Now, you must understand something. I have to discuss something today: when somebody does something to you, toward you, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. There’s a very famous story about a man named Abba Umna. Who was Abba Umna? Abba Umna was, let’s say, a doctor, and every single morning he would get a bat kol, a heavenly voice, saying, “Shalom Aleichem.” Imagine getting that every single morning. This is on page 21, at the bottom, where it tells the story of how every day a bat kol would come to him and say, “Shalom Aleichem.”
Abaye heard about this situation because Abaye was getting it every Friday before Shabbat: a bat kol saying, “Shalom Aleichem.” But Abba Umna was getting it every day. So he asked, “Who is this Abba Umna?” They told him, “What he does, you can’t do.” He asked, “Why?” Then he started saying how honest Abba Umna was, how much tzniut (modesty) there was in his business, and that he was a doctor with a separate waiting room for men and for ladies. He went on to say more and more things.
But this is what happened. Abaye sent his students to test Abba Umna. They went to Abba Umna, slept at his house that night, and took his blankets. In the marketplace, they started selling the blankets. They waited until Abba Umna came to the marketplace, then said, “Blankets for sale,” in front of him. Abba Umna said, “Okay, I’ll buy them.” They said, “We don’t know how much these are worth.” He said, “This is worth this amount. It’s worth $2,000.” They asked, “How do you know it’s worth $2,000?” He said, “Because I bought these blankets. It’s worth $2,000.”
They said, “Wow, how honest you are! What were you even thinking when we were selling them? You weren’t going crazy? You didn’t flinch. They’re your blankets, and you know they’re your blankets, and you still didn’t scream it out. So you stole our blankets. What happened?” He said, “Because I thought that maybe you were collecting money. Really, you needed money to call pidyon shevuyim. Somebody was captive, and you need that money in order to—what’s it called?—to ransom out and get him back.” And that’s the end of the story.
But the bottom line is this: How did Abba Umna even give them such benefit of the doubt? How does he give them such benefit of the doubt? They ask him, “What were you thinking when we were selling you your own blankets? What were you thinking?” He says, “Ah, I was just thinking, what, you needed the money for tzedakah (charity)? I understand.” How does he even think like that? How does he even give them such benefit of the doubt? And he says, “I don’t know.” The answer is that when you view people as being on a very high level, you automatically think, “There’s no way they’re going to steal my blankets. It’s got to be something else.” So he viewed them at such a high level. It must be that they were collecting tzedakah, something like that. So they needed it for pikuach nefesh (preserving life), pidyon shevuyim.
The only way—one of the ways, I should say—that you can give people the benefit of the doubt when they do something wrong to you, do something against you, or do something that doesn’t look right, is by viewing that person as being on a high level. When you view that person that way, you think, “There’s no way, there’s no way.” So when you view someone and think, “Wow, you know, this person has a really, really big personality. There’s no way that’s going to happen,” you have to view Bnei Yisrael (Children of Israel) as Kedoshim—that they’re high levels, that they’re not just regular people. They are people on a high level. And when you know that, wow, you automatically view them a different way. Nothing’s going to bother you.
I remember someone telling me that, within the first month after he got married, his wife asked him for a cup of water. All of a sudden, as this guy was bringing the cup of water, it spilled all over, all over, all over. I was like, “What’s going on?” She didn’t scream or yell. She was like, “How are you not screaming and yelling? If it happened to me, I would go crazy on you.” She said, “I just think for a second, and I say, ‘There’s no way you can just come and pour a cup of water on me. Obviously, I know it’s an accident. Obviously, I know that there’s something behind it. Obviously, I know that. Why would I go crazy?’”
Sometimes people’s reaction is automatically, “Oh, what are you doing?” I’ll tell you what happened to me. The other day, I was at my nephew’s wedding, and there was some random person there, mamash (really) random. He was opening a bottle of Coke. You listening? He opened the bottle, and it spilled all over. You know, sometimes it went all over me. I had a gorgeous, brand-new suit, everything. It was my nephew’s wedding. I was like, “What? What would you do? What would you do?” It’s funny because the person who did that to me, instead of saying, “Sorry,” said, “Listen, everything is good.” I’m serious. It’s a true story. He said, “Everything Hashem does is good.” You know, it’s like, you say sorry to that. So now, on my end, I’m going to get angry at him. I’m going to get upset at him. It’s not like he shook the bottle and then opened it. He opened a bottle. It probably fell on the floor from somebody else, and he opened the bottle.
But the bottom line is, you have to think before you react in life, and you can give people the benefit of the doubt. And like that, automatically, one of the ways that we’re learning is, first of all, the guy’s not doing it on purpose, and the person’s not going to go again. Second of all, you have to look at the person who did something to you as an elevated person. There’s no way. Don’t look at a person and say, “Ah, no, no, no.” When you do that, when you view the person as being at a high level, automatically you’ll be able to give him the benefit of the doubt. If so-and-so did this, that, that, you give him the benefit of the doubt because he’s a high-level guy. He’s a high-level personality. There’s no way he’s going to be able to do that. It must be a different cheshbon (consideration) that happened in that situation.