Judge Every Person Favorably – The Teachings of Chassidus from a Life-Changing Perspective That Reveals the Good in Every Jew | Rabbi Asher Perkesh

00:00 When we talk about the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel, a very simple question comes up: What exactly is this mitzvah? Is it a mitzvah about feeling? Am I supposed to love? The plain meaning of “Love your fellow as yourself” is to love another Jew—to feel love, a special love, for every Jew. Or does this mitzvah have a practical expression? And what does that mean in practice? Usually, when a Jew wants to fulfill a mitzvah, he checks the books of halachah. He opens the Shulchan Aruch, the Rambam, books of halachah that explain what he needs to do. How do you fulfill the mitzvah? To put on tefillin—there are the laws of tefillin. To keep Shabbos—there are the laws of Shabbos. Kashrus—there are the laws of kashrus. For everything, we have books of halachah that explain in detail, in practical terms, how to put the mitzvah into action. So what exactly is the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel? Today we’ll look into it, search, and discover, first of all, something very surprising from a halachic standpoint about how the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel is fulfilled. From there, we’ll look at it through the special perspective that Chassidus gives us, and understand Ahavas Yisroel from a place that is very, very interesting, very deep, and very real and practical in everyday life. We’ll begin with a story connected to the power of our words, the power of our speech. We spoke about Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev in the previous class. We touched on how he was the defender of the Jewish people: how, through a teaching he received from our teacher the Baal Shem Tov, he developed his special approach of speaking in the Jewish people’s defense and always advocating for them. Chassidim relate that on the very day Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev was born, the Baal Shem Tov entered the shul and made an announcement to his students. He was very

02:27 happy. “What makes today different?” the students asked. And the Baal Shem Tov told them: “Today, a special soul has descended into the world. It will illuminate the world with its Ahavas Yisroel, find merit in the Jewish people, and defend them in every situation.” There are dozens, hundreds of stories about Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev and his Ahavas Yisroel. But one particular story connects very strongly to what we’re going to discuss today about the power of our words. It’s the well-known story of a Jew in Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s town who had sunk to the lowest depths. He had reached the depths of sin and transgression. He was an utter heretic, spoke against Hashem and His Moshiach, and mocked everything holy. Once, this Jew met Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev in the street and said mockingly, “Rebbe, I’ve committed every transgression in the Torah. There isn’t a prohibition in the world that I haven’t violated.” Rabbi Levi Yitzchak looked at him and said, “I envy you.” The Jew was startled. He thought the Berditchever hadn’t understood what he’d said. But the Berditchever told him, “Yes, I truly envy you.” “The Rebbe envies me? A man who has committed every sin in the world? How can you, Rebbe, envy me?” The Berditchever said to him, “The Gemara says that when a person does teshuvah, if it is teshuvah motivated by love, his deliberate sins become merits. All the transgressions a person committed in the past—once he does teshuvah out of love, those sins become merits. So listen,” said the Berditchever. “Year after year, I gather one more mitzvah each day, then another—another deed, another word, another thought, another kind word, something more—and I can barely gather a few mitzvos a day. How many do I manage to accumulate? You,

04:50 in a single moment, need only do one good teshuvah, teshuvah out of love, and everything—all the sins and transgressions you’ve committed until now—will turn into merits in an instant. I don’t have that possibility; you do. That’s what I envy.” And as the chassidim relate, it was precisely those sincere words, spoken from the depths of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev’s heart, that broke through the man’s heart of stone. He did complete teshuvah and became a baal teshuvah himself. What is this way of defending others? The Mishnah says, “Judge every person favorably.” That was the Berditchever’s strength: judging every person favorably. The Mishnah says a Jew must judge everyone favorably. Sometimes we ask: Wait, isn’t that naive? Is it real? Is it sincere? You say something nice because you want to make him feel good. But do you actually think that? What does it mean to judge favorably? After all, this person sins. He does terrible things, lowly things. So what, I’m supposed to find some merit? Find something nice to say, offer some justification? It often sounds like a kind of naivete, doesn’t it? Or something I do just to make the other person feel good. But where is the truth in it? There’s an even deeper question. We also have the mitzvah, “You shall surely rebuke your fellow.” In the same verses where the Torah says, “Love your fellow as yourself,” it also commands us to offer rebuke. So wait—how am I supposed to fulfill the mitzvah of rebuke? To rebuke someone, you have to see the negative things, the things the person has done that need correcting, and talk to him about them. You have to tell him, “Look, you did this and that, and you’re not allowed to do

