“You must investigate, inquire, and question thoroughly.”
– From here it is learned that there are seven inquiries made (when judging a case) – Rashi

ELUL is here! Even though August has just begun, Rosh HaShana is sneaking up on us. Would you like a good judgement on the Holy Day of Judgment? Our Sages tell us if we judge others righteously then G-d will judge us righteously. So as we prepare during this final month for the High Holidays, we should train ourselves to remain silent before we judge a situation. We should investigate the situation to see if there is an explanation for what is going on. Even if we do not ask those involved directly but we at least think of possible solutions to the situation, we will be able to handle it much better.

The Chofetz Chaim tells a story of a visitor who walked into a shul by the fifth aliyah on Shabbos. He sees a boy in his late teens get called up for an aliyah and immediately gets upset. He begins to yell at the Gabbai, “How can you call up such a youngster when you have so many honorable members in your shul? Just look at all of the elderly scholars on the Eastern wall. Look at the many adults that are sitting here. How can you call up this kid!” The Gabbai turned to this man and responded that if this visitor was normally in the shul every week or even showed up during the beginning of the Torah reading, he would know that the other people either had aliyos last week or earlier in the Torah reading that Shabbos. Anyway, this “youngster” has Yahrzeit so he is required by Jewish law to be given priority for an aliyah on this Shabbos. The visitor made a fool of himself because he did not fully investigate the situation before responding.

I learned that I should not quickly jump to conclusions when I was in college. There was one Shabbos morning when I saw an acquaintance who I sometimes spoke with get called up for an aliyah. The strange thing was he was wearing jeans and began to wonder how could he wear jeans on Shabbos. But after his aliyah I became more upset as he said the blessing for Gomel (when someone is saved from a dangerous situation, he says this blessing normally after getting called up for an aliyah). If he knew he was going to get an aliyah so he could say Gomel, why couldn’t he dress properly. Then, two aliyos later, his brother was called up and he was also wearing jeans. Although I was friendly with them, I decided I was not going to say anything to them, and I was lucky I didn’t. After davening, I was talking with them and one of the brothers mentioned how embarrassed he felt to get an aliyah wearing jeans, but he had no choice. On Friday, he was driving home from the dry cleaners when his car hit a pothole. Right next to the pothole was a gas pipe cover that was sticking up, and the way his car hit the pothole, it also hit into the gas pipe, setting the car on fire. Luckily, everyone survived, but the brothers each only had one suit and both suits were destroyed in the car fire. Therefore, all they had left to wear was blue jeans.

A person never knows…

So, when a husband comes home and his wife has not even started dinner yet, do not get angry. Investigate the matter a little and you will find that she tried to start dinner two hours ago, but your son decided it would be funny to flush a deck of cards down the toilet. And when a husband comes home late from work and dinner is cold, don’t yell at him. Investigate and you will see that he went to the shul to set up for Shabbos so he would have extra time to help prepare the house on Friday afternoon. Or there could be millions of other reasons why things happen the way they do. We just never know. So before jumping to a conclusion, investigate, investigate, and investigate. And when you are done investigating, do some investigating because then you will find the situation is not really as bad as you thought it was.

Good Shabbos!
-yes
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