Michael Wex - How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

Dont Be a Shmuck

Whats a Shmuck?

Whats a Mentsh?

Extending the Shmuck

What a Mentsh Does

How to Do It Like a Mentsh

I

M ANY PEOPLE READING this sentence have already looked at the cover of this book and snorted derisively. Ach, du lieber! I knew it all along. The kvetch-guy, the big expert, the Grand Poobah of Yiddish, should give Dan Quayle a call and ask for lessons in spelling. Mentsh, my eye. Everyone knows that the word is spelled mensch.

And if we were all speaking German today, it would be. A bagel and schmeer would be spelled Begel und Schmier, lox would be Lachs, and wed think of all three as wholesome Teutonic delicacies straight from the Vaterland because a Mensch, one of a certain age, at least, would be a solid citizen whose service in the Wehrmacht or on the home front had helped Germany conquer the world. The kind of mentsh described in this book would probably be a thing of the past; and I, were I lucky enough to be alive, might have written a bookas underground as any bestseller can beabout a language that was born to quetsch.

Lets not belabor the obvious, then: Yiddish and German are two separate and very different languages that use different alphabets and reflect wholly different ways of thinking. If youre worried about what mentsh is really supposed to look like, imagine a cover that reads:

How to Be a and Not a

The authentic Yiddish mentsh has no truck with any ABCs. The best we can try to do is come up with a substitute as close to the original in sound and meaning as possible. Unlike the German Mensch, the Yiddish mentsh has a definite t-sound between the n and the sh; unlike the German, it isnt German, though it could certainly be described as Germanic. The Yiddish mentsh sounds no more like Mensch than the German ist sounds like the English is. Where is and ist mean the same thing, though, well see over the course of this book that the Yiddish mentsh differs from Mensch even more in meaning than in spelling or pronunciation.

The Latin-alphabet mentsh is also an internationalism, the transliteration sanctioned by YIVO, the Acadmie Franaise of the Yiddish-speaking world, for use in all languages that employ the Latin alphabet. To use Mensch in its stead is to deny Yiddish-speakers the right to ensure that their language is represented with a maximum of accuracy in other languages. Mentsh was even used instead of Mensch in Yiddish transliterated in Germany before World War II, and people who can get their heads around the idea that Beijing renders the name of the Chinese capital more accurately than Peking shouldnt have any problem with mentsh.

The second Yiddish word in the title presents no such trouble; it isnt really German at all and has nothing to with the German Schmuck, which means jewelry. While Yiddishists might have preferred to see shmuk instead of shmuck, I felt in this instance that the latter spelling came closer to satisfying everybodymy favorite way of satisfying nobody (see Chapter 2)especially because shmuck is used a bit differently in this book from the way it is used in Yiddish. Although mentsh can be used of both men and women in Yiddish, the Yiddish shmuck applies only to males. On the basis of the same principle that allows etiquette, the French for label or price tag, to mean nothing but good manners in English, I have extended the reach of shmuck in English to cover people of either sex who dont know how to behave. One need only compare the French con a c-word that also means jerk of either sexto see the same principle at work on the other side of the anatomical divide.

In the same spirit, shmek, the correct Yiddish plural of shmuck, is used interchangeably with shmucks, a highly anglicized version of the same idea.

II

S OME TERMS THAT come up fairly often in the book might not be immediately familiar to people who have not attended a Jewish day school. The Talmud, for instance, consists of two sections. The earlier one, completed around 200 C.E. , is called the Mishna. The Mishna was compiled in Hebrew and consists, for the most part, of attempts to organize and interpret the practical applications of the Bibles commandments. The part known as either the Gemara or the Talmud (the latter name has come to be used for the whole collection) was finished about three hundred years after the Mishna. It is mostly in Aramaic and consists, loosely speaking, of commentary on the Mishna. There are two different Talmuds, compiled in two different places and containing much divergent material. These are commonly known as the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Historically, the Babylonian has been the more important. In the few citations to the Jerusalem Talmud in this text, the word Yerushalmi precedes the name of the tractate from which the quotation has been drawn.

The Talmud became essential to Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. The destruction of the Temple and the accompanying loss of Jewish political autonomy mark the beginning of Judaism as we know it, a religion characterized by exile and dislocation. Until the year 70, Jewish practice revolved around offering sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud and its way of thinking helped to change a religion focused on a specific location into one that can be taken anywhere with no loss of intensity or authenticity. As I have written elsewhere, Acceptance of Talmudic authority marks the real difference between Jews and the rest of the world.

Midrash is a collective designation for various types of homiletic interpretation of the Bible. Although the main midrashic collections were compiled during the Middle Ages, the material contained in these collections is often of considerably greater antiquity.

Rashi is the acronym by which R abbi Sh lomo Yi tskhoki (died 1104) is known. He is the author of the best-known and most influential commentaries on both the Bible and Talmud, commentaries that are printed alongside the text of both works and studied as a virtual part of them in traditional religious schools.

The Shulkhan Arukh (The Set Table) is the title of a legal code by Rabbi Joseph Karo (died 1545) that has become authoritative for Orthodox Jews of every stripe. It serves as the basic rule book of halacha, as Jewish law is called in Hebrew.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

T HIS IS A book about happiness, your own and that of others. Its a book about living decently without preaching about it or turning into a Goody Two-shoes like Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. It is based on an idea of what it means to be fully human, an idea developed by people who have been labeled as subhuman on more than one occasion. Its about how to care for yourself by thinking about others.

It doesnt matter who you are, where you come from, what religion you follow, or if you follow any religion at all. The principles outlined in this book will work for anyone who makes the effort to put them into practice, and as well see, the most important one of all originates in a piece of advice that a rabbi gave to a gentile. Although some of the explanations of Jewish tradition that follow might sound a little esoteric or out of the way, theyre here to show how theory was turned into practice. I first learned the basic ideas treated here at home and heard most of them from my mother, who didnt know one page of Talmud from the next, but had pretty clear ideas about what it means to be a mentsh. The same ideas, often expressed in the form of proverbs, have also been passed down by millions of other Jewish mothers over the course of many centuries.