How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  Still, childhood plays a crucial role in the growth of the idea of a mentsh. The Yiddish mentsh seems to have evolved from its German forebear on the far side of the door to the kheyder, the traditional Jewish elementary school. The basic study technique in such schools still consists of reading a passage from the Bible and translating it from the original Hebrew into Yiddish: if we make allowance for the fact that the Bible is not really in English, the beginning of Genesis would come out as, “In the beginning, in onheyb, God created, az got hot bashafn, the heavens and the earth, di himlen un di erd.” Any necessary explanations are also added; if these come verbatim from traditional sources, those other sources are quoted and translated in their turn.

  Students soon learn that the Yiddish mentsh can represent at least four different biblical words that mean “man” or “person.” According to the proverb, “Odem is a mentsh and ish is a mentsh and enoysh is a mentsh and geyver is a mentsh” but, we’re warned, “a mentsh isn’t always a mentsh”—a human being isn’t always a mentsh. The first two Hebrew words, odem (which gives us “Adam”) and ish (think of the Is in Judas Iscariot) are the ones that really concern us. The third, enoysh (whence the English name Enos), is pretty much synonymous with odem (most commentators say that it places more emphasis on the lowliness of the human condition), while geyver is limited to males and can also mean “cock” or “rooster.”

  Odem refers to the entire human species, regardless of age or sex. So we find “from the first-born human [odem] to the first-born animal” (Exod. 13:15); and “whoever kills a human being [odem] will surely be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). An ish is an adult male; its female counterpart is isho. Although some meanings of ish depend on the presence of a penis (“husband,” for instance), others can easily be extended to either sex, since Hebrew uses the masculine form to refer to any indefinite person: “someone,” “anybody,” “nobody,” “somebody.” The “whoever” in the verse from Leviticus just quoted provides a fine example of this use of ish. No one has ever claimed that the use of ish as the subject here means that murder is forbidden only to males.

  There is an equally unambiguous example of this indefinite usage at the beginning of the second chapter of I Kings, when the dying King David charges his son, Solomon, and says:

  I am going the way of all the earth; be strong and be an ish. And keep the charge of the Lord your God to walk in His ways and keep His statutes, commandments, ordinances, and testimonies as they are written in the Torah of Moses, so that you may prosper in whatever you might do and wherever you might turn.

  (I KINGS 2:2–3)

  I have yet to see an English translation that doesn’t render ish here as “man,” yet nothing that Solomon has to do in order to be an ish is anything that a woman could not have done just as well, even in biblical times. Therefore David Kimhi, a prominent medieval exegete and grammarian, explains that ish in this verse means “being diligent, controlling yourself and subduing your baser impulses,” an interpretation echoed roughly seven hundred years later by Rabbi Meir Weisser. Weisser, better known as the Malbim, was chief rabbi of Bucharest for a short time, turned down a chance to be chief rabbi of New York, and spent a good deal of time explaining the differences in meaning and nuance between apparently synonymous Hebrew words. According to him, ish is often used “to designate generality, not gender”—everybody, not just certain somebodies—and can refer to someone who “exercises control.”

  Odem and ish crop up frequently in the Bible and Talmud, often in exactly the kind of moralizing passages that we’ve just seen: the mentshly ideal is not something that was confined to any particular segment or group in Yiddish-speaking Jewish society. The idea was the common property of all Yiddish-speakers, regardless of their religious or political attitudes. It originated in the basic curriculum that was common to the entire Yiddish-speaking world, then took on a life of its own outside of the classroom among grown-ups who had studied there as kids. These people were rich and poor, bright and dull, old and young, male and female, conservative and liberal. They might have suffered at the hands of people—Jewish and otherwise—who were not mentshn, but they never lost their respect for mentshn with whom they might disagree about everything except the necessity of being a mentsh.

