God cannot judge the world based upon His perfect conceptions of right and wrong; He takes into account our inherent weaknesses and limitations, and the way these affect conventional and accepted standards. In making our assessments, we must take example from the Almighty who “goes down” when rendering judgment, evaluating people based on their frame of reference.
The Torah in Parashat Vayera tells the story of the destruction of Sedom and its neighboring cities, which is preceded by God’s informing Avraham of His plans to eliminate the sinful city. He tells Avraham, “I shall go down and see if its cries render it deserving of annihilation…” (18:21).
The Midrash Ha-bi’ur (commonly attributed to the 15th-century Yemenite scholar Saadia Edni), noting the phrase, “I shall go down” (“eirda na”), writes, “On this basis they [the Sages] said: Do not judge your fellow until you are in his place.” The author of this Midrash detects within the image of God “going down” to Sedom an allusion to the famous exhortation in Pirkei Avot to delay judgment before considering the person’s exact situation and circumstances. Just as God “went down” into Sedom, so-to-speak, to determine its fate, so must we “go down” into our peers’ circumstances before casting judgment.
How exactly does the Midrash interpret the notion of God “going down” to Sedom, and how does this teach us about the way to judge others?
Rav Yehuda Leib Ginsburg, in his Yalkut Yehuda, explains (based on a passage in Rav Yosef Shaul Nathanson’s Divrei Shaul) that God “went down” into Sedom in the sense of judging them by appropriate and reasonable standards. There are many modes of conduct that are deemed acceptable by conventional norms and standards, though from the perspective of God, the source of goodness and benevolence, would be considered unethical. When God judges the world, He must “descend” from His frame of reference and enter that of us fundamentally flawed mortals. God cannot judge the world based upon His perfect conceptions of right and wrong; He takes into account our inherent weaknesses and limitations, and the way these affect conventional and accepted standards. When He judges the world, He “comes down” to view us through the prism of the human experience, to assess our actions from an earthly, rather than heavenly, frame of reference.
The Midrash Ha-bi’ur teaches us to follow the Almighty’s example in the “judgments” that we make about the people around us. We, too, must at times “go down” in making our assessments. As the Yalkut Yehuda writes:
Just as the Almighty does not judge a person based upon His moral consciousness, but rather according to the person’s consciousness, similarly, every judge must go down from his high level of consciousness and judge the person according to who he is. And this is what is meant when they [the Sages] said, “Do not judge your fellow until you are in his place” – meaning, a judge must lower himself and go to the place and moral condition of the defendant…
The exhortation “Do not judge your fellow until you are in his place” requires us to have different expectations from different people. Some people are not ready for the standards that we have set for ourselves and follow. In making our assessments, we must take example from the Almighty who “goes down” when rendering judgment, evaluating people based on their frame of reference, and not based upon His pristine standards of perfection.