by Rabbi Marcia Plumb
He (Ben Azzai) used to say: Do not be scornful of any person and do not be disdainful of anything, for you have no person without his hour and no thing without its place.”
What does it mean: every person has their hour and everything has its place?
It means that every person is like a puzzle piece, which will fit into the jigsaw of our lives in unexpected ways.
We never know if the person we are rejecting out of hand might have provided us with an answer to a question we didn’t know we had.
I’ll give you an example. I was once on a small bus in Morocco on a day trip into the desert. I sat across the aisle from a young newly married couple. She wore a hijab and he, a Muslim head covering. His name was Muhammad, her’s Sarah.
Muhammad and I chatted. He told me that he didn’t require her to wear a hijab, that he didn’t care, but she chose to wear it.
He worried (a bit correctly)that I might judge and reject them as religious extremists.
Because I didn’t know them enough to judge, I thought about it and decided to adopt the middah of Btzelem Elohim as the basis for our conversations. Regardless of his clothing, he was a child of God, just like me. I looked beneath his outward appearance and focused on his inner soul, with the hope that he was in touch with his.
I asked about his work in computers. Eventually he asked about my work. My earlier judgement came up- how would they react to the fact he had been talking with a Jew?
I told him I was a rabbi, and we quickly moved through the fact that yes, women can be rabbis.
He was quiet for a bit, and I wondered if my Jewishness meant the end of our budding friendship. He looked up and said, ‘You are nothing like I was told you would be.’
‘’What do you mean?’ He answered, “You are nice. You are not evil, and you do not hate all Muslims. That’s what I was always told about Jews.’
I replied, ‘You are nothing like what has been suggested about Muslims–that you are all extremists.’
We then spent the rest of the day learning how wrong what we were told to believe was, and how powerful it was to meet someone and learn about them as a person, as a child of God.
He and I both took a chance to override our assumptions and prejudices, and choose to see the humanity in each other. We gained so much because of it.
‘Do not be scornful of any person and do not be disdainful of anything’, for everyone has their hour and everything has its place.’
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