On Being a Mensch

 

I was honored to be asked by Hamorah Orit to come talk with the 2nd grade as part of their community celebration about being a mensch, and wanted to share with you what I shared with them.

 

Intuitively, I know what being a mensch is. A mensch is kind, and thoughtful, and honorable—a good person. She’s such a mensch!—it’s a familiar refrain, and one that speaks to a shared understanding of menschlichkeit, or the qualities of "menschiness." But because I am curious, I also wondered—where does this word come from? Beyond its meaning, what is its history?

 

Mensch, as it turns out, comes from the German word for person. It’s a Yiddish word that became popular in English in the early 20th century—following the big wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States that began in the 1880s. (Another word that had a similar route into English is schlep—maybe because a lot of those immigrant Jews were mensches who had to schlep their tuchases off to get here and build a life?)

 

So, a mensch is a person, a human being. But what does it mean to be a human being?

 

As many of you know, I often look to poetry to help me understand the world. But I also often look to the weekly Torah portion, or parshah. You never know what you’ll find there—as the saying goes, you can’t step into the same stream twice, because the water is always different—so too I always find that because I bring new questions each time I read Torah, the stories it tells me are different.

 

This week’s parshah is Emor. There is a great deal in it about priestly rules—how to perform certain rituals, and reminders about doing good work in the world, like setting apart some of what you harvest from your fields for those who have less than you. But Emor is also about the calendar, and our holy days. Emor tells us about Shabbat—about taking a moment to rest, to set apart time, to recognize and appreciate what is special.

 

This, I think, is a clue. Being a human being, and being a good human being, a mensch, is about recognizing and appreciating what is special.

 

One of our core values here at Brandeis is chesed, or kindness. Sometimes it is translated as loving-kindness, or grace. I think chesed is about recognizing and appreciating what is special—in ourselves, and in our friends. It is about being a mensch. And I think there are a few ways to think about how we do that.

 

The first is a phrase that comes from a different part of the Torah: B’tzelem elohim, which means "in the image of God," and which we sometimes translate as the spark of the divine that is in us all. What it tells us is that each of us is connected—whether you think of that as being connected by God, by a shared spirit, or by our atoms, the science and nature of our beings. B’tzelem elohim is a recognition that each life and each spirit is special, each human being you meet is a Shabbat in the world, a special moment that is both separate and connected. Being a mensch and acting with chesed is recognizing and taking care of the spirit of our friends, our brothers and sisters, and even people we do not know. And the good news is that is easy to do! You can lift someone’s spirit with a smile, with a note of appreciation, with an invitation to play.

 

Another word from the Torah that comes to mind for me is rachamim, or compassion. Rachamim comes from the Hebrew word rechem, which means "womb." When we feel compassion for other people, we are recognizing their bodily selves—recognizing that each of us was born, each of us skins our knees sometimes, or feels tired sometimes, or feels hungry. To be a mensch, to act with chesed, is to also recognize and take care of that part of our shared humanity—to help each other up when we fall, to give a friend a hug when their shoulders are sagging, to share our bread with the hungry.

 

So, my friends, I would say to you this: we are not all of us mensches all of the time, but we can all try to be more of a mensch more of the time. And that means acting with kindness; it means taking care of each other in body and in spirit; it means recognizing that each human being is special, just as you are special, and full of grace.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of recognizing and appreciating, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan