Judge Favorably? That’s an Oxymoron
The Torah instructs us to judge others favorably. On the surface, that means don’t jump to conclusions when it seems that someone has done something wrong. To me, this is an essential part of living a spiritual life.
Of course, reality kicks in, and it’s not as easy as we’d like it to be.
For example, it may actually seem that the cleaning woman did steal your jewelry, that the guy in the car in front of you is a really bad driver, or that your neighbors are nattering nincompoops.
In these situations it would seem spiritually sound to avoid jumping to conclusions. Maybe the jewelry was misplaced, the driver is lost, and the neighbors don’t realize how they come across to others.
More complicated are the situations in which we may find ourselves going to extreme lengths to explain the conduct of others. Instead of doing that, I would like to suggest a different approach.
Every action that we do, we do for a reason. Human beings are infinitely complex. Often the reason for our behavior is below the level of our awareness - meaning, we may not understand ourselves why we are doing what we are. What we do is based on our motives (conscious or not), our feelings, and our upbringing, among many factors.
If this is so, how can we reasonably judge another - even if he or she is behaving badly? We don’t know why they’re doing so. And we don’t know that we would behave differently, especially if we were in their very sinful shoes.
Instead of trying to whitewash the conduct of others, we can remind ourselves that everything that we do is a product of our internal states - our hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties, our temperament, and even the amount of sleep we got the night before.
Other people, much like ourselves, are human and prone to mistakes. We can allow others to be imperfect, and we can hope that others will afford us the same luxury when it comes our time to err.
Instead of judging favorably, let’s try not to judge at all.