The Lesson of the Shmendrik

I’ve been exploring the notion that Jews born after 1945 have been raised in an environment that made a high priority of assimilation and social and economic advancement and that turned its back on Jewish spiritual traditions, rendering us spiritual orphans.

Yet I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon that seems to contradict the case I am making. Time and again we see Jews in leadership positions who have no visible connection to Jewish thought and practice making statements or taking actions that absolutely reflect Jewish values. They might even preface their statement with, “I learned from my grandmother,” just like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democratic Congresswoman from Florida did when she said, “what I know I was taught to believe in around my family table, which was that we should stand up for people who have no voice, fight for the civil rights and civil liberties that are instilled as Jewish values.”

And lest someone leap up to flame me as if that was a partisan issue, I’ll quote Republican Lee Zeldin, who said, “My interactions, values, lessons, wisdom passed along, was most often passed along from my grandfather, Jack.”

How can it be that spiritual orphans are still holding and acting on Jewish spiritual values? Doesn’t that disprove the whole notion that we are spiritual orphans?

I need to call out an important assumption embedded in that question: Jewish spirituality is not some kind of soul-consciousness that is divorced from the real world. It embodies values in a very central role.

That’s not true for all spiritual traditions and teachings. We find plenty of teachers advocating for the bare act of being present, for example, where the goal is to be conscious of the reality of the moment without any evaluation or judgment. That’s what permits the military to implement mindfulness meditation where it is applied to improve attention control, enhance performance, manage stress, and strengthen resilience in service members. In the book Bio-Inspired Innovation and National Security, Dr. Elizabeth Stanley, founder of the Mind Fitness Training Institute, states:

The military already incorporates mindfulness training … into perhaps the most fundamental soldier skill, firing a weapon. Soldiers learning how to fire the M-16 rifle are taught to pay attention to their breath and synchronize the breathing process to trigger the finger’s movement, “squeezing” off the round while exhaling. (p. 263)

An authentic Jewish spiritual perspective would pay a lot of attention to where that gun was aimed and why.

I recall reading an article about thieves who were taught mindfulness in prison. Turned out that most of them continued to be thieves, only now they had stronger powers of awareness and alertness to apply to their pilfering ways.

In the world of traditional Jewish thought, values are of paramount importance. That preeminent position given to values is woven into the basic outlook of the Jewish world. Think of the depth of praise wrapped up calling someone a mensch. That idea still has potency even in this spiritually orphaned world. When we say that someone is a mensch, we are expressing admiration for that person’s character, and especially their integrity. A mensch is a responsible person you can rely on, who has a sense of right and wrong and in general is simply decent, which is a rare enough characteristic to merit high praise.

The esteem for values shows up today in another way as well. Calling someone a mensch praises their character, whereas there is a very long list of Yiddish words that are applied with surgical precision to call out people whose character is less than exemplary. For a few late-night talks on Shavuot I’ve done a talk under the title, “Why Does Yiddish have More Words for Character Flaws than the Inuit have for Snow?”

And while those words originate in Yiddish, they have entered the American English lexicon. I went to the Miriam Webster dictionary and found the following words listed:

• klutz: a clumsy person

• nebbish: a timid, meek, or ineffectual person

• nudnik, a person who is a bore or nuisance

• putz, a stupid, foolish, or ineffectual person

• shlemiel, an unlucky bungler

• shlemazel, a consistently unlucky person

• shmo, a jerk

• shnook, a stupid or unimportant person

• shnorer, one who wheedles others into supplying his or her wants

• yenta, a blabbermouth, a meddler

Those were just the ones I could think to test out. If you can think of others, please check whether they are in the dictionary and pass them along as a comment to this blog. Mind you that those definitions do not come from a Yiddish dictionary but the main Miriam Webster ENGLISH dictionary!

(Side note: I have to wonder what went wrong for shmendrik that it didn’t make the grade. Maybe the editor was such a shmendrik that he or she didn’t realize that Wikipedia would give a whole entry to this word it overlooked!)

You don’t have to speak Yiddish or even be Jewish to understand and maybe even use these terms that dissect a person’s failings, and that fact provides the basis for answering the question I posed above, when I asked, “How can it be that spiritual orphans are still holding and acting on Jewish spiritual values?” Just as Jewish words have entered the general lexicon, so have Jewish values developed a kind of life of their own so that it can seem that being kind or compassionate or generous or truthful or patient is just expected human behaviour when, in fact, those notions have a distinct history and Jewish pedigree.

Jewish values are operating in the Jewish world on autopilot. Spiritual orphans who had exposure to the Jewish community in their formative years would have absorbed those values with their mother’s milk and would have come to give them importance in human behaviour – but without any awareness of their history or role as spiritual values. A person can have the values but because they are spiritual orphans, they are divorced from the framework that explains WHY these values are important and should be embraced and cultivated.

The values live on but disconnected from the spiritual system that developed them in the first place, just like the terms shlemiel and shlemazel continued to live on even as Yiddish has all but disappeared from the scene.

Someone who wants to undo their spiritual orphan status – to reclaim their birth family – needs to turn to look for the spiritual system that developed within the Jewish world in which what I have been calling “values” have a vaunted place. Stay tuned for my next posting. Meanwhile, check the dictionary for your favourite Yiddish insult and let us know if you find it listed there … as an English word!