by Wex, Michael
“Out of hand” hardly does it justice: Baxter sometimes sits outside in the rain while one of his superiors has sex in his apartment. He’s angling for promotion; what he gets is contempt. He’s described as “some schnook that works in the office” his place is “some schnook’s apartment,” and a schnook is what Baxter really is, because a schnook is a shmuck in English disguise.
As we saw a while ago, the English pronunciation of shmuck derives from a dialect form of the Standard Yiddish shmok. This dialect, typical of areas that are now parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova, was only one of a number of Yiddish dialects and is hardly the only one to have contributed words to English. It isn’t even the only dialect from which English has taken words based on shmok. The standard language’s shmok form gives us the English schmo, a somewhat dated term for “jerk” that could do with a revival, and the even more obsolete shmohawk and shmohican, both of which can still be heard in old Warner Bros. cartoons: “What a shmohawk” “He’s the last of the shmohicans.”
Shmok would also have been pronounced shmook in yet a third widely spoken dialect. The vowel is close, although not quite identical, to the sound that English has in book, hook, or cook. There is no schnook in Yiddish, though; it’s an English word, a euphemism that substitutes an n for the original m in shmook in order to keep things clean. Substituting one consonant for another in order to avoid uttering a forbidden word is already familiar to us from the treatment of God’s names, and the same principle is at work with shmook and schnook.
The eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines schnook as “a stupid or unimportant person,” the kind of spineless, eager-to-please, kick-me-again-but-please-notice-me underling that Jack Lemmon portrays in this movie. He’s waiting for the personnel department to pay attention to him. Aside from the apartment, the only thing that distinguishes Baxter from any of the thousands of other employees in the same building is that he is the only man who takes his hat off when he gets into the elevator.
He has a crush on Fran Kubelik, one of the elevator operators, and things start to get complicated when he finds out that she has been having an affair with Mr. Sheldrake, the married head of personnel, who has given Baxter his promotion and forced Baxter to give him a key to the apartment. Although nothing at all has happened between him and Miss Kubelik (played by Shirley MacLaine), Baxter is hurt and disappointed when he realizes that she’s involved with Sheldrake (Fred Mac-Murray), and even more shocked when he comes home on Christmas night with a woman who has picked him up in a bar, only to find Miss Kubelik in his bed. Earlier in the evening, Sheldrake let her know that he wouldn’t be leaving his wife for her, and she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills.
Baxter calls the doctor in the apartment next door. The doctor, who thinks that Baxter is a compulsive womanizer over whom Miss Kubelik has tried to kill herself, has long wondered how such a nebbish can have such luck with women and how anybody can maintain such a frantic pace of drinking and carousing. He sits Baxter down once they’re sure that Miss Kubelik is going to be all right and gives him a good, if rather brief, talking-to:
DR. DREYFUSS: I don’t know what you did to that girl in there—and don’t tell me—but it was bound to happen, the way you carry on. Live now, pay later. Diner’s Club! Why don’t you grow up, Baxter? Be a mensch! You know what that means?
BUD: I’m not sure.
DR. DREYFUSS: A mansch [sic]—a human being!
Although Baxter is not supposed to be remotely Jewish, he seems to get it. Dr. Dreyfuss (played by Jack Kruschen) is definitely the Yiddish-cadenced conscience of the film, and his appeal to Baxter’s latent mentsh-hood starts to work on Baxter, who begins to realize what a shmuck he has been. In describing her affair with Sheldrake, Miss Kubelik says, “Some people take, some people get took—and they know they’re getting took, and there’s nothing they can do about it.” It’s a shmuck-eat-shmuck world out there, and Baxter finally stands up to it and acts like a mentsh, like a person with something to them: he takes back the key to his apartment, turns in his key to the executive washroom, and tells Sheldrake, “Just following doctor’s orders. I’ve decided to become a mensch. You know what that means? A human being.”