  Although the idea of mentsh-hood is rooted in religious education, religious practice itself is far from crucial in determining whether or not a person is a mentsh. At one time, traditional observance was taken for granted if you were speaking about a Jew and, of course, dismissed out of hand if you were not. Otherwise, neither faith nor unbelief tends to matter very much, so long as the person in question is a mentsh in other respects. A venerable Yiddish proverb states, “Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew.” Equally venerable and even more pointed is, “A goat has a beard, too, and it’s still just a goat”: that is, better a mentsh who isn’t religious than a religious person who isn’t a mentsh. Since the days of the Prophets, we’ve been told that if you don’t observe the commandments that govern relations between people, God isn’t going to be too impressed by the care that you take in fulfilling more ceremonial obligations.

  An image of the day-to-day mentsh, who might or might not be rich, religious, or intelligent, is found in the book of Kings, where we are told that during the reign of Solomon, “Judah and Israel dwelt in safety, ish under his own vine and under his own fig tree” (1 Kings 5:5, in the Hebrew), that is, each person under their vine or fig tree: their own, not their neighbor’s; their own, with no eye to acquiring someone else’s and no thought of enlarging their vineyard or orchard at the expense of anyone else. Substitute “job” for “vine” and “bank account” for “fig tree” and you’ll see that it isn’t as easy to sit contentedly as the Bible makes it sound; a mentsh, in short, is someone who does his best to treat other people as well as he treats himself.

  III

  THERE IS AN old joke that sums up the traditional Jewish attitude to almost everything. In the version that was going around when I was a kid, a little boy runs up to his zeyde, his grandfather, and says excitedly, “Zeyde, zeyde! Did you hear? Sandy Koufax just shut out the Twins and won the World Series!”

  The grandfather looks at the boy with world-weary rue and says, “So? It’s good for the Jews?”

  This is internal satire, of course, Jew-on-Jew mockery of the Jewish preoccupation with survival and the occasional tendency to judge everything against narrow communal standards of “good for the Jews” or “bad for the Jews.” It’s a typical—and justified—concern on the part of members of any unpopular minority group, made into a cultural touchstone by people who were always an unpopular minority. I can still remember the first words that I heard from a grown-up when the news reached us that President Kennedy had been assassinated: “Please God, don’t let it be a Jew [who shot him].” I heard the same thing when George Wallace was shot. The fear in both cases was something entirely separate from the attitude of individual Jews to the people who’d been shot; there was a pervasive dread that the entire Jewish community would be held responsible, should the shooter turn out to be Jewish.

  The history of the Jews in the West has been defined by the Christian notion of collective guilt, and Jews remain sensitive to the idea that all of us will be blamed for the actions of any of us, or that one of us in a position of power will be accused of acting in the interests of the Jews instead of the nation. One of the more convoluted expressions of this attitude that I’ve encountered was the relief expressed after 9/11 by many Democrats whom I know that Joe Lieberman had not become vice president, after all; they were afraid that the presence of a Jew in so high an office—any Jew—would only have complicated an already horrible situation.

  When “bad for the Jews” so often equaled carnage or expulsion, “good for the Jews”—which almost nothing ever was—became an ironic rhetorical question that meant, “That’s all very nice, but I really don’t care.” For years now I’ve yearned to be a judge on some reality television show
, one of those in which people sing, dance, or do whatever else they do in order to become celebrities, just to make “So, it’s good for the Jews?” into a nationally popular catchphrase.

  Again, as an expression that satirizes the Jewish preoccupation with other Jews and with how we’re all perceived by the people around us, “good for the Jews” is a less serious version of the one unvarying and inflexible rule that characterized Ashkenazic Jewish society until very, very recently: it is incumbent on every member of the community to behave in such a way as to help maintain the community from within while doing nothing intentionally to increase the enmity from without—always to act in a way that is good for the Jews. While the latter part of this rule was sometimes taken as a warning against Jewing it up too much in public—nisht far di goyim, “not in front of the gentiles,” has been a byword for a very long time and has certainly been used by less tolerant members of the Jewish community to promote a particularly small-minded, petit bourgeois, Grundyish version of our culture—the former part helps to explain the development of mentsh-hood as a community ideal.

