by Wex, Michael
The beauty, indeed the genius, of Hillel’s idea is that it allows us what Christianity would call our fallen state; it lets us start acting like mentshn right now. It takes the egotism that has been with us since Adam and Eve and makes it work for, rather than against, us and our development as human beings. By doing exactly what most moralists are always telling us not to do—thinking of ourselves—we become paradoxically able to start considering others and doing things that benefit them as well as us.
This is the beginning of mentsh-hood. You have to go beyond sympathy for another person, even beyond empathy, and on to real identification. Rather than simply imagining yourself in their position, you imagine a complete reversal of positions: you give them your choices, your power, your ability, and you assume theirs. Then you decide how you might want to act toward them. You put yourself aside, get as far inside the skin of the other person as you can (we all know that you’ll never be able to go all the way), then figure out what’s wrong with your original solution and zero in on possible causes for complaint. You identify any grounds for kvetching and do your best to rectify or eliminate them in advance. Rather than doing to someone else that which you’d have them do unto you, you are—by gradually eliminating all the negative and unacceptable courses of action—doing what they would have you do to them. And that, of course, is the object of the whole exercise: treating other people as well as you treat yourself, not necessarily as you treat yourself.
Without the capacity to do this, the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves is not really intelligible. If, however, we engage in this kind of imaginative sympathy often enough, we’ll come to understand others better and better, make fewer and fewer mistakes in interpersonal relations, and be better able to avoid being victimized by shmucks.
Isn’t this still pretty much what Jesus says, though? And if it is, then what makes it so all-fire Jewish? Jesus mentions the so-called Golden Rule twice in the Gospels, once in Matthew and again in Luke. In the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, the passages are as follows: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12); “And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31). The version in Matthew is clearly a paraphrase of Hillel’s statement, right down to the comment about the law and the prophets. Does the difference in approach, the difference between “do” and “don’t do,” really make that much of a difference?
In many day-to-day situations, the answer is no. Either one will get you to hold the door open for the lady with all the packages or the gentleman with the walker. Either will teach you to say “please” and “thank you,” or remind you to send a salami to your boy in the army. The difference makes itself felt in bigger things, larger issues that go beyond simple courtesy or physical help. Imagine, for instance, that you’re depressed. You’ve lost your job and are working as a telemarketer; your spouse has divorced you and taken the kids, whom you can now see for no longer than an hour at a time and only under supervision at nine A.M. on alternate Sundays. You had to sell your collection of Charlie Parker bootleg acetates to help cover your legal bills, and the rest of your vast jazz collection followed soon afterward. You’re forty-five years old and living from paycheck to paycheck, when you’re working at all—and the minimum wage that you’re earning doesn’t even cover your basic expenses. You have no organic illness, no history of emotional problems; it’s just that your life has turned to crap and it’s really bumming you out.
A friend of yours went through something similar a few years ago and is eager to help. He’s back on his feet now; he’s got a new job and a new relationship, his kids have even petitioned the judge to grant him increased access time. Things had been bad, though, as bad as they are for you. He’s coming over tonight and has promised to tell you how he was able to cope, how he got through all of this and came out okay.
Good as his word, he turns up. Better than his word, he’s got a small package, nicely gift-wrapped, that he hands to you. “Here it is,” he says, “the only things that kept me sane.”
You open the package eagerly. This is the closest thing you’ve seen to a present in who knows how long. There’s a card on top with an encouraging message, you pull away the last of the wrapping paper, and there they are, two boxed CD sets, brand-new and still in their shrinkwrap. “Here you go,” he says. “I’m pretty sure they’ll do you as much good as they did me. I really hope so.” A tear wells up in one of his eyes.
You look down and there they still are: Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits, Vols. 1, 2, and 3, and Troubadour, a two-disc boxed set of Donovan’s greatest works. You think you’re going to puke. Maybe you’ll burst into tears, or into the mad laughter of a woman who goes to traffic court and finds herself shunted off to the gallows.
“Why don’t we put ‘Mandy’ on and think about the kids?”
You want to scream, you want to yell, you want to kick your well-meaning friend in such a way as to make future children impossible. Instead, you sit there and listen to “Mandy.” And “Atlantis.” And even “Jennifer Juniper.” And Jennifer is your name.
Your friend meant well. You know it, even though you’re feeling even worse than you were before. He knows your taste in music, but he did for you what somebody, as it turns out, had done for him. And for him, it worked. So tonight he started with himself and extrapolated to you. He should at some point have asked, “Is this really the right time to try to broaden a friend’s musical horizons? Had someone brought me a bunch of operas in my hour of need, how would that have made me feel?” But he didn’t. He brought what he would have wanted.
