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Suffering can educate us love, however all too typically we let it educate us apathy and indifference — or, worse, unbridled rage and hostility. Our afflictions harden us, flip our focus stubbornly inward, make our most aggressive impulses appear each vital and justified. We come to really feel entitled: I used to be oppressed, and nobody championed my trigger; I don’t owe something to anybody. But the Bible encourages us to take the alternative tack: I used to be oppressed, and nobody got here to my support; subsequently I’ll by no means abandon somebody weak or in ache.
Many individuals who have suffered terribly, whether or not personally or politically, hear each voices in our heads and have each impulses in our hearts. One voice tells us that the ache we’ve got endured (or are enduring) frees us from duty to and for others — justifies our fixating on ourselves — whereas one other voice insists that our struggling should educate us to care increasingly deeply for others. Through the mandate to like the stranger, the Bible instructions us to nurture the latter impulse relatively than the previous, to let our struggling educate us love.
At a second like this, the mandate to like the stranger can appear to be talking to broad and intractable geopolitical conflicts, and actually, it’s, nevertheless it additionally addresses us personally, on the most intimate ranges. I do know each these voices solely too properly. Having misplaced my father as a toddler and been left alone with a mom who lacked the emotional instruments to guardian any youngster, not to mention a grieving one, I wrestle at instances with feeling entitled to disregard different folks’s ache and take care of simply my very own. And but — having skilled aloneness, abandonment and abuse — I additionally really feel an intensified sense of empathy for and duty towards those that are alone, deserted or abused. It is that this impulse that the Bible seeks to nurture in me and in every of us.
This week, once we retell the Exodus story, we should keep in mind its implications: Since we all know vulnerability, the plight of the weak — whether or not amongst our personal kin or amongst those that don’t look or pray or converse like us — makes an particularly forceful declare on us.
The commandment to do that work is each particular person and communal; it’s, on the one hand and at varied factors within the Bible, very a lot particular to Jews. But alternatively, it’s elementary to the heritage of human civilization, and thus it addresses each individual and each individuals who hear it. Perhaps, having suffered, you’re tempted to study indifference and even hate. Refuse that temptation. Let your reminiscence educate you empathy and your struggling educate you like.
