Author of "Embracing Auschwitz" and "Mensch•Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi - Wisdom for Untethered Times." Winner of the Rockower Award, the highest honor in Jewish journalism and 2019 Religion News Association Award for Excellence in Commentary. Musings of a rabbi, journalist, father, husband, poodle-owner, Red Sox fan and self-proclaimed mensch, taken from essays, columns, sermons and thin air. Writes regularly in the New York Jewish Week and Times of Israel.
All of religion can be distilled down to the question of how to be a good person. To be religious is to be good – and to be good is to be religious. You can find a version of the Golden Rule in almost every living faith; but for Jews, especially, being a mensch is at the core of an authentic Jewish life.
One isn’t born amensch. Nor is it a status that one ever completely achieves; for to boast that you are menschis, by definition, not to possess the requisite humility to be one. Becoming a mensch is a life-long process, a journey, an aspiration.
Although the word mensch means “man” in German, the Yiddish word is not gender specific, nor does it correlate to what might be considered “macho” qualities. Quite the contrary, in fact, To be a mensch, only kindness matters.
The Talmudic tractate Avot, 6:6 provides a roadmap as to how to live an ethical life. This passage includes 48 middot (measures) through which we can “acquire Torah.” See the full list of middot here. Each day during the High Holiday period, running from the first of Elul through Yom Kippur, I’ll be highlighting one of these middot, in order to assist each of us in the process of soul searching (“heshbon ha-nefesh”) and our preparations for the new year.
Leo Rosten defines mensch as, “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being “a real mensch” is rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.”
Each of these “Mensch•Marks,” as I call them, these benchmarks of menschiness, will be illuminated with bite-size essays, stories and anecdotes from various sources, including my own experiences. Any wisdom I share is not from a pulpit on high, but rather from an unfolding story of a fellow traveler, one who has stumbled, failed and persevered, struggling with the questions large and small, and through it all has tried to live with dignity and grace.
And there is a tie-in to this election season. While being a mensch should certainly involve a desire for consensus building and peace, the authentic mensch also seeks justice and is compelled to refrain from sitting on the sidelines when the hour requires taking a stand. These Mensch•Marks will not shy away from the obligation to stand up for what is right. Nor should we.
And as reminders of where Jewish and ethical values might have a role to play in the existential choices we voters are about to make, I hope you will share these bits of wisdom with your family and friends. Make sure they all subscribe to my Substack (free or paid) so they won’t miss a single one!
This brief, throwaway, human interest story, dateline Haifa, was probably intended to act as a palate cleanser from the BBC, who first reported it, squeezing it in between the bombardment of northern Israel from Lebanon and the paroxysm of violence in the West Bank.
How the jug looked before the accident - and will after the repair (Hecht Museum)
But like just about everything in Israel these days, even this little sidebar had existential implications. A 4-year-old child accidentally breaks a priceless item 875 times older than him, an item as old as the Jewish people itself - at a museum in a country that treasures two things above all (with the possible exception of hummus): archeology and children, one a testimonial to its past and the other a guarantor of its future.
But what was most jarring was not what happened to the jar. It’s what happened to the child. Or more precisely, what didn’t happen. Given the tensions that exist in Israel right now and given the priceless value of these ancient artifacts to the Israeli psyche, one might have expected the wrath of God to come down on him - or at least no ice cream for dessert that night?
Instead the boy and his family were given a free tour of the museum.
Come again?
"There are instances where display items are intentionally damaged, and such cases are treated with great severity, including involving the police," Lihi Laszlo from the museum told the BBC. "In this case, however, this was not the situation. The jar was accidentally damaged by a young child visiting the museum, and the response will be accordingly."
A specialist in conservation has also been appointed to restore the jar, and it will be returned to its spot "in a short time."
I give the museum officials credit because I’m not sure I’d have been able so such restraint, until I took a moment to realize what this child has been through for the past year - he and all Israeli and Palestinian children. And I am not making any distinction between the children on either side, nor am I implying any equivalence in the degree to which they have suffered or the culpability of the parties who inflicted that pain. There is simply one fact here that cannot be denied: So many lives of children have been smashed like that jug, and most of these shattered psyches won’t be as easy to glue together as that relic from eons ago.
