My favorite scene in A Serious Man is the Goy’s Teeth parable. For those who haven’t committed the entire movie to memory, that’s the story told by the second Rabbi (Nachtner, the bald one), about a Jewish dentist named Sussman who finds a message carved into the back of a goy’s teeth. The message, which is written in Hebrew, reads: Help me, save me.
Larry’s wife is having an affair, one of his students is trying to bribe him, and someone is writing letters defaming him to the tenure committee. Larry wants to know what it all means, and he’s come to Nachtner for answers. Nachtner tells him about the goy’s teeth to illustrate that sometimes questions don’t have answers. He concludes thus: What could such a sign mean?
That’s Nachtner’s punchline. But the scene’s punchline comes a moment later after Larry demands that Nachtner tell him what he told Sussman. Nachtner seems to think it’s beside the point, but he tells Larry anyway: The teeth? We don’t know. Signs from HaShem? Don’t know. Helping others? Couldn’t hurt.
Nachtner delivers the line with a nonchalance that I used to think was incompatible with kindness as a commandment. Maybe it is. But nonchalance is not incompatible with kindness as a duh-statement, and helping others, couldn’t hurt is the duh-statement to end all duh-statements.
If I sound flippant, it’s only because I see great value in taking this idea for granted. As Nachtner contends (with infuriating serenity), we can’t know everything. But there is at least one thing we can know—not believe, not take on faith, but know for a certainty: Helping others is good. We don’t have to bite our nails over it. We can just get to work. If this isn’t the answer to every unanswerable question, it’s at least a sound response.
What I’ve always admired about Judaism is that it’s for all its dialectic a pragmatic system of thought primarily concerned with the here and now. What we know is more important than what we don’t know. What is is more important than what might be. Unanswerable questions should be asked but not dwelt on at the expense of our sacred duh-statements and the good we might do in service to them.
The teeth? We don’t know. Signs from HaShem? Don’t know. Helping others? Couldn’t hurt. This is the whole movie. The rest is commentary.