Can We Judge Everyone Favorably?

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Answers with Held, the podcast where we confront big questions with bold thinking and honest searching. I'm Rabbi Shai Held. Each week, I invite a guest onto the show to explore a powerful Jewish idea. Together, we wrestle with timeless questions, uncover new insights, and model what it means to take Torah and Jewish thought seriously. I have the great privilege today of welcoming, as my guest, my very dear friend, Rabbi Steve Greenberg. Steve is the founding director of Eshel, an organization dedicated to supporting, educating, and advocating for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews and their families. And I think it's fair to say Steve has had a really transformative role in creating a place within Orthodoxy for people who are queer to feel welcome. Steve, thank you so, so much for joining me. And it's a pleasure to be here with you, Shai. Today, we're going to be talking about a topic I think is both extremely important and in some ways extremely difficult. People in the Jewish world take for granted and perhaps even throw around casually the idea that we are obligated to judge people favorably. [SPEAKING HINDI] And yet, it's not always clear what that idea means. And when it is clear, it's not always clear that it's desirable, sometimes maybe not even possible. And actually, it sometimes seems that this idea might be dangerous. So I've invited Steve here to help me dig in to what this idea means and to how we might interpret it responsibly and thoughtfully. So Steve, thank you so, so much for being here. It's a pleasure to be with you, Shai. Let me actually begin with reading the Mishnah in a vote for a minute, just so everyone knows what we're talking about and a phrase is placed in its proper context. The Mishnah says, this is a vote chapter 1, Mishnah 6. Yo, Shua bin Pirakia Umar. Joshua bin Pirakia says, Aselacharav, make for yourself a teacher, ukneilacharavair, and acquire for yourself a friend, they have a done it, call Adam le khaf s'rute, and judge every person, I'm going to translate on the side of merit, on the scale of merit. So let me just begin with the most basic question, Steve. What do you think that means to judge every person le khaf s'rute? You know, there's this notion that is popular, that it's important to be non-judgmental. But I don't think the mission is actually saying any of that. So this is saying is that we always are assessing the moral rightness of wrongness of actions and people all the time. And it's a natural function of living in the world and trying to figure out how we fit in it and how we're supposed to behave. There's really no way not to judge. The question is, can we attempt to read other people's behavior with generosity and tilt the scales in their favor most of the time? That's really, to me, a really fascinating connection. And it reminds me one of the things that I personally find most striking about the story of the flood is that right before the flood, God says, God decides I'm going to destroy the world right? Why? Because the human yates there, the human impulse is evil all day long, right? And then after the flood, God decides not to destroy human beings again. And the reason is, the very same reason. Why? Because the human yates there is evil. And what that taught me, I actually wrote about this a bit in the heart of Torah, but what that taught me is that actually it all depends on how you look. You can look at the very same attribute in a person and decide to condemn them for it or decide to forgive them for it. Right? The example that always pops in my mind is, you know, you have somebody in your life and you say, she's just not capable of having a relationship. And you write her off. And then all of a sudden a bulb goes off and says, oh, she's just not capable of having a relationship. And you adopt a totally different emotional and sort of intellectual posture towards her. Maybe that's the meaning of Kaft's root on some level. It's not seeing different facts about someone. It's actually all about how you hold them up to the light. That's like, I think actually very liberating as a possibility, right? You can say, like, look, Steve Greenberg is a nutman. And then you can say, he can't help it, right? And you see it with a kind of the eyes of mercy. So what's interesting about the encouragement to judge people favorably? It's an interesting question why it appears at the end of this Mishnah in relation perhaps in some way to making for yourself a teacher and acquiring for yourself a friend. What do you think about that, Shay? - So I think it's actually a really important question because I used to sort of think, oh, yeah, these are like, the first two, I see how they go together, make for yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend. But what does that have to do with judging people favorably? And then over time, I came to think that maybe there's actually a