My grandfather Velvel — may his memory be a kick in the pants — once told me, “Zalmanleh, the world has plenty of clever men. What it needs is more mensches.” I was nine. I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought a mensch was a kind of sandwich.
I was wrong about the sandwich. I was also wrong about pretty much everything else at nine. But sixty years later, I think I finally have a working definition of how to be a mensch — and it has almost nothing to do with what the dictionaries say.
What the Dictionary Says vs. What Your Bubbe Means
Look up “mensch” in any English dictionary and you’ll get something polite, like “a person of integrity and honor.” Which is true the way “a hurricane is some weather” is true. It misses everything.
In Yiddish, mensch just means “person.” Not a man — a person. A human being. The whole point of the word is that being a regular, decent human being is so rare and so honorable that we made it the highest compliment we have. Think about that for a second. In Jewish life, the top award isn’t “genius” or “saint” or “winner.” It’s “person.” That’s the bar. And most of us, on most days, do not clear it.
When my grandmother — who could fit a whole sermon into the words “Eat something” — called somebody a mensch, she was saying: this is a person you can lean on. A person who shows up. A person who doesn’t make a fuss about it afterward.
How to Be a Mensch in One Sentence (the Honest Version)
If somebody puts a gun to my head and says, “Zalman, define mensch in one sentence,” I’d say this: A mensch is someone who does the right thing when nobody is watching and doesn’t bring it up later when they are.
Everything else is footnotes.
The “nobody is watching” part is the test. Anybody can be polite at a wedding. Anybody can be generous when a camera is rolling. The mensch is the guy who slips your forgotten umbrella back into your bag without telling you, then watches you walk to your car in the rain and just smiles. He didn’t need credit. He needed you not to get wet.
The Quiet Habits of Mensches
Over the years I’ve collected a kind of unofficial field guide. These are the small, almost embarrassing habits I’ve noticed in people my grandfather would have called a mensch:
They return the shopping cart. Even in the rain. Even when nobody would know. Especially when nobody would know.
They remember the name of the waitress. They tip her extra in cash if she had a long night, because cash doesn’t get taxed away and because she has kids.
They show up for the funeral. Not just the wedding — anybody shows up for a wedding, there’s cake. The mensch shows up for the shiva, where there’s only a folding chair and an awkward silence, and he sits in the awkward silence with you because that’s what you need.
They don’t tell you they did it. The single biggest marker of a true mensch is what they leave out of the story afterward. If a guy tells you about all the people he helped this week, he is not a mensch. He is a press release.
Why “Nice” Is Not the Same as Mensch
Here is where most English speakers go wrong, especially the ones who learned the word from a movie. They think mensch means “nice.”
It does not.
Nice is a surface thing — a smile, a held door, a polite “how are you” that doesn’t actually want an answer. A mensch can be a grumpy old plumber with a face like a bag of nails, who shows up at midnight to fix your basement because he heard your kid was sick and the water was rising. He doesn’t smile much. He yells at the pipe. He drinks your coffee. He won’t take payment.
That is a mensch.
The smiley salesman who calls you “buddy” and forgets your name on the way to his car — that is a guy. Possibly a charming guy. Not a mensch.
If you want more of this kind of distinction, where the wisdom hides inside the joke, my Kabbalah Kronicles are a long-running attempt at the same thing — explaining Jewish ideas without the dry-cleaner-receipt version of mysticism.
How Kabbalah Sneaks Into All of This
People hear “Kabbalah” and they picture red strings, candles, and a man with a long white beard saying something cryptic about the universe. Mostly they picture this because Hollywood has not been our friend.
Real Kabbalah — the kitchen-table kind I grew up around — has a simpler claim. It says every person carries a spark of the divine, and our job here on earth is to do tikkun olam, which translates roughly as “patching up the world.” Not saving the world. Patching it. Like a tire. One small hole at a time.
Being a mensch is, basically, tikkun olam in shoes. Each kind act, each shopping cart returned, each shiva-call made — that’s one patch. You don’t fix the whole tire. You fix your patch. And if everybody does their patch, the tire holds air.
I went deeper into all this in Kabbalah & You, which is the CD I made for people who’d like the mystical stuff explained the way my grandfather would have explained it — which is to say, with a sandwich nearby.
The Mensch Test (Try This at Home)
If you want to know whether you’re being a mensch in any given moment, here is the test I use. It has three questions:
One: Would I still do this if no one would ever know?
Two: Would I want my grandmother to hear about it the way I’m about to do it?
Three: Will I shut up about it afterward?
If the answer to all three is yes, congratulations, you’re being a mensch. If the answer to any of them is no, you are being something else — possibly fine, possibly clever, but not a mensch.
The third one is the killer. I have failed the third one many, many times. The urge to tell somebody about the nice thing you just did is so strong that whole industries are built on it. Social media is mostly the opposite of menschiness. It is “look what I did” with filters.
How Children Learn to Be a Mensch (and How We Forget)
Kids learn this the way they learn everything — by watching. They don’t learn it from the lecture you gave them about being good. They learn it from the night you stayed up cleaning your neighbor’s gutter because his shoulder was bad. They learn it from the way you talk about the cashier when the cashier isn’t there.
I’m not above admitting this. My own kids picked up most of their best habits from my wife, who is a mensch in the original Yiddish sense — meaning she does the thing, then never mentions it, and gets quietly annoyed if I mention it for her.
If you’d like a softer entry to this idea for the little ones in your life, my Jewish stories page has free reads that dress the lesson up in plot and pancakes, which is how kids prefer their wisdom.
Mensch Is a Verb (Sort Of)
The trick about being a mensch is that it isn’t a personality. It isn’t a type. It is a verb pretending to be a noun.
You don’t become a mensch and then coast. You menschify, daily, in small annoying ways. You hold the door. You call your mother. You don’t honk at the guy in front of you who’s clearly lost. You let the woman with two items go ahead of you with your full cart of groceries, and you do it without sighing in a way that makes her feel bad.
The day you stop doing those things, even for an afternoon, you are not a mensch on that afternoon. That’s the deal. There’s no permanent membership card. Velvel used to say, “A mensch yesterday and a mensch tomorrow is still a putz today.”
He had a way with words.
One Last Thing My Grandfather Said
Near the end of his life, when his memory was getting tricky and he sometimes called me by my father’s name, my grandfather pulled me close in a way that was unusual for him. He smelled like Old Spice and onions. He said, “Zalmanleh. Be a mensch. Everything else — the money, the smarts, the funny — these are nice. But a mensch, that’s the whole job.”
And then he asked if there was any rugelach.
I think about that sentence at least once a week. It is the cleanest piece of advice I’ve ever received about how to be a mensch, and the funny part is, he wasn’t trying to teach me. He was just hungry and a little bit afraid, and he wanted his grandson to turn out alright.
I’m still working on it.
If you want more of my grandfather, my grandmother, the rabbis who couldn’t find their glasses, and the rest of the cast of characters that taught me whatever I half-know about this stuff, wander through my funny stories for free, or come find the books and CDs if you want the longer version with snacks on the side.
And in the meantime — be a mensch. Quietly. The world is short on them.