Snap judgements

An Avot mishnah for Shabbat: Perek 4 (parashat Behar)

Continuing our series of erev Shabbat posts on the perek of the week, we now turn to Perek 4.

Judging by appearances—it’s something we all do. But should we? Rabbi Meir forces us to consider if we should, at Avot 4:27:

אַל תִּסְתַּכֵּל בְּקַנְקַן, אֶלָּא בְּמַה שֶּׁיֶּשׁ בּוֹ, יֵשׁ קַנְקַן חָדָשׁ מָלֵא יָשָׁן, וְיָשָׁן שֶׁאֲפִילוּ חָדָשׁ אֵין בּוֹ

Don’t look at the vessel, but at what’s inside it. There are new vessels that are filled with old wine, and old vessels that don’t contain even new wine.

Rabbi Meir is not merely talking about wine. He is referring to every occasion on which we let ourselves be guided by superficial impressions. But is he being realistic?

We live in a world where appearances are important. If a person wears a police uniform or a soldier, we immediately determine that person’s role and, often, their rank or status. We assume that charedi garb or hippie get-up are measures of their wearer’s religious or cultural preferences. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) argues that reliance on these snap assessments is the only way to navigate life in a world such as ours which is laden with messages and constantly changing situations.

But Rabbi Meir enjoys support too. The popular rock number by Bo Diddley, “You can’t judge a book by the cover”, has been performed or recorded on countless occasions by artistes as distinguished as The Rolling Stones since its release in 1962. Another song, “The cover is not the book”, is known to a new generation of children following the release of the “Mary Poppins” movie in 2018. Going back to earlier times, Rambam summarises (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De’ot 5:9) the way a Torah scholar should appear in public, raising the implication that anyone who confirms to these norms will be judged as one.

Taking things at face value is an impressively powerful marketing tool. Toothpastes, for example, never seem to deliver the same set of sparkling white teeth as the model who appears on the promotional material. But that is only a fraction of the reality with which we live. Who has not purchased a large packet of breakfast cereal or a bloated bag of so-called artisan chips/crisps, only to find that much of it is empty? Or, in the world of pascal gastronomy, bought a manufactured product bearing a label that proclaims kasher lePesach in large print and the words le’ochlei kitniyot in print so small you need a microscope to read it. We do judge the container, but the product can so easily let us down.

There is another aspect to judging by appearance, a rather more sinister one. At many junctures in the long, hard history of Jewish life in the Diaspora, we have been required to wear distinctive and sometimes deliberately degrading clothes or badges so that non-Jews can instantly and without inquiry ascertain our religious status. Can we learn anything from this? Perhaps we can say that, just as we can’t judge wine by looking at the vessel (or, in modern parlance, by reading the label on the bottle), we should not impose external appearances on others where the effect is to humiliate them or to deny their individuality.

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