by Wex, Michael
VI
THE OBVERSE OF this approach to life, the other side of the coin, is that everybody becomes responsible for anybody’s sins. This is a problem faced by all minorities; if just one of their members does something stupid or vicious, the victims and witnesses and people who hear about it are liable to decide that such behavior is typical of the whole group. In light of the traditional Jewish view that the Children of Israel are supposed to behave in a way that does credit to their Creator, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to discover that Judaism refers to such behavior, the kind that makes a whole people look bad, as khilel ha-shem, “defamation or desecration of the name of God.” The idea is that non-Jews will take a look at someone like Jack Abramoff or the Rubashkin family of Postville, Iowa—flamboyantly Jewish people guilty of breaching the most fundamental laws of human decency—and conclude that they are the logical outcome of the Jewish way of life and belief.
Such Orthodox malefactors provide us with a fine example of what can happen when a culture loses touch with itself, when it forgets why it is doing the things that it does. All you have to do is open a Bible to see that the Jewish legal system consists to a large degree of a series of often incomprehensible prohibitions. As Maimonides, paraphrasing a Talmudic exposition of the same idea (Yoma 67a), explained almost a thousand years ago, there are two types of commandments:
Mishpotim, ordinances, are commandments with reasons that are obvious and benefits that are immediately apparent, such as the prohibitions against theft and bloodshed and the obligation to honor one’s father and mother. Khukim, decrees, are commandments without any clear reason. Our sages said: “I [God] have decreed these things for you and you have no authorization to enquire into the reasons for them.” Our evil inclinations kick against them and the nations of the world try to gainsay them: for example, the prohibitions against pork or eating meat with dairy and the commandments concerning the cow with the broken neck and the red heifer and the scapegoat.
(MISHNEH TORAH, Laws Concerning the Misuse of Sacramental Objects 8:8)
These commandments—which don’t really affect an omnipotent and omniscient deity one way or the other—offer us a sort of training in the control and redirection of our impulses and desires. They teach us how to think of others just as soon as we think of ourselves. Remember what Rabbi Elazar said: “I really want to eat pork and sleep with Moabite showgirls, but…” There are no brownie points for someone who says “feh” to roast suckling pig and makes barf noises when entering a gentlemen’s club; you might just as well refrain from murder because the sight of a corpse makes you faint. The point behind not doing what you want to do has to be that you want to do it; when you don’t do what you want to do, it isn’t because you have suppressed your desire, it is because you have surpassed it:
Rav said: The commandments were given only for the sake of refining humanity. For what does God care if one person slaughters from the front of the animal’s neck and another does so from the back? You must admit then that the commandments were given only to refine humanity.
(GENESIS RABBO 44:1)
Done properly, what sets Judaism apart from other systems of belief is the idea that it ain’t what you don’t do, it’s the way you don’t do it. If you didn’t do it but think you did, you’re as guilty, morally, as if you’d done it:
When Rabbi Chiya bar Ashi’s wife overheard him praying to be delivered from sexual temptation, she said, “Why is he saying such a thing when he’s been too old for us to have relations for years now?” One day when he was studying in his garden, she fixed herself up, changed her clothes, and walked back and forth in front of him a couple of times. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am Khorusoh [a famous prostitute] and I’m on my way home from work.” He asked her for sex. She said, “I’ll take the pomegranate that’s on the little branch on the top of that tree as payment.” He leapt up, got to the top of the tree, and gave it to her.
When he came home, his wife was heating the oven. He got inside. “What are you doing?” she asked. He told her what had happened, and she said, “That was me.” He paid her no mind until she showed him the pomegranate. He said, “Nevertheless, I intended to do something forbidden.” Rabbi Chiya suffered over this for the rest of his life until it finally killed him.
(KIDDUSHIN 81B)
While this is the real, acted-out version of the sin that Jesus called “adultery…in his heart” and that got Jimmy Carter into so much trouble when he ran for president, it is also the plot of many a comedy and could be looked on as a sort of proto–Woody Allen script. Not only does Rabbi Chiya never seem to notice any resemblance between his wife and the best-known hooker in town, but the old man’s leap to the top of the tree and subsequent hop into the oven are rife with cinematic possibility.
The point, though, is that as far as Chiya is concerned, he cheated and got caught, even if the woman with whom he cheated was also the woman on whom he cheated. He intended to deceive his wife; he thought he’d deceived his wife; and the fact that it was his wife all along merely added an extra element of shame to his already powerful feelings of guilt. As Rabbi Akiva says on the very same page:
What happens if someone is planning to eat pork but ends up eating mutton instead? The Torah tells us that he must atone and be forgiven. How much the more so then if he’s planning to eat pork and actually does so?
(KIDDUSHIN 81B)
While the intent to do what is right does not justify a bad or evil act, the intent to do wrong deprives an otherwise laudable action of any real moral value. If you smuggle a starving child out of Darfur, you’re a mentsh—and then some; if you find the same child hiding in your trunk after you land in Cairo, the kid’s no less alive, but has managed to preserve herself without any effort on your part. Saving someone from getting onto a train that neither of you knows is about to explode is simple happenstance; if he misses that train because you’re busy robbing him, you’re still a gonif, and asking the judge for clemency because you ended up saving the victim’s life is nothing but chutzpah.