07:00 that,” and rebuke him. So how do these two things fit together? The mitzvah of “You shall surely rebuke your fellow” and the Mishnah’s instruction to “judge every person favorably.” And here we come to something wonderful that we find in halachah. Open the Rambam, in Sefer Hamadda, Hilchos De’os, chapter 6, halachah 3. This is where the Rambam presents the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel. We look at the Rambam and see these words. The Rambam says: “It is a mitzvah to love every Jew, as it says, ‘Love your fellow as yourself.’ It is a mitzvah to love every Jew as oneself, as it says, ‘Love your fellow as yourself.’ Therefore,” the Rambam continues, “one must speak of his praise.” That’s how he begins, and then he goes on to say several more things. When we look at these words, we stop and notice something remarkable. We asked: What are the laws of Ahavas Yisroel? And here the Rambam tells us clearly: Love every Jew as yourself. And what does he say immediately afterward? “Therefore.” How is that expressed? What is its practical expression? “Therefore, one must speak of his praise.” Speaking in praise of another Jew fulfills the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel. Interesting. The Rambam writes about this in greater detail earlier, in the previous chapter, where he discusses a Torah scholar. The Rambam says that a scholar should be recognizable not only by his wisdom and Torah learning, but also by the way he walks, his conduct, his composure, and the way he eats. Among these things, the Rambam mentions his speech. And there too, how does the Rambam describe the scholar’s speech? What distinguishes his conduct is that “he judges every person favorably; therefore, he speaks of his fellow’s praise and not of his faults at all.” What is this idea of speaking in someone’s praise—and that this is the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel? It’s interesting how we fulfill it. Why is this the first thing the Rambam mentions as the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel? And here we

09:33 We need to arrive at the unique perspective the Baal Shem Tov revealed to us: the power of speech, the power of the words one person says to another. We see this in a negative context, and of course, as our Sages say, “The measure of good is greater than the measure of punishment.” In other words, if we see something on the negative side, then all the more so it applies on the positive side. We see the power of a person’s words in the negative—in matters of lashon hara and gossip—and from that we can learn about the power a person has in his words when he says something good, when he speaks in praise of a friend. What does that accomplish in the soul? What does it do? There is a story told about the Baal Shem Tov. In the town of Mezhibuzh, where the Baal Shem Tov lived, there were all kinds of Jews, including simple people. As is well known, the Baal Shem Tov drew every Jew close, and he especially loved and drew close the simple people. Once, in the synagogue, while the Baal Shem Tov was present, a quarrel broke out between two householders, two Jews in the synagogue. In his anger, one Jew shouted at the other, “I’ll tear you apart like a fish.” When the Baal Shem Tov heard those words, he was shaken, and he called his students over. The Baal Shem Tov was known to have a very special ability, which he used from time to time to teach and guide his students. He had a particular way of doing this: he would ask the students to stand together, each placing his hands on the shoulders of the next, and then the holy Baal Shem Tov would place his holy hands on the two

11:38 students standing at either end. He asked them to close their eyes, and then a most shocking sight was revealed to them. Suddenly they saw one man tearing the other apart like a fish. They cried out in fear and alarm. Then the Baal Shem Tov removed his holy hands and said, “That is the power of a person’s speech.” When a person speaks, he creates; he acts. What is contained in a person’s speech brings things into being in the world. When a person says a word, that word truly does something on a more spiritual plane. And when our eyes are a little more refined, we can see the actual effect of a person’s speech. Here, a person had said something negative, and it truly created something in the world. What is the explanation? The deeper explanation, according to Chassidus, is that a person and all his faculties—as Iyov says in the verse, “From my flesh I perceive G-d”—the person’s entire makeup, his faculties, limbs, emotions, all of it, allows us to perceive G-d. In other words, man was created “in Our image, after Our likeness.” A person is, so to speak, in the image and likeness of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. In the language of Tanya, these faculties “were drawn down from them through a chain of descent.” That is, all the faculties of the soul and everything a person possesses are, in essence, part of a chain of descent from the higher sefiros, from Hakadosh Boruch Hu, so to speak. So when we speak about the power of speech, the power of speech Above, so to speak, with Hakadosh Boruch Hu, is what the Mishnah means when it says, “The world was created through ten utterances.” The world was created through the power of speech. Of course, when speaking of what is Above, we must remove any physical or material connotation. We cannot speak of physical speech there, but the idea remains: the Torah calls the way Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world “speech.” “And G-d said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” “And G-d said,

14:06 ‘Let there be a firmament,’ and there was a firmament.” Through His utterance, Hakadosh Boruch Hu formed, created, and made an entire world of beings. Since a Jew was created in the image and likeness of Hakadosh Boruch Hu, our speech has the power to bring things into being. Our speech, too, creates, forms, and does things, and things happen in the world. This power that the Baal Shem Tov speaks of also has a source in the Midrash. In Midrash Rabbah on Parshas Emor, commenting on the word “Emor,” the Midrash says, “The words of Hashem are pure words.” It discusses the utterance of Hakadosh Boruch Hu and explains that His utterance is pure and brings about purity. A Jew must learn from Hakadosh Boruch Hu that his own words, too, should be pure. The Midrash goes on to discuss the whole subject of lashon hara and gossip: a Jew must know to learn from Hakadosh Boruch Hu that his speech should be pure speech, and not, G-d forbid, impure speech. From there we understand the special power of human speech. Based on this, we can also understand what the Gemara says in Tractate Arachin. There is a well-known teaching in the Gemara that lashon hara kills three people. Who are the three? There are several ways to explain it, and one explanation is that they are the speaker, the listener, and the person being spoken about. Everyone asks the same question: the speaker did something wrong—he spoke lashon hara. The listener also did something wrong, clearly—he listened to lashon hara. But what danger is there to the poor person they spoke about? Here we come to the deeper meaning according to the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings. When we speak about a particular event or a particular person, the power of our speech is that it

16:18 brings that thing into being, taking it from potential into actuality. Through that speech, it becomes a reality. In other words, sometimes something can be buried in the ground, hidden away. It is there, but it has no significance. As long as it has not been put into words, it remains buried beneath the ground. It has no expression, and it could stay that way for a person’s entire life. The moment we speak about it, speech takes it from potential into actuality, from concealment into revelation. From a potential, it becomes something in the world, something real. That is what happens with lashon hara. When you say something bad about another person, that bad quality may until now have been buried within him, hidden away, without any practical expression. But through your speech, you have brought it out. You have made that bad quality into a reality, and then, Heaven forbid, it may actually come to expression. That is why the Gemara says lashon hara also affects the person being spoken about. We said that the measure of good is greater than the measure of punishment. So far, we have been speaking about speech on the negative side. Let’s take that point, and through it we will gain a wonderful, deeper understanding of the words of our Sages in Pirkei Avos and of the Rambam’s words on the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel. If this is true on the negative side, how much more so when a Jew says a good word, when a Jew speaks in praise of another Jew. You emphasize his strengths, the positive qualities he has, the wonderful abilities within him—that is where you place the emphasis. So when you speak in praise of your friend, you bring out the potential strengths hidden within him

18:18 For him, from potential into actuality—and this is what the Rambam says. The mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel, “Love your fellow as yourself,” means loving every Jew as you love yourself. So first of all, how is that expressed? By speaking of his virtues. Because Ahavas Yisroel, as we also discussed in the previous class, stems from the unity of the Jewish people. It comes from the place where a Jew’s inner essence is revealed: a Jew is truly a part of G-d above. The moment you look at a Jew from that place, at his inner essence, and bring it out into the open, his beauty, his strengths, his treasures, the most wonderful things, are revealed. This is what the Baal Shem Tov revealed to us. One of the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings is on the verse, “For you shall be to Me a treasured land, says Hashem of Hosts.” The Baal Shem Tov says that the Jewish people are called a treasured land. Hakadosh Boruch Hu says: The Jewish people are My treasured land. What does “treasured land” mean? The earth. From the outside, you see soil, dust, stones. But beneath the surface, deep within the earth, lie the most wonderful treasures. Beneath the earth there are springs, minerals, all kinds of things, gold—treasures that we still haven’t finished discovering. The most precious treasures are hidden in the earth. Everything came from the dust, as the Sages say. Every Jew is Hakadosh Boruch Hu’s treasured land, says the Baal Shem Tov. Within every Jew’s soul, within his inner faculties, lie wonderful powers of wisdom, good character, upright conduct—wonderful qualities connected with the essence of a Jew, who is truly a part of G-d above. Endless treasures. How do we bring them out? The Rambam comes and says: Therefore, one should speak of his virtues. When you say a good word about a Jew, when you speak about his strengths, you

20:33 speak about the good in him, and you bring that good out from concealment into revelation. According to this, what is the deeper meaning of our Sages’ words, “Judge every person favorably”? What is so beautiful about these words? What is their deeper meaning? “Judge every person favorably” doesn’t just mean making him feel good, saying a kind word to him, or, as we said, naively fooling ourselves—not seeing the bad and seeing only the good, as if everything were fine. On the contrary, it is the most wonderful and profound form of rebuke. How can I rebuke another person? There are two ways. If I see someone doing something negative, something wrong, there is certainly a mitzvah to rebuke him: “You shall surely rebuke your fellow.” But it can be done in two directions. I can point to the bad and tell him, “Hey, you did something wrong,” explain just how negative what he did was, and try to persuade him to change his ways. But what did I point to? The bad. And what did I talk about? The bad. What have I done? I’ve taken the bad that was in him and brought it out even more. I’ve made an issue of it, talked about it, built it up, made it into something big. So the opposite happens: the bad becomes more real, more tangible. The second way is “Judge every person favorably.” See the grounds for judging him favorably, see the positive side, see the good in a Jew. Let’s take one of the examples we’ve been discussing. Besides the story we told about the Rabbi of Berditchev, how he told that man that through the power of teshuvah he could turn all his deliberate sins into merits, let’s look at this

22:24 a little more deeply. When we see a Jew who has stumbled or fallen into sins and transgressions, what is happening to him is what the Torah calls a test. Hakadosh Boruch Hu places a person in a test. The yetzer hara and its desires are the tests every person faces. Every one of us, to one degree or another, has tests in life—all the temptations of the yetzer hara before our eyes. Some people have harder tests, much harder ones. What determines that? It is explained in Chassidus: Hakadosh Boruch Hu does not give a person tests in order to make him fail, G-d forbid. On the contrary, He gives a person a test in order to elevate him. The word for “test,” nisayon, Chassidus says, is related to “Raise a banner upon the mountains”—a banner, something high and elevated. A test is not a failure. A test is not a stumbling block. It isn’t something meant to break me or bring me down, as though someone were chasing after me: “Aha, I caught you in the act! You failed here, you did—” catching you in some sin. On the contrary, Hakadosh Boruch Hu wants to raise a person up to a higher level, and that is why a test comes. It depends on the strengths a person has. Only Hakadosh Boruch Hu knows a person’s true strengths, what powers lie within his soul. And there is a Jew who has such tremendous strengths. How do we know? How is that expressed? In his tests. The tests Hakadosh Boruch Hu places before a person correspond to the inner strengths he has. Hakadosh Boruch Hu knows a person’s true strengths, and precisely someone with greater inner strength, greater talents and more tremendous abilities faces greater tests, because he has the ability to overcome them. If

24:34 he did not have the ability to overcome them, Hakadosh Boruch Hu would not have placed him in that test. So when I look at a Jew and see that he is struggling with an extremely difficult test, that he faces an overwhelming temptation from the yetzer hara, instead of looking at the bad, at his behavior, at what is happening in practice, speak about his strengths. Speak about his tremendous strengths. Reveal the wonderful powers he has, the power of teshuvah he has, the tremendous strengths within this person. Speak of his virtues. In this way you will lift him up, raise him through the test, and help him reach the place he is truly capable of reaching. This is what the Rambam means by “Judge every person favorably.” In chapter six, where the Rambam speaks about the Torah scholar, he says, “Judge every person favorably, and therefore one should speak of his virtues and not of his faults at all.” What does the Rambam mean? Exactly this point. When you see a person whom you need to judge favorably, the plain meaning is that the Rambam is speaking about a person who has done something negative, which is why you need to find grounds to judge him favorably. You aren’t lying to him or to yourself. Rather, you are doing it to help a Jew, to help him rise, to help him overcome the difficulties and tests he faces. So, “speak of his virtues and not of his faults at all.” Once you recognize the tremendous inner strength demanded of this Jew, and the special powers Hakadosh Boruch Hu has given him, that itself gives you the strength to see only the good in him. Then the bad falls away. You can no longer see the bad. You see only good. That isn’t a lie; it’s the truth. You see the beauty, the goodness, the preciousness, the treasured land, that deep part

26:21 And the amazing thing is, suddenly, when you look at that Jew, your glasses change. You see him in a completely different light. Rabbi Shabtai Slavaticki, the Rebbe’s shliach in Antwerp, Belgium, often tells a story. A Jew who had a connection with him began drawing closer to Judaism, observing mitzvos and learning Torah. He kept progressing, until at one point he revealed a secret to the shliach: there was a certain matter, a very serious sin, that he could not free himself from. He was involved with a non-Jewish woman. He said to him, “This is a test I can’t withstand. I’ve already been to rabbis and scholars; I’ve gone to all sorts of great Torah sages. I’ve tried. They all tried to persuade me, to explain how serious it is. But it’s stronger than I am.” So Rabbi Slavaticki suggested that he go to the Rebbe. As he tells it, when the Jew came and passed by the Rebbe, the Rebbe said to him, “I envy you.” The Jew was bewildered that the Rebbe would say, “I envy you.” The Rebbe then explained: the tests that Hakadosh Boruch Hu places before a person are meant to elevate him, to reveal the tremendous potential within him. The greater the test, the greater the opportunity Hakadosh Boruch Hu is giving you to rise to a higher level. This test was something special that this Jew had been given. It meant that he had such special strengths that he could overcome it. “I wasn’t privileged to face such a test. You were given it because Hakadosh Boruch Hu believes in you and knows you have special strengths, that you can truly reach... And when you withstand this test, you

28:32 will be able to reach true heights and reveal your true potential.” Those very words had an effect on that Jew. That shell, that force, that attraction, was broken within him. He truly made up his mind and succeeded in freeing himself and becoming a complete baal teshuvah. That is what we need to learn. This is the practical mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel. Of course, Ahavas Yisroel has many expressions in action, beyond the feeling of love itself. The Rambam also writes in the laws of mourning about visiting the sick, bringing joy to a bride and groom, and, in an entirely different context, G-d forbid, matters of mourning and accompanying the deceased. These are all expressions of the mitzvah “Love your fellow as yourself.” The Rambam says that the Sages instituted an obligation for a Jew to do all these things, and it all flows from that mitzvah. But these are particular things that arise at particular moments in life—happy occasions, and, G-d forbid, things we should never know of. In this Rambam that we discussed today, though, we have a practical way for a Jew to put Ahavas Yisroel into action every day: by training ourselves to see the good, to focus on the positive, to bring it out and speak about it. When we talk about Jews and about particular situations, we should speak about and emphasize the positive, bring out a person’s virtues, talk about the good in him, and bring that strength out into the open. Then we can transform a person’s reality and reveal the most wonderful treasures within him. That is really the deeper meaning of Ahavas Yisroel. A Jew once told a story about his childhood. He grew up in Brooklyn, and his father passed away when he was young. He was an orphan and a very, very mischievous child. The school had a hard time with

30:52 him. He was thrown out of school, out of cheder, every day. He was an extremely disruptive, mischievous child, and his poor mother couldn’t take it anymore. At one point, since they had a connection with the Rebbe, his mother asked to consult with him about what to do. She was at the end of her rope. She came with her son and told the Rebbe everything that was going on: what the teachers said, what the educators and the principal said, how he had gone from one school to another, and how she just couldn’t manage anymore. She described all his wild behavior at home, while the boy stood there listening to everything he had done and was doing. The boy himself told this story many years later. He said that as he stood there listening to it all, he was ready for what would come next. He was used to being shouted at and reprimanded. He thought, “Well, I know already—I’ve been insolent. What will the Rebbe say to me?” Then the Rebbe turned to him and asked, “What do you say about everything your mother has said? Is it true?” “Yes,” he answered, “it’s true, every word.” With a big smile, the Rebbe turned to the mother and said, “True! Do you see? He’s a truthful child. He doesn’t lie; he speaks the truth. You’ll have a great deal of nachas from this boy.” Those words of the Rebbe brought about a revolution in the boy’s heart. Years later, when he told the story, he said those words had changed his heart. The Rebbe did not say a word about the negative behavior, the wild conduct or the insolence. The one thing the Rebbe saw was a child who spoke the truth. He praised him and brought out his strength, the special quality he possessed: he was a child

33:01 of truth. With that, the Rebbe transformed him, changing him from one extreme to the other. This is what we need to learn from the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel. How do we apply it in daily life? The Shulchan Aruch—here we are speaking about Ahavas Yisroel and the power of our words. It is also very closely connected to what we have been reading lately in the weekly parshas, including Parshas Behaalosecha. Outside Israel they are reading Parshas Behaalosecha; in Israel they are reading Parshas Shelach. Both parshas deal with speech. At the end of Parshas Behaalosecha, we read about Miriam’s words and the effect that speech had on the Jewish people. Then we read about the spies’ words—their slander of the Land—and what they brought about through it. From there we also see the positive side: speaking in praise of the Jewish people, as Calev and Yehoshua did. They, on the contrary, spoke in praise of Eretz Yisroel, bringing out all its virtues and wonderful qualities. So let’s bring this message into our everyday lives: look for what is praiseworthy in another person. As a side note, of course, we should add that the halachah about speaking in praise of another person has some exceptions and rules we need to know. The Shulchan Aruch says we must be very careful when praising someone not to go on praising him too much, because that can lead to speaking disparagingly of him. These are halachos connected to avak lashon hara. So we certainly need to do this wisely and thoughtfully, knowing how to focus on the good without being drawn into anything negative. And through this strength—being mindful of the power of our words, of their ability to build up and reveal the good in every Jew—we will truly merit what is written: through the mitzvah of Ahavas Yisroel, we

35:07 will merit, speedily in our days, the coming of Moshiach Tzidkeinu and the complete Geulah. Amen, may it be so.