How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  It is better for a person to throw himself into a fiery furnace than to shame his fellow in public. Whence do we know this? From Tamar, as it is written (Gen. 38:25), “When she was brought forth, she sent to her father-in-law.”

  (BOVO METSIYO 59A)

  The idea of flinging yourself into a fiery furnace before shaming someone else in public—even when this someone else might have done something shameful—is mentioned on three other occasions in the Talmud (Brokhos 43b; Kesubos 67b; Sotah 10b), and the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 is mentioned every time. Tamar was Judah’s twice-widowed daughter-in-law. She was married to Judah’s son Er, who died without issue, and then to Er’s brother, Onan, from whose name we get the term onanism; he preferred to spill his seed on the ground rather than inside his wife, lest she bear a son who would be considered the child of his deceased brother. Tamar had waited quite some time for Judah’s third son, Shelah, to grow up, so she could marry him, too, but it still hadn’t happened. Worried lest she die childless, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and sleeps with Judah, who promises to give her a kid as payment. She demands a down payment—who wanders around with a goat under his arm?—and he gives her his seal, its cord, and his staff.

  When Tamar, who is still betrothed to Shelah, turns out to be pregnant, she is convicted of adultery (her engagement makes her Shelah’s, even before the marriage), and Judah orders her to be burned. As she is about to be consigned to the flames, she says, “I am pregnant by the man to whom these belong…. Please acknowledge the owner of this seal and the cords and the staff” (Gen. 38:25). Judah admits his fault and accepts responsibility for the twins that she bears.

  Rashi’s explanation of this episode reflects the standard view of both the biblical and Talmudic passages:

  She didn’t want to shame him by saying, “I am pregnant by you,” so instead she said, “the man to whom these belong.” She said to herself, “If he admits it on his own, he admits it; if not, let them burn me, but I will not shame him.” From here they said, “It is better for a person to throw themselves into a fiery furnace.”

  Nomads being nomads, Tamar would probably have ended up on a bonfire, but the Talmud’s fiery furnace has considerable resonance in Jewish literature. A popular midrashic story uses the same Hebrew term to describe the furnace into which Nimrod casts the boy Abraham, who has refused to acknowledge him as the sole master of the universe. Abraham, of course, emerges unscathed. When his idiot brother Haran, who doesn’t believe in the real God, decides, “If Abraham can do it, so can I,” he ends up like a marshmallow that has fallen into the campfire.

  A more strictly canonical version of the same story is found in the book of Daniel, where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (who are known as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in Hebrew) refuse to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s giant idol and are thrown into a fiery furnace—in Aramaic this time, instead of Hebrew—from which all three emerge unharmed (Dan. 3).

  One of the things that the Talmud is saying in invoking this image is that you won’t be thrown into a fiery furnace for whitening your fellow’s face in public. For Abraham and the three Hebrews, truth is more sacred than life itself; they wound up in a fiery furnace for refusing to affirm a lie so huge and so corrupting that they would rather die than pay it the most cursory lip service. But people who shame their fellows in public don’t care what comes out of their mouths, as long as it serves their purposes. For them, the real difference is not between truth and falsehood; it’s between effective and ineffective. If a lie will do as well as the truth, there’s no need to put any premium on the latter; if the best way to get myself a promotion is to blame my mistakes on somebody else—that’s their problem. I’m busy spending my bonus.

  The indifference to truth and falsehood, the corruption of meaning that goes along with any attempt to whiten someone’s face in public, will keep you out of the fiery furnace forever. Once you replace God or The Good or The-Divine-That-Lives-Within-Us-All with Nimrod or Nebuchadnezzar or an all-expenses-paid trip for two, there is no need for you to be roasted alive; your sense of principle is already toast. The Talmud is trying to tell us that it is better to burn for truth and decency than rot by bearing public witness to the questionable conviction that someone who has the chutzpah to disagree with you is a cock-sucking, ass-jumping, booger-eating pedophile who gets himself off with a dildo cast from Saddam Hussein’s little willy.