Pretty trivial, no? Take it one notch higher and see what happens, though: a group of missionaries who know what’s best for you. There isn’t a man or woman among them who doesn’t consider Jesus the greatest gift that they’ve ever received, and they’re determined to make a gift of him to you, too, whether you really want him or not. The one thing that they themselves would want more than anything else on earth is to be saved, and now that they have been, they’d like to see you saved, too. Imagine that they run the government, imagine that anybody who turns down this gift will have to leave the country; her belongings will stay, but she will have to go. And she is you. The gift they have is so great and is going to make you so happy that they know that once you’ve agreed to accept it, you’ll thank them for having been so remorseless in their efforts to get you to take it. After all, you were unwilling. And now, if you’d just step onto the pyre…
It didn’t happen every day, it didn’t happen everywhere, but it still happened. Hillel’s idea wouldn’t allow it to happen.
VI
NOT ALL JEWS listen to Hillel any more than all Christians want to convert the rest of the world to Christianity. Hillel, however, claimed that his principle was also the basic principle of his religious faith, and later commentators, Rashi among them, have explained the negative turn of phrase by pointing out that while we’re massively capable of doing things that anger God, there’s little we can do to help Him. In Jewish terms, the idea of treating God the way we’d like to be treated ourselves is both heretical and silly. Rashi takes the word that is usually translated as “fellow” literally and understands it as “friend.” Our friend is God, and Rashi manages to get Hillel’s statement to mean that we should go out and learn what God hates and then avoid it.
Less pietistic opinion holds that the main thing that Hillel is saying here is that morality and ethics precede halacha. Yet the story about Hillel and the potential convert might not be quite as straightforward as it appears at first sight. The heathen who comes to Shammai is one of a number of heathens who ask Shammai to convert them and who end up being chased away. In this case, the man says that he will become Jewish if Shammai can teach him the whole Torah, which Shammai seems to understand as Torah in the sense of a scroll containing the five books of Moses, while he, the heathen, stands on one foot. Shammai, who is quoted as saying, “Recei
ve everybody with a cheerful countenance” (Ovos 1:15), but is nowhere recorded as having said, “Do as I say, not as I do,” says nothing. Instead, he pushes the heathen away with the measuring rod that he’s holding.
The heathen then goes to Hillel, who appears to understand Torah in its wider, less confessionally oriented sense of “law, teaching, doctrine.” Hillel converts him and then utters his famous sentence. When Hillel characterizes it as “the whole of the Torah in its entirety”—think of Torah as a one-word version of Keats’s “all ye know on earth and all ye need to know”—there is certainly a dig at Shammai here, an implied command to the inquirer to forget about that man who was threatening you with his yardstick; the real Torah is about those things that have no limits to their measure, and he clearly got none of it from Shammai.
Note also that Hillel’s rule is fulfilled almost as soon as it is revealed. “Don’t do to others,” he tells the proselyte, and then, “Go, learn.” It’s a subtle but unmistakable way of letting the ex-heathen know that the interview is over. “How would you like it if people kept barging in on you with smart-ass questions? You wanted an answer, you got it. Now go do something with it.” Of course, Hillel doesn’t make a big deal about it, just sneaks it quietly by without ever ruffling the smile on his face.
Hillel is no Kris Kringle or Casper the Friendly Ghost, nor do you have to be one if you want to be a mentsh. There’s a difference between a good person and a Goody Two-shoes. A mentsh is accommodating, but is never a sap; a mentsh can get annoyed, but won’t become annoying. A mentsh is a real person who lives in a real world, where he spends far too much time dealing with shmucks while fighting not to become one himself. He’s smart, tough, worldly, and honest. Remember, Hillel was Hillel when he was still chopping wood and nobody was asking him for anything but kindling. Raymond Chandler’s description of his ideal detective—of Philip Marlowe, really—might be a bit idealized, but it certainly hits all the main points, except for the all-important fact that he can just as easily be she:
He must be a complete man and a common and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things…. [He has] a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness…. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
Like Hillel in his ancient robes, like all those detectives who wear wide-brimmed hats, call most women “dames,” and spend their time solving murders, a mentsh never forgets that actions have consequences: farther down on the same page of tractate Shabbos, the three heathens whom Shammai chased away and who were then converted by Hillel come together sometime later and say, “Shammai’s bad temper sought to drive us from the world, but Hillel’s mild humility brought us under the wings of the divine presence” (Shabbos 31a). They are not the same people as they would have been had Hillel acted differently.