deep wisdom here in your Shua Ben-Parachia's claim that actually you can't actually have a teacher or a friend unless you're willing to see people with generous eyes because inevitably otherwise, you will find fault with them and write them off. It's impossible to have a relationship with a teacher. It's impossible to sustain a relationship with a friend unless you're willing to sort of give someone the benefit of the doubt. And then maybe even going deeper, it's possible that having a teacher and a friend feeling connected and grounded in relationship in the world is precisely what enables us to feel safe and secure enough to see people favorably, right? Sometimes loneliness can make you a very cruel reader of other people. And so I wonder whether it's bidirectional here, right? Judging Lechaf's route both enables us to build relationships and also can stem from having those very relationships. - I think that is right on. It's also not unrelated to the nature of experience with intimate, really close relationships, that the closer the relationship, the more subjected is to slight and to offense and to hurt. And so if you are overly sensitive to hurt, if you get offended easily, it's gonna be very hard to hold a teacher and very hard to keep a friend because you're spending a great deal of time with them. I once asked myself this question, is it easier to become friends with an enemy or an enemy of a friend? And of course, the answer is obvious. It's much easier to become an enemy of a friend because your enemy, you don't see very often. So how are you gonna befriend him? But your friend you see so often, it's inevitable that something will come up. So it may be that you're suggestion that friendship and mentorship require this kind of generosity 'cause otherwise you're gonna lose them. - Yeah, I think that's actually really profound and worth just sort of underscoring for a minute, which is, it's precisely the people that you're closest to whose faults can be clear as day to you. You see, oh, that your cousin is an egomaniac and your spouse is what it write. You see those things all the time and you can't sustain a relationship if you're like, well, I'm gonna write off any person I see, who's difficult, 'cause we're all difficult and to have a relationship on some level, not you, Steve, but the rest of us. We all have on some level to engage in this work to make relationship possible. - Let me just jump in and say that while this isn't the topic, this is the foundation of pluralism for me, is that we all choose partners, parties, communities, not because they're perfect, but because they have excellence as we love and weaknesses that we can live with. And if you are a person who can't live with weaknesses, with foibles and faults, with mismatch of relationship and communication sometimes, if you can't live with that, then you're not gonna be able to belong anywhere. And so the inside of pluralism is, I have to treat everyone who I disagree with and who might be in conflict with as a person who I don't yet fully understand and need to give the benefit of the doubt sufficiently to at least engage them. And so, pluralism requires a kind of toleration of imperfection in myself and in others. - Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, this actually relates in an interesting way to something I've thought I'll add a lot. I'm not totally sure why, but I've always been taken with the idea, the midrashic notion that God creates chuva or repentance even before God creates the world. And it's always occurred to me that what that means, me drosh is suggesting is that without chuvah human beings can't actually function in the world. Imagine a relationship that was one strike in your out, right? There would be no such thing as friendship, let alone marriage, right? Let alone parenting. And so this idea that somehow a shift in the way we see people has to be a possibility in order for there to be a world at all. I find that actually quite moving and humbling. I came upon a comment years ago in a commentary on the Torah called its "throhr hamore", 16th century commentator on the Torah, who if I understand him correctly, in his commentary on "ve a hafta la rea hakamucha" "unlove your neighbor as yourself", essentially defines it more or less as judging people lachafs root, judging people favorably. And I want to ask you, why would someone say that love your neighbor as yourself, which Rabiaqiva tells us is the great printable of the Torah? Is judge a person favorably this little cute missioner that we started with actually is the core of the Torah? How could that be? What does that mean, do you think? Well, it shouldn't surprise you, the author of a book that dedicates itself to the expansiveness of love as a foundational frame for covenantal thinking broadly, to imagine that love requires the kind of humility and generosity that accepts the world as broken. And on some level, I would say, it is the definition of love is to love beyond