How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  In other words, reality wins every time. When the consensus of reasonable people opposes a prescribed mode of behavior, the prescription is adjusted accordingly. Indeed, it is forbidden to pass any law or decree that is certain not to be observed (Bovo Kamo 79b); instituting such a law will only bring about disrespect for the lawmakers, whose more reasonable rulings will end up being ignored as well, and turn fundamentally law-abiding people into sinners. Even the most teetotaling of rabbis would have advised against Prohibition.

  V

  IN SUCH A system, where the fait accompli is ultimately more powerful than any argument, care has to be taken about which faits become accomplis and the way in which they become so. Traditional Jewish society operated on the basis of a number of shared assumptions and beliefs, and what we now think of as religious behavior was as much a sign of ethnicity—of where you belonged—as anything else; men got up in the morning, put on prayer shawls and phylacteries, and recited the morning prayers, not because they were religious but because they were Jews and that’s what Jewish men do in the morning. Think of Jewish life as a game of sandlot baseball with the Shulkhan Arukh as the rule book. There’s no real umpire, no ref of any kind, because everybody is assumed to know how to play. Local traditions, lot-specific variants of the standard rules, are explained as the progress of the game demands, and woe to any neighborhood kid who tries to sneak by to go to the library or the movies; once the game gets going, they have no choice but to play.

  Being Jewish in the traditional society of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe was a twenty-four-hour-a-day affair, something that determined every aspect of your life. The various codes of Jewish law, culminating in the Shulkhan Arukh, ran your life, and their rules extend far beyond the realm of ritual. The first four chapters of the Shulkhan Arukh are called: The Law of Getting Up in the Morning; The Law of Getting Dressed; Behavior in the Washroom; Laws of Hand-washing. The Shulkhan Arukh tells you how to get out of bed; how to put on your clothes; how to go to the toilet; how, when, and where to have sex; who not to have it with; and many other things that outsiders might consider either inconsequential or matters of strictly individual preference.

  Most of the Jews who performed these activities in strict accordance with the book’s demands had probably never seen a copy and would not have been able to understand it if they had. These practices were passed along as the natural way of doing things, something you learned as a kid and continued to do for the rest of your life, teaching them to your own children in turn, and so on down the generations. The most you were likely to know was that if the Shulkhan Arukh doesn’t tell you how to do what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

  The motive underlying this apparent mania for codifying even the minutest details of human behavior, the real purpose of all this regimentation, is a desire—an obsession, really—to make every conceivable activity that isn’t sinful or criminal into something more than itself, to invest it with meaning and purpose beyond its own performance and confer dignity even on something as lowly as taking a crap. The blessing that accompanies this activity explains how people have been created with “holes upon holes and orifices upon orifices,” and that “if one of these were to rupture or another to be stopped, it would be impossible to remain alive and stand before [God] for even a single hour,” that is, we couldn’t continue to be ourselves if the Lord were to deregulate our physical functions. Everybody knows this, but a Jew was never allowed to forget it. Jews have always known that other people don’t approach all of these activities in a similar spirit, but such lack of knowledge in no way detracts from the essentially meaningful nature of the activity itself.

  Pausing to make a bit of a fuss over everything—what Yiddish calls a tsimmes—also helps to remind us that there are more important things than our own immediate needs or petty desires. The discipline of having to make a short blessing before you eat and a very long one afterward, no matter how hungry you are or how much of a rush you’re in to get back to work, reminds you that you are not the center of the universe and that the universe, in turn, does not exist solely to satisfy your desires.

  Classical Jewish culture is all about weighing and measuring, putting things in their proper places in proper proportions. As a religion based on mitzvahs—commandments that prohibit some activities and make others obligatory—Judaism is above all a religion of action, of performance and activity. While the outside world might look at being Jewish as a state of being—something that you are—the internal attitude of the culture is somewhat different.

  From the Jewish point of view—the one that matters—being Jewish is a matter of how you think and what you do. Being born to a Jewish mother or converting anytime thereafter is simply the admission ticket to a lifelong party in which the dancing never stops. Judaism is something that you do all the time, and it draws virtually every human activity into the same vortex of permission and prohibition. So the daily prayer service opens with a couple of statements adapted from the Talmud that tell us what we’re allowed to do ad libitum, as much as we want to, and also lets us know which commandments will help us heap up treasure in heaven even though they might not always seem to be doing us much good on earth:

  These are things to which no limit has been set: the size of the corner parts of fields that are left open for the poor; that of the offering of first-fruits to be brought to the Temple; the number of times one can go to the Temple during the year; the amount of charity and other good deeds for which neither repayment nor recompense is sought; and the study of the Torah.

