Introduction
“Man, the prisoner of nature, becomes free by
becoming fully human.”
-
Erich Fromm
In
the Talmud, Hillel the sage states, “In a world that lacks humanity, be
human.” If you – like most people – are concerned about the rancor
that has poisoned public life, you are holding in your hand an
antidote. In a world as dehumanizing as ours has become, simply
being a kind, honest and loving person, a man or woman of integrity, has become
a measure of. heroism – and at a time when norms of civility are being
routinely quashed, it may be the only measure that matters. Hillel is
saying that when everything seems to have become unhinged around you, just
persevere with the singular focus of being the best human being you can be, and
everything else will follow from that. If you can get your own act
together, at some point others will follow your lead.
It's
like the story of the man outside the gates of Sodom, warning the people to
stop their sinning, a legend popularized by Elie Wiesel: “He went on
preaching day after day, maybe even picketing. But no one listened. He was not
discouraged. He went on preaching for years. Finally, someone asked him,
‘Rabbi, why do you do that? Don't you see it is no use?’ He said, ‘I know it is
of no use, but I must. And I will tell you why: in the beginning I thought I
had to protest and to shout in order to change them. I have given
up this hope. Now I know I must picket and scream and shout so that they should
not change me.’"
And,
I would add, if we cultivate civility and integrity with dogged persistence, we
will eventually change them too.
I’ve
devoted my life to trying to become a more fully realized, morally evolved
human being, a person of character.
Jews
have a word for that: mensch.
One
isn’t born a mensch. Nor is it a status that one ever
completely achieves; for to boast that you are mensch is, by
definition, not to possess the requisite humility to be
one. Becoming a mensch is a life-long process, a journey, an
aspiration.
Joseph
Campbell writes in “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” “A hero ventures forth
from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder – fabulous
forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes
back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his
fellow man.”
For
the mensch, the journey to moral maturity is no less heroic,
if perhaps a little less dramatic and a lot less bloody. But unlike
with Campbell’s mythic hero, in the end there is no decisive victory, because
this is a journey with no end. Every Bar or Bat
Mitzvah video notwithstanding, one can never stop, look up at the heavens and
say, “Today I am a mensch.” More accurately, the student
should say, “Today, I have started the process toward becoming a mensch.”
While
it’s unseemly to call yourself a mensch, for Jews there is no
greater honor than for another person to call you one, indicating that, while
the process of growth never ends, you’ve passed a threshold whereby others view
you as a human of exemplary character. I often use the expression
when eulogizing someone, but never have I said, "She was a
billionaire" or “He wrote a dozen best-sellers.” There is something
about "mensch" that transcends professional success. Our
jobs do not define us; neither do our homes, cars and stock portfolios.
What defines us, ultimately, are our relationships, our integrity, the love we
give, the love we receive.
Leo
Rosten, who wrote “The Joy of Yiddish,” defines mensch as “someone
to admire and emulate, someone of noble character.” Dr. Saul Levine writes
in Psychology Today, “The admirable traits included under the
rubric of mensch read like a compendium of what Saints or the
Dalai Lama represent to many, or others whom you might think merit that kind of
respect. These personality characteristics include decency, wisdom,
kindness, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, benevolence, compassion,
and altruism.”
But
one does not need to be a saint just to be a decent, thoughtful person. To be a
morally evolved human being means in fact to be fallible and imperfect, but
always striving to do better. It means to seek justice but never at
the expense of compassion. It means to connect, to family, to one’s
people and one’s home. It means to seek transcendence, to see the
extraordinary in the ordinary, to love unconditionally, to serve a higher cause
and live a life of dignity and integrity.
Incidentally,
although in German the term clearly refers to males and connotes masculinity
(or, in the case of Nietzsche, uber-masculinity) for Jews it is not
gender-specific - a woman can be a mensch too.
courtesy of Foxymug
In
every respect, for her compassion, courage and ability to forge common ground
with ideological opponents, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the quintessential wo-mensch.
So let me tell you about my
life-path toward mensch-hood and how, while it may or may not have
achieved the notoriety of Campbell’s mythic heroes, in some ways it’s been
downright biblical.
According
to the Book of Numbers, the Israelites made forty-two stops as they wandered
from Egypt to the Promised Land. Jewish and Christian commentators
alike assign this number spiritual significance, some associating those way
stations with what medieval Kabbalists believed to be the forty-two letter name
of God. The father of modern Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, said that
the forty-two stations represent the stages of a person’s
life. Rabbi Simon Jacobson, noting that the Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, also
means “narrow places,” writes, “All the forty-two journeys are about freeing
ourselves and transcending the constraints and limitations (Mitzrayim)
of our material existence which conceals the Divine, subduing and sublimating
the harsh “wilderness” of selfish existence, and discovering the “Promised
Land” – a life of harmony between body and soul.”
In
the following pages, I share forty-two stepping stones along my own path of
growth, with each challenge yielding significant insights that have helped me
to bring God’s love into the world. Bahya Ibn Pakuda, a 10th century Jewish
philosopher, wrote, “Days are like scrolls...write on them only what you want
remembered.” This book represents my personal Torah scroll, the sacred text of
my life experience, incorporating lessons I have learned during my winding,
tortuous journey through the Wilderness. These way stations have
been the nexus where the mythological trials of Campbell’s hero have met the
all-too-real predicaments of a current-day rabbi, the drama played out not in
the belly of a whale but in the aisles of Walmart, their sacred lessons
emanating not from within a Joban Whirlwind but from the creamy interior of an
Oreo cookie. The roadmap through my forty-two stations is best
depicted not by Waze or Rand McNally, but through the Periodic Table of
Being a Mensch that you see below.
The
table was created by Tiffany Shlain and Let it Ripple Film Studio
(letitripple.org) for the ten-minute film, The Making of a Mensch. It
incorporates Hebrew categories of character development popularized by the 19th century
movement known as Mussar, a philosophical school that
is gaining renewed popularity today. These twenty-four qualities meld neatly
into the forty-two stepping stones of my journey. This table is not
like a game board, where the boxes may increase in value as you progress along
the selected path. Rather, these character traits are of nominally
equivalent value and they need to be cultivated simultaneously, for they
interact and reinforce one another. A sense of justice is enhanced
by accumulated wisdom and courage, and humor and humility go hand in
hand. This periodic table is really an interactive 3-D network of
human strivings, presented here imperfectly on a one-dimensional grid.
The
brief essays in this book are organized into categories of character,
benchmarks of “menschiness” (or, to use the Yiddish term, menschlichkeit). Each
chapter describes a Mensch•Mark, one stepping stone toward spiritual
maturation. This search for personal grounding chronicles how I’ve
struggled to transcend pain, to overcome the errors of youth and the perils of
aging, to grow from failure, to balance the parental and pastoral, to navigate
the shifting tides of post-Holocaust Judaism, to cherish the sanctity of life
and the holiness of the everyday, and to overcome my own innate cynicism,
seeking a purer faith of affirmation, trust, kindness – and forgiveness.
These
themes have been guiding principles of my life’s message, each one becoming
dominant at various times, and at other times receding into the background
while they also interact and reinforce one another. These
Mensch•Marks, (OK, please indulge me if you think the term is corny), presented
thematically rather than chronologically, are the points of reference through
which I have constantly recalibrated my compass, and they are the life-lessons
through which my journey will be assessed by my children after I am
gone. I hope some of these Mensch•Marks will inspire you as
well.
If
at the end of the day, I have helped to nurture and raise a family – and a
congregation – filled with real menschen (the plural of mensch),
that will be just fine with me. If by sharing what I’ve learned, I
can bring just a bit more decency to a world that has lost its moral moorings,
a modicum of generosity, honesty and human connection in a world overflowing
with cruelty, loneliness and deceit, then I’ll have made it to my personal
Promised Land. I’ll have done my job.
I’m
an optimist. I believe that we can turn things around, one mensch at
a time.
Being
a rabbi has helped me to help many others – and myself - along the path toward
finding wholeness and holiness on a human level. For my very
job is to be human – and to show others how. As I
wrote in The New York Times Magazine back when I
was 28, which is now (gasp) over three decades ago:
As
I see it, I am a spiritual leader simply because I want to refine my own
spirit, to stretch myself, using the texts of my tradition for guidance, and,
in doing so, possibly to inspire others to do the same.
I
love my work because, in an age of self-driving cars, computerized Jeopardy
champions and ubiquitous robocalls, mine is one of the few professions that can
never be outsourced to a machine. There is no Rabbi
Robot. When it comes to nurturing human qualities, rabbis and other
clergy have a distinct experience advantage that can be very helpful in helping
others to confront contemporary challenges to civility and integrity.
Look what’s happened to leisure
time, which many consider to be a fundamental human need. Rabbis know all about the loss of leisure
time—we had to be on the job 24/7 long before the rest of America began seeing
their working hours seeping into vacations and weekends. Now, just about everyone must deal with
emails elbowing their way onto our beach chairs, barbecues, and soccer
sidelines. How can we carve out
opportunities to stop and smell the roses, experience transcendence, and take
in the inherent beauty of life?
Mensch•Mark 19 will help show you how.
What about privacy? “I never found the companion that was so
companionable as solitude,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. But over the past several years, Americans
have seen a precious wall of privacy crumble before their eyes, with so much
information about each of us now being shared in social media—or more
surreptitiously. Rabbis saw those barriers crumble long ago. Long before Facebook, our lives were already
an open book. As one who grew up in the
fishbowl as a PK (preacher’s kid), I know!
And I can help you cope with it.
See Mensch•Marks 1 and 13, for
starters.
And when it comes to promoting
mindfulness in daily living (something so many people are trying to do these
days), or seeking kindness in an increasingly cruel landscape, or, at a time of
unprecedented mobility, yearning for a sense of rootedness—well, rabbis have a
two-millennium head start in dealing with all of these. A whole bunch of Mensch•Marks will help you understand that; you can start with Mensch•Marks
4, 32, and 41.
Face it, with little privacy or
downtime and a whole lot of moral challenges to juggle, you are all becoming a
lot like me. These days, everyone’s becoming clergy—and we clergy
have lots of lessons to share about being human in the twenty-first century.
Unlike a tell-all memoir, there are
parts of my life that will not be all-told here. An important yardstick in building a menschlicht life is the ability to
preserve a smidgen of privacy in a world where so little of it remains. My marriage, which has been incredibly stable
and loving, is primarily off-limits here.
I speak a lot about the challenges of parenting, but my children’s adult
lives are also allowed to recede respectfully into the background. My pets,
however, are fair game. And the marriage
between myself and my congregation, which also been long and stable, is
detailed here very selectively and (I hope) sensitively. I’m not writing this to settle scores or to
feed into the lurid appetites of an insatiable zeitgeist, but rather to respond
to my father’s clarion call to me: “Be a
mensch.”
So, given what I’ve just written, I
must include this disclaimer right from the start. My life has been b-o-r-i-n-g, at least by
Hollywood standards. I’m a serial
monogamist in both my marriage and work.
While I’ve had a brush or two with death, I’ve been lucky enough, thus
far, to avoid wars, natural disasters, or dreaded diseases. I’ve experienced anti-Semitism and hate, but
only in a manner that would have made millions of martyrs chuckle. Ironically, rabbis are somewhat immunized
from the kinds of overt anti-Semitism that might infect other workplaces;
because we are so identifiable, people are usually on their best behavior. I’ve had some vexing moments professionally
that have tried my soul, but most of the crises I’ve faced would not have made the
cut for your average Lifetime movie or Oprah interview.
But that’s precisely my point. There is nobility in normalcy, especially in
untethered times such as these. There is
a gallantry in overcoming everyday challenges that cuts to the essence of what
the ancient rabbinic sages had in mind when they rescued Judaism from the rubble
and ashes of another crazy apocalyptic era 2,000 years ago.
As A. A. Milne taught every child
equipped with a honey jar and an imagination, you don’t need wizards and
dragons and secret portals to Narnia to find adventure and purpose in a Hundred
Acre Wood. The Milne quotes sprinkled
throughout the book act as a unifying thread, a reminder that boring can be
beautiful. With a nod to Benjamin Hoff’s
classic 1982 introduction to Eastern religion, The Tao of Pooh, one might call this sacred life-poem that I present
here, “The Torah of Pooh.” There’s a lot
of dignity to be gained in the drudgery of daily life, and in the counted days
of a single well-lived life. Such a life
is, in its distinct way, heroic.