disappointment. That is what it is. There was a period in my life struggling with my own issues. I was very depressed and nonetheless I went to Carlbach for Friday night Davideen and I'm sitting there and the music is not doing anything for me and I thought it would. And then I get to Hashem lemabouliyashav, God sat in the flood, "Vayeshif Hashem al-Khaleh al-Alam" and it says, "God will be king forever." And I kept repeating that line because something hit me. And I began to imagine God's recognition of the destructiveness of his own disappointment in the world he had created. And he's watching it disappear. In that moment of frustration, he decides not to be an artist who rips up the work that isn't perfect, but a king who cares for his people in their realness. And then I realized I was depressed because I was an investing. I needed to reinvest in the less than perfect life that I was given. And all of a sudden I was overcome with joy. The joy of accepting that you can live a full and rich and joyous life even amid the limits and imperfections that are going to be part of anyone's lot in life. What's the relationship then between seeing others generously and learning to see ourselves that way? Right? Because it feels like that's really underneath the story you just told and it's very profound. Right? That maybe there's a kind of seamlessness between how I see others and how I see myself. Right? I think we're being a broughtsloth sort of hinted at all. That's what I was thinking of as a rebeenachem and as a famous piece in the Kutema-aran that begins with saying that no a person must judge everyone favorably from Aval 26, even someone who's completely wicked. It's necessary to search and find in him some modicum of good that in a little bit he won't be wicked. In finding in him a modicum of good, judging him favorably elevates him to merit and gives him a path for Chuvah. So here's the, by the way, he begins with that and then in a paragraph, the third paragraph of this mamar, he says, "And this is true for yourself. Likewise, a person must find some good point within himself. It is known that a person must take care to always be happy and be very hard from depression." So he's basically claiming that both both are necessary. You need to always seek the best in others and you need to actually do it for yourself as well. One of the things that I think is actually quite fascinating is the Maharals reading of Danlachhavsuchhrab, Ijudalawi of Prague, who was a wide thinker and a kind of philosophic foundation for many later Jewish contemporary Jewish philosophers as well. And basically he claims that just like God created us and loves us despite our flaws, we imitate God by loving others that way too. This Danlachhavsuchhrab is what God normally does with us. And so the Maharal is actually claiming that have they done the Havsuchhrab is a kind of fulfillment of the relational commitment of education and friendship as well. It's like God has created a world and wants relationship to it and therefore has judged people generously. Our creativities which are about learning from each other and connecting to each other, we're not going to sustain a world any better than God will without that kind of generosity and love. This notion of Kavsuchhrab as a form of love, you know, one of the things that I would say most profoundly landed with me in working for so many years on my book about love is I started out thinking that love is a way of feeling love is a way of acting love is a way of willing. And I think one of the things that I learned from reading text after text after text after text about love and about compassion and about kindness is that love is also a way of seeing. Sometimes we love people with our eyes, right? Like what do you choose to see when a person walks by you? What do you choose to see when your friend reaches out to you to complain about the same thing for the 13th time and you feel like a really we're going to do this again. You're like, no, yes, we are going to do this again because you need this. Right? That there's something about, you know, just seeing in that way. I will share a story that is not my own story, but that is a kind of influential story in philosophy. The philosopher Iris Murdoch famously tells this story and kind of referred to as the story of the mother-in-law. There's this, you know, British mother-in-law and she's very elegant and refined and her son brings home a wife to be and the mother-in-law sees the future daughter-in-law as simple, ineligant, maybe even a little purish and uncouth. And because she is a very refined British woman, she treats the daughter-in-law impeccably. Her behavior is 100% fine. And over the years, she sees how this woman she thought of as burish and uncouth and unsophisticated actually has made her son incredibly happy, has enabled him to thrive in all kinds of ways. And her perception of the daughter-in-law really changes. And she comes to see her as actually, she's