(Shabbat Special) Mensch•Mark For Elul 11: A Perceptive Heart - Sichlut HaLev
If you really want to speak Jewish, you gotta have sechel (common sense). But maybe pure reason is overrated in this post-Holocaust age. A perceptive heart might just require a touch of insanity.
About the Mensch•Mark Series
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 here. For each of these days of reflection, running from the first of Elul through Yom Kippur, I’m highlighting one of these middot, in order to assist each of us in the process of soul searching (“heshbon ha-nefesh”). Today’s Mensch-Mark is being delivered on Friday, to avoid sending it on Shabbat. Like mannah in the wilderness, there’s a double portion of mensch-marks today for your inbox!
Today’s Middah: A Perceptive Heart - Middah Sichlut HaLev
URJ’s Take
This text is taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes, attributed to Kohelet, the son of David. In it we are given instructions as to how to derive the most out of life. We are told that it is the heart that has the power to lead us in the right direction so that we might enjoy our lives.
The rabbis tell us that while it is important to have an understanding heart (Middah Binat Ha-Lev), it is not enough. We must also have a perceptive heart. When we are confronted with difficult decisions we respond both intellectually and emotionally. We use both our minds and our hearts but it is the perceptive heart, the heart that helps us apply the lessons we have learned from experience to our decision-making that makes the difference.
The Talmud records an argument over the meaning of the question, "But wisdom, where shall it be found? (Job 28:12) R. Eliezer said: In the head. But R.Joshua said: In the heart".
(Midrash Prov.) Among the sages and scholars, wisdom traditionally meant common sense (sechel) and good judgment in everyday matters-knowing, for example, when to speak and when not to, when to act and when not to (Voices of Wisdom). No single set of rules can tell us what we should do in every circumstance or how to navigate our way through new situations. All we can do is to consult that inner good sense we have been cultivating in our hearts through study and deeds, and hope that it will enable us to make good decisions.
Throughout Jewish history and folklore, the rabbis have reasoned their way around difficult questions through the use of stories. Of all the elements in Jewish folklore, the parable is probably the most revered. The Hebrew name for it is mashal and it includes stories, fables and brief allegories. The parable is not just an ingenious and entertaining story. It is subtle and imaginative, containing both wisdom and common-sense understanding of both the heights and limitations of the human being. The rabbis of the Talmud loved to use parables to teach lessons. It is these lessons that help us develop a perceptive heart.
An example of a parable is the story of the man who was carrying a heavy load of wood on his shoulders. When he grew weary he let the bundle down and cried bitterly, "O Death, come and take me."
Immediately, the Angel of Death appeared and asked, "Why do you call me?"
Frightened, the man replied, "Please help me place the load back on my shoulders." (A Treasury of Jewish Folklore)
Rabbi Eugene Borowitz reminds us that foolish "sages," more naïve than wise, populate the literature of every age and society. Our 19th century Eastern European ancestors gave us "The Wise Men of Chelm" as our very own archetypical fools. According to one Chelm story, when God created humans God wanted to distribute the wise and foolish souls evenly across the earth. While flying over Poland, the bag got caught on a mountain peak, and many of the souls drifted down to Chelm, a town in Poland. Many people, in fact, complained that Chelm got more than its share of foolish souls. A wonderful source of both humor and wisdom, the Chelm stories help us realize just how closely wisdom and foolishness are connected. (In fact, the Hebrew word for foolishness is sechel, spelled samech-kuf-lamed, which has an identical etymology to the Hebrew word for wisdom, sechel spelled sin-kuf-lamed). These stories remind us that there is a little foolishness in every wise person and a little wisdom in every fool.
Here is an example of Chelm wisdom:
The people of Chelm were worriers. So they called a meeting to do something about the problem of worry. A motion was duly made and seconded to the effect that Yossel, the cobbler, be retained by the community as a whole, to do its worrying, and that his fee be one ruble per week. The motion was about to carry, all speeches having been for the affirmative, when one sage asked the fatal question: "If Yossel earned a ruble a week, what would he have to worry about?" (A Treasury of Jewish Folklore)
MARLENE MYERSON
My Take: The Sechel Slap
Here’s a quick exercise in Gematria, Jewish numerology, which often reveals hidden connections that exist in sacred texts. If you go to this numerology website you’ll see to that the Hebrew words “Kipurim” and “Sechel” both equal 350 (each Hebrew letter has a numerical value), this linking the act of atonement with the Hebrew word for “common sense.” I would translate “sechel” as what happens when you slap your head and say to yourself, “Dummy, you’ve been doing it wrong all along – now show some ‘sechel’ and be a mensch!” Yom Kippur is sort of that slap in the face. Or, in the words of this website, “The enhanced, increased spiritual light of Yom Kippur makes it much, much easier for our intellect to be accountable, repentant for our errors when bowing before the Eternal Judge.”
If you really want to speak Jewish, you gotta have Sechel.
It was one of my dad’s favorite words, primarily because he bemoaned the fact that no one seemed to have it. He kvetched about it.
But you know who had it? Of all people, Marlon Brando had it. He wrote in his autobiography…about the transformative role Jews played in his personal development in the 1940s. He said,
There’s a Yiddish word, sechel, that provides a key explaining the most profound aspects of Jewish culture. It means to pursue knowledge and to leave the world a better place than when you entered it… It must be this cultural tradition that accounts for their amazing success… the one constant that survived while the Jews were dispersed around the world.
If only Brando had admiration his love of Judaism to the next level! If only he had been Jewish! Just imagine the possibilities for some of his biggest scenes:
On the Waterfront:
“I could have been a cantor! I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am, I could have sung bim-bam! And then I would have been a cheery-bum!”
Or how about A Streetcar Named Desire?
“Hey Stella!... D'oro! For Kiddush! AGAIN!?”
Brando did have some tense moments with the Jewish community, but he did real teshuvah. He was a mensch. Like a sandek at a bris. Anyone who’s been through our 7th grade lifecycle curriculum knows what a sandek is. I’ll give you a hint. Better yet, I’ll give you an offer – that you can’t refuse. It’s fascinating how the Hebrew title for the film “The Godfather” is HaSandek. And I’m imagining Israelis in 1972 lining up to see the movie and wondering who the mohel was going to be.
"Hopefully, he’ll do a clean job. Not too bloody!"
Some translate sechel as common sense, but it’s more than that. It’s the ability to think for oneself. Sechel is derived from the word meaning to be bright or see clearly. Haskalah is enlightenment. In the Bible the wise or enlightened are known as maskilim, from the same root. The maskilim are said to shine like the sky (Daniel 12:3), and King David was described as maskil, for his poetry combined with political and military acumen. Sechel first appears in the third chapter of Genesis, when Eve comments that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is “desirable as a means to wisdom l’haskil.” Here the Bible introduces the moral lesson that wisdom can be used for good or for evil, a theme found in later Jewish texts as well.
A maskil is the complete package. And most often, a maskil is also - a mensch.
There’s a Yiddish saying: “With a horse you look at the teeth; with a person, you look at their sechel.”
But if you see a horse while watching The Godfather, you’re not really looking at the teeth.
Another saying: “Ask advice from everyone, but act with your own sechel.”
We need a little sechel in our world. Jonathan Haidt wrote recently in The Atlantic a much discussed essay entitled, Why the past ten years of American life have been uniquely stupid: He compares America since 2010 with the Tower of Babel story:
Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. …not only between left and right, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.
It's a fascinating essay, about how we’ve been dummied down by social media, one click at a time, one “like” at a time.
I agree with Haidt that we have lost much of the capacity to think for ourselves. We lost the capacity to assess success or failure except through the transactional world of algorithms that are determined for us. We became cogs in a much bigger machine. We gave up our privacy, too. But that’s incidental, because we had already given up our capacity to make wise, considered, reasoned decisions.
In short, my dad was right. We’ve lost sechel.
My Take #2: Toyota, Auschwitz and Chelm (Jewish Week, 2010)
Maintaining some semblance of sanity requires just a touch of insanity, an art we Jews have been perfecting for centuries. (And no, I’m not talking of the insanity that rants about dog eaters in Ohio.) This essay was written just as I was about to head out on one of the most impactful trips of my life.
Tomorrow, I’ll be joining the March of the Living, an annual pilgrimage from Poland to Israel.
The experience of the Holocaust stands alone in Jewish history, a godless counterpoint to all things sacred. Alongside the majestic peaks of Sinai and Zion, our view now includes this man-made mountain of children’s shoes, empty luggage and echoing shrieks, a clump of human refuse that dwarfs everything around it, taller than Sinai, more imposing than Zion, more insurmountable than Everest.
As I prepare to face the enormity of Auschwitz for the first time, it occurs to me that since the Shoah, rabbis have become like Toyota salesmen. What, after all, are we selling, but a product once revered, but now proven to be a grand farce. The myth has been summarily detonated, the brand exposed. Just as “Made in Japan” now has reverted to its original derogatory, postwar meaning (cheap, fake, laughable), “Made at Sinai” now feels like its “Made in Japan.”
Oh, we rabbis have been trained well. We’ve developed numerous diversionary strategies to refocus the question (“Where was God? Well, where was MAN?”) or simply to foster a perpetual state of denial (“We can’t know God’s ways”). Some have chosen to relinquish some of God’s omnipotence, others go much farther. But for the most part, we focus on beating home the message that Judaism still has an important function to serve, even if there’s a gaping hole under the hood. Some deny that the hole exists, clinging naively to pre-Auschwitz fantasies. It is astonishing how many otherwise intelligent, modern, skeptical Jews buy this theological nonsense, slickly packaged by various ultra-Orthodox groups. But most rabbis, while not denying the seriousness of the challenge, prefer to set the questions aside, suggesting that maybe the next generation will solve the problem.
Over the decades, there have been brilliant attempts to deal with this dilemma. Some, like Richard Rubenstein’s existentialist “After Auschwitz,” have been powerfully honest. Such radical theologies proliferated in the ‘60s, during the so called “Death of God” era. Since then, God has survived quite nicely, thank you, but those bold theologies have yellowed with age. The question of Auschwitz remains as vivid as ever, but after 65 years, we seem to be tiring of asking it.
It makes me wonder: If Toyotas never get fixed, but for 65 years company propagandists spew forth the message that the cars are really safe, will we start believing in them again? Will the producers just wear us down until we tire of asking the questions? That strategy seems to have worked with other products. Some people actually think that cable news is really news. Some Jews believe that the same God who was silent in Auschwitz actually caused Iraqi Scuds to miss their targets in TelAviv. The madness has worn us down.
Perhaps the antidote to such madness is a different kind of madness. The day after we march on Auschwitz, my group will stop off on the way to Warsaw in a quaint town called Chelm, for Jews the eternal capital of absurdity. Chelmites are mythical Jews from a real town, known for their propensity to take logic to its bizarre extreme.
Two men of Chelm went out for a walk, when suddenly it began to rain."Quick," said one. "Open your umbrella.""It won't help," said his friend. "My umbrella is full of holes.""Then why did you bring it?""I didn't think it would rain!"
A New York based Klezmer group named Golem wrote a song recently about a Chelmite who leaves on a journey to Warsaw, gets lost and ends up back in Chelm. "He's so stupid that he thinks he's actually in Warsaw,” bandleader Annette Ezekiel told SPIN.com. “The moral is any place can be any place else -- it doesn't matter where you are."
But for me, it will matter a lot. I’ll be coming from Auschwitz, the darkest place in Jewish history, and then I’ll be staying over in Chelm, the funniest. Chelm will be the place where I wash my hands after visiting this countrywide cemetery, a way station before I head to Jerusalem for the second part of the March.
Two points about Chelm. First, laughter provided a great outlet for those suffering from hunger, poverty and hatred, as the Jews of Poland did for so long. But rather than laugh at real people, the Jewish genius invented a mythical community to laugh at. Not only is that practical (as opposed to laughing at Poles, who might respond by killing you), it is far more ethical to make fun of fake people than real people.
Second, Chelm might hold the key to our getting beyond the theological quandaries of our age. If the commanding voice of Auschwitz has muffled the God of Sinai for the time being, maybe we need to pay more attention to the God of Chelm. The Yiddish aphorism, “Man plans, God laughs,” just might be the most apt theological response to an age of absurdity. It’s not that God is laughing at us, simply that God has taught us that laughter is the only way one can respond to a world of unfathomable evil and unspeakable tragedy, while clinging to life and dignity.
Maintaining some semblance of sanity requires a modicum of insanity, an art we’ve been perfecting for centuries, ever since we figured out how a poor peasant living in rags could be transformed into royalty through the simple act of lighting candles, drinking wine and blessing hallah on a Friday night. If that isn’t a little taste of madness, what is? The first Jewish kid, whose life was replete with tragedy, was nonetheless named laughter (Isaac). We’ve been re-living Isaac’s story ever since.
Would you buy a used Toyota from this God? Perhaps not. But at least the divine gift of laughter gives us the courage to stare directly into that gaping hole in the chassis and laugh at the absurdity of it all, while gasping in amazement that, despite everything, we are alive.
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