The Empathy Strikes Back

Photo taken at the Women's March in Washington by Wendy Rabinowitz

I read in Real Simple magazine that empathy is trending. But those streams of people hurtling off the Van Wyck, those pro bono lawyers camping out cross-legged in the terminal, the magnificent Judge Donnelly....that's not a trend, that's a major spike. That's the yeasty conscience of America rising up and saying NO. The news will not continue at that exhilarating pace, but something is definitely happening here. The action that some people are taking is lifted up by the empathy bubbling up from a great many more people.

Of course, like hot yoga and the paleo diet, empathy isn't for everyone. In his recent Tikkun article, "Normalizing Trump's Authoritarianism is Not an Option," Henry A. Giroux writes that the perpetrators of the invasion of Washington are engaging in "a demented appropriation of Ayn Rand's view that selfishness, war against all competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals" and further, that going forward "compassion and respect for the other will be viewed with contempt." Up until now, it's been greed that has stumped me, left me shaking my head in bewilderment. How much is enough? How many Lamborghinis can one person drive? But this, this is a new frontier, beyond greed, beyond racism and misogyny, to the core of a Darwinian universe. Not only don't I care about you, but I have nothing but disdain for anyone else who might care about you. It's the twenty-first century law of the jungle, complete with twittering fiber optic cables strung from tree to tree.

Everything disseminated from Pennsylvania Avenue can now be traced back to a deep aversion to mercy, considered a symptom of womanish weakness. Pre-existing condition? Too bad. Immigrant from the wrong country? Shoulda been born in Omaha. Think you're entitled to free public education? Guess again. Take notice. There will be no more liberal mewling over equity or the plight of the less fortunate. Ridiculing a disabled person is now an acceptable form of theater. From now on, success will be calibrated in units of high-rise real estate and wattage of celebrity. If you don't measure up, your speech will be drowned out by the jingoist brass band and you will be herded into the stadium to cheer for the all-American winning team. If you don't fall in line, you will not only be considered a loser, but an enemy. Nikki Haley, the new American ambassador to the UN, made this clear when she intoned about the expectation that countries will either support any and all US positions or be put on a list. All communication contains an implicit "or else."

But the empathy strikes back. This is because it is fundamental to our humanity, as old as nursing mothers, as ancient as nourishment itself. Anyone who has ever been fed or offered sustenance understands the essential connectivity between people, the hunger to know and to serve. Right now, empathy is coursing through our veins after a consumerist dry spell. Lao Tzu says "Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield." Think of Steve Bannon as a boulder. Think of all of us eroding him until a few gifted and determined people knock him off the precipice.

Empathy is a bio-spiritual condition of being, a process that normally ebbs and flows like desire. It's always there waiting to be aroused, constantly on the alert for opportunities to replicate, to insinuate itself. Here's how I think it works in the everyday. A seventysomething friend tells me that after a period of uncertainty, she has decided to devote her remaining time to fighting for social justice. I feel the tears welling up in my eyes. This takes place in between dance numbers at someone else's 70th birthday party and I am taken entirely by surprise. I have forgotten that empathy is the reason that people cry just as much at weddings as they do at funerals. Because it is not only about being willing to see other people's suffering. It is in the first instance about recognizing our shared humanity and how much we are alike, warmed by the same sun, breathing the same air. Palestinians in Dearborn breathe. Mexicans in Phoenix breathe. When cowboys in Washington try to round people up like so many farm animals, we all feel fenced in.

These days, empathy is a contagion that has spread rapidly, starting with our smallest private gestures and already resulting in millions of people marching on January 21st.  It is a flood of human connection, biblical in its proportions, already sweeping the country. There will be no reconstructing the city of indifference.This is how the species survives. This is how the planet survives. Empathy is the foundation of the resistance to tyranny.

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Citizen Kaufman

Four Freedoms march, photo by Lee Cheek

I am an American, although I've always secretly suspected that I'm not a real American in the Sarah Palin sense. As an aside, I find that I'm missing Palin's goofy Duck Dynasty style. Sarah, after all, was looking at Russia across the Bering Strait, not playing x-rated games or joining caviar-eating oligarchs in the baroque anterooms of Moscow's finest hotels. Still, long before mama grizzly broke onto the scene in the 2008 election cycle, I struggled to convince myself of the authenticity of my national origins despite the fact that both of my parents were born here. Last I looked, New York City is part of our country. I've always felt like an outsider. No Santa Claus in my childhood, no Easter bunny, no tendency towards flag-waving in the family. At the same time, I have, mea culpa, taken my citizenship for granted. In this regard, I am very different from my Congolese friend who was granted asylum here several years ago or my Chinese friend who jumped through many hoops to get his green card. Now, in the light of the present catastrophe, I am re-evaluating my identity and laying claim to being an American, to being a citizen. Please join me.