  The idea of the fiery furnace explains the apparently irrational conduct of Chiya bar Ashi that we saw near the end of chapter 2. Having shamed his wife, as he thinks, by hiring a prostitute after abstaining from marital sex for years, he attempts to fulfill this injunction literally by jumping into the oven at home; only then does he find out that the prostitute was really his wife, who had disguised herself just as Tamar did. This didn’t make him feel any better.

  Jonah Gerondi, a thirteenth-century rabbi whose Gates of Penance still serves as a guide for Orthodox Jews interested in moral improvement, provides a slightly different perspective. Gerondi’s preoccupation with penance is sometimes attributed to a crise de conscience occasioned by his having encouraged Church authorities to burn Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, an act that eventually led to the public burning of the Talmud. Rabbi Jonah eventually recanted his denunciation and did penance for it; as someone who was well known for having committed the sin that he describes here, Gerondi writes with unusual passion:

  Behold a touch of murder—whitening the face of another. His face turns white and the redness flees and it resembles murder, and so say our rabbis of blessed memory. Secondly, the anguish of this whitening is more bitter than death, and therefore our rabbis say that a person should throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than whiten the face of his fellow in public. They do not say this about other grave transgressions and they thus compare a touch of murder with murder itself, as they say (Sanhedrin 74a), “Let him be killed rather than commit murder.”

  (SHAAREY TESHUVA 3:138)

  The phrase translated here as “a touch of murder” comes out literally as “dust of murder,” or better, “powder of murder.” It’s as much a form of murder as every astronaut’s favorite drink is a form of orange juice; just add water—or in this case, blood, the blood that has fled from the victim’s face—and there you have it, just about as good as the real thing:

  He who whitens the face of another does not recognize the enormity of his sin. His spirit is not embittered by his transgression as that of the murderer is, and thus he is far from repentance.

  (SHAAREY TESHUVA 3:140)

  According to the most reliable accounts, it took Gerondi himself nine years to repent for his treatment of Maimonides, who had been dead for three or four decades by then and was as unable to enjoy his vindication as he had been to defend himself earlier.

  IV

  THE EMPHASIS PLACED on this prohibition against shaming another in public seems to reflect the importance of rapid-fire, take-no-prisoners debate—the sort of thing monumentalized in the Talmud—in Jewish life. Opening your mouth and letting a bullet fly out, embarrassing someone else in the course of a conversation, has become what might be called the default sin of Jewish social life, the one that people are most likely to commit before even realizing that they’ve done so. As long ago as 1873, a rabbi named Yisroel Meyer Kagan published a book called Chofets Chayim (Who Desires Life), about how to avoid what is called loshn ho-ro, “evil tongue”: slander, gossip, calumny, and the like.

  The book, which became so popular that Kagan is still better known by its title than by his own name—he himself is almost never called anything but the Chofets Chayim—takes its title from the Psalms: “Who is the mentsh who desires life, who loves days in which he sees good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceitfully” (Ps. 34:13–14).

  Important and influential as Kagan’s book has proven, his mission, so to speak, was merely to remind us of what we should have known all along. In addition to the types of prohib
ited speech that we looked at earlier, the Talmud goes to some length to provide prescriptions for not hurting people’s feelings inadvertently. Sanhedrin 94a tells us: “Do not abuse an Aramean in front of a convert down to the tenth generation.” The popular Yiddish version of this goes: “Far a ger tor men ken goy nisht sheltn, it is forbidden to curse any gentile in front of a convert.” Similarly, we are told in tractate Bovo Metsiyo 59b, “In the presence of someone with a relative who has been hanged, do not say, ‘Hang this fish up for me.’” The Yiddish for this one comes out as, “Don’t mention rope in front of someone with a relative who has been hanged.”

