Yom Kippur 5776: The Limits of Empathy

Yom Kippur 5776: Whose life matters?

For a lot of us, yom kippur is about introspection—taking stock of my life, what I’ve accomplished. What I haven’t accomplished. Taking stock of my relationships, what’s new and wonderful, what’s broken and needs my attention. And of course we have Yizkor, where we remember our loved ones who are no longer with us, and our grief tinged memories of their presence in our life.
But Yom Kippur is not just about looking in. It is about taking stock of where I stand in the world, how I have impacted the world, what’s wrong with the world even if it’s not my fault, and how I can heal it. The priest’s 3 confessions moved out in concentric circles: first we take account of our personal lives, our families, what happens in the private sphere, and take responsibility for what I’ve broken. Then we move out to our tribe, and then the whole nation. What have our nation done wrong? What are the sins of our nation even if I have not caused them? The Talmud teaches that the high priest, especially, bears everything on his shoulder because at least he could have davened harder, for peace, for safety. It was a huge weight to carry.
How much of a weight do we have to carry on our shoulders? Do we have to bear moral responsibility for the whole nation, for the world?
How far must our empathy extend?
If empathy is a zero sum game, if having concern for one person means I neglect another, then it cannot possibly extend to the entire nation. I must pick winners, and in doing so, pick losers. I only have limited attention. If I pay attention to the black community, I neglect the police who are getting shot at trying to keep the peace. If I pay attention to what’s going on here, I neglect the millions of syrians fleeing the atrocities of Assad, and the horrors going on in ISIL, in Iran, all over the arab middle east.
When I pick up Aliza, to feed her, Daniel wants to sit on my lap, which is okay because I have two legs. When I kiss Daniel, Hannah thinks it means I don’t love her, and of course, my legs are already allocated. We have a basic assumption that love is a limited resource,
But What if loving one person, having empathy for one, actually extends my compassion, makes me more capable of loving of loving others? What if empathy is not a zero sum game, but rather like the ocean, where you may take a cup but it is still full? Or better yet, what if it is like a candle, where if I take the heat to light another candle, I actually increase the light in the room? What if by having empathy even for the people hardest to have empathy for, I actually extend my ability to empathize with the entire world?
Some people scratched their heads when pope francis washed the feet of juvenile offenders. Did these people deserve his concern? And as jews, we are tempted to say, yeah, that’s catholic meshugas; we know better.
There is a very interesting Mishnah in Sanhedrin, about what the shechina (the divine presence) says when a murderer is executed. This is a murderer we are talking about—someone who was convicted with absolute certainty, by witnesses who warned them and saw them commit the act. When such a person is executed, the shechina complains, “my head hurts.” The divine presence in the world is an empathy that feels the pain of all human beings, even a murderer.
Having empathy for a murderer does not mean we’ve taken sides, that we don’t have empathy for the victim. It means our soul has become so expansive that we even feel the pain of such a person.
The haftarah for today, from the book of Isaiah, tells us not to be overly introspective today. It tells us to take stock of the world, and take responsibility for it, to feed the hungry, take the needy into our homes and have them at our table.
Why the needy?
The mystics tell us that actually, the needy are an embodiment of the shechina, of the divine presence in the world who is eternally dependent on the divine, and has no light of her own, much like the moon is in need of light from the sun.
What about the needy who are caught up in drugs, in violence? Are they too an embodiment of the shechina? As we all know, poverty is intertwined with gangs, drugs, violence. Is Isaiah telling us to focus on such people, on Yom Kippur?
Two weeks ago, we had a selichot program that I found heart opening. We were visited by 3 students at cincinnatti cooks, Kye, David, and Rachel.
Little David, who isn’t so little, looks like a gang member. He is a strong young man, black, he wore a baseball cap, and dressed like a gang member. He actually was, previously. He grew up in a poor, violent neighborhood, where you had to be tough to get by on the street. As he said, you couldn’t show any signs of feelings, of softness. He had to miss school regularly to take home his family’s WIC food baskets. I don’t know if he finished high school, but he got caught up in drugs and gangs, and was convicted on a gun conviction. Many of the students grew up with abusive parent figures, going hungry, being beaten and insulted as children.