like a beautiful woman. She's wonderful. She's big-hearted. She's kind. She's generous. And Iris Murdoch, she does this completely beautiful thing. She says, you know, if ethics is only about how we act, nothing has changed. This mother-in-law treated the daughter-in-law impeccably then, as she treats her impeccably now. But what we understand Murdoch says is that morally, something incredibly significant has happened, namely that her vision has changed. Simply the way she looks at this person is different. That's why for Murdoch vision is such an essential piece of ethics. And that feels to me to be such a Jewish idea. Right? That vision is integral to ethics. Right? Ethics is about my eyes. When I think about models in my own life of judging other people at Khaf's hood, not to put you on the spot, but I often think about the dozens of stories you've shared with me over the years of just really horrifically cruel things people have said to you. And not just people, but rabbis, prominent rabbis, Gadolim. Right? People have just said to you things that are just appalling in their cruelty. And I've always been so struck by your kind of insistent willingness not to demonize them back. I feel like I have gotten angrier on your behalf than you've gotten angry. And it's always been so striking to me like, how do you do that? Maybe I should ask differently. Why do you do that? Even before how? Can you talk a little bit about how? Because you really embody this. How does that happen? Well, I discourage anybody working at Ashul, the organization that I'm part of, to use the word hate. I just don't think it's helpful. Even if it's true, it's just the reason people respond harshly is either out of ignorance or fear or a mix of both. So my response is to figure out how I speak to ignorance or fear. Anger is not helpful. Indignation is not helpful. I identify with the opposition's fear that what I am suggesting threatens the foundations of their intellectual religious and social worlds. If I don't understand, what I am asking of them is enormous. If I don't get that, that the social and intellectual and religious worlds are part of, this is disruptive in the extreme. And so I have to hold that anxiety and fear. I care about them. And so generally speaking, it's not 100%. But generally speaking, I want to be aware of their emotional and religious vulnerability when I talk, you know, I respond. And that, by the way, it's not always successful. But our success to the extent that we've had it is been that we don't demonize the people who demonize us. Wow. Yeah. So I think you've said something really very profound. And I want to sort of, if I could, almost in a pedantic way, pull out something that you said just now, which is that rather than see the vitriol that is being directed towards you, you see the fear that is generating the vitriol. Yes. And that that is sort of a dimension or an aspect of what Kof's Koot really means, right? It's like instead of choosing to assign someone's cruelty to wickedness, you assign it to some vulnerability that they have. And that enables you to sort of stay humane precisely when they are not treating you that way. Is that accurate? It is. I also, I'm eager for them to hear themselves. And to rather than tell them you're ignorant and fearful, I want the conversation to be gentler because I just don't think it works to kind of to do that. I want them to sense from the conversation that they owe us more humility than they're giving us. Let me ask you a very raw human question about Kof's Koot about judging people favorably. Isn't it just too hard sometimes? Don't people just behave in such degraded, depraved ways that you just can't? I mean, you've experienced people saying things to you that are so cruel. Isn't it just not possible? I don't think you need to respond to that. Meaning, I think you already have. But go ahead, if you want to add, add. Well, the only thing I would add is that there is a difference between taking action to protect the vulnerable and actively attempting to demean and dehumanize perpetrator. They are separate things. There's a beautiful film, Dead Man Walking. The film where Helen Prejohn engages a clearly depraved murderer for the sake of the hope that his humaneness can grow in dimensions. She doesn't really succeed, but the attempt is incredibly beautiful. This is despite the fact that he's guilty and he's going to be put to death. I think that you could distinguish. That work is hard work and it takes a very large spirit to be able to manage it. That is, even the Torah says that you're supposed to not let a person who has been put to death for murder hang in a public space because God is hanging. It's a fascinating, you know, a pahsuk that this criminal is really an image of God and you don't want to demean him. So I would say that you could distinguish between active, clear, thoughtful response to stop suffering and viciousness. See, is there a time, do you think, when it is problematic