by Wex, Michael
It can hardly be an accident, then, that the Mishna chooses the word golem, rather than something that means “fool” or “unlearned person,” to describe the opposite of a sage or wise man. But typically for a document that has had so much influence on Yiddish patterns of thought and speech, the Mishna only mentions things that the golem doesn’t do. These are:
Keep silent in the face of someone with more experience and education.
Let a person finish speaking without interrupting him.
Consider what he’s going to say before making any reply.
Confine his questions to the matter under discussion and give direct answers to any questions that he’s asked.
Address matters in the order in which they’ve been presented.
Say “I didn’t hear you,” when he doesn’t hear [i.e., admit to not understanding what has been said].
And admit the truth when he is found to have erred.
(ovos 5:7)
In other words, a golem is the kind of person who knows more about everything than you do and never shuts up about it. He doesn’t listen to what you’re saying because he’s too busy talking at the same time, jumps from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason, and refuses to acknowledge any fact that could indicate that he isn’t right. As the technology necessary for radio or television news-talk shows had not been developed at the time of the Mishna, these were still unambiguously negative characteristics. In a culture that valued debate above almost all other human activity, the inability to converse properly disqualified a person from full participation in society. Look up the word conversation in any English dictionary and you’ll see that it comes from the Latin conversari, which doesn’t mean “to talk,” but “to live with, keep company with.” Someone who doesn’t know how to talk to other human beings doesn’t know how to live with other human beings; the Mishna might call him a golem, but he’s really a shmuck in a toga. Remember Mr. Cohen, the “cancer, shmancer” guy from chapter 1? Just move him back a couple of thousand years and you’ll see that the golem is like the synagogue on the other side of the road from yours: he is the person you don’t talk to. But that doesn’t always mean that he isn’t talking to you already.
In his commentary on this Mishnaic passage, Moses Maimonides, the incredibly influential twelfth-century rabbi and philosopher whose fans included Saint Thomas Aquinas, elaborates on the difference between the golem and everyone else:
A golem is a person who possesses some intellectual and moral virtues, but without any of them being complete or properly ordered. They are confused and mixed up and contaminated with defects. [Such a person is called a golem] because of his resemblance to productions of an artisan which have received their basic shape but have not been refined and finished, like a knife or sword that the smith has not finished: they have only their most basic form, but have yet to be whetted and sharpened and polished.
(COMMENTARY ON Ovos 5:7)
Maimonides bases his interpretation on the relatively common Mishnaic use of golem to mean “unfinished vessel or utensil, artisanal production still in progress.” The golem that he describes has failed to reach at least one essential stage of human development; just as a spoon that needs planing and buffing is still unfit for use, though it has the form and appearance of a spoon, so the golem falls a step or so short of real mentsh-hood. He has a body, but still needs “to be whetted and sharpened and polished” before he can be anything other than a walking klots—that’s klutz in English—a great big chunk of wood that lies athwart the path to social relations.
The wise person with whom the Mishna contrasts the golem is not described as clever or well informed, but only as knowing how to make his or her conversation an orderly thing that takes account of the presence and feelings of the other party. The Mishnaic golem differs from the robo-golem of more recent times in that he’s the unquestioning servant of his own desires, rather than someone else’s. The human golem can talk, but not converse; he can holler, and is more interested in shutting you up than hearing you out. Male or female, the golem is not a complete mentsh—not yet, at any rate—but is still an unfinished part-mentsh. The Yiddish folk-mind has narrowed him down to a very specific part, the one least inclined to submit to instruction or accept limitation and most likely to do whatever it feels like doing. Imagine human character as an erection-in-waiting—when it isn’t bouncing back and forth, flaccid and absurd, it is hard, dumb, and tough to control—and you’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with.
II
RICK WILCOX, ONE of the leading figures in contemporary American mountaineering, discovered an unusually clear case of the kind of human underdevelopment that we’re talking about. There’s no better example of a clueless golem or a shmuck in motion than the high-altitude specimen that Wilcox ran across in the Himalayas a number of years ago. Discovering a fellow climber in life-threatening distress, Wilcox and his wife arranged for a helicopter to get the climber out of danger and off the mountain. They were more than a little taken aback when the person whose life they’d saved “stiffed us,” as Wilcox put it, “for the helicopter bill.”
