Shaping Identity with Empathy

As 2009 gets underway, I honestly feel exhausted. 2008 was a stressful year for the world - for so many reasons - and events taking place in Israel and Gaza this last week have elicited a confused sadness and sense of despair in me that I had hoped to avoid at the start of this new year. I’m sure many of you feel the same. When heartbreaking events such as those unfolding in the Middle East occur, the business of “identity” always unfurls itself, asking us to choose, definitively, who we are and who we support. They usually result in an unbreachable divide between communities and individuals. I hope and pray, though, that in each of our minds, these processes of “choosing” and “identifying” are not so simply cut and dry.

As I began to prepare this d’var torah a couple of weeks ago, I planned to talk about my upcoming journey to India on the American Jewish World Service’s World Partner’s Fellowship. In two weeks, I depart for Bombay, where I’ll work for ten months with a community-based organization that receives funding from AJWS. In this d’var, I was going to talk about the incredible nature of this program; the real-world significance of ten young Jews living and working in different communities in India, forging personal and professional bonds with members of those communities, and the powerful implications of this kind of extended, hand-to-hand social justice work. I was going to talk about the personal significance this experience holds for me – even before my departure – by describing how excited I am to learn about the intersections of Judaism and social justice and to practice Tikkun Olam in an international setting. And I was going to proclaim how lucky I feel to be able to travel to such a unique and eye-opening corner of our world. This fellowship is a gift, and I hoped to share some snippets of it with you, even before it takes place.

I was going to focus on the concept of global citizenship, specifically in reference to the work I will be doing in India. Judaism, coupled with the idea of global citizenship, is the foundation of AJWS’s work throughout the developing world. I was going to talk about our relationship, as Jews, to “the other” in a social justice-oriented context. In fact, I compiled several different resources that would help me explain the importance of this theory – not all of them Jewish – but all of them instrumental in building the case for the humanistic worldview extolled by the philosophy of global citizenship.

I was going to tell you about how Rabbi David Rosen, the Director of the American Jewish Committee's Department for Interreligious Affairs recently stated that the *essence* of Judaism is to “engage and affirm ‘the other’ in his or her own dignity” – through works of social justice and empathy – “and only then can we truly see the divine spark within ‘the other’,” whom we should take to mean those not ourselves, obviously, and those not of our own communities.

If I was discussing India, I would have said to you that Imam Yahya Hendi, founder of Clergy Beyond Borders, and chairman of Imams for Human Rights and Dialogue recently exclaimed at a panel discussion at the University of Washington that “our existences as Jews, Muslims, and Christians, etc. are dependent on the existence of ‘the other’.” He asked, “Can we engage together in social justice in the name of our own religions?” He asked “can we COMPETE with one another in the work of goodness and righteousness towards one another?” The holy Imam then rightfully identified that we’ve spent so much precious time building strong, high walls to the point that we think they’ll never come down. Why don’t we turn those walls into tables, he asked, through acts of empathy and Tikkun Olam?

If I was talking about India, I would then read to you an excerpt from Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s book “No Future without Forgiveness” in which he discusses “Ubuntu,” a traditionally African philosophy of humanity. It went like this: "Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human...You share what you have. It is to say, 'My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up in yours.' We belong in a bundle of life. We say, 'A person is a person through other persons.' It is not, 'I think therefore I am.' It says rather: 'I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.' A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are."

If I had been speaking on the connection between global citizenship and my upcoming experience in India, I would have closed with a simple quote from Zen Buddhist monk Thich · Nhat · Hanh. He says: “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”

I was then going to say to you that I consider global citizenship to be a concern for common humanity which transcends our own personal worldviews, and that we actively address through concerted social justice efforts. It is a fusion of respect and empathy and an understanding of our responsibilities as beings of this world.

