How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  He used to say: A bor is not afraid of sin and an ignoramus cannot be pious. An overly timid person cannot learn and an irascible one cannot teach—and not everyone who does a lot of business gets smart. And in a place where there are no mentshn, try to be a mentsh.

  (ovos 2:5)

  The Mishna opens with two descriptions of how contrary extremes of behavior lead to the same bad ends. In the first case, we are told that the bor has no fear of sin and the ignoramus lacks piety, that is, is not punctilious in ritual or ethical observance. The Hebrew word bor has no precise equivalent in English. Maimonides defines it as a person who is “wanting in both intellect and character, that is, lacking both wisdom and morals” (Commentary on Ovos 2:5). A bor isn’t afraid to sin; he is too crude, too socially and intellectually uncouth for the idea of transgression to have much meaning for him. Instead of right and wrong, he sees the world in terms of want-this, not-want-that. He does what he wants to because that’s what he wants to do, and lets nothing theoretical get in his way.

  The ignoramus—am ha’aretz in Hebrew (Yiddish: amorets, with the accent on the or)—is literally “the people of the land,” a way of describing what we would call “the folks on Main Street,” “the great unwashed,” “plain people,” “the salt of the earth,” or, to put it into Aramaic, “Kamtso bar Kamtso—Nameless McNobody.” Just plain Bill and Jane. Good, decent folk who only know what they read in the paper. In strictly Jewish terms, an amorets doesn’t know enough to be able to understand the details of the commandments and is therefore unlikely to perform them properly, no matter how sincere or well intentioned she might be.

  With respect to knowledge, let’s not forget that the newspaper or Web site or blog that is the amorets’s chief source of information is sometimes edited by the rabbis who ignored Bar Kamtso at the party, sometimes by Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, and sometimes by a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The heart of the amorets is in the right place, but without a reasonable store of general knowledge and a mind trained to interpret and use this knowledge, she can easily go off in the wrong direction without realizing that she has done so: once again, think of well-meaning southern whites a generation or two ago who had no use for the KKK but never really questioned the morality of segregation, either.

  The next pair of opposites is a little more straightforward. The overly timid student is too shy to speak up, too scared to ask questions if there’s something that he doesn’t understand, while a bad-tempered teacher makes all of her students overly timid: they’re so afraid of an outburst of temper that they sit and nod and pretend to understand, rather than risk being yelled at or embarrassed.

  Hillel’s descriptions point to the social and religious consequences of these different types of unproductive behavior. The bor and the amorets both make moral or ethical behavior into a matter of accident rather than choice. While it’s possible for both to act ethically, it is difficult—if not impossible—for either to do so for ethical reasons. Since the bor does whatever he wants, he doesn’t care if his actions are sinful or virtuous; the amorets doesn’t always know, and doesn’t even know that she doesn’t know.

  The bor, for instance, has twelve beers in an hour, starts his car, and drives off in search of a toilet. The amorets knows that driving after drinking twelve beers is very dangerous; she therefore has only six in the same hour, gets into the car feeling well in control of herself, and starts to drive. If she’d known about the .08 percent law, she would have obeyed it, but she’s so ignorant that she’s never heard of it. She understands the principle of not driving while impaired, but doesn’t understand enough to know when, precisely, impairment begins. Both the bor and the amorets are driving while drunk, but they’re doing it for different reasons: the bor doesn’t care, the amorets doesn’t know.

  Likewise, those who succumb to fear of questioning and those who instill that fear both help to diminish learning and wisdom, thus preparing the ground for future crops of bors and ignoramuses. They sow seeds of noncultivation. Hillel’s description of them is followed by a codicil that should be the motto of every MBA program on earth: “Not everyone who does a lot of business gets smart.” Thinking only of business won’t give you any purchase on brains. You can breeze through the financial pages and still be an amorets. Not everything is a matter of business, and approaching every aspect of life as a question of profit or loss will make you stupid in nonmoney matters; overriding concern for your own advantage brings only the narrowest of benefits.