Classical Jewish thought stands in categorical opposition to the idea that good ends can justify not-so-good means. “A good deed leads to a good deed, a transgression to a transgression,” the Mishna tells us (Ovos 4:2); you don’t embezzle money to give yourself time to study Torah. Conversely, you don’t use the study of Torah or any other aspect of traditional Jewish learning or life to justify your own prejudices, stupidity, or refusal to follow the dictates of common sense. You’re not supposed to, at any rate. The Talmud provides two direct illustrations of the sort of person who does so:
A foolish hasid [i.e., a shmuck who uses religion to justify his shmuckishness] is like what? It’s like he’s walking and there’s a woman drowning in the river and he says, “It’s not right for me to look at her in order to save her.”
(SOTAH 21B)
He sees a child thrashing about in the river and says, “I’ll take off my phylacteries and save him,” except that by the time he gets the phylacteries off, the child has died.
(YERUSHALMI SOTAH 4:1)
The Yiddish word for this particular type of shmuck is khnyok. Defined by Weinreich as “bigot, philistine; petty, unreasonable conservative,” a khnyok can also be characterized as a shmuck with a rule book, the sanctimonious type who is ready to find fault with everybody for not living up to the standards that she has taken it upon herself to enforce. The zealots and ideologues mentioned earlier would all be called khnyoks in Yiddish.
The Talmud makes no bones about the consequences of khnyokish behavior. In explaining why Jerusalem was destroyed, the rabbis tell the story of how a man named Bar Kamtso tried to frame the whole Jewish people by telling the Roman emperor that the Jews would refuse to offer the emperor’s sacrifice in the Temple. When the emperor sends a calf to Jerusalem to be sacrificed, Bar Kamtso makes a blemish in its upper lip. Such a blemish disqualified an animal from being offered in the Temple:
The rabbis considered offering it to
avoid trouble with the government when Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkilos said, “People will say that we offer animals with blemishes on the altar.”
They then considered killing Bar Kamtso to keep him from informing on them, but Rabbi Zechariah said, “They’ll say that we killed him for making a blemish in a sacrificial animal.”
Rabbi Yochanan said, “The humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkilos destroyed our Temple and burnt our Sanctuary and caused us to be exiled from our land.”
(GITIN 56A)
As neither shmuck nor khnyok would be coined for more than another millennium, the Talmud was forced to talk about Zechariah ben Avkilos’s “humility,” that is, his fear of what others might think, of how those not in full possession of the facts might misinterpret the proper course of action and possibly cause him to lose face before his inferiors. Zechariah’s “humility” is usually interpreted as lack of understanding. He is so concerned with appearing to obey the law that his action—or nonaction—finally makes its continued fulfillment impossible. This truly insane hyperliteral approach makes Zechariah the Inspector Javert of Jewish law; what it makes of the rabbis who didn’t reject his suicidal plan out of hand is another question entirely.
VII
ZECHARIAH BEN AVKILOS lets us see what happens when we fulfill any kind of ethical or ceremonial requirements solely for the sake of discharging them or showing others how much closer we stand to heaven and The Big Fellow Who Lives There than they do. Subtle and even profound ideas undergo a process of shmuckification that turns them into parodies of their original intent. They become sticks with which to beat the less punctilious, mirrored sticks into which the beaters can gaze upon the glory of their own righteousness—regardless of the price exacted thereby from the community as a whole.
Yet people like Zechariah or the anonymous but foolish hasidim described in the Talmud are no less slovenly or self-indulgent than the beer-sodden zhlob of whom they would most certainly disapprove, the kind of guy who takes his eyes off the TV only to avoid stepping on his kids on his way to the fridge. Zechariah, the foolish hasid, and the drunk have all given in to their basest impulses. They might have started from different bases, but they all share the same feeling of self-satisfaction. The guy with the beer is unquestionably the least dangerous of the bunch; the hasid puts paid to the odd individual life; and Zechariah ben Avkilos causes the destruction of an entire civilization. To use mitzvahs for your own advantage—even if the advantage is only a deep feeling of self-pride—is to turn them into transgressions, which produce nothing but further transgressions, further instances of wrongdoing.
The Talmud goes on to detail the consequences of Zechariah ben Avkilos’s disastrous scruples. In discussing the siege of Jerusalem, the rabbis explain how three men of extraordinary wealth pledge enough necessities to keep the city going for the next twenty-one years. The local zealots, who want to fight the Romans rather than make peace, burn the storehouses and deliberately bring about a famine; Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai manages to sneak out of the city and get an audience with the emperor, who agrees to grant any request that he might make. And what does Rabbi Yochanan ask for? The same old roll with butter that we saw with Bontshe Shvayg. “Give me [the town of] Yavne and its wise men [i.e., the Sanhedrin],” he says, “and the dynasty of Rabban Gamaliel and doctors to cure Rabbi Zadok.” And the rest of ’em can all go to hell.
