How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  “If a guest coughs, it means that he needs a spoon.” This proverb provides a nice example of the kind of seykhl that mentshn use. The guest, someone passing through town who has no place of his own to spend a Sabbath or holiday, can do nothing with the soup that is sitting in front of him because there’s no spoon at his place. Inviting a guest home for a meal is still considered one of those mitzvahs that is its own reward (especially if you get a really interesting guest who’s got some good stories to tell), and the competition to get one on a Friday night could be fierce. The guest is therefore mindful of the embarrassment that even a polite request for a spoon could cause the householder and his wife. Not wishing to whiten the face of his host by calling attention to a failing, he chooses to cough instead.

  The householder, who is as well versed in this way of communicating as the guest, knows that the cough is a way of not speaking. If the guest won’t talk, there must be something that he would prefer not to say. The host looks to where the guest is sitting, tries to figure out what’s wrong, and finally says, “Darling, why don’t we give our guest a spoon.” The problem is solved with almost no words being spoken.

  The premium put on intelligence could lead to near-Holmesian powers of working things out. Menachem Mendel, the Rebbe of Kotzk in Poland, once had a very beautiful esreg, the lemonlike citron that is used in the ritual of Sukkes, the Feast of Booths. People go far out of their way and often well beyond what they can comfortably afford to get themselves the most beautiful esreg they can find, especially since an esreg with any kind of flaw is not valid for ritual use; even the ugly ones are beautiful, and the beautiful, it is said, are sublime. The Kotzker was so proud of this esreg of his that he showed it to all his students. They praised it and agreed with the Rebbe that it really was unusually beautiful. Noticing that one of his more prominent students, Wolf Landau, was absent, the Rebbe sent the esreg off for his inspection. Landau, who later became the Rebbe of Strykov, looked the esreg over and pronounced it flawed.

  Checking the esreg again, the other students finally noticed a tiny flaw that they had all overlooked on their initial examination. “How did you find it?” they asked Landau. “It’s almost impossible to see unless you’re looking for it.”

  “The truth is that I still haven’t found it,” said Landau. “But when the Rebbe wanted to hear my opinion after everybody else had already examined it and found it perfect, I figured he wouldn’t be asking unless there was something wrong. Now show me the flaw.”

  Landau’s ability to think his way through such problems made him skeptical of many rebbes who claimed miraculous powers. One day he was sitting in a wagon with a bunch of Hasidim on their way from one town to another, when they passed a group of gentile children playing in a field by the side of the road. Landau stroked his beard and put an otherworldly expression on his face. “That boy,” he said, pointing to one of the kids, “that boy is an orphan.”

  The Hasidim asked the driver to stop the wagon. A couple of them got out, went over to the children, and asked after the welfare of the boy’s parents. The boy told the Jews that they were dead.

  The Hasidim reported back to the passengers in the wagon, and all were amazed by Landau’s ability to see into the child’s soul and discern his nature. Where other rebbes would have sat back and allowed themselves to be praised, visualizing the way the story would look in a posthumously published volume detailing all the miracles he had wrought while on earth, Landau denied having any supernatural abilities at all. “I saw that he was wearing a grown-up’s hat and I asked myself, ‘Where would a child get a hat like that? From his father. And why isn’t his father wearing his hat? He must have no further need for it. Why doesn’t he need it? If he’s sick, he’d hold on to it for when he gets better. Therefore, he must be dead. And if the boy’s mother were still alive, the sight of her husband’s hat falling over her son’s ears would probably be too much for her to bear, so I concluded that she must be dead, too.”

  These stories demonstrate the kind of seykhl that leads to mentsh-hood; it is rooted in learning to understand the needs and feelings of others through a dialectical process that is the same as the one used to study the Talmud and similar texts. While the yidisher kop, the “Jewish head,” might sometimes seem to go out of its way to complicate the simple while simplifying the complex, the judicious employment of this sort of reasoning, divorced from any shmuckish desire for show-offy pyrotechnics, goes a long way toward helping a mentsh make the right decisions, especially when the proper course of action might not be immediately obvious.

  IV

  PUTTING YOUR seykhl to good use is the basis of the next remark in Di Uzida’s commentary, which also seems to originate with Isaac Abarbanel: “Indeed, if we follow the path of seykhl, the meaning of ‘In a place where there are no mentshn’ is: people who have not conquered [or: subdued] their evil inclination. Do not learn from them. Rather, exert yourself to be a mentsh. For there is no mentsh other than he who subdues his evil inclination.”

  Our seykhl tells us not only that self-discipline makes a mentsh, but that there is more to a mentsh than we might have thought. The remark about subduing your evil inclination is based on a statement found later in Ovos: “Who is mighty? He who subdues his evil inclination” (Ovos 4:1). The word translated here as “mighty,” gibbor, also means “valiant, courageous person; hero.” It is the epithet inevitably attached to Samson’s name in Hebrew and Yiddish, and would probably have been attached to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s had he made any movies in Yiddish.

  The idea of heroism in this context is appealing; the notion of struggling against overpowering odds and finally vanquishing the most obstreperous aspects of your personality has something very attractive about it. The idea that being a mentsh is a victory over selfishness and temptation, over all the shmucks who are dancing around you in a ring, chanting, “One of us, one of us,” is difficult to resist. It is the vindication, the triumph of the moral self-reliance that the mentsh has developed.

  Di Uzida brings this section of his commentary to a close by departing from Abarbanel and citing “an aged sage” who told him:

  In a place where there are no mentshn, i.e., where there are no people other than yourself, in a hidden place where there is no one to see you or know what you are doing. Do not on that account say, “I will sin; who’s going to see me, who’s going to know?” Even in a place where there are no people and you are in private and all alone, you must exert yourself to be a righteous, upright, and trustworthy person.

  Rather than threaten divine retribution in either this world or the next for violations of mentshly behavior, Di Uzida takes the more stoic (some would also add, more mature) approach: act like a mentsh even if nobody but you will ever know the difference. Not only is mentsh-hood its own reward, but a mentsh can almost be defined as a person who does the right thing even though no one is looking and there is no possibility of ever being caught. Redundant as it sounds, just being a mentsh is the whole point of being a mentsh. As long as you think about getting caught, you’re still thinking like a bit of a shmuck.

  This indifference to the possibility of getting away with something makes hash of the kind of ethics games that used to be popular at parties, the ones where you have to decide which of two hypothetical courses of action to follow. You’re told that you can bring lasting peace to the world by pushing a button that will cause the death of an anonymous peasant in China. You won’t know anything about the person you kill—no name, no region, no nothing. You’ll push a button here and he or she will drop dead over there. No one will know that the death was anything but natural. It will be just one of however many million deaths take place there every year, and no one will know but you.

  In return for this action—it’s so far removed from you, motivated by considerations that have so little to do with the usual reasons for murder that it can hardly be classed as such—you will improve the lives of every man, woman, and child on earth. All you have to do is press a
button and kill—or maybe only think that you have killed; how will you ever really know?—an anonymous peasant. If you don’t do it, the next outbreak of rape and violence in the Congo, probably no more than fifteen minutes away, will be entirely your fault. What would you do?

  A mentsh would flip you the bird and refuse. The first question that he or she would ask is the one that we saw last chapter: What makes my blood redder than the Chinese peasant’s? Why can’t I cause the death of an anonymous hedge fund manager instead? What would I think if somebody approached a Chinese peasant with a similar offer for killing an American peasant, and the anonymous American peasant was me? Or my son? Or my daughter? Would I be willing to take a knife and cut my child’s throat, if I had a guarantee that the death of the child would redeem the world?

  No way, no fucking way—that’s what a mentsh would say. Her seykhl would tell her that this is a sucker question: a promise of achieving the impossible, or the nearly impossible, at no cost to anyone who isn’t somebody else, has to be a con. And as we’ve all learned from W. C. Fields, you can’t cheat an honest man. An honest man or woman knows that you don’t get anything for nothing and that tiny investments cannot be guaranteed to yield massive returns. A mentsh, or a mentsh who bothered to pursue the conversation and wanted to score some points, might offer the questioner a counterproposal: “I’ll press the button and take a life. No problem. The benefits far outweigh any of the drawbacks. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the anonymity. It’s cowardly, unworthy of such a noble enterprise. I’ll do it, but instead of the Chinese peasant, let me push the same button and kill you instead.” A mentsh who had reason to believe that the offer, impossible as it might sound, might be real, would say, “Forget about the peasant. Kill me.” And a real mentsh might even mean it; mentshn have certainly died for less.

  v

  A mentsh is wise to more than the ways of the world, though; he is also wise to himself. In taking account of ish in the sense of “important person, person of substance, leading citizen, The Man,” Di Uzida raises the kind of emotional issues that make many moralists uncomfortable:

  In a place in which there are already prominent people and eminent scholars, there is no need for you to be cautioned to try to be an ish and become as wise as they are, because jealousy and ambition will force you to try to be an ish. But in a place where there is no ish, you might let yourself go and not try to be an ish because you see yourself as greater and smarter than anyone else around you. Since you are greater than anyone else in the place, it will look to you as if you’ve already attained such perfection as is necessary. Therefore it says, “I’m warning you to try to be an ish in such a place. Do not be wise in your own eyes.”

  (PROV. 3:7; my emphasis)

  A mentsh, remember, doesn’t get rid of his evil impulses, he subdues them and puts them to work for the good. Pride, lust, anger—they all have their place. The trick is learning how to keep them there. Despite the bad press that anger gets, there are sources that speak about how to put it to good use. Jewish tradition acknowledges that anger can play a useful, and even a beneficial, role in human life, as long as it is confined to the kinds of occasions mentioned by Maimonides, who said one “should get angry only about something that is worth getting angry about, in order to keep such a thing from happening again.” This is the anger of prophets, social reformers, and shmuck-fighters all over the world. With adjustments for scale, it should have been the anger of the rabbis at the host’s treatment of Bar Kamtso.

