so powerful a sense of entitlement to whatever we think should be ours—whether it’s something we already have or something we want—that there’s no room for anyone to get in our way. We want it, we’re going to get it; and if it’s at someone else’s expense, who cares? Just as long as they’re somebody else. We’ve been in a moral coma for too long now, one that sounds as if it could have been inspired by the old vernacular translation of per ardua ad astra, the motto of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Latin means “through hardships to the stars,” but the whole country knew that it really meant, “Fuck you, Jack, I’m fireproof.”

  “Consequences are for other people.” Anybody might have said so; a shmuck is someone who really believes it, and usually does so unconsciously.

  This is a book about how to keep yourself from believing that you’re somebody special. It’s about how not to be a shmuck.

  ONE

  What’s a Shmuck?

  I

  MY MOTHER NEVER told me anything about shmek, as more than one shmuck is called in Yiddish. She never uttered the word in my presence, not in English and certainly not in Yiddish, and might never have said it in her life. It wouldn’t have been ladylike; it wouldn’t even have been polite. Although most people who speak English are now familiar with the word, those who don’t know any Yiddish are often unaware of its literal meaning. English has borrowed shmuck’s extended meanings of “jerk, fool, metaphorical asshole and inconsiderate idiot who has no idea of the effect that he has on others” directly from Yiddish, but has left the original meaning, the one that generated all these other associations, so far behind that English-speakers are often shocked to discover that shmuck is one of the “dirtiest” words in Yiddish, the sort of thing that could make your mother try to wash your mouth out with soap, even if you’re fifty years old when you say it. If you think of the power that fuck used to have in polite conversation, how it could convey both emphasis and offense, you’ll have some idea of the force that shmuck still retains in Yiddish.

  Its primary meaning in Yiddish is “penis,” but just as prick, dick, pecker, whang, and pork-sword frequently reach beyond simple anatomy and into the realm of character analysis, so does shmuck. Unlike any of these English terms, though, or even such straightforward designations as tallywhacker or man-meat, shmuck started out as something cute and funny rather than big and potentially bothersome. It has its roots in the nursery, in little boys’ discovery of themselves and the world around them, and began not as shmuck, the dirty word, but as shmekele—“shmucklet”—something much smaller than a shmuck, not as fully developed, and much more socially acceptable; a peashooter instead of a pistol.

  Shmekele itself seems to have started out as shtekele, “little stick,” the euphemism used by toddlers and their baby-talking parents for a little boy’s penis. Shtekele is a diminutive form of the now obsolete shtok, which means “stick” or “club,” and must also have referred to a full-grown male member (compare the difference between a big, thick cigar and its diminutive, cigarette); if a shtok is a walking stick, the shtekl, in this usage, becomes something
of a candy cane.

  It isn’t entirely a matter of size, though. Somebody must have noticed that the little stick wasn’t always as rigid as a stick is supposed to be—technically speaking, only the infantile erection is a shtekele—so the well-known shm prefix was substituted for the first few consonants, as if to say, “Shtekele, shmekele! Just look at it now. We know it’s not really a cute little stick, so why don’t we call it a shmute little shmick.”

  The shm prefix is one of the great Yiddish contributions to the English language. It can take anything, no matter how frightening, and make it innocuous, unthreatening, unimportant—quite a significant trick for victims of constant persecution. If you can’t defeat an enemy or deal with a threat, the least you can do is to turn it into a joke:

  MR. COHEN: Hello, Mr. Levy. How’s your wife these days?

  MR. LEVY: Freg nisht, don’t ask. She was just diagnosed with cancer.

  MR. COHEN: Cancer, shmancer, abi gezunt, as long as she’s healthy.

  This surprisingly popular old joke is still circulating in many versions, all of which turn on the reaction of Cohen, a know-it-all who isn’t really listening and doesn’t really care about the welfare of Levy’s wife. He is so quick to throw in a shm in order to cut Levy’s troubles down to their proper size—smaller than Cohen’s, no matter how big they might look to Levy—so quick to come out with the standard kvetch-squelcher abi gezunt, “as long as you’re healthy,” that he misses the all too painful fact that this time it’s something serious.