Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/empathy-culture/page/18/)
I’m not sure we’ll ever know who was crying out on the recording when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. But I am certain that millions of mothers in this country are crying out for something that our current justice system cannot give: the assurance that their black and brown boys will not be suspect before we bother to learn their name or their story.
This is what I want: to speak to people in ways that work for them, that don’t require them to adopt my worldview or habits, that support them in being heard and understood without having to work hard to understand me, and that contribute to our ability to collaborate towards mutually beneficial goals while allowing each of us to pursue our needs in the ways that work for us. If I can do this, I right away model, on a microscopic scale, the very world I want to create for all of us.
However, if we are to survive as a society, if our planet is to survive, we are going to somehow have to become smart enough to rely on reason, and not empathy, to make our most important decisions. Yes, we will always be moral. And empathy will always, as an emotion, focus our attention on the personal stories we encounter. As it should.
But our survival depends, paradoxically, on our ability to overcome our emotionally-informed morality. On our ability to look at climate change statistics and say, “Yes, I must act. Immediately.”
. . . [T]he extremist Jihadi script is out there; sadly, this constitutes a distinct behavioral model for disaffected and maladjusted individuals to embrace for meaning in their lives.
Seventy percent of cats at the shelter have to be euthanized. Who shall be saved and who shall be damned? We didn’t want to think of it that way. Who deserves to escape the burning fiery furnace? What do you bring as currency to buy salvation? Your suffering? That seems right, but suffering can create an abyss. That big surly cat growling from a cage might have suffered more than most, but we didn’t want her bites and scratches, her hissing and fleeing under the bed. Your good deeds? But how can we know the past from what we see in the present? Your love?
Some people will no doubt see the president’s gesture as political pragmatism rather than a spiritual act of forgiveness. I say the two are not mutually exclusive. Republicans also ought to employ both political pragmatism and the spirituality that they claim in making political decisions.
Every week at Rutba House, we have a time of confession. Years ago, we decided it was an importance practice to have in place, whether we need it this week or not. In community, we’re going to mess up. We all need space to be reconciled.
Often, when it’s time for confession, we sit in silence together and look at the ground.
But I’ve noticed something over the years: whenever one person is honest enough to confess their failure, everyone else inevitably joins them.
One of the core milestones on the path of consciousness transformation is the moment when we can fully integrate the radical awareness that our emotional responses to the world and to things that happen to us are never caused by another person. This awareness stands in stark contrast to our habitual speech, which states that we feel what we feel because of what someone else did. Instead, we learn, if we apply ourselves deeply to this practice, that our emotions are only caused by the meaning we assign to what someone did, and that meaning is generated from within us, not by the actions.
It took three vehicles to get to Jenin. The first and last were shared taxis that played pop music the whole way; the one in the middle was a bus driven by a handsome and solemn man with a big, religious beard, whose television played music videos memorializing martyrs. If the West Bank is shaped like an hourglass, Jenin is at the top of the upper bulb, where the sand is when it’s full. Thousands of years ago, the dusty city was named after its gardens, but more recently Ariel Sharon called it a “hornet’s nest of terrorism.”
Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to highlight V-Day and the global movement to end violence against women. My mother was the victim of violence in her childhood, as was I and so many people, both women and men, whom I know. If we really love women, children, and other vulnerable people, we will not accept the astronomical rates of violence in our world today.