This week, I learned that sometimes what we don't know is the greatest gift, but a greater gift is to know that we don't know.
It’s the season of Judging. The season comes with its own rhythm: retrospecting, improvement and ultimately facing Judgement. Now we have spent the past few weeks trying to prepare ourselves for this auspicious time and I had the ironic thought that perhaps the key to achieve success on the Yom HaDin is to stop judging.
That conclusion came to me through the following episode. The details are not important for this discussion, but something happened, business related, that left me both confused and upset at someone. I had drafted a strongly worded email and just before I pressed send, I thought maybe I should just simply ask him to clarify. So, I did and he responded that he was just as confused. Long story short, a third party had mixed up names, making a mistake and the recipient wasn’t at fault at all.
In other words, I should have been dan l’kaf zechus from the start. It shook me that I had so quickly leapt to conclusions. How ready I was to write a whole story in my head, transcribe it in email and even Slack others, about someone else’s intentions.
It got me thinking that I have to be better at not jumping to conclusions. I am talking for myself here, often I catch myself judging others by how they dress, how they talk, how they walk. While it is important to a degree, you need to be smart about how other people act, I wind up putting them in a box. Often strategic business decisions are made by how we ‘shatz the person up’, or in English how we prejudice them based on their behavior or personality. It’s a bit of a lazy shorthand, and yet it slips out before I even notice. Just like we strengthen our physical body, we need to work to strengthen our minds and instincts.
That same day, I went to a siyum on Seder Nezikin. The one making the siyum highlighted the very last word of Masechet Horayot: Teiku. We don’t know. That’s how it ends—an admission of human limits. He reminded us: here in Eretz Yisrael, every kind of Jew lives shoulder to shoulder. So many styles with so many ways of being. We wonder about them and sometimes we even bristle at them. But the truth is: Teiku. We don’t know.
I then realized that this is spelled out so clearly in this week's parashah.
The parashah tells us ‘The hidden things are for Hashem only...’.1 Rashi explains: the hidden things—the secret thoughts of another—aren’t our responsibility. They’re God’s department. Our job is only with the niglot, what’s actually visible and known.
When we remember this, the instinct to judge melts away. Why are we putting ourselves into mysteries we can’t possibly see?
Another friend, Tuvia Eisenman, recently related that he was shopping for shabbos and someone asked for money for groceries (which somehow keep getting more expensive). At first, he hesitated, but then he realized that this guy needed money, so he gave him what he had, which was a large bill. Just a few minutes later, an email comes in that a client had signed - a deal he has been working on for weeks.
Who knows how many relationships and how much bracha we can reap if we would only look at each other favorably, make room for another and be empathetic to them, give them space, let them be.
As my friend, Yitzy Langer, recently shared “Moshiach has already tried to come several times. However each time he comes we turn him away because we want a yid to look or be a certain way.”
Furthermore, what is true for everyone else, is true for ourselves as well. While there is room for teshuva, Rebbe Nachman teaches us that
כמו שצריכין לדון אחרים לכף זכות... כמו כן הוא אצל האדם בעצמו, שצריך לדון את עצמו לכף זכות, ולמצא בעצמו איזה נקדה טובה עדין
Just as we must judge others favorably, we must also judge ourselves favorably.2
When we perceive ourselves negatively, tear ourselves apart and shrink into smallness, we are effectively judging ourselves. However we must realize that we are not just lowly avadim, we are also children of Hashem, a nation of princes. If we struggle to grant this courtesy to ourselves, no wonder we struggle to grant it to others.
So as the year closes, maybe the work is this: remember that judgment belongs to God alone. Our role is different. We’re here to see the revealed, to spot the good, to tilt the scales with compassion.
When we carry that truth and walk with the certainty that we are exactly as Hashem intends, and when we judge one another favorably, then midda kneged middah, Hashem will judge us favorably. This allows the gates to open to a new year full of bracha and geula.
Devarim 29:28
Likutey Moharan 282:2