I’m late today, I know. It happens. Not, I suspect, that many of y’all are reading it on the 20th, so you might not have noticed. Still. Here’s the eighth verse from the Rodkinson translation, which is easy to copy and paste:
Jehudah b. Tobai and Simeon b. Shata’h received from them. The former was wont to say: ‘Make not thyself as those that predispose the judges, and while the litigants stand before thee let them be in thine eyes as guilty; and when dismissed from before thee let them be in thine eyes as righteous, because that they have received the verdict upon them.’
Are y’all put off by the thees-and-thines? I kinda like ’em, myself. Anyway. This is job-specific advice, from one Rabbi to others, and as such we may be inclined to say to ourselves we’re not judges, we don’t need to study this verse. But we’re going to study it anyway, albeit at somewhat less length than the first six.
Those that predispose the judge is an odd phrase, and there’s a good deal of comment about it in the various translations. The general feeling is that Jehudah ben Tobai was describing the judge in a case acting as if he were counsel as well, suggesting arguments for one side or the other. Some of the later commentators suggest that this is a warning against hubristic belief in your own judgment; Rabbi Natan says that when you enter a house of study and hear an argument that seems preposterous, rather than immediately walking out, or immediately responding with an argument of your own, sit down and listen to the full argument, and its source, and think about it deeply. This is good advice, but I’m not sure how well it connects with the text.
In our own judgments, in our political judgments of who to vote for or support with time or money, and in our personal judgments of who to trust and who to spend time with, and in our commercial judgments of who to do business with, who to buy from and who to hire and who to invest with, does this text help us? Of course it isn’t always possible to put aside our own biases, our own mindsets and instincts, which are what predispose the judge, after all, but we can strive to be objective and compensate for our predispositions. Should we?
Another interpretation in the tradition is that in seeking another person’s judgments, we should attempt to appeal only to the judge’s impartial analysis with objective evidence, not to play upon the instincts and biases that everybody has. Of course, this is one thing in a court of law, but… twice in renting an apartment, we were aware that we were being offered a good deal because of prejudice. In one case, it was because the landlord thought we were heterosexual, in the other, the landlord thought we were white. We avoided those factors in deciding where to live. In the case where we did take the apartment, we (after the fact) took some solace in the idea that the bigotry of the owner was costing them money, but I don’t think that justification holds up when you look at it in the light. On the other hand, we did not seek to prejudice the judge, in this case the owner of the apartment, nor did we even try to manipulate the pre-existing prejudices we recognized. We simply allowed those prejudices to work in our favor.
Well, mostly in our favor. There are drawbacks to having crazy landlords, and we were pretty damned good tenants, all things considered. Still.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.