Which Side are You On? Empathy and Compassion as a Road to Healing and Peace A Sermon for Kol Nidrei 5785

It’s interesting when we think about our lives and the memories of seemingly mundane things that stick with us. Over the past few months, I have thought of one memory in particular when I was in 7th grade and started to be more tuned in to news. It was 1974, the year after the Yom Kippur war, and I had begun to follow as well as I could the tensions on the borders between Israel and her neighbors. Every strike or harm against Israel affected me. And being a budding young activist who wanted to make a difference, I decided to write petitions against actions the Arab countries were taking against Israel, and to get my classmates to sign them.

So about once a week, when there would be some harm done to Israel that I would read about or see on the news at night, I would draw up a petition the next morning before I went to school. English class was the perfect organizing venue. Since it was mostly an individual, self-paced class, it was possible for me to move around and approach each kid, asking them to sign. None of them understood the petition. All of them signed.

So one day, emboldened by my success, I asked my teacher to sign. To my surprise, he wouldn’t. Instead, he challenged me. Maybe if Israel didn’t retaliate every time, he said, this wouldn’t happen. I argued with him—how could they not retaliate? I didn’t make a convert. When I look back on it now, I both appreciate his taking me seriously enough to argue, but I also think he missed the point. After all, I didn’t have any foreign leader’s address, and the petitions only ended up in a pile in my room. So what was I wanting by asking people to sign? I think I just wanted to be seen. I think I just felt that I was one of the few kids who came to school that day sad about what was happening in that far-away place, and I wanted people to know. I think that more than an argument, I wanted my teacher to say something like: “You seem worried. I can see that this is scary. I really hope everyone there will be ok.” I wanted to be seen, but both of us, far away from the conflict, were stuck taking sides, wanting to be right.

During that same time, the conflict in Northern Ireland was becoming more violent. I didn’t understand the causes of the fighting far away, but I did want to show support for my friend who was Irish American. I understood there were two sides and didn’t know what side he was on. So, I asked him while we were walking to school, “are you Catholic or Protestant?” and when he answered Catholic, I said, “ok, I’m on the Catholic side,” wanting to make him feel better. But even as I was saying it, I somehow felt that there may have been better ways to support him. And though he was appreciative, I think he may have vaguely felt the same hesitation as I did. In both cases, whether with my English teacher or with my friend, there was some kind of comfort, care and empathy that was deeply needed, but that my middle school self couldn’t articulate.

Ten years later I did find what I was yearning for—some truth I had not been able to express. I was traveling in Ireland with a friend and had read about a retreat center in Northern Ireland, off the beaten track, a center where both Catholics and Protestants who had suffered violence and trauma in what was called “The Troubles” could seek respite, listen to each other’s stories and feel wholeness and healing through the human connections that transcended sides. I was moved by the religious vision of reconciliation that had inspired it, and I somehow knew that I wanted to visit. Going to this oasis of compassion felt like a pilgrimage to me. So many people had been deeply hurt and traumatized by the violence there. For the people I met there, it was empathy both given and received that was a path to healing.

I want to talk about that empathy this evening. I want to talk about compassion. For while religion has been accused, often fairly, of being the driver of conflict and war, religion at its best offers deeper teachings that lead us to peace, and those are teachings of empathy and compassion. I think those teachings call to us with urgency today, for one of the casualties of war is this basic teaching of empathy, resulting in wounds not only to our bodies but also to our souls. And it is that deeper place in our souls that is needed to move out of the never-ending spiral of hate.

Empathy and compassion for those beyond one’s “side” are central to Judaism. H’ H’ El rachum v’hanun—”God is a God of compassion and love,” is sung throughout the high holidays. The Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, comes from the word rechem or womb, as if to say that we are all conceived in the womb of the Creator. The foundation of empathy indeed goes back to the first chapter of Genesis (1:27)—that each person is created in the image of God. And the Talmud says, “who is to say that your blood is redder than your fellow’s?” (BT Sanhedrin 74a).

Along with the sacredness of human life is another essential spiritual teaching of Judaism and of many religious traditions and that is the interconnectedness of all life. That is the meaning of the Shema. That is the root of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teaching: “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”¹ Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, calls this “interbeing.”

Now neither Martin Luther King nor Thich Nhat Hanh were naïve about human violence, war and sin. In fact, I specifically chose the teachings of those teachers tonight because their people were victims of the worst injustices, and risked their lives for change. But what their teachings have in common was the ability to work against injustice without hate for a whole group of human beings—in other words, working for justice while keeping their ability to feel empathy and compassion for all. For they taught that evil and injustice is not a characteristic of one group of people whom we need to vanquish. It is a struggle of all human beings. As Rev. King said,“ our ‘is-ness’ and our ‘ought-ness’ are eternally at odds with each other. “Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good.”²

When we do not show empathy for all who are suffering, but rather entrench ourselves in the suffering of only one side, we strengthen the evils of injustice that relies on hatred. We wound our souls and cover the holy spark deep within that we need in order to create a different reality. As Rev. King said: “Every act of hatred, even when it comes from the oppressed, adds to the tragic midnight of injustice…. If we retaliate with hate and bitterness, the new age will be nothing but a duplication of the old age.”³

The alternative to this insistence on simple “sides” is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “non-duality.” In wars, this is especially challenging. In his words, “in wars we …pick sides, usually the side that is being threatened. Peace movements are born of this feeling. We get angry, we shout, but rarely do we rise above all this to look at a conflict the way a mother would who is watching her two children fighting. She seeks only their reconciliation.”⁴ For Judaism, that mother is the Shechina, God, who is in tears over the suffering in the world. Having compassion for others, is seeing the world through God’s eyes.

One of the many ways Thich Nhat Hanh showed the practice of non-duality was in holding a retreat for Vietnam Veterans after the war.⁵ These veterans were suffering immensely, both for what was done to them and what they had done. For some of them, sitting with other vets and Vietnamese people was the first time they felt a path to healing. Like the retreat center in Northern Ireland, compassion and empathy opened hearts and opened the possibility of peace.

There are many organizations in Israel and the West Bank that, like the retreat center in Northern Ireland or in the United States for Vietnam veterans, do just that. The Parents Circle-Families Forum⁶ is an organization of Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones in the conflict and come together sharing their pain and seeing each other’s full humanity as a way to heal. Combatants for Peace⁷ is an organization of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian people who were once fighters but no longer believe that there can be a future for anyone through hatred. It was born of the discovery of empathy, each fighter coming to see the faces, the full humanity of the other.

Last spring there was a vigil in an American city sponsored by American Friends of Combatants for Peace. Jews and Palestinians quietly gathered holding pictures of children of all backgrounds who had died since October 7th. A colleague shared a story that when they gathered to put together posters with photographs and names of the children for whom they were mourning, a Palestinian woman noticed in herself that she was feeling more empathy for Palestinian children. She shared that with the group, and suggested that if others noticed that in themselves, they should out the names of children underneath the photographs, so that people could just see the humanity of each child, without placing them on any side. That is what they did. That, I believe, is seeing the pain and suffering through God’s eyes.

We are thousands of miles from the fighting and cannot and should not tell people in trauma who are how to be. But we can notice our own suffering here and that of others around us, and can resolve to reduce suffering through compassion. To bring peace we need, as Thich Nhat Hahn says, to be peace.⁸ To be peace we need to feel empathy and compassion for all.

And yet, even though many people I talk to long to be able to grieve for and have compassion for all, there are so few spaces even here in the West, that invite us to see this conflict with full empathy for all its innocent victims. When I walked by the encampment at Harvard this spring when I was at a conference, students were quietly and movingly creating a memorial writing names of the many Palestinians who had been killed in the war since October 7th. One professor who had addressed our conference I was attending noted that she had seen that as well, and expressed a wish that we could have a memorial with all the names, Palestinian and Israeli together who had died or been taken hostage and projected in the Yard. But those spaces have been hard to find–not only in encampments and other pro-Palestinian spaces, but in Jewish spaces as well. I often wonder what would happen if all the synagogues and all the mosques and all the universities had a memorial to all the precious lives cut down by violence, just as Combatants for Peace did, without creating a sense that one side’s suffering cancels out the other’s. Children are not born into the world with flags in their hands. They are all precious souls in the eyes of God.

And there is a chilling reason for the lack of those spaces. There was a psychological study at Stanford years ago described on an episode of Hidden Brain called Tribes and Treason.⁹ The psychologist, Lee Ross, noticed through his study that when “Arabs and Israelis think about their conflict, each group desperately wants observers to know that they have been wronged, but to acknowledge the pain on the other side feels as if it somehow limits this claim.”

Another study referred to on the episode showed that when people were asked to think about the suffering of people on the other side, they could show empathy, but if when they were reminded of their own people’s suffering, they showed less. “Trauma makes us turn inward,” the host Shankar Vedantam said. “It creates justifications for the harm we cause other groups. It makes it harder to feel empathy for our enemies.”¹⁰

The tragedy of this psychology is that empathy itself becomes a casualty of war. There have been cases where Israelis and Palestinians have been both accused of treason, simply for the expression of empathy for the other. And it makes the simple telling of our own stories, which are often a cry for help, be seen as an attempt to hurt the other.

All this has had a chilling effect. And this limiting of spaces to empathy of only one people is perhaps why there is the distressing absurdity of some instances of people sympathetic to Palestinians tearing down posters of hostages, and some instances of people sympathetic to Israelis wanting to label the stories of Palestinian victims as anti-Israel.

But empathy for the other does not limit a case of justice on one’s own side. We can be both clear in our convictions and expansive in our empathy and compassion. For we must remember that whatever vision of Israel and Palestine we are committed to, they all depend on the well-being of the other. Our fates are intertwined, as is the fate of all of humanity. Our visions will need to be based on the simple truth that as Rev. King said, we are all “tied in a single garment of destiny.”

How do we begin to reduce suffering and acknowledge the deeper reality of interconnectedness? One simple way is to tell the stories of those who act according to that reality. Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli women was a founder of a Jewish-Palestinian group called “Women Wage Peace” and someone who would drive people from Gaza to get medical care in Israel, was killed by agents of hate in her home on October 7th. You have heard of that horrific event, wounding us to the core. But have you heard that in July, in a displaced people’s camp in Southern Gaza, Palestinians setting up the shelter decided to name the community and kitchen space after Vivian Silver, and worked with her son, who has taken on Vivian’s peace activism, to create the banner.¹¹ You can see a photograph of this banner, with the name “Vivian Kitchen and Community Space” in English and Arabic along with her picture. A banner of compassion and hope in the midst of rubble.

You probably know of Hersh Goldberg-Polin who was kidnapped on October 7th and murdered last month both acts of extreme hate. Do you know that Hersh himself believed in peace for all, and had a friend who is an Arab-Israeli journalist, Yanal Jabarin,¹² who wrote columns calling for his release in Hebrew and Arabic and went to vigils for the release of hostages. Yanal spoke at a peace conference in Tel Aviv and said: “This is the time to unite, Arabs and Jews, because despair is not an action plan.”

When compassion is defined by some members of both sides as betrayal, we need to nurture our souls by reading of the many actions of compassion happening right now. There is “Standing Together,”¹³ an organization that brings Jews and Palestinians who live in Israel together to forge joint vision. There is “Shutafut Hagoral, Partners in Fate,”¹⁴ which was an organization of Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews who began collecting food and necessities immediately after October 7th, and making deliveries in the Negev to both Jews and Arab residents. There is the Sulha Peace Project¹⁵ that seeks to “strengthen humanity and restore the faces of the human beings that live on both sides of the conflict….and focus on training people to listen and feel with our hearts – an ability that is necessary for any future solution to this conflict.” These are stories and spaces that ground me, that lead me away from despair and give me hope. And there are numerous instances of kindnesses here in our country as well, as we Jewish and Palestinian and Lebanese Americans sadly share the sufferings of loss, pain and grief.

Grief. Melila Hellner, Israeli scholar and teacher at the Hebrew University and the Hartman Institute shared from her heart this summer in a class for American rabbis and said: “Grief can be experienced together and grief does not demand that you can only be one sided. It is one of the most painful things at the moment to see how difficult it is to feel that empathy…but I think in the last analysis we have to hold both sides. We have to.”¹⁶

I pray for the strength that we can. Yom Kippur is a day that teaches us to open to compassion. It is the only day of the year when we say the line in the morning prayers “hapoteach lanu sha’are rachamim” the One who opens for us the gates of compassion…” I pray that compassion wins over hatred, and kindness wins over cruelty, and that our words and actions can reduce suffering both in our own hearts and in the hearts of those all around us. May it be so.

Footnotes

^{1 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings
and Speeches, p. 290.
2 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/loving-your-enemies-sermon-delivered-dexter-
avenue-baptist-church; https://www.vox.com/2015/1/19/7852311/martin-luther-king-faith
3 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings and Speeches, p. 139.
4 Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, (New York: Bantam
Books, 1991), p. 118.
5 Peace Is Every Step, p. 102.
6 https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/homepage-en/
7 https://www.afcfp.org/
8 Peace Is Every Step, p. 11.
9 https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/tribes-and-traitors/
10 Shankar Vedantam, https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/tribes-and-traitors/
11 https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-peace-activist-murdered-by-hamas-is-memorialized-in-gaza-
evacuee-camp/
12 https://forward.com/opinion/658230/arab-israeli-hostages-hersh-goldberg-polin/
13 https://www.standing-together.org/en
14 https://partnersinfate.com/en
15 https://www.sulhapeaceproject.com/en
16 https://www.hartman.org.il/responding-to-devastation/}