Be on the Side of Empathy

This essay was first published by Honeymoon Israel, Passover 2024.

During the American Civil War, President Lincoln was asked by an advisor if he believed God was on their side, to which he famously replied: “my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.” Over the last half year, it has become increasingly difficult to understand which side of a different war deserves our allegiance, a question increasingly confounded by a flurry of missives jockeying for authority on truth, justice, and the clarity of Jewish values.

Yet fundamentally it is the whole notion of sides that has us turned around. When human beings suffer, God is on their side, and so ought we to be. The Haggadah reminds its readers that the whole story of Pesah is predicated on a collective consciousness that notices the suffering of another: “Then we cried out to the Life Force of our ancestral memory, and that Consciousness heard our cry and saw our suffering…” (Deut. 26:7). The rest of the story — the plagues, the splitting of the sea, the miraculous sustenance in the desert, and the ultimate deliverance to a promised land — followed only from this awareness of suffering.

Insofar as God is the innate loving-awareness of Being to which we all have access, then let the texts of Pesah direct us to be on God’s side. In the book the Song of Songs, which we read on the Shabbat that falls in the middle of Pesah, twice it says “Who is she that rises up from the desert?” (Song 3:6, 8:5). This phrase is simultaneously a reference to the Jewish people in their emergence from Egypt, and a call to a proverbial lover we seek to understand and bring closer. Here the very question provides our salvation; when we see someone rise up from a place of destitution, we need to stop and ask ourselves: who is this person who is coming up from the desert? What is the desert they have been inhabiting? And how did they get into that desert to begin with?

In other words, the question itself demands an ethic of empathy. It does not ask us why they are coming up from the desert; it does not ask whether they are justified in their rising up; nor does it ask us where they are going and whether they have a plan once they get there. It simply asks us who they are.

And to this the Haggadah says: they are people, and they are suffering, and therefore God is on their side.

This must be our guiding principle. On Pesah this year we need to ask ourselves the questions of empathy — with regards to Israelis and Palestinians, with regards to the conflict, the war, the Jewish future, and with regards to each other in our local communities and lives. Only an ethic of empathy will deliver us to any kind of land or era of promise. Only empathy will restore our spirit as in days of old. Only empathy will remind us just whose side we are on.