A Rabbi, a Pastor, and a Mensch

It has been quite a crazy week here in Israel. Since no one is running the show, each actor/minister tried to outshine the other, coming up with a series of preposterous ideas.

In the same week we had Israel Katz battling Uber, Naftali Bennet fighting history, and Miri Regev in a crusade against the entire Western Civilization. Luckily one former minister, Benny Begin, played the role of the little Dutch boy who plugged his finger in the dike to prevent a catastrophe.

Incidentally  it was also the week of the International Holocaust Memorial Day. In the past the State of Israel, through Yad Vashem, has always acknowledged the sacrifice of non-Jews, the Righteous among the Nations, and the trees in their honor are the first thing we see once we enter the museum.

It didn’t start yesterday, but recently our leaders have managed to persuade many Israelis that the whole world is against us, and this conviction has made many segments of the Israeli society become more insular, and intolerant.

But perhaps it is still possible, through modeling and education, to change people’s attitudes? and this is exactly what Menachem Daum, an Orthodox Jew and a documentary film maker, tried to do with his own two sons.

In the documentary film Hiding And Seeking (2004), Menachem Daum challenges the hatred of non-Jews within the ultra-Orthodox community. As a son of a Holocaust survivor, who immigrated to the US, he decides to take his wife and two adult sons to Poland on a journey to find the Polish family who saved their grandfather during the war.

Daum’s two sons live in Jerusalem and they have become ultra-Orthodox. He and his wife are aware of the fact that their chosen life style in the Haredi community, isolate them from the whole world.The parents would like their children not to see anti Semitism everywhere and to be more open to the world.

Thus the Daums show  their adult children part of the outside world, which is unfamiliar to them.The sons reluctantly agree to go, but it is clear that in spite of heeding the 5th commandment, they don’t trust the father’s judgment and see no value in that journey

The film consists mostly of conversations, there is nothing dramatic going on, apart from the underlying understanding that the Daum family is alive today because of those Polish people.

Gradually there is a  change, and at the end of the film the Polish family gets the certificate of the Righteous among the Nations, and one of the sons is making an emotional speech in which he shows his gratitude.

At that moment, I knew for sure that Menachem Daum was right not to give up on his adult sons. At the age of 70, he not only changed their attitudes, but he showed them the way to become better people.

Menachem Daum is an Orthodox Jew, but for him this faith means that he is first of all a Mensch. This is the "ethical legacy" which he bequeathed  his sons.

In Israel today we desperately need more Mensches like Menachem Daum. And since Wednesday was International Holocaust Memorial day, it is appropriate to, once again, tell about the courageous Pastor Andre Trocmé who, in response to the demand of  the Vichy authorities to produce a list of the Jews in town, answered: “We do not know what a Jew is, we only know men.”

We should be able to give the same answer here in Israel.

The essay appeared  in the Times of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-rabbi-a-pastor-and-a-mensch/

She Is A Real Womensch"

 SEP.08.2013 

When we say that someone is a real mensch, we express admiration for  a person who is better than most of us, he/she is an cut above the rest.  The term “mensch”  in Yiddish means a person of integrity. A mensch is someone who is responsible, has a sense of right and wrong and in general is the sort of person other people look up to.  According to the dictionary in English the word has come to mean "a good guy."

The word  “mensch” in  German is the equivalent of “man” which is male grammatically, but refers to a general person not a male one. Since all the definitions in the dictionaries refer to mensch as a male -- a man of integrity, perhaps it is time to revisit the term.

Although we admire a mensch, when was the last tome that we used that word to describe the good qualities of a man? It seems to me that it doesn’t happen often; finding a man who is a mensch, as a partner, a colleague, a lawyer, a friend,  an advisor  is not easy.

Yet, I was sitting with a woman friend and we were discussing an upstanding  young woman who, we both agreed, was a real “mensch.” That young woman  is a person of integrity, she is responsible, principled, honest and sympathetic. She is proactive, volunteers in the community, helps her grandmother, in short, she is a [wo]mensch.

Literature is full with examples of women of integrity: Dorothea, the protagonist of Geroge Eliot’s Middlemarch,  is a real womensch. She has a good sense of right and wrong and is brave enough to stand up and fight for her beliefs.  Since she comes from a privileged background, Dorothea  sees it as her duty to help the poor in her area by planning and building cottages for the workers and by promoting the building of a new hospital.

In real life we also don't have to look hard to find womensch; going through the list of my friends I realize that they easily fit the definition of a womensch. Otherwise they would not have been my friends; who would like a friend who is not a woman of integrity, or as the dictionary states: unwomensch, is evil or a cruel person.

So how come there are so few men who are mensch and so many women who are? it seems to me that the qualities of a mensch are not compatible with those of a successful man. We need not forget that if in our society when we want to compliment  a business man we often say that "he is aggressive." I believe that while we have fewer demands of  men, especially those who are successful, to have moral qualities, we would not want our children to be raised by women who lack integrity.

Since the meaning of the word mensch is so beautiful and clear I suggest that from now on we take over the term and refer to ourselves as womensch.

And although it might suggest being less successful, in my own life I would always prefer to be  surrounded by wo/mensch, whether they are men or women.