By, Simon Rocker
2 min read
There are few higher Jewish compliments to pay someone than to call them a mensch, though, of course, a true mensch would be too modest to want to be complimented.
A mensch is a person who can be relied on to act with honour and integrity. But the Yiddish term means more than that: it also suggests someone who is kind and considerate.
Rabbi Neil Kurshan, author of the book Raising Your Child to be a Mensch, characterises it as "responsibility fused with compassion, a sense that one's own personal needs and desires are limited by the needs and desires of other people. A mensch acts with self-restraint and humility, always sensitive to the feelings and thoughts of others".
A mensch is driven by an innate decency, motivated perhaps by a sense of values to live up to but not out of regard for recognition. They will act as a mensch at times when it may be hard to be one. In Ethics of the Fathers, Rabbi Hillel said: "In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man. For man, read mensch."
It sounds like a male term, but it comes from the German word for "human being". So Louise Mensch can be a mensch. If you scan the death announcements in the JC, and you will probably see men more frequently eulogised as a mensch, while a woman may be described as an "exemplar of menschlichkeit".
Jonathan Hadary, who played Tevye in a 50th anniversary revival of Fiddler on the Roof in the United States last year, thought the world's most famous milkmen one kind of mensch. "He's a lovely, smart, wily, troubled, good-humored, sweet, loving, open-minded man," the actor said.
Another fictional example, according to Stephan MacFarland in the New York Daily News, was Sam the Pickle Man in the romantic comedy Crossing Delancey — "one of the great Manhattan mensches of motion picture history", whose qualities stood in contrast to those with more superficial allure.
Tributes to the American film director Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, who died earlier this year, noted that he had the reputation of being a mensch. The critic Richard Christiansen said that he was "aggressive in his desire to succeed but never at the sacrifice of somebody else's gain".
Robin Gorman Newman, author of How to Marry a Mensch, said in an interview in 2006 that, at the time of her earlier book, How to Meet a Mensch in New York, "a lot of the people didn't even know what it meant, and if they did, thought it meant someone who was a nerd or a bore”. But "menschiness" had become cool and mensches eagerly sought.
Mensches may be people who have achieved high office, but they are just as likely to be largely unsung heroes or heroines, admired within the small circle who know them well.
Anglo-Jewish institutions may have had to suffer an over-sized ego or two but they have enjoyed their fair share of real mensches, too.
The late Sidney Frosh, president of the United Synagogue at a particularly fraught period in its history, was a model communal servant, whose courtesy never departed, even when sorely taxed.
Lady Jakobovits, the ultimate rebbetzin, was renowned for her warm touch and willingness to help those in distress. "Her empathy made her among the most exalted women in Anglo-Jewry," her biographer Gloria Tessler said.
Hendon Synagogue's legendary shammas, the late Moshe Steinhart, whose heavy German accent took English vowels to places they had never been before, was the classic exemplar of the synagogue official who had a sense of humour as well as of a sense of tradition.
Mensches are people we look up to, but they are never too good to be true.