Judge Generously
October 8, 2009
Judge Generously (1)
A teaching from tradition:
Da ki tzarikh ladun et kol adam lekaf zekhut;
You have to judge every person generously.
Even if you have reason to think that person is completely wicked,
it’s your job to look hard and seek out some bit of goodness,
some place in that person where he is not evil.
When you find that bit of goodness
and judge the person that way,
you may really raise her up to goodness.
Treating people this way allows them to be restored (lehashivu),
to come to teshuvah. (2)
So taught Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav,
great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov,
the founder of modern Hasidism.
A Hasidic master himself,
born in 1772 in Medzhybizh, Poland,
Rabbi Nachman lived a brief, brilliant, and spiritually dramatic life.
Like his great-grandfather, he served God with joy, and
was capable of attaining great heights of devekut—
a meditative state of dedication to the Eternal.
He also suffered from dark depressions, and was
“a person more burdened than most with a sense of sin and guilt.” (3)
You have to judge every person generously….
Treating people this way allows them to be restored [le-hashivu],
to come to teshuva.
Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
The first of
aseret yamei teshuva,
the ten days of teshuva.
Often we translate “teshuva” as “repentance”:
these are the Ten Days of Repentance.
But what is teshuva, really?
The word “teshuva” comes from the Hebrew root shuv,
which means “turning,” an idea contained also within the concept of repentance:
turning away from error or sin,
turning through contrition and remorse,
finally turning to a better path, an improved version of ourselves.
And yet, something about the very idea of turning
itself resists definition or containment;
every time you think you’ve arrived,
a new turn presents itself.
In our Torah portion last Shabbat, Nitzavim,
the parashah we always read
on the Shabbat immediately preceding Rosh Hashanah,
we find in a passage of ten verses eight repetitions
of the root shuv.
The people stand on the shores of the Jordan River,
preparing to enter the Promised Land,
listening to Moses’ final exhortations.
They hear him speak
of a turning of their hearts,
a moral and spiritual turn toward core values, toward God;
of a physical return to the land,
a restoration of this wandering people
to the home God promised their ancestors;
of an emotional restoration,
a return to wholeness.
Moses assures the people:
Adonai will “delight in your well-being,
just as God delighted in the well-being of your ancestors . . .
once you return (tashuv) to Adonai your God
with all your heart and soul.” (4)
Always returning to something always already there:
a restoration of all things lost.
“Everything returns,” writes Rabbi Lawrence Kushner;
“Comes back to that which it was.
This is not futility.
It is fulfillment.” (5)
Elohai neshamah shenatata bi
tehora hi:
My God, the soul you have implanted within me is pure. (6)
This, then, is teshuvah:
A return to what you were,
to what you already are;
a return to what you are supposed to become.
*****
Da ki tzarikh ladun et kol adam lekaf zekhut;
You have to judge every person generously. (7)
But where does Rabbi Nachman get this idea,
that, tzarikh, we “must judge everyone generously?
Why must we?
The teaching does not originate with Rav Nachman;
he is quoting Pirkei Avot,
“Chapters of the Fathers,”
a tractate of the Mishnah that
collects the ethical teachings of the Tanna’im,
great rabbinic teachers who lived in the land of Israel
beginning in the late first century C.E.
and continuing to the end of the second.
Aseh lekha rav ukenei lekha chaver
vehevei dan et kol ha-adam lekhaf zkhut.
“Get yourself a teacher, find someone to study with,”
reads the first, more familiar part of this teaching;
“and judge everyone generously.”
The Mishnah is the oldest,
most authoritative collection of
Jewish law and wisdom in our tradition,
and it is telling us that judging generously
is the right thing to do.
That may be reason enough for some,
but here’s one more good reason,
in the words of Rav Nachman again:
Treating people this way allows them to be restored,
to come to teshuvah.
Not only must we judge every person generously
because our sages the Tanna’im
have told us it is a mitzvah, the right thing to do;
we must do it because it brings on another mitzvah:
it brings people to teshuvah.
*****
Da ki tzarikh ladun et kol adam lekaf zekhut;
You have to judge every person generously.
So what does it mean to judge generously?
What, especially, does it mean to judge generously
when dealing with one whom we have reason to think
is “completely wicked,” rasha gamur?
Does judging generously mean we have to
forgive everything,
ignore the record of evil,
let the rasha off the hook for his wickedness?
This is not justice, we protest.
Must generous judgment be poor judgment?
“No, no,” I imagine Rav Nachman responding
to us, his students.
Not at all.
For judging generously still is judging,
and we are all responsible for our transgressions
against God and humanity.
