How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  Bar Kamtso said, “Since the rabbis who were sitting there did not protest, that must show that they approve [of the host’s behavior], so I will go and chew things over with [inform on them to] the government.”

  (GITIN 56A)

  The rabbis’ silence suggests that the scene has played out loudly and publicly, rather than in discreet undertones. Bar Kamtso’s assumption that their inaction indicates acquiescence—or perhaps only indifference—becomes a lot more credible when we see how ready they are to act when he brings the blemished calf to the Temple. Indeed, Samuel Eidels, known as the Maharsho (died 1631), one of the most eminent and influential of Talmudic commentators, asks why the rabbis kept silent:

  You could say that perhaps they failed to protest because they were unable to do so, and perhaps this was so because of the sycophancy that prevailed in that generation.

  (MAHARSHO to Gitin 56A)

  They were afraid to speak out in front of the wealthy and well-connected party-thrower, who was in a position to be able to do them harm, and they let their fear come between them and their duty, just as they later allowed Zechariah ben Avkilos and his noticeably warped logic to lead them to certain destruction. Zechariah is a total Talmudic nobody who is mentioned on only one other occasion (Shabbos 143a), but the Midrash gives us reason to believe that he had plenty of shlep, and that the host of the party would have paid attention had he spoken: “Zechariah ben Avkilos was there [at the party]; he was able to protest, but did not do so” (Eikho Rabbo 4:3, my emphasis). The Midrash makes Bar Kamtso a lot more subtle than he is in the Talmud.

  Angry as Bar Kamtso is, it is almost inevitable that he decides to act like a shmuck in return. Getting back at the discourteous host—treating a shmuck like a shmuck—isn’t enough for him, though. If Bar Kamtso had expected (or received) different treatment, he and the host might not have been enemies in the first place. Bar Kamtso is after the rabbinic establishment that allows shmek like the host to corrupt it for their own ends. If we follow the Midrash, we can also say that he knew that Zechariah ben Avkilos would end up making the decision about the sacrifice. Bar Kamtso knew exactly where his vengeance was going to lead.

  It isn’t that he had no reason to be angry. As Maimonides puts it:

  One should be neither as easily angered as a choleric person nor as impervious to anger as a corpse, but should occupy a middle ground. One should get angry only about something that is worth getting angry about, in order to keep such a thing from happening again.

  (MISHNEH TORAH, Laws of Conduct 1:4)

  Anyone who has grown up in a traditional Jewish home knows how much is worth getting angry about if you’re a parent, but Maimonides counsels temperance; there are few things that a hissy fit will keep from recurring. The traditional attitude toward anger is that it is a shmuckifying agent par excellence, capable of turning an otherwise intelligent person into an utter idiot: “He who grows angry forgets what he already knows and increases stupidity” (Nedorim 22b); “Anger puts an end to wisdom” (Pesikta Zutrosi, Va-Eyro); and, most tellingly in this case, “Because he was swayed by anger, he was swayed by error” (Sifre, Matos 5). By going after the rabbis, Bar Kamtso is simply repeating the party-thrower’s mistake of placing the blame where it doesn’t really belong. This doesn’t let the rabbis off the hook for their indifference, but they’re still not the people who threw him out. Bar Kamtso’s anger has turned him into the image of everything he hates.

  There is a well-known Talmudic axiom that holds that “a person’s character is revealed in three things: his cups, his pocket, and his anger” (Eruvin 65b; in Ashkenazic Hebrew, these three things come out as be-koyseh, u-bekiseh, u-bekaseh, which has a much better beat). You can tell who someone is by how he behaves when he drinks, how provident and honest he is in financial matters, and how he acts when angry. Assuming that Bar Kamtso had had time for a first-century cocktail or two before being confronted by his host, he acquits himself admirably on the first two scores: he acts politely, makes a reasonable case for staying, and offers generous compensation for being allowed to do so. But it all goes for naught once he gets angry, and there is nothing that takes a person from mentsh to shmuck as quickly and as irrevocably as anger.

  Since the rabbis at the party, the scholars who are supposed to embody all that is best in the culture, did not come to his defense or object to his ill-treatment, Bar Kamtso decides to take his revenge on the system that makes the rabbis so important:

  He went to the emperor and said, “The Jews have rebelled against you.”

  “Says who?” asked the emperor.

  “Send them a sacrifice and see if they offer it.”

  He sent a choice calf with Bar Kamtso, who made a blemish in its upper lip…a place where we consider it a blemish but they [the gentiles] do not.

  (GITIN 56A)

  If he, Bar Kamtso, was thrown out of a house on a specious pretext, he was going to make sure that the same thing happened to the rabbis. The Hebrew name of the Temple is bais ha-mikdosh, literally, “house of the holy place.” Since the days when it was still functioning, it has been known colloquially as ha-bayis, “The House,” or bayis sheyni, “The Second House,” to distinguish it from the Temple built by Solomon and destroyed in 586 B.C.E. Bar Kamtso took a legitimate grievance and made it into a rather unfunny joke. Where Bar Kamtso got kicked out of a house, he was going to make sure that those who allowed it to happen would be kicked out of the house.

  Continual upping of the ante in the name of a spurious quid pro quo or measure for measure has been a leading shmuckish characteristic for as long as there have been shmucks to overreact. Bar Kamtso, the nobody, the grasshopper’s little boy, made sure that no one would ever forget the wrong that he had suffered. If the rabbis raised no protest when an injustice was committed against him, he’d give them an injustice that would open their mouths at last; one way or another, they were going to be screaming. And that’s where Zechariah ben Avkilos comes in.

  III

  WE NEED TO look at one more aspect of the story of Bar Kamtso and the party before we go on to talk about the things that a mentsh is supposed to do. Shmuckish behavior is usually pretty easy to identify, as long as someone else is engaging in it. Any shmuck can get up tomorrow, feeling bad, and say, “I shouldn’t have done that; I said the wrong thing; I should have spoken up,” and go on with her life. A person who understands mentshhood will call the aggrieved or offended party and apologize; they will have done the mentshly thing and made up, insofar as possible, for having acted like a shmuck. The nature of what they did and the nature of the person to whom they did it will determine the future of their relationship, but there’s almost sure to be a period of frostiness before relations can return to whatever is normal.

  A real mentsh, though, will see shmuckishness looming, and more often than not—which is the best that we can ever hope for—will know how to avoid it. It’s like in old cartoons, when a character steps off the edge of the cliff, pauses for a second, then turns into a lollipop with the word sucker on the wrapper in great big letters; a mentsh sees the cliff coming up and is smart enough to avoid it. In her mind’s eye she envisions a gift-wrapped penis with the word shmuck emblazoned on the wrapper and knows what it is that she wants to avoid. This kind of negative visualization—the ability to see what you don’t want and take steps to prevent it—is one of the cornerstones of mentsh-hood, and we’re about to see how dire the effects of not practicing it can be. The rabbis’ failure to act in the case of Bar Kamtso not only lays the groundwork for all of subsequent Jewish history, it also gives us considerable insight into how a mentsh is supposed to behave.

  Whoever these people were, however learned they might have been, they were clearly no mentshn, and their learning was a sad waste of time. There’s an old Hasidic joke about a young man who comes to a famous rebbe, a Hasidic leader, and says, “I’ve been through gants shas, the entire Talmud, six times,” to which the rebbe replies, “And how much of the Talmud has be
en through you?” No matter what these men knew, it had had no effect on anything but their memories. Their failure to intervene in this instance, their inability to recognize that throwing some nobody out of a party—no matter how big a makher the host was—was indeed some skin off their ass, led to the destruction of an entire civilization. They weren’t the only guilty parties, but that’s what shmuckery is like; it’s highly, highly contagious.

  The violation of mentsh-hood committed by the party-giver, the one that the rabbis were so remiss in not protesting, receives more serious treatment in the Talmud than any sin short of murder, despite the fact that this particular transgression is never mentioned directly anywhere in the Bible. It begins with the host’s first approach to Bar Kamtso.

  The host’s treatment of Bar Kamtso begins with verbal disrespect and ends in physical contempt. While no one can force him to like Bar Kamtso any more than Bar Kamtso might like him, they both have a moral obligation to control their feelings and make sure that the strength of their dislike yields to the fact of the other man’s humanity. Negative feelings about another person do not make him any less human, no matter how much you might dislike him. “What makes your blood redder than his?” asks the Talmud (Pesokhim 25b). What makes you more intrinsically worthy than he is?

  You’re supposed to back off and “let the honor of your fellow be as dear to you as your own,” as the Mishna enjoins, without being quick to anger if he fails to show you the same consideration (Ovos 2:10). This is a fancy way of saying, “Other people have the same feelings as you do, and something that would piss you off will probably do the same to them”:

  This statement is a first step and support and a remedy to keep a man from becoming angry with his fellow, for his fellow’s honor will be as dear to him as his own, in accordance with what is written in Scripture, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). If you hurt your hand, you do not say, “One hand has injured the other, so I’ll let the other hand injure this one.”…If you get angry, it is impossible for you not to affront the honor of your fellow.

  (MIDRASH SHMUEL to Ovos 2:10)

  Loving your neighbor as yourself is the biblical forerunner of all those pop songs in which the singer, to quote Smokey Robinson, tells the sung-to, “I don’t like you, but I love you”: you don’t have to like your neighbor, but you do have to love her, that is, make the same excuses for her and accord her the same consideration as you would for yourself.

  Liking is one of those matters of the heart that are always concealed from others, and no moral code or system of ethics can make you like somebody. They can, however, tell you how to act toward people, whether you like them or not. You can treat somebody decently without liking them at all; that’s why good manners and courtesy are known in Hebrew as derekh erets, literally, “the way of the land”—that’s “way” in the sense of “custom”—a term that also covers such activities as earning a living, acquiring the skills by which to do so, and sexual intercourse—all the things that create and sustain a functioning civil society. Interestingly, in Yiddish the same term comes to mean “respect, giving due consideration to the honor of your fellow, loving him as yourself.” It’s all classed as “the custom of the land” because it’s the custom of every land, the only way in which any group of people is able to live together in relative harmony.