  These are things whose fruits are eaten in this world, even while their dividends are paid in the next. And they are as follows: honoring your father and mother; giving charity and performing similar beneficent acts; getting to the synagogue early both morning and evening; hospitality; visiting the sick; providing for [poor] brides; escorting the dead to burial; devotion in prayer; bringing peace between a person and his fellow and between man and wife—and the study of Torah is equal to them all.

  (PEAH 1:1; SHABBOS 127A)

  Aside from the study of Torah and getting to the synagogue on time, the only strictly ritual activities mentioned depend on the existence of the Temple and have not been performed by anybody for the last couple of thousand years. All the others are the kinds of apparently colorless good deeds that would appear not to need any support or authorization from a canonical text. You don’t need to have heard of the Ten Commandments to treat your parents well, nor do you need to own a pair of phylacteries to make a charitable donation. So what are these doing here? Why doesn’t the text mention things like eating kosher food, keeping the Sabbath, circumcising male babies, and all the other things for which Jews are so well known?

  The answer, strange as it sounds, is because these instructions aren’t really intended for individuals—or, at least, not for isolated individuals. Although Judaism is all about what you do, it’s also about who you do it with. It is a stubbornly communal religion that revolves in large part around the idea of having nine other Jews around to form a community. Traditionally, these were all males, and any settlement that did not have at least ten male Jews aged at least thirteen years and one day was considered a random collection of Jewish families living in close proximity to each other, but did not qualify as a congregation.

  One of the main differences between a community and a group of individuals was that once the community made itself known to the secular authorities (to whom the Jews often had to appeal for the right to settle in the first place), it was permitted a fair degree of autonomy and was allowed to set up whatever institutions and organizations it needed to keep itself going. As historian I. A. Agus puts it:

  The professional rabbi was entirely unknown in the Rhine communities of the early Middle Ages…. Religious as well as secular authority was vested in the “community” which acted as legislator, judge and administrator. When a serious religious problem arose, some residents of the town were inclined to decide one way, w
hile others disagreed, thereby displaying the lack of a centralized religious authority…. [These Jews] were therefore left to their own devices, and were forced to organize every phase of their social, economic, and political life on the basis of their own law.

  Even later, when each town would have at least one professional rabbi, we must never forget that these rabbis were community employees who could be fired if the community found them unsatisfactory in any way. In every case, the community decided what kind of institutions to maintain and how much money—or what percentage of the money that they had—to devote to them. A list of typical institutions reads like an embodiment of the list of mitzvahs in the prayer that we just quoted. In a community of any size, you’d find most, if not all of the following:

  bikker khoylim—visiting and providing necessities for the sick

  hakhnoses kale—wedding clothes and provisions for indigent brides

  khevre kadishe—funeral and burial society

  hakhnoses orkhim—hostel for travelers with no money for an inn (generally a bench in the study house)

  moës khitin—Passover food for those who can’t afford it

  gmiles khasodim—free loan society

  talmud toyre—free Hebrew school for children whose parents cannot afford tuition

  malbish arumim—free clothing for the indigent

  beys yesoymim—orphanage

  hekdesh—poorhouse

  moyshev zkeynim—home for the aged

  Of the eleven different funds and institutions listed here, the first seven are referred to directly in the text of the prayer, while the last four all fall under the more general rubric of gmiles khasodim (defined here as the free loan society), interpreted more literally as “good deeds for which no repayment or recompense is sought.” Helping those in need wasn’t just a nice thing to do, it was what God wanted the entire community to do. Failure would bring trouble—big trouble, little trouble, some kind of trouble—with the Imageless Being Upstairs, and the fact that everybody had to recite the prayer every morning of their lives helped to make sure that no one was going to forget it: while you might prefer not to have to depend upon such undesired largesse, at least you know that the only way you’re going to starve is if there is no food for anybody else, either.

  And finally we get to the point: traditional Jewish society was based completely on the idea of mutual cooperation, of everybody looking out for everybody else. Think of London during the Blitz or New York City immediately after 9/11, then imagine that tragic solidarity and disaster-born benevolence continuing for centuries. That was Jewish life in much of Europe before 1939, when the assailed were finally exterminated.

  If nothing else, life in a constant state of siege—even when the siege is cultural rather than physical—helps to encourage strong feelings of in-group solidarity. The idea of sharing a common destiny that could end up being determined by a common enemy can bring people together, even if only to prevent that enemy from becoming the author of their fate: there are no atheists in foxholes and no non-Jewish Jews in a pogrom. The idea that we can’t escape from one another is elaborated in two separate Talmudic comments on the biblical verse, “Each one will stumble over his brother” (i.e., each other, Lev. 26:37, translated literally). The first says, “Each [will stumble] over the sin of his brother, which teaches that they are all responsible one for the other” (Sanhedrin 27b), while the second goes on to explain, “All of Israel are responsible [or: are guarantors] for each other” (Shvuos 39a).