Rather, judging generously means
seeking out every side of a matter,
every aspect of a human being.
It means, as Rabbi Nachman urges us,
seeking out ayzeh me’at tov, “some bit of goodness,
someplace in that person where he is not evil.”
Treating people in this way allows them to be restored,
to come to teshuvah.
Rav Nachman continues:
This is why the psalmist says:
[‘Od me’at] “just a little bit more
and there will be no wicked one;
you will look at his place and he will not be there” (Ps. 37:10).
…
By looking for that [‘Od me’at, that] “little bit,”
the place, however small, within them where there is no sin
(and everyone, after all, has such a place)
and by telling them, showing them, that that’s who they are,
we can help them change their lives.
Even the person you think (and he agrees!) is completely rotten—
how is it possible that at some time in his life
he has not done some good deed, some mitzvah?
Your job is just to help him look for it, to seek it out,
and then to judge him that way.
Then indeed you will “look at his place”
and find that the wicked one is no longer there—
not because she has died or disappeared—
but because, with your help, she will no longer be
in the place where you first saw her.
By seeking out that bit of goodness
you allowed her to change,
you helped teshuvah to take its course.
Some of you might think “well, isn’t that nice?”
“Always see the best in people. So what?”
In fact, one of my best friends, a rabbinic colleague,
said exactly this
when I told him that I had taken this teaching of Rav Nachman
as the theme for my Rosh Hashanah sermon.
But I’d like to turn this text for you in a different direction
and propose that Rabbi Nachman’s message here,
“judge generously,”
is radical.
Teshuva is a returning, we’ve said,
to what you were,
to what you already are;
to what you should be.
But how do we do it?
Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin explains:
“[t]he process of teshuvah begins
when we acknowledge that we were wrong,
that we did wrong.
It continues when we seek forgiveness from the one we wronged . . .
and when we strive with honest intention
not to repeat the wrongful act.”
It is a fairly standard three-step process
that is taught and discussed
from kindergarten Sunday school classrooms
to the halls of rabbinic seminaries:
1. Recognize that you have done wrong;
2. Seek forgiveness from those you have wronged (including yourself, and God);
3. Do your best not to do it again.
But this is not what Rabbi Nachman is describing;
not at all!
Da ki tzarikh ladun et kol adam lekaf zekhut;
You have to judge every person generously.
Treating people this way allows them to be restored,
to come to teshuvah.
Before the rasha, the wicked one,
feels the smallest twinge of remorse;
perhaps before she even recognizes that she has done wrong,
let alone seeks forgiveness—
By seeking out that bit of goodness
you allowed her to change,
you helped teshuvah to take its course.
We raise that me’at tov, that bit of goodness, to the light.
We show the rasha
something about himself
that he had lost sight of.
We remind him: betzelem elohim bara oto(8)
in the image of God, God created humanity;
and thus the divine reflection resides
in every human being,
somewhere, however deeply buried.
By looking for the little bit of good
in every person,
Rabbi Nachman teaches,
we allow that person to come to teshuva,
even the one who seems completely wicked,
the one to whom it has not yet occurred to feel regret.
The German poet Goethe said:
If we take people as they are, we make them worse.
If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be,
we help them to become
what they are capable of becoming. (9)
Such power each one of us wields,
every moment, and so often
unawares:
over others,
over our whole world,
to “hel[p] teshuvah take its course.”
Every one of you has an example you can share.
The teacher who helped a child blossom,
emerge from his shell,
by finding his me’at tov,
the one so many others called troublemaker:
It turns out this kid, who doesn’t think school applies to him,
is meticulous about keeping his pencils sharpened and in order,
so the teacher makes him the classroom pencil monitor.
His duties: giving out pencils, collecting pencils, sharpening pencils,
sorting out the pencils that have outlived their usefulness.
He’s good at it. All the students, now,
always have sharpened pencils
with working erasers.
He feels good. He catches himself
paying attention to the teacher’s lessons now and then.
And this student, in the course of half a year, goes from
troublemaker to top of the class…
I have a friend who was unhappy
because the city never plowed his street after a snowstorm.
All the other streets, but not his.
He called public works
and asked to speak to the director,
the guy who’s already had hundreds of people
call to complain to him this winter,
the guy who today is also answering the phone,
because his secretary’s kid is home sick.
My friend asks, cordially enough, if he can
send someone over to plow his street.
It’s a city street, after all, and the snow
stopped falling 36 hours ago,
the third big storm in two weeks.
“We’ve been working twenty-hour days over here!”
the exhausted director snaps.
“We’ve got to get the schools cleared out first:
the driveways. the sidewalks . . .”
My friend, feeling not heard,
begins to speak with an edge to his voice, and soon
both men are shouting.
My friend’s wife
(sorry—not to stereotype, but it’s a true story)
takes the phone from her beloved and
begins thanking Mr. Public Works for the great job he’s doing
clearing all the other streets in the city
(except for hers
and maybe a few other short little cul-de-sacs),
because truly, the streets that have been cleared
look like the storm never happened:
“so thorough! and efficient!
we know how hard you’re working…
long hours, short money,
we really appreciate it . . . .
And oh, about our street?”
“Can’t promise anything,” says
Mr. Public Works, considerably softened. “Maybe in another twelve hours.
We’ll do the best we can.”
Call ended, not five minutes later
the snow plow shows up.
[And this is the part I imagine:]
Back at the city offices, Mr. Public Works is smiling,
radioing his crews about the nice compliment they’ve received,
realizing how tense everyone has been
these last two weeks
since he’s been barking orders like a drill sergeant.
And the next day,
after an evening when he and his wife for once didn’t argue
when he got home late,
but enjoyed a glass of wine together
while looking out on the clear winter night,
he brought doughnuts to the office for all the drivers,
and made a point to ask his secretary
how her kid was feeling this morning.
It’s not as dramatic as a jailhouse redemption,
or a Holocaust story. Those happen
too. We’ve all heard such stories,
of amazing transformations,
a spectacular blossoming of the me’at tov,
that little bit of goodness
someone saw in the former villain.
And then there are the little things that happen every day….
We help others to teshuvah,
to return, to fulfillment of
the best that they can be,
by judging generously.
Each one of us possesses this
wondrous gift.
But there’s yet one more reason to
judge every person generously.
Rabbi Nachman continues:
So now, my clever friend,
now that you know how to treat the wicked
and find some bit of good in them—
now go do it for yourself as well!
…
I know what happens when you start examining yourself.
“No goodness at all,” you find. “Just full of sin.”
…
[But y]ou too must have done some good
for someone, sometime.
Now go look for it!
But you find it and discover that it too is full of holes.
You know yourself too well to be fooled:
“Even the good things I did,” you say,
“Were all for the wrong reasons.
Impure motives! Lousy deeds!”
Then keep digging, I tell you,
keep digging,
because somewhere inside that now tarnished-looking mitzvah,
somewhere within it there was indeed a little bit of good.
That’s all you need to find:
just the smallest bit: a dot of goodness.
That should be enough to give you back your life,
to bring you back to joy.
By seeking out that little bit…
and judging yourself that way,
you show yourself that that is who you are.
You can change your whole life this way
and bring yourself to teshuvah.
We return to ourselves our very life,
Rav Nachman writes.
What else?
Is it truly living
when we have become a distortion of ourselves,
twisted to fit into the false consciousness
built of all our careless transgressions?
Find that nikud tov, that dot of goodness
in yourself,
and you can change your whole life this way.
Harsh judgment distorts us just as much
as the transgressions.
By judging generously,
we give ourselves the strength to
make a change,
to return to the holiness of our origin,
our tzelem elohim, the image of God reflected in each and every one of us.
This is the most important part:
if we can judge everyone generously,
we can do it for ourselves.
And, doing it for ourselves,
we are so much better prepared to do it for others.
And now, in judging everyone generously,
we return ourselves, the whole world, to who we really are,
what we are supposed to be.
We can bring ourselves to teshuvah.
Rabbi Nachman concludes:
It’s that first little dot of goodness
that’s the hardest one to find
(or the hardest to admit you find!)
the next ones will come a little easier,
each one following another.
And you know what?
These little dots of goodness in yourself—
after a while you will find that you can sing them!
Join them to one another
and they become your niggun, your wordless melody.
You fashion that niggun by rescuing our own good spirit
from all that darkness and depression.
The niggun brings you back to life
and then you can start to pray…
[Singing niggun.]
1. I am grateful and indebted to Rabbi Art Green, who brought me this text; to Rabbi Laurie Phillips, who taught it to me; and to Rabbi John Linder, who provided me with Goethe, lots of encouragement, and the perfect ending. And, of course, to Rav Nachman.
2. Nachman of Bratslav, Likutei Maharan. Translation, Art Green in Ehyeh.
3. Art Green, Ehyeh.
4. Dt. 30:9-10.
5. Lawrence Kushner, Honey from the Rock, “Circles of Return.”
6. Birkot Ha-shachar, morning liturgy.
7. Pirkei Avot 1:6.
8. Genesis 1.
9. Quoted by Viktor Frankl in The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy.