If shmucks had legs, this guy would be Bigfoot. The willingness to accept help, as if having his life saved were his due; the self-importance that leads him to think that a total stranger should be happy to foot the bill; the dishonesty, ingratitude, chutzpah, and lack of manners, not to mention the complete absence of any scruple about repaying good—genuine, altruistic, nothing-in-it-for-the-benefactor good—not with evil, so much as with contempt, brings us about as close to shmuckish perfection as we’re likely to get. This is a guy who can’t converse; his only problem with other people is that they exist when he has no use for them. It’s one thing to cheat the reaper, it’s something else to cheat the guy who cheated him for you. All that’s missing is a lawsuit against Wilcox, ideally for having come between the plaintiff and his original plans.
While this alpine asshole might have reached the summit of recent shmuckishness and set a benchmark for the entire twenty-first century, he can’t be said to have done so alone. Today’s shmucks have a lengthy pedigree behind them, extending in mythological terms all the way back to the beginning of time. We can witness the birth of the shmuck near the opening of the book of Genesis, the chronology of which seems to imply that even before there were people, there were shmucks.
Full as it is of sinners, evildoers, and deeply flawed heroes, the Hebrew Bible is a virtual encyclopedia of shmuckish activity from its earliest pages on. Adam and Eve start to behave like shmucks only a few short lines after they have both been created. While the Christian notion of original sin doesn’t jibe very well with standard Jewish ways of thought, the idea that, left to his own devices, an untutored human being stands a better than even chance of turning into a shmuck most assuredly does: all he has to do is talk to another person. The story of the Tree of Knowledge and the expulsion from Eden can be read as the overture to a still unfinished symphony of shmuckishness.
If there’s a mythological element to any of this, something that might strike a thoroughgoing rationalist as hard to believe, it is only that it is possible to be a shmuck without even being human. Adam and Eve have been created at the end of the second chapter of Genesis; the first line of chapter 3 states that “the snake was the most cunning of all the beasts of the field that the Lord had made.” The Hebrew word translated as “cunning,” arum, looks the same as the Hebrew word for “naked.” In the verse immediately before this one, Adam and Eve are described as arumim (that’s the plural adjective), “naked, unconcealed, open,” and Eve takes the serpent’s leading question—“Did God actually tell you not to eat from any tree in the garden?” (Gen. 3:1)—as an open, honest inquiry with no ulterior motive behind it.
Now, the serpent himself is quite a shmuck, the kind who can’t stand to see others enjoying themselves. Rashi, whom we met in the last chapter, says, “The snake saw them naked, having sex where all could see, and he lusted for Eve.” Rashi’
s commentary is printed alongside Scripture itself in all traditional editions of the Hebrew Bible, and this particular passage was once known to virtually every Jewish schoolchild. I’m not going to linger on the phallic associations of the snake and their peculiar appropriateness to a discussion of shmek—the English “shlong” for penis comes from the Yiddish shlang, which has a clean meaning of “snake” and a dirty one of shmuck, in the anatomical sense—except to note that when schoolkids used to translate Rashi’s comments from Hebrew to Yiddish, the idea of a shlang seeing two people having sex and wanting a bit for itself produced plenty of schoolboy quips and giggles, pre-Freud as well as post-, especially in view of the fact that Rashi prefaces the above remarks by discussing “why the snake came to Eve,” rather than Adam. This would have been translated as far vos the shlang came to the woman, which could be taken as a lesson in biology just as easily as in “what brought death into the world and all our woe.” Human history begins on a bad night in an interspecies singles bar.