Important as brains are, there is also the matter of sensibility. What is an aspiring detecto-mentsh to do if he or she isn’t as smart as Philip Marlowe? What if you’re a little understaffed in the seykhl department? Take a look at P. G. Wodehouse and never forget: Bertie Wooster, mentsh; Gussie Fink-Nottle, newt fancier, shmuck.
VII
HILLEL’S MAXIM IS basically the how-to manual for the commandment in Leviticus about loving your neighbor, a sovereign remedy for the kind of exceptionalism that can always find an excuse for yourself while denying one to everybody else. There’s a phrase in the Talmud (Pesokhim 113a) that’s become the basis of a Yiddish proverb: “Ven freyt zikh got? When does God rejoice? Az an oreman gefint a metsiye un git zi op, when a poor person finds something that’s been lost and returns it to its owner.” Despite the fact that the pauper could either use the item or sell it for some much-needed money, he does the honest thing, the right thing. By thinking, “How would I feel if somebody stole this from me after I’d misplaced it?” instead of “My need is greater than the owner’s, so I have a right to keep this and dispose of it in any way that I see fit,” he doesn’t make himself any less poor, but he’s certainly made everyone around him a little more rich. In such a way of thinking, all egos become equal; none is any higher or lower than your own.
This kind of ethical egalitarianism helps to keep people from succumbing to the temptation to turn into the worst kind of shmuck, the kind who works actively to oppress others. In his book The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo describes an experiment carried out by an elementary school teacher who wanted to teach her students about racial prejudice “by arbitrarily relating the eye color of children in her classroom to high or low status. When those with blue eyes were associated with privilege, they readily assumed a dominant role over their brown-eyed peers, even abusing them verbally and physically.” The kids in the privileged group immediately began to perform better in school, while the kids in the other group did worse.
The next day, though,
Mrs. Elliott told the class she had erred. In fact, the opposite was true: brown eyes were better than blue eyes! Here was the chance for the brown-eyed children, who had experienced the negative impact of being discriminated against, to show compassion now that they were on top of the heap…[but] the brown-eyes gave what they got. They dominated, they discriminated, and they abused their former blue-eyed abusers.
This isn’t Bosnia or Rwanda; these are eight-year-olds in Iowa who haven’t the ghost of a pretext to go after each other. Without some way of checking their egos, though, something to keep them from doing cruel and obnoxious things only because they can, the kids, like so many adults before them, simply fall into a pattern of reciprocal abuse that has no other motive than opportunity.
“Do unto others” doesn’t really cut it once you’ve dehumanized those others and reduced them to something less than you are. You’re better off to shift your focus away from them and back to yourself. If you act enough like Hillel to bring your aversion to being a shmuck to the fore, you will refuse to do things to others that you don’t want done to yourself, regardless of what color their eyes are or how little you might think of them. You’ll be able to overcome any desire for revenge, any need to show someone who’s boss or what’s what. You don’t have to like them, you don’t even have to hate them. All that matters is that you aren’t them.
VIII
HILLEL LETS THE new convert know quite explicitly that even though “Do not do what is hateful to you to your fellow” can be said to sum up the whole of the Torah, there is still plenty of commentary that he’s going to have to learn, myriad different ways to make himself not hateful. The importance of study in Judaism has always been seen as a lovely, wonderful thing that let Jews sharpen their minds instead of their swords, gave them a certain advantage over their less studious neighbors when it came to quick thinking, and prepared us all for nice professional positions that keep us from getting our hands dirty. A great deal has been made of the Jewish devotion to study for its own sake, to the acquisition of knowledge and improvement of understanding for no other reason than that all knowledge is felt to be useful and that it’s better to be smart than stupid.
Recent research, though, suggests that the idea of “and you shall meditate upon it day and night” might have an inherently moral function completely independent of the sanctity that a Jew who studies the Torah is likely to attribute to the act of studying or the words of the sacred text.
In an experiment to measure hypocrisy, David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo offered a group of subjects a choice between two tasks, a short and easy one or one that was difficult and long. The subjects were told that they had to assign one of these tasks to themselves and one to a subject from ano
ther group (which didn’t really exist), who wouldn’t be told that the current subject had determined which task he or she would be performing.
The subjects were also told that tossing a coin would be the fairest way to make this decision, and they were supplied with a randomizing computer program that would simulate an actual coin-toss. Ninety-two percent immediately took the easy task for themselves; 8 percent used the randomizer. No participants assigned themselves the difficult task. Those who had used the randomizer were then eliminated from the group and the rest were asked to evaluate their actions for fairness. On a scale of 1 to 7, the average score fell well past the midpoint.
A different group was then assigned to watch others assign themselves the easy job and then rate them for fairness on the same scale. The observers’ fairness ratings were significantly lower than those of the first group.