and maybe even forbidden to judge other people favorably? I mean, you and I, when we talked about having this conversation, we both immediately gravitated to the same provocative comment of Rabbi O'Vadi of Barton-Nurau, one of the traditional commentators on the Mishnah, who basically says, "I'm going to oversimplify here just to get to this point, fine, judge people favorably unless you know, unless you know, because if you know that they have a track record of wickedness, you are obligated not to judge them favorably. You don't put a predator in the room with a child for a fourth time. You're forbidden from doing that, right? Because you know not to judge them favorably." I find that to be sort of a very sobering voice in this whole discourse, right? That says, "Yes, judge people favorably, but don't be polyanish, don't be naive, and don't be reckless with other people's safety." Right? So, you know, it's interesting because the God says that the line from our Mishnah to, you know, "Heve done le chavsahut comes from Batseric tishbata tamitechah. In righteousness you shall judge your fellow men." And so the Gimara and Shabwold basically has three different interpretations. Batseric could mean "fairly," which means if you have too lit against one campy standing or one campy sitting and one have a long time to express his view and others, I mean, short time fairness is required. Then the other meaning Batseric tishbata tamitechah is generously like Tzedaka, like charitably, right? So here's the thing. When I think in their circumstances where charity is obligated and circumstances where only fairness is obligated. And I think that might be a distinction that could be helpful. In no space is fairness irrelevant, even in a space of violence and horror. And just to sort of emphasize the point, chavsahut is never ever ever an excuse let alone a mandate to abandon the vulnerable. That is, I mean, as fundamental as it gets, right? The widow, the orphan, the abused child, the neglected kid is never to be abandoned because you've chosen to, you know, interpret their abusers behavior favorably. In the time that we have left, I want to talk about something I think that is really hard but also really important and I think really quite beautiful. It's a commentary on this mission, an elaboration of this mission by Rabbi Natan Gastetner, who was a "charrady rusheshiva," the head of a Yashiva in Benebrak, I believe, who died in, I think 2010, and very taken with some of his writing and his commentary on this mission, I find really, really beautiful. And I want to sort of very briefly share with you what he says and then like have us think about it a bit together. He points out that the Hebrew "Khalha-adam" can mean as it obviously does in its straightforward sense, all people, but it can also mean somewhat sort of homiletically the entirety of the person. And he says essentially when someone hurts you or behaves inappropriately towards you or cruelly towards you, one of the things that you can do is rather than focus exclusively on the thing they did to hurt you, you can zoom out and look at the entirety of the person which he takes to mean to learn their life story such that you understand what it is about their life experience that might have led them to act like this. And when I saw that, it reminded me of something in Rambham in my monides that affected me very deeply after many years. Rambham talks about how when someone hurts you, you have to tell them, right? This is the mitzvah of Tochacha of Rebuq. And in describing what you're supposed to say, he says that you ask, "Madua asitali kakhthachach," I think I'm remembering this right more or less. Why did you do this to me? And I've always assumed that that question was followed by a question mark exclamation point that it was a kind of rhetorical question. And then a few years ago it occurred to me, what if Rambham is inviting us to actually ask that question totally, openheartedly, "Why did you do this to me? Why did you do that?" And that what Rabbi Gastetner is offering us is like, you know, sometimes maybe understanding what a person has been through does doesn't justify their behavior, but allows you to see them as human again. You know, there's a, the philosopher Robert Roberts, who's a moral American moral philosopher, is a big impact in the way I think about a lot of things. He says, you know, when someone hurts us, when we're alienated from them, we often in our imagination turn them into a monster. And the project of forgiveness in part is actually restoring them from being a monster to just a person. And I sort of feel like that's what Rev. Gestetner is saying, "Coffee's good can be." On some level, the whole enterprise of assessing other people and understanding how they behave in relation to you is a question of kind of trying to figure out like what's behind their, their, you know, their actions. So Shai, it's very touching and I know that, you know, you have both thought about