On New Year’s Eve Miss Kubelik, who was about to reconcile with Sheldrake (whose wife has thrown him out), finds out that Baxter wouldn’t give him the apartment for the night. She ditches Sheldrake and goes to the apartment. Baxter confesses his love; Miss Kubelik hands him a deck of cards and says, “Shut up and deal.”
Baxter’s feelings for Miss Kubelik give him the motivation and the courage to stop being a shmuck and to act like a human being instead of a lap dog. Baxter is alone through most of the movie; even on Christmas Eve he has nowhere to go and ends up in a bar only because Sheldrake and Miss Kubelik are using his apartment. Otherwise, he’d have been home alone. By making someone else, someone who isn’t himself, his central concern, Baxter is able to step back and see what’s been happening, not only with Miss Kubelik but also with himself.
His sole concern before falling for Miss Kubelik is advancement at work and he is smart enough to realize that lending out his apartment will do things for him that hard work alone, in a room filled with hundreds of others doing exactly what he’s doing, is not really going to get him anywhere very quickly. Yet the higher he gets at work, the more he comes under Sheldrake’s thumb; he only gets shmuckier, to the point where he’s facilitating the bad treatment of a woman he likes and with whom he shortly falls in love.
Yet as soon as he stops thinking about his career and tries to help Miss Kubelik, not because he wants her but only because she needs help, he stops being a shmuck. It’s the first unselfish thing he’s done in the whole movie. To spare Miss Kubelik any further shame, he lets Dreyfuss assume that he was the reason that she tried to kill herself, so that when the doctor begins to talk about being a mentsh, Baxter is finally in a position to understand. By the end of the movie, Baxter has gone from being the kind of personality-free team player that selfish executives dream of to being the kind of player that you’d actually want to have on your team.
VII
Finding something outside of yourself on which to focus is crucial to developing into a mentsh. Jewish tradition seems to have stumbled upon this secret a long time ago when it started to make study into the main nonpraying activity of the religion. Though confined mostly to males until quite recently, the democratization of study became a crucial factor in the survival of post-Temple Judaism and it remains so even today. As far back as the book of Joshua, the Lord commands, “This book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth, and you shall meditate on it day and night” (Josh. 1:8). Eventually, study became an integral part of synagogue attendance—a daily event for most Jewish men in Eastern Europe. Aside from those bits of the Bible and rabbinic literature that have been incorporated into the liturgy itself (and often tend to be rushed through without much thought), lessons in Talmud, Midrash, legal texts, and the like would be given after the afternoon and evening services by the local rabbi or better-educated laymen, who could open the texts up for people who couldn’t have got through them on their own. Societies for reciting Psalms, studying the Mishna, and so on, were common in larger centers and were often organized on occupational lines: the Shoemakers’ Mishna Society, the Water-Carriers’ Psalm Group, and so on.
Male social life in many places consisted of evening trips to the local synagogue for communal prayer and organized study, generally seasoned with healthy portions of local and international news and gossip and often topped off with a shot of whiskey or vodka. Groups of this type tended to be made up of people who didn’t study during the day and weren’t always capable of doing so without help—workers, artisans, the non-elite members of the community. Gathering in this way did more than fulfill the halachic obligation to attend communal prayer whenever possible; it also served as a shield against the scorn and contempt of the more snobbish sections of the community descri
bed above.
The “common people” in the bes medresh—the synagogue—were doing exactly what the big shots did, and a minyan is no respecter of persons: everybody from the age of thirteen years and a day is equal. There is no big or small, no number one or number ten; the right to lead the service has more to do with who is in mourning or marking the anniversary of a family member’s death than with any particular status in the community. The daily minyan is an oasis of temporary equality, a kind of circumcised Round Table in the service of an invisible king. And if the cool kids, the Mr. Sheldrakes of the local Jewish community, didn’t think it was good enough for them, the hell with them, especially after the rise of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. As A. J. Heschel has pointed out:
[The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism] considered practical mitzvahs in the light of a person’s complete personality. Nobility of character was just as important as piety. While he certainly did not deprecate the practical mitzvahs, he felt that the most important thing consisted of what a person was in his essence.