Imagine that Hugo Chávez has used his petrodollars to buy the whole of the United States, except for New York, which he has placed under siege. A well-known public intellectual smuggles himself out of the city and gets to Chávez, who agrees to grant him a boon. Instead of asking for New York, the public figure says: “Give me New Haven and its sages; the Kennedys, including Arnold Schwarzenegger; and a cardiologist to look after Dick Cheney.” A grateful America would most surely salute:
Rabbi Joseph or Rabbi Akiva said, “[God] turns wise men back and makes their knowledge into foolishness” (Isa. 44:25). Yochanan should have said, “Let them [Jerusalem and its people] off this time.” But he didn’t think that he would be granted so much and that if he were to ask for it, not even a little would be saved.
(GITIN 56B)
Yochanan’s “Give me Yavne” should have been preceded by “If you won’t give me Jerusalem.” While it is entirely possible that the Vespasian of the Talmud (who shouldn’t be identified too closely with the Vespasian of history) would never have given Yochanan all of Jerusalem and its inhabitants, Yochanan had a duty to ask for it. His instinctively narrow focus on himself and his colleagues looks even worse when compared with the bargaining that Abraham engages in to try to save Sodom from the wrath of God—who’s supposed to be a lot scarier and more powerful than any emperor—in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis. Abraham takes his life in his hands by asking, and he does so five times. Zechariah ben Avkilos and Yochanan ben Zakkai are too self-absorbed to do anything but give up before they’ve even tried: each is willing to sacrifice the general welfare to the interests of his own reputation or friends or idée fixe. As the Talmud tells us further:
[Simeon bar Yochai and his son] had been hiding in a cave for twelve years when Elijah the prophet appeared at its opening and said, “Has no one let Bar Yochai know that the emperor has died and that his death sentence against Bar Yochai has been annulled?” They went out and saw that people were plowing and sowing, and Bar Yochai said, “They forsake the eternal life and occupy themselves with a transitory life,” and every place on which he and his son cast their eyes burst into flame immediately. A voice came out of heaven and said, “Did you come out of there to destroy my world? Get back in your cave.”
(SHABBOS 33B)
[When they came out again twelve months later, they had learned their lesson.]
These people aren’t really wicked; they’re much more dangerous than that. The wicked can be brought to judgment and punished; these others continue to refract everything through their own desires and are unable to see clearly once their immediate interests come into play—which is, regrettably, always. They’re shmucks, well-meaning shmucks who might just as well be wicked for all the good that they do.
THREE
Extending the Shmuck
I
THE TALMUD AND the rabbinic literature associated with it have a great deal to say about the kind of shmucks whose own interests are their only interest. The Mishna, the earlier part of the Talmud, completed around the year 200 but drawing on much older material, gives quite a detailed portrait of the kind of person whom we would call a shmuck. The term that the Mishna uses is “golem.” While science-fiction and fantasy fans are familiar with the golem as a proto-robot, the rabbinically animated forerunner of Frankenstein’s monster, the word did not acquire this meaning until relatively late in its history. Golem started out as something considerably different.
The word is first found in the Bible, where it occurs in Psalm 139, verse 16: “Your eyes saw my golem.” The Revised Standard Version translates golem as “unformed substance” the Jewish Publication Society Bible has “unformed limbs” the idea of formlessness or lack of definition is paramount, and harks all the way back to the primal matter at the beginning of Genesis, where the earth is without form and void. This idea of something raw, unfinished, undifferentiated becomes the chief meaning of the word in ancient postbiblical writings. According to the Talmud:
The day [of Adam’s creation] lasted twelve hours. In the first hour, his dust was gathered together; in the second, he became a golem; in the third, his limbs were stretched out; in the fourth, his soul was tossed into him.
(SANHEDRIN 38B)
The golem here is a featureless lump with no identifiable characteristics whatever, not even limbs. More important, though, it has yet to acquire a soul. A golem has all the material that goes into a human being, but it still needs work, plenty of shaping and polishing, along with actual animation, before it will come to resemble something that we might think of as human. A golem is to a man or woman as a chunk of dough
is to a loaf of bread; indeed, a related rabbinic tradition (Genesis Rabbo 8:1) describes how the raw material of Adam-the-golem was stretched from one end of the world to the other, as if primordial man were really a primal pizza.
It is this idea of incompletion that causes the legendary automaton to be called a golem. A golem can do anything that a person can do—stories of people using golems as unsalaried butlers are legion—except think and speak, the two activities that separate human beings from everything else. If you tell a golem to do something, it will keep doing it until you give it an explicit command to stop. If you ask a golem a question, it will stare at you and say nothing. Hence the colloquial use of golem in Yiddish to denote a slow-moving, ungainly, dull-witted sort of person; zitsn vi a leymener goylem, “to sit like a golem made of clay,” is to be the Yiddish equivalent of a cigar store Indian, someone who just sits there, silent and immobile. You talk and talk, ask questions, try to draw her out, but not a word comes out of her mouth and you begin to wonder if she’s really human or merely a clever simulation. The golem—the real one, that is—has the outward physical features of a human being, but is like Adam in the third hour of creation: it has arms and legs, but lacks brain and soul. It is a rough draft of a human being, basic material still sorely in need of refinement.