What sound judgment requires regarding starting with serving water to those seated.

The Shaykh : Then, here is something that sound, empirical judgment requires. The server is not usually assumed to be cultured enough to know the ranks of the men, their statuses, their ages, their differences in knowledge, and the like. So if it is said to the server, "Start with the eldest of the people," as is in the hadith , the first thing that should be noted in this is age.
This imposes on the server what is similar to what is said in books of theology. And, unfortunately, they differed on this: Is it permissible for Allah, Blessed and Exalted is He, to burden His servants with what they cannot bear? The Asha'irah held that Allah can burden His servants with what they cannot bear. What we know, as the Exalted said, , is that would it be that Allah burdens any server who enters any gathering like this? He would have to perform a detailed structural examination to see whether Shaykh al-Tuwajiri is more deserving, or that Shaykh sitting there in the front of the place? I do not know, especially if one of them has just dyed his beard, covering his gray hair, and there is no blame on him for that, while the other has used some dye but the trace of gray remains, like me, for example, where I am not able to pay much attention to dyeing the beard, but I do it this year, and praise be to Allah, also in many cases. So here, this server will be confused between this and that. This contradicts the ease of Islam and the leniency of Islam. As for "the rightmost," the rightmost: some say that if a child distinguishes his right from his left, that is enough to command him to pray. And I do not adopt this, because the Sunnah is clearer than this statement.
So if we look at all of this, I think the tranquil souls will be at peace with this ruling and place it in its proper position. The hadith in the discussion, and the hadith of the miswak also, regarding "the eldest," is also in that. And this is among the aspects I pointed to that facilitate for students of knowledge reconciling the hadiths where something of a contradiction may appear between them, and there is no contradiction, praise be to Allah, in them.