  The same sensitivity also extends to poverty and suffering, and has even had some influence on how people say their prayers. When I was a kid, the verse “I was a youth and have now grown old, and I have never seen a righteous man let down nor his seed go begging bread” (Ps. 37:25) was never recited aloud, even though it forms part of the grace after eating that is often sung at Orthodox or traditional gatherings that involve a meal. When a group came to this line, they would all drop their voices, recite the words in an undertone, and then come back singing for the closing verse of the blessing.

  There were too many people sitting in synagogues in the fifties and sixties who had been let down in a big way during World War II for anyone to want to imply, even if only by inadvertent contrast, that they must somehow have deserved what happened to them, that maybe they and their murdered friends and families hadn’t been righteous enough.

  Similar concern was also demonstrated nonverbally. One of the funds mentioned in last chapter’s list of communal agencies and relief committees was moës khitin, “wheat money,” which started out as a way of providing poor people with flour with which to make matzohs for Passover and has evolved into a charitable fund that outfits those who can’t afford it with food and other necessities for the holiday. Deliveries used to be made in middle of the night in order not to shame the recipients. I’ve even heard of cases in which non-Jews from other parts of town (generally employees of one of the guys on the committee) would be hired to do the driving; the names on the delivery lists meant nothing to them. No one would see the bags of groceries being dropped off on the recipients’ porches or in the halls of their apartment buildings; no one not on the committee would know who wasn’t making a living that year, which meant that no one could be tempted to tell someone else.

  Perhaps the most dangerous kind of loshn ho-ro is what might be called “false truth” or “pseudo-truth”: statements that are factually accurate but have been made in order to hurt someone rather than convey information or advance the cause of learning. Speech of this type is the particular preserve of the kind of shmuck who likes to glory in her “plain-spoken honesty,” the tell-it-like-it-is, I-call-it-the-way-I-see-it sort of dork who never has a good word for anything and generally hides behind the excuse of “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  This commitment to acting like an eleven-year-old who has just looked hypocrisy up in a dictionary is dealt with in the Talmud in connection with weddings: What do you do when the bride is a pooch? Praising and entertaining the bride is a huge mitzvah; wedding guests still dance in front of the bride, and they used to sing her praises as they did so, a relatively uncomplicated thing until you found yourself dancing for a bride who looked like Popeye:

  How do you dance before the bride? The school of Shammai says, “Describe the bride as she is.” The school of Hillel says, “[Say] ‘Beautiful and charming bride.’ The school of Shammai says, “And if she’s lame or blind, you say, ‘Beautiful, charming bride,’ when the Torah commands, ‘Keep far away from falsehood’” (Exod. 23:7)? The school of Hillel said, “According to you, then, if someone makes a bad purchase in the market, should you praise it to him or deplore it? You’ve got to say, ‘Praise it.’” On this basis, the sages have said that a person should always conduct himself pleasantly to others.

  (KESUBOS 16B-17A)

  In short, it doesn’t cost any more to be nice than it does to be mean, but it leaves everybody feeling a whole lot better. The Tosfos, twelfth-and thirteenth-century commentators on the Talmud, get to the heart of what being pleasant to others really means:

  The bride as she is. [The school of Shammai says,] “If she has a defect, don’t mention it and don’t praise her, or else praise something about her that’s nice, such as her eyes or her hands, if they are pretty.” The school of Hillel says, “They should praise everything about her, for by listing [only] her good qualities, they imply that everything else is undeserving of praise.”

  A “truth” that is told solely for the sake of causing harm, of putting someone in their place, or casting them in a bad light is nothing but a stick in the hands of a bully. As anyone who has spent more than ninety seconds in a schoolyard knows, a stick made of wood doesn’t inflict lasting damage unless you poke someone’s eye out; an unflattering “truth” can stick to a person forever. That’s why we’re told that “a mentsh should always be among the persecuted rather than the persecutors” (Bovo Kamo 93a). This doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to go out of your way to be victimized, but that you should aid and identify with those who are being ill-treated, rather than with those who are mistreating them.