  You can’t be forced to like a person, but you can be prevented from mistreating someone for having a personality or skin color or haircut that might strike you as disagreeable. There is at least an even chance that they feel the same way about you, which is why the Bible makes love the answer. Biblical love, the love decreed in Leviticus, insists that you cut your neighbor the same slack as you cut yourself, that you make as much of an exception of him or her—of everybody, that is—as you’re willing to make of yourself; or ideally, as you would have made of yourself if you happened to be a shmuck—which keeps you from holding others to unreasonably high standards.

  The verse in which this commandment is found also contains a couple of others: “Do not take vengeance or hold a grudge against your countrymen; you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). The Talmud defines the difference between taking vengeance and holding a grudge:

  If you say to someone, “Lend me your scythe,” and he says, “No,” and the next day he says to you, “Lend me your ax,” and you say, “You didn’t lend to me, so I won’t lend to you”—that is vengeance. And what is holding a grudge? You say, “Lend me your ax,” and he tells you, “No.” The next day he says, “Lend me your garment,” and you say, “Here it is. I’m not like you, who wouldn’t lend to me.” That is holding a grudge.

  (YOMA 23A)

  Simply giving the other person the garment doesn’t make you a nice guy; it does not cancel out the hatred that you’re nursing in your heart. Essentially, what the Bible is saying is:

  Don’t act like a baby.

  Don’t conceal hatred and harbor grudges.

  Find the same justifications for people who deal with you as you would find for yourself in dealing with them.

  Try not to hurt them any more than you would try to hurt yourself.

  The “I am the Lord” at the end of the verse is God the Father’s way of saying, “I really mean it. Don’t make me come down there.”

  In the Talmudic story that we’ve been looking at, Bar Kamtso asks to be cut some slack by offering to pay for the party, but the host is so intent on keeping his house and his banquet Bar Kamtso-free that he acts as if Bar Kamtso’s presence were somehow Bar Kamtso’s fault. He tells Bar Kamtso to leave, then lifts him from his seat and throws him out of the house, despite Bar Kamtso’s plea for dignity. Indeed, a midrashic version of the same story actually has Bar Kamtso say to the host, “Do not put me to shame, and I will pay for the feast.” To which the host replies, “You are not invited” (Eikho Rabbo 4:3). The outcome, of course, is exactly the same.

  Public humiliation of this type arouses the same horror as murder or idolatry in classic Jewish literature, and strictures against causing embarrassment to others are among the most emphatic in Jewish culture. One person’s loss of face can lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of shaming and vengeance that spreads from person to person, community to community, like any other plague, until it infects the whole of society. Because embarrassing someone in public violates a moral, not a penal, code, vengeance is often the only way to punish an offender. We’re dealing with a crime that can sidestep any legal system and for which the perpetrator is rarely convicted:

  Shaming one’s fellow in public is like spilling his blood. Rabbi Nachman bar Yitzchok said: “Well spoken! I have seen the red go out [of a person’s face] and the pallor come in.”

  (BOVO METSIYO 58B)

  The idiom translated here as “shaming one’s fellow in public” literally means “to whiten his friend’s face in public,” which makes Rabbi Nachman’s comment a lot easier to understand. The idea, of course, is that someone is so mortified by what has been said or done to her that she is quite literally appalled: she turns white, loses something from her face.

  Treating people in this way is considered so serious a breach of proper human relations that it is marked out for special treatment in Hell:

  Everyone who goes down to Gehenna comes back up, except for three who descend but do not return. And these are: he who sleeps with another man’s wife; he who shames his fellow in public; and he who saddles his fellow with a disparaging nickname.

  Isn’t that the same as putting him to shame?

  They mean even a nickname that he’s already used to.

  (BOVO METSIYO 58B)

  While the chief Talmudic commentaries seem to be more worried about how long it takes for those who do not reascend to reascend—this is not the typo that it might look like—such concerns do not affect the basic idea that each of these sins involves people who have held others up to mockery, ridicule, or spite, and are unlikely to repent for having done so. These sins are
all deeply rooted in the “because I could” way of thinking, the one that we translated a long time ago as “fuck you” they tend to take something away from the victim without affording the perpetrator any real gain. Neither adultery, face-whitening, or name-calling involves any physical harm; they are ways of undermining the victim’s self-image and social standing, and of violating his self-respect, which they can damage or even destroy. Adultery, perhaps surprisingly, is not considered the worst:

  It is better for a man to be suspected of adultery with another man’s wife than for him to shame his fellow in public…an adulterer is executed by strangulation, but has a portion in the world to come, whereas one who shames his fellow in public has no portion in the world to come.

  (BOVO METSIYO 59A; see also SANHEDRIN 107A)