Little dave is in the Cincinnatti Cooks program now, and almost finished. He has interviewed for a job as a dishwasher at a chain restaurant, which he is excited to take. I worked as a dishwasher in high school—it was miserable, underpaid, hard work. This is Little Dave’s path out of the criminal system.
Listening to dave’s story, and Kye’s, and Ruth’s, I was struck by just how hard their lives are, how hard they have to work just to stay out of criminal trouble. At the dessert reception, Little david was piling up desserts. At first I figured, okay, he’s not worried about seeming appropriate, but then it dawned on me, he hasn’t had dinner. I offered him dinner, and he gave me a look of “that would be terrific.” The students in the program do not make an income; they get to take home one portion for their families. Some of them are homeless, or living in a recovery center.
Ruth was laid off from her job at a day care, because she is restricted for working with children for 10 years from her date of conviction; she lost her house, and at age 66, she is just beginning a career as a food service worker. She described the temptation of wanting to cash a forged check, just to have basic necessities. What an incredibly hard row to hoe.
I want to challenge us with the possibility that david, Ruth, Kye are included among the people Isaiah is saying we should be thinking about today. Isaiah calls us to think about the stain of poverty on our nation, a stain which has only spread, not gotten better. Perhaps, too, we should even think about people like Little david who chose gangs and drugs because it was the only viable career path they could see, and hurt people along the way. Can we, like god, be poshet yad leshavim, extending our hand out to those who wish to return, and have empathy for Little David, Kye, and Ruth?
I think we can. That night after selichot, and the next morning, many of us reacted strongly realizing that we had hungry, homeless people here, and hadn’t done more for them. One person poignantly asked, did they just come to serve our own spiritual needs, for us to feel good? What were we doing for them? It was a very good question.
This past year, riots have erupted under the banner of black lives matter. It is a truism, of course, that black lives matter; but the challenge has been that it seems to negate other peoples’ lives from mattering. What about white lives, like Zachary Hammond, a teenager in south Carolina who was shot while he was out on a date, who had 10 grams of marijuana on him? What about cops, like sonny kim, who was just a wonderful human being? What about the innocent children in sex slavery, and slaves on fishing boats, don’t they matter too?
And what about the fact that many of these young black men who have been shot really were often up to criminal activity, or that they didn’t follow police orders? Shouldn’t we focus our attention instead on people who really are just the innocent bystanders, people who chose not to go down the path of criminal activity?
Every life matters. The Mishnah teaches that when a human king stamps coins, they all look the same—they have the image of the king. When god stamnps coins we all look different, but we still have the image of the king. We are all unique manifestations of the divine image. Can we understand that all lives matter, that there’s no such thing as a lowlife?
The window into this, for me, is Little David. We could write him off as a gangster, a criminal. Our system does exactly that, by making it so hard to return to society, by leaving drug trafficking as the only viable career option open to him. Little david could easily be shot by a cop, and nobody would blink. Can we see the divine image in him?
I think once we do this, we develop our empathy, our ability to see the divine in everybody. We challenge ourselves, we ask ourselves: is everybody in our country given the opportunity to lead a life in which they really matter, where they are not the dregs of society?
I am challenging us, as a community, to look at the poor neighborhoods in Cincinnati, black neighborhoods with 74% childhood poverty rate, and ask how we can help. The black community has 8x the level of gun violence as non-black; 1 in 6 black men will be incarcerated in their lifetime. Isaiah is talking about these communities. Isaiah challenges us: what would happen if we take them into our homes, feed them, clothe them, help them?
Isaiah calls us to unlock the fetters of wickedness around the world:
To speak out about slavery—in the sex industry, fishing, chocolate
To speak out about oppression of religious minorities happening right now in the middle east

Isaiah calls us, too, to reach out to our own communities, to places like the new prospect Baptist Church, in the old JCC, and ask how we can help. To reach out to Cincinnatti cooks, which is helping people like david rebuild their lives, giving them a second chance, and ask how we can help. To join with AMOS, which I am a member of, and pursue policies which create equal opportunities. And to take a deep look at our society, and not accept the status quo, to ask what we can finally do to untangle the terribly tangled web of poverty, drugs, and violence that traps people like Little david, to help them live lives that matter, that honor the divine image in them.