The snake’s conversation with Eve is not only a fairly intense version of aggressive bar talk, it is also presented as the first conversation ever to take place between any of God’s creatures. The snake’s opening gambit is a classic example of what biblical and rabbinic tradition call “wronging” or “cheating” or “fraud” in speech: neither party to the conversation tells the truth, and each is lying in order to get their own way. The Talmud explains the idea of cheating in speech:
What does it mean when Scripture says, “Do not wrong one another” (Lev. 25:17)? It refers to wronging in speech. If someone is a penitent, do not say to him, “Remember your former deeds.” If he is the child of converts, do not say, “Remember what your parents did.” If he is a convert himself and comes to study Torah, do not say, “Can a mouth that has eaten cadavers and carrion, abominable, creeping things, come to learn the Torah that came forth from the mouth of the Almighty?” If someone is afflicted, if he is visited with illnesses or has buried his children, do not speak to him as Job’s friends did: “Is your fear of God not your confidence? Isn’t the integrity of your ways your hope? Recall, has an innocent person ever perished?” (Job 4:6–7). If donkey drivers come seeking grain, do not say, “Go to X, who is a grain merchant,” when you know well that X has never been in that business. Rabbi Judah said, “Do not pretend to be interested in making a purchase when you have no money, for this is something that is concealed in your heart, and with respect to things that are a matter of the heart, it is written ‘and you shall fear your God’” (Lev. 25:17).
(BOVO METSIYO 58B)
The snake tricks Eve by asking a leading question disguised as an exercise in information gathering, but before she becomes the first poor shmuck in the world, the credulous dupe who ends up suffering because she’s bought a bill of goods, Eve unwittingly helps the serpent along. She tells him that God has commanded her and Adam “not to eat of it [the tree] or touch it, lest [they] die” (Gen. 3:3). God said nothing about touching, only eating; Eve’s attempt to go one step beyond the commandment, to make the prohibition more stringent than it was—to be more religious than God, as it were—becomes the efficient cause of her downfall. Rashi tells us that “the snake pushed her into the tree and said, ‘Just as touching it didn’t kill you, neither will eating from it.’” As the Jerusalem Talmud asks in a slightly different context: “What the law has forbidden isn’t enough for you? You’ve got to go and forbid yourself other things, too?” (Yerushalmi Nedorim 9:1).
Well before Rashi, the Midrash seized upon Eve’s unwarranted “touch” to comment: “Don’t make the fence any bigger than it needs to be, lest it fall over and destroy the plants [that it’s supposed to be protecting]” (Genesis Rabbo 19:3). By adding what she probably thought of as insurance, all Eve managed to do was give the shlang yet another opening to screw her. As Rashi says, “The snake’s words made sense to her. They pleased her and she believed them” believed them because she wanted to believe them, because they seemed to be in line with what she already wanted.
The serpent is a shmuck in the sense of being gratuitously mean or nasty. He knows full well the consequences of eating from the tree, but hopes that once Eve’s eyes have been opened, she’ll give him a tumble, either out of gratitude or because she’s finally noticed his natural charm. For the sake of a little snake-on-lady action, he is willing to risk the future of everything on earth.
Eve falls under the heading of one who is “gullible, easily duped, naive,” but not without a powerful belief in her own intelligence. She is the first person to engage in one of the most quintessentially shmucky of activities: thinking herself clever while behaving like a complete screaming fool. Adding a needless and dangerous prohibition is only the first mistake she makes. Rashi asks why she gave the fruit to her husband after she had eaten from the tree. Why risk his anger or sacrifice the intellectual advantage that she had just gained from eating the fruit? Because, he says, she was afraid that “if she died [from eating the fruit] and he were to remain alive, he would marry somebody else.” Better he should die, then. No one but the two of them anywhere on earth, and already she’s jealous.
It doesn’t end there, of course, because Adam also eats the fruit, and when God asks him if he has eaten from the forbidden tree, Adam doesn’t bother with a proper answer. “The woman that you put with me gave me,” he says (Gen. 3:12), and “you” should be printed in italics: “You gave her to me; she made me do it and you made her make me, Mr. Omnipotent. So it isn’t my fault, it’s your fault.” Rashi, echoing the Talmud (Avodo Zoro 5b), says: “Here he denies the kindness” that God had done him by giving him a companion. It isn’t so much the ingratitude itself but the refusal to accept any responsibility for his own actions that makes Adam such a shmuck here. He’s quite content to land Eve in more trouble, as long as he can get himself off the hook.
