Talmud Class: Should We Care About What Other People Think of Us?

What do you want to be known for? That is a question only you can answer.

What are you known for? That is a question you cannot answer. That is a question that can only be answered by other people.

The difference between what we want to be known for, and what we are known for, is the work we are called upon to do to become ever better versions of ourselves.

That is the Torah of a thought leader named Jeff Henderson in a recent Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.

In other words, there are times when other people’s opinions about us matter. In fact, after the sin of the golden calf, when God threatens to destroy the Hebrew slaves and to create a new people, Moses argues that God should not destroy the people of Israel and start over again:

Let not the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that He delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.” Exodus 32: 12.

Why should God care what the Egyptians think? The Egyptians were slave-owners. The Egyptians were oppressors. What kind of moral compass could they have had? The classic rabbinic answer, embodied by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, is that God’s reputation matters. Having chosen to intervene in history by freeing the slaves from Egypt by dint of signs and wonders and plagues, the meaning of this narrative in the world at large does matter. What people say does matter.

But are there limits to whose views about us matter? In the Andy Stanley podcast, Jeff Henderson invites us to think about the groups whom we are for, and whose opinions about us therefore matter. The work we need to do can sometimes only emerge by asking others what they think of us—unsettling but true.