D’y’know, I had thought I would just cover this verse in one note, and possibly go on to cover Simeon ben Shata’s note in a second one and be done for the week. No, once I get started, you just can’t stop me.
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.’
Not that everyone is guilty, but that anyone could be guilty. Rabbi Natan says When two litigants come before thee for judgment, one of whom is poor and the other rich, say not: “How shall I declare the poor innocent, and the rich guilty, or vice versa? If I declare one of them guilty, he will become my enemy”. The principle is written in Deuteronomy 1:17: Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; [but] ye shall hear the small as well as the great. The word is not actually persons but faces, a little Schenectady for y’all, but in the context of the first part of the verse, dealing with the potential prejudice, I think faces are important.
Still, as advice, this bit makes me uneasy. We grow up to value the concept of innocence until proof of guilt; does this not fly in the face of that great American Value? And if we take it outside the courtroom to our classrooms or living rooms or neighborhoods, what then? Is that a good way to live?
I’ll venture this, as a way to look at the text, and then we’ll move on to the last bit. Remembering the arrogance of being one of those that predispose the judges, from the previous leg, we can look at the advice to let both litigants be guilty in your eyes as a reminder that your instincts about who to trust and who not to trust are not reliable. There are lots of people who seem trustworthy because they are good at seeming trustworthy, not because they are actually worthy of trust.
I recently skimmed through the screenplay of The Spanish Prisoner, one of David Mamet’s Big Con movies. I know it’s fiction and all, but the thing about the Big Con is that for a big enough payoff, you can have a lot of people in on it. The plot twists in that appear (from a quick skim) to largely be that that other seemingly trustworthy person is also in on it! Somehow that always bugs me in recent movies, although of course in The Sting, it doesn’t bother me that they not only set up an entire bookie’s parlor teeming with people who appear to be ordinary gamblers but who are in on it, but also two or three remote locations full of people who are in on it, too. When somebody asked me how Jonathan Edwards (the medium, not the Senator) could be a phony, when he could connect with all those people in the audience, I said how much would it cost to hire an audience full of extras and give them a few lines?
I’m not saying you should live life as if you are being scammed by Paul Newman and Robert Redford. But in talking to people, I get the sense that an awful lot of the time, we feel like we can tell who is lying, who is trustworthy, who is out for what he can get. And we can’t. Not consistently, not any of us. It’s probably good to keep that in mind.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Rabbi Natan’s advice is worth pondering, anyway: to have a presumption in favor of neither the great (as, say, Roman law tends to do) nor the small (as, say, a modern progressive tends to do), but to judge each case on its merits. I started off to say that this struck me as terrific, and very difficult advice, which places Natan interestingly at odds with both (the inheritance of) Roman culture and (one reading of) the gospels. But I’m haunted by the lingering progressive suspicion that not to presume in favor of the small may amount in practice to a hidden presumption in favor the great, and I’m too sleepy and lazy to think it through further just now.