  After all these categorical statements, Hillel makes an abrupt change in sentence structure and issues a command: “In a place where there are no anoshim, you should strive to be an ish yourself.” In a place where everybody is like the people just described, it’s up to you to be the exception. You must be the ish.

  We’ve already noted that ish can mean “person in charge, person who exercises control,” and the passage that we’re looking at here is a perfect example of the way in which it can be used to mean both “control over others” and “control over himself.” While the bor is generally considered the human equivalent of a vacant lot—the major commentators point out that the basic meaning of the word bor is “fallow or uncultivated field,” the dry raw material of the clay golem—members of the other three categories are poised on the edge of various forms of self-defeating shmuckery. The amorets’s defective knowledge of how to control what leads to a parody of self-discipline, while the shy person’s fear produces self-repression rather than self-command. By being too scared to ask the necessary questions, he effectively turns himself into an amorets when he has every opportunity not to be one. His irascible counterpart, who doesn’t control her temper at all, condemns her terrified students to a similar state of amorets-ism.

  An ish, on the other hand, is a person whose demonstrable authority over himself lends his advice and opinions a certain weight with others. This kind of ish can likewise be called a mentsh in Yiddish—a person of respect, without any of that phrase’s Mafia connotations—and what Hillel is saying is, “In a place where there are no mentshn”—think “elders” in the sense of “respected authorities”—“try, make an effort, put yourself out, even if you’d prefer a life of cozy retirement, to be a mentsh.” If there isn’t a Man, it’s up to you to be The Man, even if you are a woman.

  To go back to Bar Kamtso and the banquet, then, there is no guarantee that the rabbis would have been able to stop the host from treating Bar Kamtso so badly, but they had a moral obligation as mentshn, as fellow humans, but even more as community leaders, to stand up and protest, to let the host know that he was out of line. Since neither Bar Kamtso nor the host can be described as a mentsh, it was up to the rabbis—not necessarily all of them, but any one of them, just one—to get up and do something. None of them tried, and their crisis of mentsh-hood changed the course of world history.

  II

  THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE analysis of this dictum of Hillel’s is probably that of Samuel di Uzida (sometimes transcribed as Ozida, di Ozida, Uzida, or Ucedo), a sixteenth-century rabbi whose Midrash Shmuel was among the most popular and widely circulated commentaries on Ovos, the Mishnaic tractate in which Hillel’s statement is found. This might not sound like much, kind of like describing it as the best-known footnote to something so insanely obscure that it’s never even come up on Jeopardy!—“I’ll take Rabbinic Apothegms for two hundred, Alex”—but Ovos, often called Avot, “Fathers,” or Pirkei Avot, “Chapters of Fathers” (it’s a question of Ashkenazic, as distinct from Sephardic, Hebrew), is the most widely read of all the sixty-three tractates of the Mishna. Its six chapters are studied in a rotating cycle on Saturday afternoons between Passover and Rosh Hashana, and at one time most men and boys—the same people who had attended the Hebrew schools described earlier—had at least some familiarity with it, even though many of them would not have been able to construe a single page of any other part of the Talmud. Its Hebrew is generally uncomplicated, its contents ethical rather than legalistic,
its style generally pithy and quotable. The Saturday-afternoon study sessions soon led to Ovos’s being included in prayer books, which often came with Yiddish translations for the benefit of those with little or no Hebrew. If there was any part of the Talmud that uneducated people of either sex might have been expected to know, it was Ovos.

  Di Uzida’s commentary—full of practical advice in easy Hebrew—was vastly popular in Eastern Europe. Rather than a unified work reflecting the ideas of a single author, it is a collection of observations from other sources that served as a sort of Reader’s Digest version of commentaries on tractate Ovos. Di Uzida’s examination of the sentence that we’re looking at features a lengthy quotation from the fifteenth-century rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, who says, among other things, “In a place where there are no anoshim”—no mentor types—“to teach you and spur you on to do the things that you are supposed to do, you yourself must spur yourself on.”

  Abarbanel touches here on one of the most important qualities of a mentsh: self-sufficiency. A mentsh must not only be able to rely on his own judgment and intuition when he has no one to turn to for advice, he also has to be self-motivated in acquiring the knowledge and insight that he needs to make these decisions. He has to have the confidence to act independently, especially when those around him are behaving like shmucks and urging him to follow suit. If you behave with kindness and consideration only when you’ve got your personal values trainer and a cheerleading squad to support you, you’re doing tricks, not good.

  As Abarbanel goes on to say, “In a place where you can’t find wise and intelligent people to teach you, you have to teach yourself.” If there’s no one around to show you what to do, no one whose example you can follow, figure it out for yourself. You’re an ish, a mentsh, and not a kid: between the knowledge that you have acquired and your experience in telling right from wrong, you should be able to work it out on your own. You’ve got to use the one thing you’ve got that separates the smart from the stupid, the wise from the foolish, the mentsh from the shmuck: your seykhl.

  III

  A YIDDISH WORD, of course, taken from the Hebrew, seykhl comes up frequently in Yiddish conversation. It means “sense, wit, reason, understanding, brains.” These are good qualities anywhere, but in a culture in which study can be said to be a form of worship, they are a basic prerequisite for full participation. Seykhl occupies the place in Jewish culture that legs do in marathon running—and this is one reference to Jewish culture that doesn’t have to be qualified by the adjective “traditional”: intelligence continues to be the most highly admired and appreciated virtue in general Jewish society, even on the part of people who lack it themselves. Whether its heroes are Talmudic scholars and biblical commentators or university professors and other intellectuals (and note the popularity of lists of Jewish Nobel Prize winners—people whose intelligence has even been fêted by the goyim), Jewish culture puts such a premium on seykhl that scholars and rabbis really were the ideal of a people with no generals or kings.

  The one thing that rabbis and famous scholars had in common with their admirers was the basic education discussed earlier. The scholars’ more sophisticated approaches to life, religious ritual, and sacred texts were gradually absorbed by their “public” in much the same way as rock ’n’ roll attitudes have penetrated offices and cubicles all over the United States: the behavior and way of thinking of a prestige group filters down to less exalted members of the community, often through written works in which elite customs and behavior are described in considerable detail. The general population then adopts such attitudes and habits as are accessible to them and commensurate with their surroundings. Once a tradition takes root, it replicates itself from one generation to the next because its adherents are all drawing from the same classic sources. Where Elvis was regarded as a tasteless joke by virtually every adult of my parents’ generation, his influence on every facet of American culture has been so great that his surname has become redundant. No one born and raised on this planet would even dream that I might be referring to film critic Elvis Mitchell, for instance, or that an Elvis imitator would be someone who types review copy while sporting dreadlocks to the middle of his back. And they’d be right not to do so.

  Just as every rock musician owes something to Elvis, so does every rock fan, who has never even thought of picking up a guitar but likes to project the image of a certain type of rebellion. The practitioner and the nonpractitioner have both gone to the same school, as it were. That’s how it was with the Jews, but without the “as it were.” In an era when most people in Europe had no schooling at all and most of the nobility was semiliterate at best, future Jewish peasants and the future aristocrats of the European Jewish mind were sitting side by side in the same one-room schools, receiving the same basic education. According to the Yiddish proverb, “Ale yidn hobn eyn seykhl, all Jews have the same seykhl, all Jews think alike,” because they all share the same Talmudically based way of reasoning. The nature of the Yiddish language is such that even people with no education whatever—the school system mentioned here was overwhelmingly male, in the sense that “overwhelmingly” means 100 percent; girls’ education varied wildly, depending on time and place—even girls absorbed this way of thinking simply by learning how to speak: we’re back to the Latin idea of conversation as the way in which you lead your life.

  Ways of thought and speech that have come directly from the schoolroom can be found in virtually every area of Yiddish. Answering a question with a question, for instance. Ask someone how they are in Yiddish, and the conversation is likely to go:

  PERSON I: Vos makht ir [How are you]?

  PERSON 2: Vos zol ikh makhn [How should I be]?

  Aside from being a textbook example of what comics who speak a little French like to call a joke manqué, an answer of this type lets Person I know that nothing much has changed with Person 2 since the last time that they spoke to each other. It is a response that is rarely used with strangers, but tells anyone who knows Person 2 reasonably well not only that things are the same, but also that the unspoken second part of the sentence—“in view of the fact that I have to put up with” whatever it is that she has to put up with—need never be uttered. The interrogative tone says it all, and you’re supposed to know that. Dai le-meyvin, as they say in Yiddish; it means exactly the same thing as sapienti sat does in Latin: enough for a person with seykhl.

  It is but a step from “How should I be?” to the type of rhetorical question immortalized, if that’s the word, in the famous old joke about Trotsky’s supposed confession to Stalin. A telegram arrives in Moscow. It reads: “I was wrong stop you were right stop I should apologize,” and is signed simply, “Trotsky.” The Great Helmsman, Comrade J. V. Stalin, is beside himself with joy: Trotsky has finally confessed his guilt. Stalin is so happy that he reads the telegram out loud. A Jew, whose identity varies from one version of the joke to the next, approaches directly and begs leave to correct the Little Father of the People. “No, Comrade. It should be read like this: I was wrong? You were right? I should apologize?” The Jew is shot on the spot.

  This type of ironic question, the kind that does not expect—or deserve—an answer, comes straight from the Talmud, and the tone of voice in which it is always delivered is redolent of Talmudic study to any native speaker of Yiddish.

  A final example, one that takes us back to the origins of the ironic resignation that is so pronounced in Yiddish, involves the same Hillel whose words we have been looking at:

  The school of Shammai and the school of Hillel disputed for two and a half years. The former said, “It would be better for human beings had they not been created,” and the latter said, “It is better for human beings to have been created than not to have been created.” It was finally decided: “It would have been better had human beings not been created, but since they have been created, let them examine their acts.”

  (ERUVIN 13B)

  It’s the typical ironic compromise. “It would have been bett
er if you weren’t here, but since you are, you might as well feel bad about it.” This is the ancestor of such punch lines as “Steaks only cost a dollar at Schwartz’s, but he’s run out? Nu, when I run out, I sell them for fifty cents.” There is a kind of logic at work here that cannot be described as universal. We’re looking at a culture in which anybody can, and often does, say, “Sleep faster, we need the pillows,” or understand and repeat something like the following Hasidic story:

  Rabbi Leib Dimimles of Lantzut was a wealthy merchant, and very learned in the Torah. It happened that he lost his money and was reduced to poverty. Rabbi Leib paid no heed to this calamity and continued his studies. His wife inquired: “How is it possible for you not to show the least anxiety?” The Rabbi answered: “The Lord gave me a brain which thinks rapidly. The worrying which another would do in a year, I have done in a moment.”

  The difference between the cultural elite and the rest of the people was a matter of degree rather than kind, in this respect at least. Although a certain natural endowment might have been needed for someone to grow up to be a rabbi, this endowment was considered to be the common property of just about everybody—which is not the same as saying that everybody made use of it. Aside from such obvious exceptions as the mentally handicapped, these intellectual attainments were felt to be within the theoretical reach of everyone; prolonged study was thought to depend more on economics and disposition than innate ability, which was generally taken for granted—an opinion that seems to have been borne out by the rapid progress of the children of working-class Jewish immigrants in the learned professions in the United States and elsewhere. Aside from access to a university system, the decisive factor was time to study: Tsu a gutn kop muz men hobn a gutn okher, for a good head, you need a good behind. This is the Yiddish version of Blaise Pascal’s remark that all human unhappiness stems from the inability to sit still in a room. The patience to labor over a problem until it is solved, the self-discipline to sit and concentrate on a book, help to train our innate seykhl by sharpening the ability to infer and work things out.