Mendel of Kotzk, the last of the Baal Shem Tov’s great successors, elaborated on this theme in a slightly more pointed manner:
“Derekh erets, good manners, take precedence over studying Torah.” As the introduction to a book reveals the essence of the book, so do a person’s manners reveal the essence of his learning.
Has he really understood it, that is, or has he only absorbed a lot of facts, learned to expatiate on all kinds of concepts that have no actual bearing on the way that he lives his life? This is the kind of question that goes well beyond the problem of how people understand the books that they read. Because the line between Jewish study and Jewish prayer is often quite fine, failure to act on the moral and ethical principles set out in more academic contexts can call the depth and even the sincerity of one’s commitment to the prayer book into question. Every Orthodox Jew, for instance, recites the following before retiring to bed every night:
Master of the Universe, I forgive everyone who has angered and annoyed me or who has sinned against me—my body, my money, my honor, or anything else pertaining to me; whether willingly or unwillingly; intentionally or unintentionally; in speech or in deed; in this incarnation or another. I forgive everybody, and may no person be punished on my account.
“I’m saying this prayer because I have probably done the same, angered or annoyed or sinned against any number of people today without even realizing that I’ve done so. I stand as much in need of their forgiveness as they do of mine.” The Baal Shem Tov and the Kotzker Rebbe want to know how many people really mean it and how many are reciting it only because it is printed in the prayer book and they’re not the sort of people to skip over anything in the book: what’s in the book ends up in their mouths, whether they’re really listening to themselves or not.
The disconnect between a compulsion to say the words while paying little, if any, attention to what they mean has been around for quite a while. One of the problems that has vexed Judaism for at least two millennia already is the ease with which you can turn into a Zechariah ben Avkilos, someone who is so busy observing the rules that he forgets to look at their real purpose and thus forgets to observe himself.
In order to combat any tendencies to this type of behavior, early Hasidism counseled action:
There is a line in the Psalms: “Turn away from evil and do good” (Ps. 34:15 [in the Hebrew]). The Hasidic interpretation of this verse is, “First do good and then turn away from evil. By doing good, you estrange yourself from evil.”
Zechariah and the rabbis at the banquet with Bar Kamtso were quite good at turning away from evil; they seem to have had more trouble with the part about doing good. By fulfilling only half of the injunction, they effectively ignore evil and pay no attention to wrongs that do not seem to be of any direct concern to them.
They don’t seem to notice that their failure to act degrades whatever learning they have and turns their positions into hollow mockeries of the real thing. Each becomes what Yiddish has labeled a tsaddik in pelts, a holy man in a fur coat, that is, a pious fraud, a little tin god, someone whose piety is a matter of outer appearance rather than inner reality. The idiom, still quite common, has been given a popular interpretation that is usually attributed to Mendel of Kotzk: a real tsaddik, a real holy man—tsaddik can also mean a rebbe, a Hasidic leader—warms the hearts and minds of the people around him; the tsaddik in pelts, the fraud in the fur, traipses about in a beautiful coat that keeps nobody warm but himself.
There are thus no mentshn at the banquet, nothing but shmek of various sizes. This lack of mentshn points to an apparent contradiction in Hillel’s statement that none of the commentators seems to have mentioned: if you’re in a place where there aren’t any mentshn, then you’re not a mentsh, either. Hillel is thus talking to all of us the way Dr. Dreyfuss talks to Baxter in The Apartment. Right now you might still be a shmuck, but if you put your mind to it, use the brain you were born with, you can change yourself very quickly. Once you start to act like a mentsh, you’ll turn away from thinking and acting like a shmuck.
You need only three things that we all learned about in The Wizard of Oz: a brain, a heart, and some guts. You don’t need separate rules for every contingency that might arise, you need one rule that’s flexible enough to deal satisfactorily with any contingency that might arise.