  An extreme illustration of the lengths to which you’re supposed to go in order to keep someone else from being shamed is found not in the Talmud or Midrash, not in a commentary or Hasidic story, but in a Danny Dill—Marijohn Wilkin classic first recorded by Lefty Frizzell. The narrator of “Long Black Veil” has been accused of murder. The killer who fled from the scene bore a marked resemblance to him, and the judge wants to know if he has an alibi. But “I spoke not a word, though it meant my life / For I had been in the arms of my best friend’s wife.” The narrator hangs for murder.

  Think what you want about the narrator and his best friend’s wife, who might well deserve all the suffering that comes upon them; the narrator had enough concern for his best friend to spare him a lifetime of undeserved pain by letting himself be executed for a crime that he didn’t commit, rather than let his friend find out that his best pal and his best gal had both betrayed him. The fact that sparing his friend’s feelings also means protecting the reputation of his friend’s unfaithful wife is just icing on this moral cake, and the narrator’s inadvertent confirmation of the Talmudic statement concerning the relative gravity of both adultery and public humiliation is an unwitting interfaith bonus. The narrator, himself a persecutor, finally casts his lot with the persecuted.

  In the rabbis’ failure to do likewise we begin to see the source of Bar Kamtso’s anger. Forgoing your own honor, suffering insuits lightly, is undoubtedly a noble quality. The Mishna tells us not to be quick to anger, but the Talmud tells us:

  Those who are insulted but do not insult, who hear themselves shamed but do not respond; who act out of love and stay happy while suffering, of them Scripture says (Judges 5:31), “Those who love Him [God] are like the sun going forth in its strength.”

  (SHABBOS 88B)

  Rashi interprets “insulted but do not insult” as meaning that “others come to them in chutzpah, not they to others.” Not insulting is not always synonymous with sitting quietly. It is entirely laudable, even saintly, to decide that you will bear any insult. However, when you see one person insulting another and you are in a position to do something about it, you are obliged to stop it, even if you yourself would have put up with the same treatment. And that is what the rabbis did not do for Bar Kamtso. They sat and watched and refrained from what both the host and Bar Kamtso were far too ready to do. They did not get angry. They did not reprimand anybody; they sat and watched and went on with the party. And they soon paid the price for their negligence:

  Whoever can forbid the members of his household [from committing a sin] and does not do so, is punished for their sin; if it is a question of the inhabitants of his city, he is punished for their sin; if it’s a matter of the entire world, he is punished for the whole world’s sin.r />
  (SHABBOS 54B)

  The rabbis attending the party could have forestalled the host’s sin but did not; they failed to upbraid him, fell short of their biblically mandated obligations as Jewish private citizens and of their duties as the legislators and preceptors—the governing elite—of the Jewish people. We already know the consequences; let’s see how a mentsh could have avoided them.

  FOUR

  What a Mentsh Does

  I

  THE RABBIS WHO failed to reprimand their host for his treatment of Bar Kamtso transgressed yet another of the fundamental principles of the ethical and legal system they were supposed to represent. This one had been formulated a century or so before the destruction of the Temple by Hillel the Elder, who was among the most influential and certainly the most popular of all the rabbis mentioned in the Talmud: “In a place where there are no anoshim, try to be an ish” (Ovos 2:5). Anoshim is the plural of ish, and as we saw in chapter 2, ish is one of those Hebrew words for “human being” or “person” or “man” that comes out as mentsh in Yiddish.

  It’s an unusual injunction. Rather than tell us that we should be mentshn and be done with it, Hillel demands that we try to be mentshn. This is not the usual way of religious or moral instruction. Imagine the Ten Commandments in a similar style: “Thou shalt try not to murder; thou shalt try not to commit adultery; thou shalt try not to steal.” That one word, “try,” would make guilt a thing of the past, depriving the commandments of any useful purpose. “God, I tried! How I tried!” would point to exoneration instead of frustration, and the exoneration would have to be universal. If we are to understand Hillel’s statement, we need to see it in its original context: