How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  Two more groups were then arbitrarily divided into subgroups based on the color of randomly distributed wristbands and then asked to evaluate the fairness of “participants” from either group who assigned themselves the easy task. The results were comparable to those from the first round, except that participants whose wristbands were the same color as the evaluators’ received even higher mean fairness ratings than the unaffiliated individuals had, and members of the other groups ranked lower than the people evaluated in the second group.

  With this experiment, DeSteno and Valdesolo have confirmed many of our less rosy notions of human nature. “A person finds no fault with himself,” as it says (Kesubos 105b), and we now have a more accurate measure of how shameless people can be about applying one standard to themselves (and members of their group) and another to the rest of the world.

  Things got even more interesting when they repeated the experiment, but with one slight difference: the addition of what is called a “cognitive constraint,” a mental task intended to divide or deflect the participant’s attention. Before answering the questions about fairness in assigning tasks, the participants were given a mental job to do. As the experimenters describe it:

  Participants were told that the experimenters were interested in how people make judgments when they are distracted. To simulate distraction, they would be asked to remember a string of digits at the same time that they were responding to a series of questions. Participants were told that a string of seven digits would appear on the screen before each question. They would then have to answer the question within 10 seconds, immediately after which they would have to recall the digit string that had preceded the question. Participants were also told that it was extremely important to provide the most accurate answers possible for questions comprising the assignment evaluation measure.

  The participants were thinking about the numbers rather than themselves. The cognitive constraint “resulted in the disappearance of the hypocrisy effect; participants experiencing load judged their own transgressions to be as unfair as the same behavior when enacted by another.” In other words, they were so busy trying to remember the numbers that they were unable to come up with any exculpatory bullshit. They didn’t actually behave any better than they did in the first experiment; they still gave themselves the easy job without regard for fairness to the next participant, but at least they got to a point where they were willing to acknowledge that they were behaving like shmucks. It might not be much, but it’s a start.

  The findings of Valdesolo and DeSteno might lend a more functional or utilitarian cast to the long-standing Jewish emphasis on study. If the Torah never really departs from our mouths and we meditate on it day and night, as the book of Joshua tells us to do (and the word translated as “meditate” can also mean “speak, utter, recite”); if we set the Lord before us always (see Psalms 16:8), perhaps what we’re really doing is employing a religiously or community-mandated cognitive constraint that, even if it can’t keep us from doing the wrong thing, at least makes it more difficult for us to rationalize our wrongdoing. “Woe unto those,” says Isaiah, “who call evil good and good evil, who make darkness into light and light into darkness” (Isa. 5:20). We’ve come almost full circle: by thinking about something other than ourselves—whether it’s the glory of the Lord or a randomly generated string of numbers—we become able to see ourselves as we are.

  Such an understanding of the purpose of constant study might help to explain some of the more troubling rabbinic pronouncements about what happens to those who aren’t paying attention:

  Rabbi Jacob says: If somebody is walking along the road studying, but breaks off to say, “How beautiful is this tree, how beautiful is this field”—Scripture considers him guilty against himself.

  (ovos 3:7)

  “Guilty against himself” means “has put himself into a position in which he is liable to lose his life.” While Rabbi Jacob is alluding in part to the folk belief that no harm can come to a person while he is engaged in Torah study—or no harm from the kinds of demons who frequent roads and trails; brigands might be another question—the basic thrust of his comment, that leaving off study on account of any distraction is a capital sin, has troubled students and commentators for a very long time: you look at a tree or a field that’s just been plowed and you could die? Vos far a meshigas, what kind of meshugass, is that? What happens if you look at a tree in a field that’s just been plowed, and appreciate the entire scene? Will you die slower? Or sooner? And if you keep your eyes closed and hire a little child to lead you, are you gonna live forever?

  If we recall that Torah scrolls tended not to be owned by individuals and that the so-called Oral Law (a term that seems to have been introduced by our old friend Hillel) really was oral for a very long time, that is, was not written down at all, the idea of studying while walking around and repeating things to yourself as if you were learning a part in a play does not sound quite so outlandish. Trees, fields, wistful vistas become no more than the wallpaper of the world: pleasant, necessary even, but background, nothing but background. Whatever you’re reviewing in your mind acts like Valdesolo and DeSteno’s string of numbers; it takes up just enough of your attention to keep you from injecting yourself into the scene before you. If, however, you drop the cognitive load that you’ve been shlepping along with you and suddenly project yourself (and your self) back into the surroundings, in which you now have an interest, you’ve reverted to a frame of mind in which you’re happy to make excuses for yourself that you would never allow for anyone else.

  Up until surprisingly recently, books were expensive and not always easy to come by, and you couldn’t always count on being able to get hold of the one you needed when you needed it. Considerably more emphasis was therefore placed on memorization than is fashionable today; as recently as 1939, the ability to recite two hundred folios (four hundred very large pages) of Talmud from memory (and prove that you understood them) was the prerequisite for the entrance examinations for Chachmei Lublin, the Lublin yeshiva often characterized as the Harvard of the prewar yeshiva world. Those who couldn’t muster the requisite four hundred pages from memory weren’t even eligible to fail. I have been told that students admitted to the yeshiva memorized a further folio every day. While four hundred pages is an exceptional amount, the principle here is the same as it is in elementary school: you can’t get rid of this stuff—and God knows, generations of ex-yeshiva boys have tried. Twenty-four hours a day, it never leaves your mind, even if it isn’t always coming out of your mouth—and traditional study still has a very strong oral component.

  It isn’t like this stuff is easy to understand; there’s a lot of cognitive constraint going on there. You can’t study twenty-four hours a day, but you can spend enough time thinking about something that is not you, that might have no direct bearing on your life—as we mentioned earlier, much of the Bible is about how to build tabernacles and offer sacrifices that none of us is ever going to see—to be able to step back and see your own behavior for what it really is. The daily study preferred by traditional Judaism is more than a means of acquiring information or strengthening your sense of belonging to the group; it serves as a constraint against cutting yourself any more slack than is cut for anybody else. It makes you aware of the all-important fact that refusing to make exceptions—especially for yourself or the members of your own little group—is the basis of all morality.

  Hillel’s dictum strengthens this anti-exceptionalism by forcing you to judge everyone else by the standards you’d use for yourself. The leniency you’d grant yourself is automatically extended to others because you are forced to treat them just as you’d treat yourself. True, the use of the cognitive constraint only affects the accuracy and honesty of the way in which you assess your behavior, rather than the behavior itself, but the ability to remove the spectacles of self-interest and see your behavior for what it really is, is the first step to change. All education can thus be used as an occasion for mentsh-
hood, as a path up from shmuckery.

  IX

  IF YOU FIND yourself saying, “I sure acted like a shmuck” often enough, you might eventually be moved to do something about it. But how often do you have to tell yourself what a shmuck you’ve been before you stop being one? How much time might elapse between that first tentative realization that you’re not really the life of the party, the office clown, Hugh Hefner Jr., or the Lord Jehovah’s security guard, and a decision to do something about it that doesn’t consist of trying even harder?

  Recognizing the fact that you are a shmuck and learning how to stop being one if you’ve never been prodded by memories of Hebrew school or heard of any of the people mentioned in these pages, are what Harold Ramis’s film, Groundhog Day, is all about. I can’t improve on Roger Ebert’s summary:

  The movie, as everyone knows, is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over and over again. He is the only person in his world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.

  Watching the movie, we see how Phil Connors, a shmuck of a TV weatherman played by Bill Murray, gradually begins the learning that Ebert mentions. It is never explained why he is stuck so tightly in February 2 that he can kill himself one day and then wake up on the morning of the same day on which he killed himself and live it all over again. He can live or die as he chooses, but he’ll be waking up at 6 A.M., with the clock radio in his room playing “I Got You, Babe” by Sonny and Cher, to face the same twenty-four hours once more.

  We never find out how many February 2’s he lives through—an early draft of the script has him reading through the entire Punxsutawney public library at the rate of one page a day, though the film as released doesn’t have quite that sense of Indian epic time—but he’s there long enough to go from absolute beginner at the piano to being an accomplished-enough player to be able to get through a bit of Rachmaninoff and some credible light jazz by the end, and he doesn’t start taking piano lessons until the movie is nearly over.

  Connors has the hots for his producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and since he’s the only character who remembers all the different February 2’s, he begins feeling her out for information about herself that he can use the next day to show how much they have in common. He memorizes French poetry, orders sweet vermouth (with a twist, yet) to show that he shares her tastes, asks her heartfelt questions about what she wants out of life. Connors eventually gets her back to his bed and breakfast but, after Rita tells him that she won’t sleep with him that night, unleashes his full shmuck self in a desperate attempt to score and tells Rita that he loves her. Rita, who has no recollection of the dozen or two February 2’s that have led up to this moment, looks at him as if he’d just slapped her and says, “You don’t even know me…. This whole day was just one long setup!”

  Faced with an eternity of frustration, Connors gets even more depressed and tries to kill himself at various times and in various ways, sometimes with the groundhog, sometimes with somebody else, sometimes all by himself, only to wake right back up at 6 A.M. to another Groundhog Day. He tells Rita that he must be some sort of god, since he’s unkillable; he demonstrates his local omniscience for her, telling her all about the lives of the other people in the diner where they’re having this conversation, and even predicting a few minor events just before they happen. “I told you!” he tells her when she asks, yet again, how he does it. “I wake up every day right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it’s always February second and I can’t turn it off.” He fills Rita in on the details of their shared Groundhog Day past, and she proposes staying up all night with him, as a sort of “objective witness” to what’s been happening. They stay up all night, and just before six, as Rita is dozing off, Phil admits that he loves her: “I don’t deserve someone like you, but if I ever would, I swear I would love you for the rest of my life.” Rita wishes him good night.

  The alarm sounds, it’s another Groundhog Day, but Phil has found his cognitive constraint—Rita, who is distracting enough to force him into accurate self-assessment—and after years’ worth of Groundhog Days he figures out Hillel’s idea for himself. He shows up for that morning’s report on Groundhog Day with coffee for Rita and the cameraman; he hears some Mozart that he likes and immediately starts taking piano lessons; he starts to look after the aged bum whom he used to walk by every day. Since it’s a small town and he’s been there for so long that he knows everything that’s going to happen, he starts to prevent bad things from happening: keeps a little girl from being run over; walks into a restaurant, goes directly to a table where he administers the Heimlich maneuver to a choking man; catches a boy as he falls out of a tree. Rita is finally won over. They spend the night together and wake up on February 3.

  The turning point occurs when Phil realizes that even though he can’t get out of February 2, he can change things in such a way that he might have a chance of getting Rita to love him. All that needs to be changed is Phil, and he sets about doing so. Things move quickly past Rita, though, and Phil begins to take an active role in the lives of many of the townspeople, thanks in large part to the imaginative sympathy that is so important a part of Hillel’s idea. In view of the circumstances, there is really nothing that anybody in Punxsutawney can do for Phil. He isn’t helping them because that’s how he’d want them to treat him, he’s helping them because helping them is the right thing to do, because—corny as it sounds—being nice to all those people makes the town, which is all the world that Connors has anymore, a nicer place for everybody. In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie, Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about “doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse.” Which might not sound like very much, but it’s just about all you can do in life.

  x

  THE PATH FROM Hillel to Phil Connors bears out yet another piece of the Talmud’s psychology, probably one of the deepest observations in all of its thirty-six tractates:

  Let a person always occupy himself with Torah and good deeds, even if he isn’t doing them for their own sake; for from doing them with an ulterior motive, he will come to do them for their own sake.

  (NOZIR 23B)

  This, of course, is exactly what happens with Phil. He might not be studying any Torah, but he certainly occupies himself with good deeds. His initial efforts at treating others with some semblance of dignity and respect are either attempts to relieve the tedium of always waking up to the same damned day or aspects of his unsuccessful campaign to get into Rita’s pants. Eventually, though, his ulterior motives recede and then vanish altogether, and he is left with the skills that he had to teach himself in order to look like the kind of man that Rita would want. Instead of messing with people because he can, instead of looking for opportunities to get away with things, Phil now begins to seek out opportunities to give away the things that the people around him need: help, consideration, advice, even money.

  Connors is still doing things because he can, but the “because” has been redirected from himself to others, and has taken on a new meaning. Where “Because I can” used to be the little devil that sits on Tom Hulce’s shoulder at the party in Animal House (also co-written by Harold Ramis) and tells him to “Fuck [the girl who’s passed out], fuck her brains out,” it now means Elwood P. Dowd inviting strangers to join him and Harvey, the six-foot-three invisible rabbit, for martinis at Charlie’s Place. Instead of “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want,” “Because I can” has come to mean, “What can I do to help you?”

  For the first three-quarters of the movie, when Phil does nothing except what he feels like—get drunk, get laid, try to commit suicide without coming back to life a few hours later—none of his actions appears to have any consequence: he wakes up at 6 A.M. on Groun
dhog Day no matter how high a cliff he plunged from the day before or how many bullets tore through his body. He lacks the insight to see that he could make things less tedious and instead acts like a kid who doesn’t want to wash because he’s only going to get dirty all over again.

  And nothing would have changed, he might well have been stuck that way forever, had Rita not led him to see his predicament as an opportunity:

  Sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes. One to be a great journalist. One to, I don’t know, go back to school, study art, or auto mechanics. One just to take care of all the busywork, you know, pay the bills, get my car tuned up. One to be the wild woman of Borneo. One to be Mother Teresa. Maybe it’s not a curse, Phil. It all just depends on how you look at it.

  The next February 2, Phil brings her and the cameraman coffee, starts taking music lessons, begins to do something. Rita’s wish list is all about herself, but once Phil adapts it to himself, it leads him farther and farther out of himself, deeper and deeper into the lives of other people. And all of them, Phil and the others, start to look like they might be happy. Or happier than they were. Thinking about others, really thinking about them and not just pretending, seems to be the best way of advancing yourself and getting what you want. Not only does everybody win, but you save yourself the trouble of ever having to fabricate another excuse for letting somebody down.

  “A mitsve,” my mother would have told me, “firt tsi a mitsve, one good deed leads to another good deed, as one transgression does to the next.” I don’t know if she knew that she was quoting Ovos when she said this or if it’s just something that she thought she’d always known, but one good turn certainly deserves another in any language. Phil Connors ends up doing a lot of things for a lot of people and not only gets himself out of a horrible rut by doing so, but he manages to get all the stuff that he wanted for himself by doing things for others. Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they’ll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That’s the way to show them. That’s how a mentsh gets revenge.