Have I mentioned that I’m late this week? And will almost certainly be late next week? I did? OK, then, the last part of this week’s verse:
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.’
In other words, if somebody accepts the judgment and moves on, don’t hold it against them. This is again a bit tricky. I mean, if somebody is caught, say, defrauding investors, and having received the verdict and accepted it, goes back into the investment business, surely common sense says that we can’t think of the felon as if he were innocent of the earlier charge? Or should we assume righteousness and repentance and redemption, even in the face of a pattern of wickedness?
On the other hand, if somebody has defrauded investers (f’r’ex), and then bring a charge against someone else who (allegedly) defrauded her, we shouldn’t start with a presumption of dishonesty, should we? Or should we? Reputation and whatnot?
I have trouble with all three parts of this verse. I can make them work, more or less, by abstracting them out, and finding places where they apply. However, their application seems to me to be situation-specific. There are times when it makes sense to keep in mind that you shouldn’t influence the judge, but there are surely times when you should. There are times when you should remind yourself to treat litigants as guilty, but there are times (and perhaps more or them) when you should remind yourself that litigants may be innocent on both sides. And there are definitely situations where having found a fellow guilty and imposed a punishment, and that being accepted and completed, we would afterward look on that fellow as without stain or stigma. And others where we want to keep it in the back of the mind, that this fellow once did so and so.
And that’s just the application in the original context. When you go outside the courtroom context to the daily life of Moishe Pipik, the occasions where you want to remember the words of Jehudah ben Tobai are few and far between, aren’t they?
This is always distressing to me. I mean, yes, I do expect to have to do some thinking on my own, and yes, part of the whole point of a disputative tradition is not only the ability but the obligation to disagree with some of the thinking in the text, even in the Scripture. But like our ontological Jenga earlier, it’s hard to remove one bit without weakening the whole. I don’t want to pretend that the decision to deprecate (as it were) one verse has no affect on my relationship with the text as a whole. I don’t want to take my religious tradition a la carte, bad things happen when you take only the comfortable parts, or only the easy parts, or only the fashionable parts. On the other hand, bad things happen when you take everything, and repress your own judgment altogether.
Distressing. Particularly because Jehudah ben Tobai is reminding me, even as I judge his (alleged) wisdom, about the difficulty of judging, and of knowing if you’ve judged correctly.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
To what extent does this verse depend on the consent of the judged? Do the parties accept the legitimacy of the court and the law, and therefore the legitimacy of the court’s decision?
Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe where disputes are resolved by a fair judge. The parties explain their dispute and their views, and look to the judge for a fair decision. They accept the decision, because they accept the social contract. Does a world like that make the verse easier?
When faced with a difficult verse, we can try to fit it to our world, or we can use it to better understand the world it was originally written for, or we can use it to better understand how we should improve our world so that the verse is not difficult.
Why assume that the verdict is for guilt? Is that implicit in the Hebrew? When I read the verse, I assumed the opposite: that you were to start by presuming that either party could be guilty, but that having judged a person innocent, you shouldn’t allow the shadow of previous suspicion to hang over them.
Kendra-That’s an interesting take. I’ve never looked at it that way, I think because I assumed that if you had acquitted a person, of course you would view them as innocent. Thinking more carefully, of course you might well acquit a person (because of insufficient evidence, say) and still think him guilty, and that would be a particular problem for a scrupulous judge. The Hebrew (insofar as I am the Judge) does seem to imply a guilty verdict, as someone who is acquitted would be presumed to accept the verdict, but it doesn’t restrict it to that.
Michael-I could quibble with whether the particulars of the verse would really apply to a Utopian system, but I think your suggestion of the perspective is really a good one, and the quibbles would be beside the point. In a general way, we could use the verses about the courts to address our expectation of a court system, which could lead to other possible paths of interpretation.
Thanks,
-V.