Playing God by refusing to judge?

At Avot 1:6 Yehoshua ben Perachyah teaches:

עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת

Make for yourself a teacher (or master), acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person meritoriously.

The third and final part of this mishnah is the source for the injunction to give other people the benefit of the doubt if you don’t know whether they intended to act in a dubious manner. After all, we don’t have a window into other people’s minds. When they do something wrong, can we be sure that they were doing so deliberately? Or did they have an explanation, an excuse that was at least plausible if not deserving of our approval?

This may not have been quite what Yehoshua ben Perachyah meant.  The word safek (“doubt”) does not actually appear in this mishnah. The commentaries of the Bartenura, Rambam, Rashi and Rabbenu Yonah make no mention of doubt either.

According to the commentary ascribed to Rashi, one should not assume that what one hears someone else has done is bad unless there is clear evidence to that effect. This idea that we are talking here about the burden of proof when judging a legal dispute—a subject matter that fits well into the first perek of Avot, where much, if not most, of the teachings are relevant to judicial proceedings. The Bartenura uses “scales of justice” imagery too: when the case is equipoised, one should not treat the person being judged as a rasha, someone who is wicked.

Rambam, whose explanation is endorsed by Rabbenu Yonah and the Me’iri, takes this mishnah beyond the realm of judicial proceedings. In their view it only really applies to someone you don’t know: if you know a person to be bad, even his apparently good actions are probably bad, while a good person’s seemingly bad actions should be viewed as good.

Some commentators seek to link the third part of the mishnah to the teachings that precede it. Thus the Sforno and Rabbi Chaim Volozhin (Ruach HaChaim) both see judging others favourably as the means of preserving the friendship that one has just acquired.

Rabbi Norman Lamm (Foundation of Faith) offers a very different explanation of this mishnah, citing a teaching of Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech Spira of Dinov, Chasidic author of the Bnei Yissaschar.  Here the focus is shifted from subjective doubt to and objective evidence of truth, towards the higher value of emulating God. He writes:

“[I]f your friend does something and you have two ways of judging him, either realistically, attributing his actions to malice and bad motives, or charitably, seeking out the best interpretation of his deeds, you must do the latter and give him the benefit of the doubt. But how can one do this when one knows that a fellowman did indeed perform a transgression out of malevolence or at least indifferent motives? Knowing the psychology of human beings, and the nastiness that lies so close to the soul, are we indeed being truthful in judging another lekaf zechut—charitably?”

This is not a rhetorical question. It is indeed demanded by Pirkei Avot itself, where truth is highlighted as one of the three things that enable the world to function (Avot 1:18) and we are told that conceding the truth is one of the seven signs of the chacham, one who is wise (Avot 5:9). The Bnei Yissaschar however effectively bypasses this issue. As Rabbi Lamm explains, this answer hinges on another mishnah in Avot, an enigmatic statement by Rabbi Akiva at Avot 3:19 that appears to have no obvious connection to our discussion:

הַכֹּל צָפוּי, וְהָרְשׁוּת נְתוּנָה

Everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted.

Rabbi Lamm explains:

“[T]he Almighty foresees everything, yet we are possessed of free will. But is this not a contradiction? Does not divine foreknowledge mean that I must do what He has foreseen, that I am denied free choice between good and evil? The answer of a number of Rishonim is that the Almighty practises tzimtzum, He deliberately curbs His own foreknowledge. He decides not to see, not to know, hence not to coerce man’s choice. So …we must imitate the divine act of self-denial—Imitatio Dei—and man too must refrain from knowing too much of the human proclivity for the base and the ugly. We must not see, not know, not understand our friend’s “real” character; instead, we must judge him charitably, lekaf zechut. This is the essence of Jewish Gevurah [literally ‘strength’,meaning here ‘self-control’]: to know how to pull back, to know when not to look at another person’s character, and to achieve “simplicity””.

These words are so noble and inspiring that we could almost swallow them whole. But in the world of middot and mussar nothing is simple. In the same perek as this mishnah, we are told to distance ourselves from a bad neighbour and to avoid joining up with a rasha, someone who is evil. These assessments are of people rather than of actions (the subject of our mishnah) but there is a fine line to be drawn—for how do we judge a person other than through his or her actions?

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