  The schools in which mentsh was used to translate the Hebrew words mentioned above were part of a society that operated as a countercultural parallel to the larger Christian society around it. They were there to educate their students for adversity, to impart not only the facts and ritual knowledge necessary for the proper practice of Judaism, but also a notion of the kind of life to which acting on this knowledge was supposed to lead. A society in a near-constant state of macro-emergency had to be sure that it was at least able to cope with the micro-emergencies that constitute so large a part of any individual life.

  One of the most important ways in which it did so was to emphasize history in a way that ignored the passage of time and made every contemporary Jew a participant in the mythic events that brought the nation into being. Every participant at every Passover seder for a good couple of millennia now has read a quotation from the Mishna and the rabbinic commentary that accompanies it:

  In every generation, a mentsh [odem in Hebrew] is obliged to see himself as if he, too, had come out of Egypt. As it is said: “And you shall tell your son on that day, ‘This [the seven days of eating matzoh] is because of what the Lord did for me when I left Egypt’ [Exod. 13:8].”

  (PESOKHIM 10:5)

  The Holy One, Blessed Be He, not only delivered our ancestors from Egypt, but He also delivered us with them, as it says: “In order to bring us, to give us the land that He had promised to our ancestors” [Deut. 6:23] [my emphasis].

  As if our current suffering weren’t enough, we’re supposed to internalize the torments of our forebears and suffer them, too. And why? Because one day, we believe, the suffering will stop and everything will be hunky-dory, and as long as we continue to think of ourselves as escaped slaves who are really here only by the grace of God, we’ll be damned sure never to treat others the way that others might have treated us. We shouldn’t take such prosperity as we have for granted, nor should we complain too much about our current plight, whatever it might be—we who have gone out of Egypt have lived through plenty worse and should never forget it. We should also remember that it was mercy that got us out of there, not any particular merits of our own.

  So strong is this latter feeling that the Bible commands the Jewish people to respect their enemies and erstwhile oppressors, which could explain why so many Jewish Community Center parking lots are full of BMWs and Audis: “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were an alien in his land” (Deut. 23:8). Badly as they might have acted, their bad behavior is not allowed to negate their good deeds in any way. As Rashi, whose eleventh-century commentary is still the inevitable accompaniment to any kheyder-level reading of the Bible, says, “Do not abhor an Edomite—completely, even though you might be justified in abhorring him because he came to greet you with a sword [see Numbers, chapter 20]. Do not abhor an Egyptian—entirely, even though they threw your male children into the river. And why not abhor them? They gave you lodging in your time of need.”

  We are commanded to take the merits of our enemies into consideration and to give credit even to those whose virtues we would prefer to ignore. You don’t have to like them, but you have to admit that you owe them. The principle is given more general application in the Talmud, which quotes the proverb, “Do not throw a rock into a well from which you have drunk,” in connection with this biblical verse (Bovo Kamo 92b).

  This sort of consideration for others, the constant reminder that they and their needs are just as real as you and yours, lies at the very root of the way in which Jewish people are supposed to deal with the peculiar burdens placed upon them by their covenant with the Lord. Too many people are looking for the easy way out, for a way to fulfill the commandments with the least possible amount of effort. But that isn’t the way that it’s supposed to be:

  Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, Where does Scripture let us know that a mentsh [odem] is not supposed to say, “I have no desire to wear linen mixed with wool; I have no desire to eat pork; I have no desire to have forbidden sexual relations,” but should say instead, “I want to do all these things, but what can I do when my Father in Heaven has ruled otherwise?” We know so because it is implied in the verse, “I have separated you from the peoples, so that you might be mine” (Lev. 20:26); that is, one separates oneself from transgression and accepts the yoke of heaven.

  (SIFRA, KEDOSHIM 9:12)

  It’s exactly what’s going on with the Egyptians in the biblical quotation: you want to hate them, but heaven or your conscience tells you that you have to do otherwise. The only way that you’re going to know what that heavenly voice is trying to tell you is to go to school and learn what the Torah tells us.