As I talked in depth about my upcoming fellowship in India, I was going to hope that these words of wisdom from such diverse backgrounds would foster in all of us an eagerness to become increasingly connected to human experiences outside of our own; to help us feel as if we hold a stake in the lives of people and communities outside of our own social networks. By sharing these philosophies with you in association with my trip to India, I would have been working towards a system where we, Jews from Congregation Beth Shalom, would identify the lives of others, elsewhere, as equally relevant and valid as our own, despite - and because of - our differences from them. I should say that I truly believe that many of us already feel this way and do indeed act accordingly. Essentially, I was hoping that by reading these excerpts we could envision together the kind of work that AJWS facilitates throughout the world, and that we could all become a part of that work, whether it be through donations to your organization of choice, or through trips to communities in the developing world like the one some congregants took last year, or simply through learning about the culture of another people.

If I had talked in depth about India, next I would call our attention to a particular pasuk from this week’s parsha, Vayigash. But let me first pause to explain what’s going on at this point in the Torah narrative. In last week’s portion, Jacob’s eleven remaining sons traveled from C’naan to Egypt, in search of food and resources to bring home in light of a harsh famine. Jacob is still in C’naan, and only reluctantly let his youngest son, Benjamin, make the journey with his elder brothers. Joseph, another of Jacob’s sons, has worked his way up to being a powerful official in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s court after having been sold into slavery by his brothers. Last week we read of how, after realizing that it was his brothers that stood before him in a position of vulnerability, Joseph plays a trick on the clan. He creates a set of circumstances in which is seems that Benjamin steals from the palace and, having been closest as a child with Benjamin, Joseph demands that this beloved youngest son stay in Egypt as punishment for his crime. As parshat Vayigash begins, Judah, another of Jacob’s twelve sons, is begging what he thinks to be an Egyptian official but is really Joseph, to spare Benjamin from imprisonment. In verse 30, Judah explains why returning home without Benjamin would result in the death of their father, since, as he explains, Jacob already lost another, most favorite son, Joseph years ago. Judah says, “V’nafsho K’shura B’Nafsho”; his soul is bound up with the boy’s soul. Jacob’s soul is bound up with Benjamin’s soul. As Benjamin suffers, Jacob suffers. So to do we suffer as our fellow human suffers. In order to effectively act against the injustices in our world, we must truly feel that Nafsheynu K’shurot B’Nafsheyhem – that our souls are bound up with the souls of…“the other.”

If I had been discussing India, I would have pointed out that this phrase should be taken as a mandate to think humanistically, as an imperative to pursue global justice. We are, as we know, our brother’s keeper. We must simply expand our definition of “brother.” If I was referencing India, I would go into how Joseph proceeds to identify himself to his brothers, saying “Ani Yosef, Achichem; I am Joseph, your brother,” before, in his position of luxury and privilege conferring upon them resources aplenty and inviting them to move permanently to Egypt so that they might be more comfortable – as he is. The beauty of this is that Joseph and his brothers have had entirely different life experiences and yet – Joseph is ready to aid his brothers because he can. And because he retains a holy empathy for the family’s suffering.

Again and again I’ve said “if only I was talking about India.” In fact, I have been trying all along to describe why I feel so compelled to journey to Bombay and participate in this amazing globally-oriented Tikkun Olam. But I am hoping that you have also taken my words as an interpretation of how to think about what is going on in Israel and Gaza. It is normal and often socially expected that we fall into certain categories when controversial events like those occurring in Israel and Gaza unfold. It is natural to feel an alliance with “our side” or “their side” based on the contexts of our own lives and the ways that we perceive information. But if we try, if only for a moment, to eject politics from our internal mental scales, and attempt to breathe in the holy words of the scholars that I read previously, we might for a moment feel as if Nafsheynu K’shurot B’Nafsheyhem; that our souls are bound up with the souls of ALL of those stuck in the middle of this horrifying conflict; that our souls are bound up with the souls of ALL of those that experience pain and oppression in our world. Experiencing this realization is no threat to our Judaism or to our support of and love for Israel, though it may feel so. If for a moment, we close our eyes, and truly envision the sacred words of the individuals I spoke about earlier, we might decide to commit ourselves to a year of Ubuntu; a year of humanism.

Imam Yahya Hendi said that we are on a ship that is sinking. We must work together to plug the holes, as shipmates, or we will all drown together.

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.