  While older Jewish sources are quick to condemn anger, they don’t have too many practical ideas about how to control it. Later literature is a little more inventive. Yekhiel-Meir of Gostynin, a nineteenth-century rebbe, wouldn’t get angry at anybody on the same day as they annoyed him. Rather, he’d tell them the next day, “You got on my nerves yesterday.” The admiring tone in which this story is related suggests that no one ever slapped him for doing so.

  A better Hasidic story tells how Faivel of Grojec, who went on to become a prominent Polish rebbe, came to his teacher, Rabbi Isaac of Warka, who was already a prominent Polish rebbe, and complained about his father-in-law’s refusal to subsidize his studies. Rabbi Isaac said, “You have every right to be angry, Faivele. But if you’re going to get angry you have to change your capote,” the long black coat that Hasidim still wear. Rabbi Isaac sent out to get Faivel another suit, and as soon as Faivel put it on he said, “Nu, Faivel, get mad.” Faivel stood there like a golem made of clay.

  Almost as sartorial is the remark of Pinchas of Koretz, a close disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. “Since I have tamed my anger,” Pinchas once said, “I keep it in my pocket. When I need it, I take it out.”

  Di Uzida is doing something similar with jealousy and ambition in the passage that we’re looking at. Accepting the presence of these impulses and then figuring out a way to use them in a kosher manner is typical of the rabbinic approach to human nature, which can hardly be called idealistic, and Di Uzida is in fact playing off a well-known saying that claims that jealousy and lust and ambition run the world. He is saying that it is easier to rechannel evil impulses and make them good than to conquer self-satisfaction, the shmuckish idea of being better than others simply because you’re yourself.

  Regrettably, snobbery of this type has been endemic to Jewish community life for centuries and the idea of the mentsh seems to have developed at least in part as a corrective to such ideas of yikhes—pedigree or lineage—as a guarantee of human quality. The yakhsn, the big shot from the prominent family, would immediately see himself as the ish in the situations described by Di Uzida, simply by virtue of his social position and money. Yiddish characterizes this kind of person in a proverb: “Es shteyt im nisht on tsu redn mit zikh aleyn, he’s too good to talk to himself.” The mentshly ideal is there to remind all of us that no matter how much we might strive, we can try but we never arrive:

  “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20). In the name of the rebbe from Lublin, it was said that what is meant here by “justice” is that if someone is convinced that he has attained the perfection of justice and that there is nothing more for him to do in this area, Scripture gives him sound advice: Pursue justice, that is to say, keep on chasing after it and never stay in one place and say that your having always acted justly up until now is enough. Real justice consists of pursuing it always, by day and by night, without any rest or relaxation. In his own eyes, a person should be as a newborn who has yet to accomplish one single thing.

  It’s a typically Yiddish way of looking at the world: moral progress is based on finding fault with your own current level of attainment. Rather than kvetch about the people out there, the mentsh learns to kvetch about himself to himself, and then do something to try to decrease his level of dissatisfaction. A mentsh is never 100 percent sure of himself because a mentsh knows his own fallibility and is always aware of the possibility of failure. In a place where everybody has learned to like themselves just as they are, a mentsh keeps trying to improve himself and his relations with others.

  VI

  THOSE OTHERS CAN be a bit of a problem, though, and a mentsh is well aware of the fact that not everyone else is a mentsh. You can be pleasant to people without necessarily believing in them, and the path from credulous naïveté to a balanced assessment of the character and motivations of the people whom you encounter is the road that leads from childhood to maturity, from the trusting shmuckery of the people who begged Bernie Madoff to take their money to the nuts-and-bolts skepticism of Harry Markopolos, who sat down and did the math as long ago as 1999, and was ignored until Madoff himself ’fessed up.

  The transition from genial sap to full-fledged mentsh is what Billy Wilder’s classic film, The Apartment, is all about. Released in 1961, it provides a more caustic look at office life in the Kennedy era than the recent television series Mad Men, which almost does the impossible by managing to romanticize the whole gray-flannel-suit, three-mar
tini-lunch way of life—everything that Elvis and the Beatles and the millions of hippies who turned into yuppies in the ’80s and ’90s did their best to rebel against, lifestyle-wise.

  The film stars Jack Lemmon as Charles “Bud” Baxter, an accountant for Consolidated Life of New York, where, as one of 31,259 employees, he works on the nineteenth floor, section W, desk 861. Baxter, who is not married, has an apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street. For the past six months, he’s been lending his key to married co-workers who need somewhere to take women who are not their wives, sometimes scheduling them railway style, one after the other, on particularly busy nights. All of these co-workers are higher up on the corporate ladder than Baxter, and they all promise to put in a good word for him with Mr. Sheldrake, the head of personnel.

  They’re not friends of Baxter; they aren’t paying him for the use of the apartment, they don’t even remember to pay him for the liquor and food that he supplies. He acts like an errand boy and they treat him like one; he’s the kind of a guy who just can’t say no.

  It started innocently enough when one of the guys in the office had to go to a banquet in the city:

  His wife was meeting him in town, and he needed someplace to change into a tuxedo—so I gave him the key and word must have gotten around—because the next thing I knew, all sorts of guys were suddenly going to banquets—and when you give the key to one guy, you can’t say no to another and the whole thing got out of hand.