The Bar Mitzvah Speech - R. Yaakov Moskowitz - TorahAnytime.com

In this great book, It Wasn't How It Seemed, the author tells over an amazing story about an uncle who is at his nephew's bar mitzvah. And in the middle of the drussa, one of the neighbors taps him on the shoulder and the uncle turns around and the man says to him, "This kid's a boring speaker." And the uncle is so taken aback. What kind of person says such a thing? Especially he knows that I'm the boy's uncle. You calling my nephew a boring speaker? So not nice. So not right. And he was so bothered for the rest of the speech until towards the end of the speech the fella taps him on the shoulder again says, "Oh no, what does this guy want?" And he turns around and the fella says, "Listen, I have heard a lot of bar mitzvah boys and I'm telling you the same thing I told you before. This kid is a boring speaker." The uncle was convinced that this individual was insulting his nephew, calling him a boring speaker, and therefore he judged him incorrectly. However, it was all because he missed one syllable and the fellow was really complimenting him calling him a born speaker. You know the mission tells us we have to judge all people favorably and the ferris comments that if it's true by all people then all the more so we have to judge our friends and our teachers favorably. He says because those are such important relationships that if we don't judge them favorably, the relationship will begin to erode and we won't gain as much as we possibly can from that friendship or from that teacher. But what are we supposed to do when somebody really does wrong us? And the tells us something unbelievable. He reads the a little bit differently. He says you need to judge the entire person. Before you judge the individual when he does something negative to you, you need to look at the entire person. Look at his positive traits. Look at what this individual has done in his lifetime that has been really good. Look at how he interacts with you in a positive way. And only after that will you recognize that what he did that was negative is really not so important and not such a big