cordnoy wrote on 28 Apr 2017 01:44:

Ideally, maybe it would be best to see the "entire picture" of a person (assuming we can do so and still love them), but is anyone capable of this? Only Hashem. For us mortals, who can't possibly get to the true depths of person's inner psyche, we ultimately have to make a choice of what to FOCUS on, knowing full well that it's not going to give us the true emes of the person's situation.  So we can use our energy to find a person's faults, or a person's strengths, or try a combination approach, but will never come to the full truth of both. And is it even our job to even try and judge a person's actions or flaws? Is there a mitzvah to see the negative in our fellow Yid? My understanding is that the only mitzvah we have is to judge our fellow yid favorably, and related this, to love them.  I think that even when we tell ourselves we're being honest by looking at a person's flaws and saying "you see, now I'm taking a balanced approach and seeing the big picture", we are still missing the majority of the picture and that energy could have been used to discover more a person's strengths.

We have a mitzvah to love our fellow yid. Can this be accomplished through any other way than focusing on their strengths and admiring what's good about them? This take SOOO MUCH energy, how can there be anything left to find a person's flaws????  

So I guess you could say I'm no longer interested in seeing the emes of a person (I used to obsess about it but it was really the yetzer harra telling me to focus on the flaws of others so I could feel better about myself).  Rather, I want to see the good, because I know that there's no way of really getting to the true emes of a person, and it's not my job to get there anyway, rather my job is to love and judge favoribly (which is challenging enough lol). So I ask Hashem to blind me to the flaws in others. I don't want to see it, even though they often pop out at me. All it does is bring me to a place of disdain for my fellow Jew.

I disagree that the best machanchim see the entire picture because no-one sees the entire picture.  From personal experience, my best mechanchim were the ones that viewed my strengths and loved me, and in that love I was able to start seeing the good in myself and believing in myself, because love is like water, it makes us grow.  Even when we see a child's strengths or weaknesses (which of course we sometimes need to do - even I have to discipline my children? lol) our love is able to put it into context.  We see it as part of much bigger, positive picture. We are able to say that the action or attitude is not good per se, but the person or child is.  And that's where we start from when dealing with the problematic behavior, attitude, action, etc... 

I also think there is great risk and harm when we overly focus on the flaws of others, much more so than if we would just ignore them completely. In a nutshell: Ultimately we have to have the awareness that we can't possibly get to the full emes of a person and his actions, so the question is: what viewpoint will bring me to fulfill my obligation to love this person? Kol Tuv and good Shabbos!

Very nicely said.

I disagree with a few points, but that's fine.

Continued hatzlachah.

cordnoy wrote on 28 Apr 2017 17:51:

G-d willing your approach should bring out the best in you, my approach should bring out the best in me, and they should both be mechazek klal Yisroel and make kiddush Hashem!

The depth of Rebbe Nachmans' Azamra torah is that we actually enable the persons transformation when we view only the good in them.
Shavuatov

GrowStrong wrote on 29 Apr 2017 18:14:

With regards to ourselves, once we have done a proper thorough housecleaning (step 4) then this is most definitely the way forwards.

I love that azamra concept. 

workingmyprogram wrote on 02 May 2017 05:17:

Yay we finally have a consensus!