MAISHE CHAYIM, WE DARE NOT MAKE FUN

Pudgy. Crewcut . Thick glasses. Clumsy. Momma's boy. I was an easy target for the taunts and teasing of bullies who knew that I was more likely to run home crying than stay and fight. Children have a knack for meting out a special brand of brutality that instinctively zeros in on those who are the most sensitive and vulnerable.

Then, one Tuesday in fourth grade, the moment arrived for me to test the hypothesis that it is sweeter to be the persecutor than the persecuted: There came Peter. A dull, plodding kid who limped. I accosted him in the schoolyard.

"You bowlegged pig with lumbago!” I crooned. How I chose that particular jeer I will never know.

I stood for an eternal second outside myself, stunned by my discovery of this heretofore-untapped reservoir of cruelty within me. And I watched Peter crumple. I will never forget the contortion of panic that twisted his face. Now out of my control, Peter loped across the yard like a bewildered, wounded puppy to his mother's protective embrace. I chased behind, not knowing how to dispel the enormity of his hurt, cowering, surrendering to a mother's wrath I was sure I deserved.

His mother, to my surprise, simply shook her head and whispered a few hushed words at me in a voice I now recognize as weary and philosophical, "If you only knew how many tears we have cried . . . “

Mortified, I ran the eight blocks home, knowing as only a child knows that I could not atone unless I offered confession to my mother. It was surely a page out of Freud or Philip Roth, but one that I have yet to regret, even forty years later. She listened impassively as, between sobs, I choked out the story of the pain I had inflicted, my regret, my sorrow.

"Maishe Chayim," she called me by my birth name, reverting to the Yiddish with which words of disappointment and counsel were invariably dispensed, "M'tor nisht oplachen. We dare not make fun of our neighbor's misfortune."

My mother says that she does not remember this episode. I do. However many gaffs and wrongs I commit with my less-than-perfect life, I will forever be haunted by the image of a panic-stricken Peter and his mother's whispered lament and my mother's restraint and wisdom. And I will do my best to haunt my kids with them, too. We dare not mock the differences and adversities of others. We dare not titter smugly even when our adversaries stumble, even when they get caught up in the web of their own intrigue.

Why?

Because it hurts, and we were not put on earth to hurt. Because it denies the basic dignity that is each creature's inalienable right, not a privilege that we as judge-and-jury capriciously bestow or deny. Because if I laugh in the moment of your distress, I have implicitly bequeathed to you the right to revel in my misfortunes. Because a society that luxuriates in the hardships of others is well on the road to being a society that is systemically heartless and cruel. Because a downfall, even when it is deserved, is not an occasion for arrogance and intimations that we are above reproach, but an opportunity to reflect on our own shortcomings and need for moral improvement.

"M'tor nisht oplachen." So, we must teach our children diligently even in their earliest years not to make fun of the child who limps or stutters or who can't catch or throw as well as the rest. We must teach them what vicious weapons, or what healing instruments, words can be, how there has never been a holocaust or act of human treachery that did not begin with the willful abuse of the miracle of speech.

Our children learn best, however, when we show them that we are willing to live by the lessons we try to teach them: We must not make fun of the handicapped. We must not toss off racial epithets or ethnic slurs. We must not tell cruel jokes about AIDS patients or retarded people. We must not say Amen to sight-bites on the news of clods wearing lurid tee shirts and holding "brown-out " parties to celebrate a criminal's execution.

And, we must assiduously resist the impulse to gloat self-righteously over the scandalous undoing of public personages who have fallen from grace, even when it is coming to them. For, if their hypocrisy and excesses are to leave any ennobling lesson, it will never be found through our own hypocrisy and excesses. "M'tor nisht oplachen.” Evil is to be condemned. The evildoer, perhaps, is to be punished. But, we dare not revel or snicker, for then we will have learned nothing.

Most of us know only too well the extraordinary pain that words wielded as weapons can inflict. And, if a few of us claim we do not know, then let us focus on how small and cowardly and insecure one must be to build himself up from a foundation of the rubble that s/he has made from others.

Then there was the day in fourth grade that I tried out the theory that it might be tastier to deliver the blow than to receive it. Peter, I will never forget the look of terror that crossed your face as you ran to your mother's arms. I will never forget your mother's quiet anguish, nor my own mother's measured admonition that sealed the moment forever: "Maishe Chayim, we dare not make fun." If it has helped me become less cruel, I hope to be worthy of your forgiveness. Please know, Peter, that even if you do not remember, I will never forget.