I have a confession to make. Many years ago, certain circumstances led me to develop a grudge against someone.
I had nothing against the person herself. In fact, I admired her. But something she did led me to believe that I’d been wronged. Suffering under a sense of great disappointment, I felt as though something precious had been taken from me. I needed someone to pin my pain on, and she was elected.
Having been appointed the villain of the piece, she continued to hold that position in my mind for a long time. It wasn’t until recently that I became privy to additional facts of the case which helped me understand that my disappointment, while real, had not been of her making. It had come about through a combination of perhaps unrealistic expectations, possibly misplaced compassion, and a lack of clear communication.
In short, I’d created a narrative in my head based more on feeling than on fact and then allowed that narrative to take its place in the archives of my memory. Filed neatly away under the heading of “Old Grudges.”
From time to time, when the topic came up, I’d pull the story out for review. I’d re-air my grievance and wallow briefly again in that long-ago sense of victimhood. The whole tale was suffused with the disappointment I’d felt back then. An emotion that colored everything about the episode.
When, as I said, I recently discovered that my grudge had far less of an actual basis than I’d believed, I naturally felt ashamed. I wished that I’d been able, at the time and afterward, to overcome my disappointment long enough to judge that designated villain favorably. Maybe then she would not have earned the role of villain in my mind at all.
Maybe I would have been able to accept the fact that she was not the instrument of my pain through any bad behavior on her part. Rather, she’d acted to the best of her own knowledge. If I ended up being hurt by what she did, she’d obviously been selected by Hashem to facilitate that hurt. Such a realization would have allowed me to withhold a negative judgement and rise above my bruised feelings.
The discovery also made me wonder, uneasily, how many other times I may have misidentified something based on how it made me feel at the time. My only consolation is that I’m not alone in this weakness. Many of us routinely follow the lead of our emotions without bothering to ascertain the cold, hard facts first. Sad, but true.
According to the police, witnesses to a crime or an accident are notoriously inaccurate in their descriptions. You’d think that being on the spot and seeing something with one’s own eyes would make a person the perfect narrator of said event. But the contrary is true. Interview five witnesses, and you’ll likely get five different descriptions. That’s because people are not recording machines. They’re human, which means that they’re subjective. And being subjective means not only seeing things but also interpreting them.
Our interpretation of events should be based on the cold, hard facts we mentioned before. Instead, we often interpret them in the light of our individual personalities, histories and proclivities. That’s why the same person that you might describe one way may wear a very different set of adjectives in my scenario. Perhaps he reminds us of someone we knew in the past. Maybe his appearance aroused our pity or our fear, which in turn obscured the reality of what our eyes saw.
For example, if I come across two kids roughhousing, I might indulgently think, “Boys will be boys…” Or I might condemn the larger of the two as bullying the other. It all depends on where I’m coming from.
It’s all a matter of perspective. And perspective is subjective.
Bribery Blinds
There’s a reason why the Torah exhorts a judge not to accept a bribe from a party to a legal squabble. Bribery, we are taught, blinds the eyes of the wise. Even the wisest and most honest of men is not a robot. Receiving a gift from someone will inevitably dispose the recipient of that gift to incline in the giver’s direction. That’s human nature.
The Torah recognizes that even the greatest judge is not an angel, but a mortal being of flesh and blood and emotion. Emotions which can be ignited and twisted.
Not surprisingly, the same principle holds true in all areas of life. Flattery and compliments are music to our ears and sugar to our egos. They can blind us to the flatterer’s true nature and more unsavory aspects. Hearing the music that we love to hear, and tasting the sweetness we crave, renders us far less than objective and our judgements far less than accurate.
When our Sages urge us to judge others favorably, they’re not just offering a good idea. They’re acknowledging one of the fundamentals of life: the fact that people are not machines. We have feelings, and those feelings can, and unfortunately often do, overshadow the facts. Until we can be certain that we have all the available facts and, equally importantly, that we’ve interpreted them correctly, we can’t trust our judgements. Far better to err on the side of judging favorably than to fall into a pit of misguided grudges and grievances.
We walk into every encounter burdened with our assumptions, our sensitivities, and our sense of entitlement… all of which have their legs stretched out, ever ready to trip us. That’s why it’s so vital that we hold onto the words of wisdom that can guide us through every shoal: hevei dan es kol ho’odom l’kaf zechus. Don’t jump to conclusion based on an assumption or a lack of information. Take the trouble to dig up the facts. And certainly, we should never conclude anything on the basis of our hurt feelings.
Our starting point should be a favorable judgement. After that, we can try to seek clarity. More often than not, that clarity will show us a prettier picture than we might have expected. Because people are fundamentally decent, and their intentions are usually good.
I hope that my own error, and the uncomfortable reflections it’s aroused, will prompt me to do better in the future. As the police commonly request of a loquacious eyewitness, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Anything else is open to subjective interpretation. And from there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to tumbling into a hole that it can be hard to extricate ourselves from.
Let’s avoid the embarrassment, or worse, of jumping to the wrong conclusions about our fellow men or women. Judging them with a friendly eye in the first place is preferable to scrambling for damage control afterward.
We can do that by allowing the facts, and not our triggered emotions or preconceived notions, to dictate the narrative.