Compassion, Tamara Erickson
The Hebrew word for compassion is rachamim, which shares its linguistic root with the Hebrew word for womb, rechem. Consequently, compassion is often understood as the manifestation of the bond between a mother and the life growing inside her.
Rachamim can be interpreted as the inner experience of touching another being so closely that the lines between “you” and “me” are blurred, an understanding that we are not really separate from one another. The interconnectedness of mother and child that occurs within the womb can be likened to the spiritual interconnectedness of all beings in the universe, or within God’s womb. Compassion is the inner quality that grows within us when we realize and appreciate our oneness.
Compassion has an important emotional component, the feeling of empathy. My oneness with you implies that I am able to feel your emotional experience as if it were my own - your suffering is my suffering, and your joy is my joy. However, rachamim does not come into being just by feeling empathy. Alan Morini explains, it is the “Jewish insistence that inner qualities only reach a state of sh’lemut, “wholeness”, when they are brought out into the world of action”. It is the action that turns empathy into compassion. To be truly compassionate, it is not enough to just feel what another being feels, but we must also act as if their feelings were our own. The capacity for compassion is innate within us but in our culture, we are more likely to perceive ourselves as distinctly separate from other beings. It is simpler for us to slip into judgment than it is for us to rise to compassion, and it is often easy for us to “other” another human being. We are more likely to be compassionate to those we care about and can relate to easily. It is much more difficult to be compassionate to a person who has committed a crime or whose actions contradict our values, or to be compassionate to a person whose life and appearance is so drastically different than our own, or to be compassionate to a group of people whose existence complicates the ability for our people to have our own homeland with a Jewish majority.
However, compassion is a skill that can be cultivated. Every time we transcend the boundaries of self and feel within us the truth of another’s experience, we are cultivating compassion. We can foster a limitless affection for humanity by seeing the image of God in every person. We can remind ourselves that everyone is doing the best they can given their resources and life experiences. What if we saw that person in prison as someone who is struggling? According to the CDC, 98% of the prison population has experienced at least one adverse childhood experience and 78% have experienced 4 or more. Without intervention, people who have experienced even just one adverse childhood experience are 2X more likely to have serious financial problems, and those with 6 or more are 4,600% more likely to face opiate addiction and are 50% more likely to have a shortened lifespan by 20 years. What if more Americans could see the person crossing our southern border illegally and answer the question, “what would I do if I were in that person’s shoes?” from a sense of shared identity and an understanding that “us” and “them”, in the words of Morinis, are “mingled in a oneness that transcends our perceptions of separate identities”.
Compassion is not limited to the human experience. Even plants seem to show compassion for each other. Studies conducted by Suzanne Simard have shown that trees have an intricate system of communication through their roots in the ground that can extend for miles within a forest. This system of communication, referred to as the Wood Wide Web, consists of a mutually beneficial relationship between plants via the fungi that colonize their roots. The underground network between roots and fungi allows plants to transfer nutrients and share information about hazards, such as pests. The trees that are most closely interconnected with all the other trees in a forest are known as Mother Trees.