  IV

  THE REST OF this book is designed to provide the relevant parts of that education both for Jewish people who might not have received old-style, ethically centered instruction in Judaism and for people who aren’t Jewish at all but are interested in learning new techniques for making everybody’s lives a little bit better. We need to have a look at a couple of more aspects of traditional Jewish society, though, in order to be able to understand that education in context and see how and why it developed into something of universal utility and application.

  As everybody knows, the Jews have no pope. There is no synod or council, no official hierarchy of rabbis that can make rulings that are binding on all Jews everywhere. There has been no Sanhedrin, no Jewish Supreme Court, for seventeen hundred years, and the Elders of Zion are merely an anti-Semitic wet dream. The truth is that if enough people oppose all rabbis on a given issue, the people are going to win every time. Such beloved Jewish customs as saying Kaddish in memory of a departed relative or waving a chicken around your head three times on the eve of Yom Kippur met with considerable rabbinic opposition at different times and places, yet are accepted today in even the most orthodox circles, which are where most of the chicken-swinging takes place. Judaism is based on consensus rather than decree, and as such has historically tended to follow the middle path between extremes of opinion.

  Take the mezuzah, for example, the case holding a small scroll of biblical passages that is affixed to so many Jewish doorposts. In discussing whether it is to be hung horizontally or vertically, Moses Isserles, author of those parts of the Shulkhan Arukh, the authoritative code of Jewish law, that set the rules for Ashkenazic (rather than Sephardic) Jews, says explicitly:

  The truly punctilious follow both opinions by placing it [the mezuzah] on a diagonal slant.

  (SHULKHAN ARUKH, YOREH DEAH 289:4)

  The earlier authorities who argued for a strictly horizontal or strictly vertical orientation are outside in the cold together, while we punctilious Ashkenazim warm ourselves by the fire of a compromise that satisfies none of the original disputants but has been sanctified by the simple passage of time.

  Think of life as a birthday party for your younger brother or sister. As a
four-year-old, you’re young enough to get some kind of consolation present, if only to keep you from getting too jealous, but you still don’t get the party that you’d like to have for yourself. Your kid brother or sister gets a party and presents, but they’re still upset that you, whose birthday it most emphatically is not, get anything at all, and they are insisting that any presents go to them, the birthday kid. Your parents point out that neither of you has any reason to whine: you both have more than you did before the party, and only a baby expects 100 percent.

  Normative Judaism has no place for babies. Until such time as they became able to deliver the balance of power in Israeli elections, zealots and ideologues were stringently ignored; the community as a whole was familiar enough with Jewish history to know that zealots and ideologues were responsible for the loss of our country and our apparently endless exile. Post-Temple Judaism is therefore uniquely accommodating, so much so that it has turned the passive-aggressive compromise into a veritable art form. It isn’t that everybody gets what they want, it’s that nobody gets what they want, but everyone doesn’t get it in roughly equal measure.

  The Talmud speaks quite openly about the difference between such biblical regulations as the prohibition against pork, which are never going to change, and those of a more purely social nature that could tear a society apart if applied, and finds plenty of room for fine-tuning the latter. So, in a well-known passage that is frequently quoted by anti-Semites bent on proving that the Talmud is the source of all evil, we are told that “Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said, ‘Money makes bastards kosher’” (Kiddushin 71a). “Bastards” (mamzeyrim in the original) has nothing to do with birth outside of wedlock; it is a legal term used to describe children born of incestuous or adulterous unions who are, strictly speaking, allowed to marry only converts or other bastards. Rabbi Joshua is talking about wealthy mamzeyrim whose money has allowed them to marry into “pure” families, despite the hereditary defect that they are supposed to be carrying. Rashi, who is the foremost commentator on the Talmud as well as the Bible, says, “They have been absorbed into the larger community on account of their wealth, which has allowed them to be ‘purified’ in the sense that in future the Lord will no longer separate them from the mainstream community because too many mainstream families will have attached themselves to them.”