This incident is a reminder that what matters most is not an old piece of pottery, or a piece of blood-soaked land, or an ancient building or the ruins of a building, however holy or strategic. It’s about living, breathing people. Yehuda Amichai’s classic poem “Tourists” has never felt more apropos:
Visits of condolence is all we get from them. They squat at the Holocaust Memorial, They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall And they laugh behind heavy curtains In their hotels. They have their pictures taken Together with our famous dead At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb And on Ammunition Hill. They weep over our sweet boys And lust after our tough girls And hang up their underwear To dry quickly In cool, blue bathrooms. Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
There’s been a lot of discussion about children lately. I won’t return to the “childless cat ladies” obscenity uttered by JD Vance, which I covered in a recent post, though it now appears that his obsession with famous childless people whose work involves children, like Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, long ago crossed over the line to vendetta. According to The Forward, he said in 2021, “So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children, and that really disorients me and it really disturbs me.”
Weird - and dangerous.
But, with or without that creepiness, which reminds me, JD, that I was a rabbi for half a dozen years, working constantly with kids, before I had children, and a camp counselor before that, it is fair to say that for both the Republicans and Democrats, children and child care have been central to their messaging and to their conventions. The New York Times’ front page photo of Kamala Harris’ grand niece looking up at her giving her acceptance speech last week is destined to be one of the defining images of this entire campaign.
The focus was where it should be, on the child and the community that raises her, the aunties as much as the parents, and the political leaders too, whether or not they have biological kids of their own.
Meanwhile, the smashed jar will, be for me, another metaphoric snapshot of the year, emblematic of the smashed dreams of Israelis and Palestinians alike, and mostly of the lives of all their children - which is why I found the Hecht Museum’s response to this accident so uplifting.
In 2013, on the first Rosh Hashanah following the Sandy Hook massacre that tore the heart out of my community, just a couple of dozen miles from Newtown, I devoted a High Holidays sermon to the subject of children. With a nod to Abraham and Isaac’s ascent of Mount Moriah, (and decidedly not to Hannibal Lecter) I called it “The Silence of the Lamb.” It is worth hearing now. You can listen to it below.
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We’ve got to do a better job of protecting our children, of creating for them a sukkah of peace, filled with lambs and puppies and lollypops, a world of rainbows, a place to experience wonder, to express curiosity, to feel the warmth of kindness, to see smiles even on the faces of strangers. To feel loved.
The book of Proverbs says, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” But later rabbinic authorities understood this to be excessive, this along with other outmoded laws, like the one in Deuteronomy calling upon us to punish the rebellious child by stoning him to death. If we really did that to all rebellious children we would have no teenagers left!
Maimonides ruled that any aggressive acts against a child that are intended to cause harm or embarrass another are forbidden (Hovel uMazik 5:1), and he interprets that verse as calling on parents to merely fake anger for the sake of the student’s character development (Deot 2:3), but to hold back from really showing it.
Reb Nachman made it clear that we should never hit children. More recent authorities are stricter in prohibiting physical punishment. One approach calls hitting a child a violation of “Lifnei Iver” (causing another to err), because hitting the child will likely cause them to hit a parent or teacher back, and thus the child will have committed a sin (Moed Katan 17a, Kiddushin 30a). Certainly, that child will hit back – but more likely, that will happen much later on, perhaps by hitting their own child.
We need to protect them not only from our violent urges but from their own. But mostly from ours. How telling it is that while months and months of negotiations and violence have not led to a ceasefire in Gaza, but the violence stopped in a second to make sure kids could be vaccinated for polio. There is a glimmer of hope in all that.
Now it’s time for our political leaders to declare a ceasefire on the childhood culture wars. Kids should be off limits. We should all agree to agree to shield their innocence.
So whenever a child is making a little too much of a fuss in services, especially this year, don’t give the frazzled parent a menacing stare. Take a hint from the Hecht Museum and give the child a smile. Or candy. OK, or fruit. Let them feel all the love we can give – because sooner or later, we’re going to have to let them go out into a very scary world, like the “uf gozal,” the chick that leaves her nest in the popular Hebrew song.
Give the kids a puppy – or better yet, let them play with your cats. But maybe not with priceless artifacts from the Bronze Age.
Next time you turn around, that child may be facing incoming in a tunnel in Gaza - or in their bedroom in Haifa.
I close with some snapshots of children in far-flung places, all doing the exact same thing: being children. (See my full album of photos Children of the World).
Children in Peru, Nepal, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Israel