and engage in kind of personally struggled with issues of abuse. I wonder how this interpretive, you know, frame of Rev. Gestetner lands for you. Many years ago, when I was first starting to be honest with myself about the emotional abuse I had stained as a kid and even as a young adult, I came across some random self-help book about abusive parents. And there's one line in there that stayed with me. I don't remember anything else about the book. But the psychologist who wrote the book said, "For some people, it might be helpful to dig deeper into your parents' biography. Not God forbid to justify how they treated you, but maybe to understand where something broke in them and to make them less large in your imagination as a result and less scary." And I have really found that sort of imagining my mother's childhood in Kavna where she's in nursery school and five years later, three of 25 kids are still alive and everyone she's related to basically has been murdered. And what it's like to go through life with that and not have any tools to deal with your rage. To simply not be equipped psychologically to do that. And so to end up as a kind of like a wrecking ball, my mother went through life like a human wrecking ball. And rather than see her as a monster, I now see her as an incredibly sad person who missed out on so much of what life has to offer. Because she suffered in incredible ways and didn't have the tools or really the will to heal. And that doesn't mean that any of the things that were said to me were somehow now okay or less awful. But it means that I have more of a picture of what Rev. Gastetner calls Kala Adam. And that that is worth something. Now it's worth something, you know. I don't want to say something sort of ridiculous and saccharine like that's worth everything. It's not worth everything, but it is worth something. It allows me to live with less anger. It allows me to work on having more compassion for people like my mother. That's where I would start to answer why this piece resonates with me so much. It's less about forgiveness per se and more about a kind of equanimity and acceptance of the complexity of being human for everybody. And that doesn't forgive egregious failure. And it doesn't mean that we give people passes. It doesn't mean that we look with rose-colored glasses on all the terrible ways human beings treat each other. But it does mean that we in a way similar to the way Rev. Gastetner described it, we have a broader, deeper appreciation of how it's difficult for everybody to manage in the world. And we hold them. We had then our national retreat with 110 LGBTQ Orthodox Jews gathering together, davening, learning and supporting each other. And young man, a chosid who has six kids and is struggling to hold his life together and is doing a fairly good job with a lot of support, both from the community that we are providing, but also a few people in his religious world. And he brought this to Tfilah on Shabbat. This is from the Matok Mi'dvash, Rabbi Daniel Frish, who's a commentator on the Zohar and has a Cidur. He's really from 1935 to 2005. And the Matok Mi'dvash has this as an introduction. It may be common in other Cidurim, Hasidic Cidurim as well. It begins prayer with a wish to have all the details of our lives be seen through a frame of acceptance. Behold, I intend. From now on, every detail of my deeds and my words and my thoughts, this day and until tomorrow at this time, I will incline for myself and all the children of Israel, I will give the benefit of doubt to myself, to all of Israel and to the whole world, and that that begins the morning's prayer. And it was this text that I mentioned to you, Shaih, that got us talking about Kavsehut. It may be that among the insights here is a kind of generosity of spirit that Kavsehut offers, that even in the details may not play out in the same way in every circumstance and the they shouldn't. But the recognition that accepting the world as it is and accepting the flaws of myself and of the Jewish people and of the whole world and nonetheless feeling the beneficence of a creator that loves it nonetheless, loves all of that nonetheless is the good way to begin our days. I feel like that's actually kind of a beautiful note to end on in a way which is that maybe what we've come to is that what Kavsehut can do is enable us to live in the world with a more expanded, capacious kind of open-heartedness to the reality of other people and their complexity and the understanding that what they are is just that people, flesh and blood, mortals with limitations, shortcomings and often beautiful things about them too. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you'll join us again next time for another installment of Powerful Questions and Answers with Held. Answers with Held is produced by Hadar, with special thanks to Sam Greenberg and Khanna Kupitz, Shoshy Lakshan and Effie Unterman. Thank you to David Kupinsky for recording and editing this episode.