How We Judge Ourselves

Passover is less than two weeks away. But before we tell the story of redemption, it is worth asking how the exile began in the first place.

Why Sacrifices?

Nearly eight hundred years ago, something happened in France that changed Jewish history there forever: the burning of the Talmud.

In 1244, the authorities gathered twenty-four wagonloads of Talmud manuscripts, brought them to the public square in Paris, and burned them. The event left a deep and painful mark on the Jews of that time. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg wrote a special lament about the tragedy, beginning with the words Sha’ali Serufah Ba’esh—“Ask, O you who are burned by fire.” To this day, many Jews still recite that lament on the morning of the Ninth of Av.

The effects were devastating. Many great Torah centers left France, along with their students and rabbis. Some moved to the Land of Israel, and others settled in different countries.

But behind that terrible event lies an even more painful story.

Maimonides was born about a century before the burning of the Talmud. Few Jewish figures have had a greater impact on Jewish thought. He was a legal authority, a physician, a philosopher, and one of the greatest writers in all of Jewish history. Near the end of his life, he wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, a book that deals with some of the deepest questions in Jewish faith and the meaning behind the commandments.

This week we began reading the book of Leviticus, often called the book of sacrifices. The usual explanation is that sacrifices served a spiritual purpose: they lifted the animal world into holiness. Nachmanides adds another idea. When a person brought a sacrifice, he says, the person was meant to think: really, because of my failures, it should have been me. But in His mercy, G-d accepts this offering in my place. That thought was meant to stir a person to repentance.

Maimonides, however, gives a very different explanation in The Guide for the Perplexed. He says that sacrifices were a response to historical reality. The Israelites had lived in Egypt, surrounded by a culture in which sacrifice was the normal way people worshipped. Human beings, he explains, do not change all at once. G-d did not ask the people to abandon every familiar form of worship in a single moment, because people are shaped by what they are used to. Instead, He redirected that form of worship. Sacrifice was not simply abolished. It was transformed. What had once been offered to idols would now be offered to the one true G-d (Moreh Nevuchim 3:32).

The Informing and the Burning

That explanation upset many people. They were not used to hearing the commandments explained in those terms. And in fact, about forty years after The Guide for the Perplexed was published, rabbis in France placed Maimonides’ books under a ban. The opposition became so fierce that some of his critics even turned to the Church and informed on him, claiming that he had written against Christianity in his books—which, from Maimonides’ perspective, was true, since he viewed Christianity as a form of idolatry.

Those who fought Maimonides and his writings ended up encouraging the Church to destroy his books. As a result, the Church was given authority to enter Jewish homes, inspect private libraries, confiscate Maimonides’ works, and burn them. This happened just a few years before the burning of the Talmud (see Tor HaZahav VehaShmad, page 59).

After some time, the Church drew its own conclusion. If Maimonides had written such things against Christianity, then surely, they reasoned, he must have taken those ideas from the Talmud. And if that was so, then the Talmud itself must also contain material offensive to Christianity. From there, the next step followed naturally: an order was issued to collect all copies of the Talmud and burn them.

So the tragic lesson is that the opening—and in a certain sense, the permission—for this kind of burning was first handed to the Church by Jews themselves. Only later did those rabbis who had fought Maimonides come to realize that the burning of the Talmud was a punishment for the burning of his books, and they expressed regret over what they had done (Chemdah Genuzah, page 18).

Judgment and Reckoning

We are now less than two weeks away from Passover, the holiday on which we celebrate the Jewish people’s journey from slavery to freedom, from oppression to redemption. But it is worth pausing for a moment to ask: how did things deteriorate so badly that the Egyptians were able to enslave the Jews in the first place? Why did the Jewish people go down to Egypt at all?

The answer is simple. When Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, they created a new reality: they made it thinkable that a Jew could be taken and turned into a slave. The sale of Joseph opened the door and laid the foundation for the entire exile in Egypt. Once the brothers had paved the way, the Egyptians followed and enslaved the entire nation.

The Baal Shem Tov offers a striking interpretation of the well-known teaching in Ethics of the Fathers, to remember “before whom you are destined to give judgment and reckoning.” At first glance, the order seems backwards. Normally, one first makes an accounting and only afterward delivers a judgment. Why does the text place judgment before reckoning?

The Rebbe explains (Yud Shevat 1966) that the Baal Shem Tov teaches something profound: no one truly has power over a Jew, and no one can really stand in judgment over a Jew. The Jewish people are called G-d’s children, and for that reason no force in the world has absolute authority over them. No human being can truly judge a Jew, and, so to speak, G-d Himself does not wish to judge a Jew from above. The only one who can truly judge a person is the person himself.

How does that work? First, a person is asked for his opinion about someone else who committed a certain act. He is asked: how should such a person be judged? And once he gives that verdict about the other person, that very judgment is then applied to him when he behaves in a similar way.

We find a clear example of this in the Tanach, in the well-known story of King David and Bathsheba. In the opening of chapter 12 of II Samuel, G-d sends the prophet Nathan to David. Nathan tells him a story: there were two men in one city, one rich and one poor. The rich man had many flocks and herds, while the poor man had only one small ewe lamb. Then a traveler came to the rich man’s home. Wanting to prepare a meal for his guest, the rich man spared his own animals and instead took the poor man’s lamb and served it.

David was furious. He immediately declared that the rich man deserved death, and that he must repay the poor man fourfold for what he had done. And then Nathan turned to him and delivered the shocking words: “You are the man.”

Why did Nathan need to do it this way? Why tell David a story first, and only afterward confront him directly? Because David first had to issue the ruling as he saw it. Only then could the reckoning be presented to him.

That, says the Baal Shem Tov, is why a person should always try to judge others favorably. In truth, whenever we judge someone else generously, we are giving ourselves the same judgement as well.

Before we sit down at the Seder to celebrate freedom, we should remember the Baal Shem Tov’s message: judge another person kindly, because in the end, you may be deciding far more than his story—you may be deciding your own.