From the Rabbi

Individuals, communities and nations are exercising compassion these days, on a global scale.

To have compassion is to expand one’s consciousness beyond limits. It is a pouring out of the ineffable capacity to care-beyond – beyond one’s own needs, beyond one’s own identity, beyond one’s own tribe, beyond one’s own benefit.

We sometimes call such people altruistic. If so, would that mean that the opposite of compassion is selfishness? Massive egotism?

The absence of compassion is actually far more destructive. If I cannot muster compassion for a suffering person without taking into account the particulars of their curriculum vitae or family tree, then what is the value of my attention to them? It would indeed be massively self-oriented as well as callous.

Indifference, then, is perhaps the best antonym to compassion. Compassion moves us in the direction of spiritually-motivated social action. For social action to be spiritually motivated, the source of concern can be varied, yet usually comes with a mixture of these attributes: empathy, love, concern, caring. The less positive emotions that may arise from “the opposite of indifference” – such as anguish, despair, frustration, resentment – are less likely, or less easily positioned, to lead one to practice compassion.

All of this is aligned with the Jewish religious view of compassion/rahamim. It is one of the highest qualities the Kabbalists associate with God. The biblical text known as the Thirteen Attributes (Ex 34:6-7), recited throughout the Days of Awe, begins: Adonay, adonay, El rahum vehanun – YHVH, YHVH, God of compassion and grace. So it is not surprising that the Kabbalistic concept of tikkun olam, repair of the world – seeking the sparks of divine light covered over by the shattering that was Creation – has come to stand for spiritually-motivated social action, particularly in recent decades.

While some on a spiritual path rest on the path of inward-looking practices, Jewish teachers, and Judaism itself, sees no discrepancy between spiritual and social concerns. Rabbi Arthur Green, in his annotated dictionary of essential Jewish terms These Are The Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life, spells this out in his definition of tikkun olam: “Such a bifurcation of spiritual and sociopolitical concerns is hardly possible. Anyone who tries to undertake it ultimately has to deal with the prophets of ancient Israel, still the strongest and most uncompromising advocates for social justice our world has ever known.”

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s project Ritual Well provides a beautiful set of blessings for Hanukkah this year, to add to your candle lighting rituals. Unless racism, economic inequities, climate change, struggle in the Middle East, and other injustices are eradicated this year, I have a feeling these blessing will still be relevant for Hanukkah of 5777. And on any day of the year, this challenge, and obligation, is aleynu/upon us. As Peter Yarrow sings: “Light one candle for those who are suffering pain we learned so long ago.”

Hag Urim Sameah- Have a Joyous Festival of Lights

- Rabbi Liz