Not a terribly auspicious start for human life, and things get worse as early as the beginning of the next chapter, when Cain and Abel prove that the fruit, if you’ll pardon the expression, doesn’t fall too far from the tree. While the Bible has Cain kill Abel because he is jealous that God preferred Abel’s sacrifice to his own, there is a tradition that links their rivalry a little more closely with the character traits already demonstrated by their mother. According to the Midrash, the two boys divided the world up between themselves, then argued over whose half the Temple was going to be in. The Middle East hasn’t changed since the beginning of time; the story of Cain and Abel constitutes the first case of the kind of shmuckery in the name of God that has come to define so much of our world today.
Fraternal jealousy comes up again near the end of Genesis in the story of Joseph and his brothers. The latter respond to their father’s unconcealed partiality to Joseph and Joseph’s unquestionably obnoxious behavior (excused somewhat by his being a spoiled teenager; his brothers are all grown men) by selling him into slavery instead of going through with their original plan of murdering him. They then tell Jacob, their father, that Joseph was torn apart by a wild beast. Jacob’s reaction? “He refused to be comforted” (Gen. 37:35). His sons’ reaction is not recorded. Three chapters earlier, two of these brothers, Levi and Simeon, massacre a city. In the chapter following that, Reuben, the eldest, beds his father’s concubine (who is also the mother of two of his brothers). In the chapter that follows the story of Joseph, Judah, another of the brothers, is about to burn his daughter-in-law at the stake for adultery until she proves that her sin, unlike Adam’s, really is someone else’s fault and that someone else is Judah. Whatever else they might have been, the sons of Jacob certainly seem to constitute the earliest fraternity of shmek on record.
The Bible goes on to detail some really first-rate instances of shmuckishness—the Children of Israel kvetching their way out of Egypt and through forty years in the desert; their worship of the Golden Calf while Moses is still on the mountain receiving the Tablets of the Law; much of the politics in the courts of David and Solomon, or the prophet Eli
sha having forty-two children mangled by she-bears for calling him “baldy”—but the climax, the apogee of paleo-shmuckery (it’s like the paleo in paleontology, from the Greek for “ancient”) is the tale of Kamtso and Bar Kamtso that forms the backdrop to the story of Zechariah ben Avkilos that we looked at in the last chapter. Since we already know where the story is going, we will be able to see quite clearly how a single stupid act started a snowball of shmuckery that brought about the destruction of the Second Temple. The Talmud tells us:
Jerusalem was destroyed because of Kamtso and Bar Kamtso. A man who was a friend of Kamtso and an enemy of Bar Kamtso once gave a party and told his servant, “Go bring me Kamtso” he went and brought him Bar Kamtso.
(GITIN 55B)
Kamtso means “locust,” Bar Kamtso, “the son of a locust” or “locust, junior” it is doubtful that these were anybody’s real names. The Talmud is trying to tell us that an entire civilization can fall over something as trivial as a “bar” before the name of an otherwise undistinguished person; over Joe McShmo receiving an invitation that was supposed to have gone to Joe Shmo. Raw human nature will do all the rest:
When the host found Bar Kamtso sitting there he said, “You are my enemy; what do you want here? Get up and get out.”
Bar Kamtso said, “Since I’m here already, let me stay and I’ll pay you for what I eat and drink.”
“No,” said his host.
“I’ll pay for half the party.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll pay for the whole party.”
“No,” and he took Bar Kamtso by the hand, drew him up, and took him out.
(GITIN 55B-56A)
It was hardly Bar Kamtso’s fault that he was invited to the party in error; as he was the host’s enemy, he would not have recognized the servant who came to fetch him and who does not seem to have mentioned who was holding the party. Once the host has realized the mistake, he chooses to follow his dislike rather than the trail of error. Instead of shrugging his shoulders or getting mad at the servant, he chooses to shame the innocent Bar Kamtso, who seems desperate to avoid the ignominy of being thrown out of the party in front of a roomful of people. By offering to pay the whole bill, he is not only willing to make sure that the party-thrower loses nothing by allowing him to stay, but effectively provides him with the means to have another party to which he—Bar Kamtso—will assuredly not be invited. But the host has clearly worked himself into a state of some dudgeon about Bar Kamtso’s chutzpah in turning up in the first place; he’s too busy savoring his hatred, is too much of a shmuck to be able to see Bar Kamtso’s point of view, and has him thrown out anyway.