I came into my profession with a
great deal of ambivalence. But with all
the bumps that have occurred along the way, the “what ifs” and excruciating
moments, I can now say, unequivocally, that being a rabbi has helped me grow
into a far better human being than I would have been otherwise; a far more
caring person, more appreciative of the precious legacy that I’ve been charged
to reenergize, and more amazed, every day, at the simple dignity and courage of
people, great and small. My sacred work
has enabled me to make a small difference in the lives of some, maybe even more
than that, but it has undoubtedly enriched my own life to a far greater
extent. Here I share some of that
enrichment with you.
My journey has taken me from my
hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, to Brown University, where I majored in
religious studies, a path that brought me closer to my own faith tradition;
then to the Jewish Theological Seminary for rabbinic training and New York
University for journalism, then professionally to Beacon, New York, then down
the Hudson River to Peekskill, and finally to Stamford, Connecticut, where I’ve
spent the past three decades at Temple Beth El, a progressive, inclusive,
Conservative congregation that was, for me, a perfect place to unpack and stay
for a decade or three.
When I left Peekskill, an artist
presented me with a gorgeous, framed paper cut with the Hebrew line from Psalm
90, “Teach us to count our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” I
hung it on my office wall in Stamford and stare at it every day. If I’ve nothing else to share, let me share
that lesson through the pages of this book.
Count your days and make every day count. That’s what I’ve tried to do.
I dedicate this book to my father,
Michal Hammerman, who was one of the nation's most renowned cantors when he
died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of sixty on New Year’s Day,
1979. He saw me enter rabbinical school
and then left us three months later.
This book is in no small measure a chronicle of my struggle to fulfill
this dangling relationship, a bond that was severed so abruptly before it had
had the chance to truly form.
I also dedicate it to my mother,
Miriam Hammerman, who, living into her mid-nineties—the last three decades with
one lung—taught me through her struggles how to cherish each moment of
life. She passed away just as this book
was being completed. Formerly a concert
pianist, she treasured every breath just as she used to caress each key. The ravages of Parkinson’s robbed her of her
ability to make music, but not of her smile, which still flashed nearly every
time I visited.
And now, as
I have passed the age of my dad’s passing, I can sense that mortality will not
allow me unlimited opportunities to get this right. So, this attempt to reclaim my father’s
legacy leads me right back to his clarion call to me and the overriding theme
of his life: Being a mensch.
As an aside, you may be wondering
why the unusual punctuation for Mensch•Marks. For one thing, I wanted the word “mensch”
to be singled out, as I hope it can become the next big Yiddish thing to enter
the English vernacular, like “chutzpah (recently accepted into American English
by Webster’s),” “schlep” and “kvetch” (which memorably made it into the
screenplay of Norma Rae), following
in the footsteps of Americanized Yiddishisms that people no longer even realize
were once Yiddish, like “klutz,” “glitch” and “bagel.” Mensch is essentially untranslatable
and it’s a word our culture needs, and it is my fervent hope that this book
will go a long way toward naturalizing it as a full citizen of American English,
where it currently is still branded as a foreigner, a loanword, by being
italicized in some style manuals. Mensch
needs to be trending, not just in Bar Mitzvah speeches and eulogies. It needs to become a thing.
Additionally, that raised dot has an interesting name in English. It’s called a “middot,” as in, “a dot in the
middle.” But in Hebrew, that word
connotes God’s thirteen attributes of love, the middot, and more
generally, precisely the kind of ethical qualities that a mensch
embodies. An entire Jewish discipline,
the aforementioned Mussar, has been built on the cultivation of these middot
in our lives. For those who feel
that religion has been rendered irrelevant—and especially those younger Jews
who have fallen away from Judaism—there is nothing more germane, life-affirming
and profoundly useful than the middot conveyed in these life
lessons. It was the founder of modern Mussar,
in fact, Rabbi Yisrael ben Ze'ev Wolf Lipkin, better known as Rabbi Israel
Salanter, who summarized the purpose of his discipline precisely as I wish to
frame this book:
At first I tried to change the world and failed. Then I tried to change
my city and failed. Then I tried to change my family and failed. Finally, I
tried to change myself and then I was able to change the world.
The guy outside the gates of Sodom could not have put it better.