  This idea of responsibility is generally interpreted in two ways. The most obvious is that Jewish people watch out for each other; that tribal loyalty, if you want to put it that way, will always override personal feeling should you come upon a fellow Jew in distress. The sorts of institutions mentioned above excited the envy and admiration even of medieval Christians, hardly a Jew-loving bunch, to the point where “if the Jews can do it, why can’t we” became a common literary motif. The fourteenth-century English poet William Langland expresses this sentiment in Piers Plowman, one of the seminal works of Middle English literature:

  A Iew wolde noght se a Iew go Ianglyng for defaute

  For alle the mebles on this moolde, and he amende it myghte.

  Allas that a cristene creature shal be unkynde til another!

  Syn Iewes, that we Iugge ludas felawes,

  Eyther of hem helpeth oother of that that hym nedeth,

  Whi ne wol we cristene of cristes good be as kynde?

  So Iewes shul ben oure loresmen, shame to us alle!

  [A Jew would not see a Jew crying out for want

  For all the goods in this world, if he could do anything about it.

  Alas that one Christian creature should be unkind to another!

  Since Jews, whom we consider the confederates of Judas—

  Each of them helps the other with that which he needs,

  Why are we Christians not as liberal with Christ’s goods?

  Shame on all of us, that Jews should be our teachers.]

  A society of this type demands that its members learn to put the interests of the community as a whole ahead of their private preferences and demands; if you can’t see why someone else’s desires might be more important than your own or why the needs of the community subsume and surpass those of any particular member, then you become a liability, no matter how much you might otherwise have to offer.

  On the other hand, your willingness to help look out for others means that they will help look out for you. One of the standard questions in ethics courses when I was in university had to do with a man whose wife was desperately ill. The drugs that would cure her cost far more than the man was able to afford, and the local pharmacist was unwilling to arrange a schedule of graduated payments or give him a deal on the price. The question was: Is the man justified in breaking into the pharmacy and stealing the drugs? Is this right, or should he stand helplessly by while his wife dies of her disease?

  This is not a Jewish question. In the kind of community we’re talking about, the husband would go to the sick benefit or free loan society in his town (or in the closest one large enough to have one); he could appeal to the local rabbi or rabbis either for help with raising funds or, if the druggist was Jewish, for applying moral and community pressure on the druggist, who, if nothing else, might have children whom he’d like to see married one day. If the cost was too great for the local community and the druggist wasn’t Jewish, recourse, often through rabbinic intervention, might be had to similar organizations in larger towns and cities, philanthropists, or—more commonly—druggists elsewhere who might offer a better price.

  So deeply ingrained was the idea of relying on these institutions that one-stop, geographically based versions of them were among the earliest organizations founded by East European Jewish immigrants in America. Some of these landsmanshaften or “societies of compatriots” still exist; just take a look at the section names in any large Jewish cemetery. After World War II, these landsmanshaften also undertook the publication of memorial books for the Jewish communities of the now Jew-less towns whose names they bear. Class-conscious versions of these locally based organizations—workers’ benevolent and mutual aid societies—played a significant role in the American labor movement; the socialists, the Orthodox, and the indifferent were all still thinking Jewish.

  The landsmanshaften can help clarify the earlier metaphor of the sandlot ball game. Imagine that you’re on your way to the library to study for an exam that you’ll be writing in two weeks’ time. As you’re walking by the landsmanshaft, though, one of the nine people inside calls you over and explains that they need a tenth for a minyan, and since you seem to know what he’s talking about, it’s going to be you. You protest: you’ve got an exam, you don’t come from that town, neither did your parents or grandparents; you’re a girl (this would have worked until fairly recently), you’re not a girl, whatever, but all to no avail. You have no choice and you end up having to go inside for anywhere between fifteen a
nd forty-five minutes, depending on the time of day. Afterward, they offer you a shot of whiskey and wish you luck on the exam.

  This is Judaism in action. If the exam was about to begin, they’d look for someone else, after detaining you just long enough to make sure that someone else comes along. Otherwise, though, there is no choice involved; the commonweal always comes first and you go in whether you feel like it or not. Refusal to participate in a minyan—where your grudging attendance is all that’s really needed—is taken as a nonverbal way of saying, “Go fuck yourself.” The day will probably come when you need nine other people to help you say Kaddish, and you, too, will have to depend, not on the kindness of strangers, but on their sense of reciprocal obligation. That’s why the Talmud says all Israel are responsible for each other: not only a certain class, not just the good ones, but everybody without exception.