FIVE
How to Do It Like a Mentsh
I
THE BEST SHORT example of the state of being that we’re trying to avoid, the most outstanding instance of overt, utterly unself-conscious shmuckery that I’ve heard in a long time came to me by way of the Austin, Texas-based tuba and bass player Mark Rubin. Reminiscing about his first tour with a real southern bluegrass band made up of real southern white gentiles, Rubin—a native of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where his father, however, was director of the university Jewish students’ center—recalled a conversation that the guys in the band held for his benefit. It concerned the morality of getting a little action on the road when there was somebody waiting for you back home. The question was: where does innocent fun stop and real cheating begin? Each member of the band had his own opinion, starting with hand-holding.
“Kissin’,” said one, “just plain old kissin’.”
“Bare titty,” said another.
It was a six-man group and they’d gone into graphic technical detail before the last member finally weighed in. “As far as I’m concerned,” Rubin swears that he said, “it isn’t cheating unless you get caught.”
Nobody since the dawn of time—and I’m including Moses, Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, and Dr. Phil in this reckoning—has ever been able to stop more than a small part of humanity from thinking this way. The best that anybody can do is to stop themselves and, if they’re lucky, influence the people around them, especially their children, to do likewise. We need a formula or a system, something transferable that doesn’t depend upon a particular person’s character or good nature. We’re looking for something that anybody can do, that doesn’t require too much theoretical knowledge or impose too much of an intellectual burden; something that can be used by everybody and taught to anybody, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they believe, and can give any of them the power to be a mentsh in a place where there are no other mentshn. We’re looking for a way to conduct ourselves that has the potential to make a statement like the following obsolete: “Pray for the welfare of the state. If not for fear of it, we’d have swallowed each other alive” (Ovos 3:2).
While this might look like the usual vulgar, law-and-order Hobbesianism that pops up on television commercials during campaigns for get-tough governors and crime-smashing DAs, it’s considerably more complex than that and touches on a theme that hasn’t yet been mentioned but cannot really be ignored any longer: the idea that too many shmucks can wreak havoc on democracy and that loss of mentsh-hood makes self-government a joke.
The Mishnaic statement above is attributed to Rabbi Chanina,
the Deputy of the Priests, who lived at the same time as Zechariah ben Avkilos and Rabbi Yochanan, whom we saw asking for the town of Yavne at the end of chapter 2. Like them, he saw the Temple destroyed; unlike either of them, Chanina was a Temple official and the Temple was where he spent most of his time. Although his title, “Deputy of the Priests,” makes him sound rather like the Barney Fife of animal sacrifice (older readers might prefer to imagine Chester, as played by Dennis Weaver, on Gunsmoke: “Bullock’s ready, Mr. High Priest”), Chanina’s job was closer to that of vice president or first runner-up; he had to be ready to stand in for the High Priest, should the latter prove unable to perform his duties for any reason.
Chanina lived at a time when relations between Rome and Judea were approaching their nadir, and the savagery with which the Romans put down the revolt that lasted from 66 to 73 C.E. aroused negative comment in Rome itself. Meanwhile, the Jews seem to have been as busy fighting each other as they were with struggling against the Romans, with the happy result that there were at least two separate wars going on much of the time, one against the Romans and one against ourselves.
In the midst of all this, Chanina was an outspoken peacenik. In Sifre, a collection of midrashic commentaries on the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, he is quoted as saying, “Peace is great, for it outweighs the whole work of creation” (Sifre, Naso, 42). In the remark quoted in Ovos—again, considered so worthy of preservation that it was included in the Harry Potter of rabbinic literature, the one work that people who don’t read rabbinic literature read, enjoy, and reread—his mention of “the state” must have caused the jaw of anybody who heard him say it to drop. Chanina is talking about Rome here, and instead of saying “the state” might just as well be saying “the enemy,” or even “the empire,” with all of that term’s Star Wars implications.