Last week, I paid a visit to the district office of my congressman, Richard E. Neal. I was relieved that he wasn't there. Not because I was intimidated by the prospect of speaking with him. I had heard him address the rally after the Four Freedoms march in Pittsfield a few days before and he seemed harmless enough. I was glad he wasn't there because there was such a banquet of political poison in Washington that I wanted him down there serving up the antidote. I spoke with his staff assistant who quaintly produced a pen and a pad that looked like a giveaway from an auto parts store. She took my name and contact information and asked me to tell her why I had come in. I said I wanted to be assured that not only would Rep. Neal support the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act, but that he would get dirty doing it, that he would actively go after the perpetrators of grand larceny now about to assume power in our country. I realize that the system is mired in corruption and that that won't change as a consequence of my little field trip, but it felt empowering and demystifying. So this is where Richie Neal hangs out when he's in town!

The march itself featured some 2000 people walking in solidarity down North Street from St. Joseph's to the First Congregational Church on a bitterly cold day. It commemorated the 1941 State of the Union address in which FDR outlined the Four Freedoms - freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear - ideas illustrated in the famous paintings by Norman Rockwell of Stockbridge. Gathering to celebrate the foundational ideas of our deeply flawed democracy generated a kind of giddiness, even as we recognized the urgency of our situation together, the collective peril we are experiencing. For this particular newly awakened citizen, the march and the standing room only rally afterwards lifted me up, expanded my vision beyond the limits of my own concerns to include the wellbeing of the larger community. Real people shivering in the January cold. Not an abstraction. The march and the rally brought the issues off the page and demonstrated what is at stake in this fragile historical moment, the right to assemble in support of free speech, to defend religious liberty, to provide for the basic needs and protections that are our entitlement. We, whatever our individual stories may be, however committed to our democracy we may have felt previously, must now be part of the resistance. This is not a time to sit out the dance. This is a time to bring down the house, to twist and shout together, each of us for all of us.


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In a Beginning

In a Beginning, because really we have no idea if this was the first time God woke up with an itch that needed scratching, a burning desire to create, a sort of Jackson Pollack moment where all the colors just had to be splashed on the canvas...In a Beginning, the energy of the infinite inhale became so concentrated, so intense, that God couldn't contain it another second (even though you understand, of course, that there were no seconds, there was no time or space before Creation).  With an enormous exhale, out came all that is and all that would be. It was dark, dark like a threatening, shadowy  back alley and suddenly gusty, that city wind that traps you in between tall buildings on a side street going west to the Hudson in January. Fierce and unwelcoming. But God said, to no one in particular, yehi or, let there be light and there was light. Unbelievable. Mind you, the light came out of nowhere, without a source. No moon, no sun, no stars. Just the really good idea of light, the idea of nurturing and growth. God saw that the light was good and decided to give it a name. After that, everything that seemed warm and open and childlike and white was called Day and everything that was sinister and hidden and mysterious and black was called Night. This caused a range of problems.

That seemed to be enough work for one day. On the second day, it became necessary to create the sky. You would think that would have come along right from the getgo, but apparently back in the day there was water everywhere kind of like after your pipes freeze and burst and it was necessary to form the sky as a way of separating the water below like Lake Superior and the Ganges from the water above, whatever that is. Now things were starting to take shape. So God called forth the Earth to form out of the water and imagined vegetation of all kinds growing on it, apricots and arugula, bamboo shoots and bok choy, watercress and avocadoes and Granny Smiths were created and God was like YES! because who doesn't like salad?

All this happened, mind you, without photosynthesis. Pretty amazing but maybe not sustainable in the long run. So, on the fourth day, God put lights in the sky because this was before iPhones with flashlights and it was really hard to see where you were going. So the lights, the sun and the moon, were created and with them the cycles of time. Weeks, months and years were set in place and provided a structure for nostalgia for the past and anxiety about the future which, as we shall see,  would soon become essential. On the fifth day, the whole project really started to pick up steam with cardinals and blackbirds appearing in the sky, trout and catfish swimming in the rivers. God was delighted, clapping the divine hands and jumping up and down on the divine feet. P'ru ur'vu, God shouted. Be fruitful and multiply. Have lots of avian and underwater sex...which isn't as easy as one might hope.

Seeing the potential fecundity of the animal kingdom, on the sixth day, God just went for it, just went all out, calling for cattle, creeping things and wild beasts of every kind. Imagine the first rhinos lumbering around, the first leopards stalking. Must have been a sight to behold. But there was something missing. What was it? You can imagine God pacing up and down, trying to come up with a Big Finish. Suddenly, a radical idea just popped into the divine mind. What if God were to create thinking beings called humans, made in the divine image, beings preoccupied with the past and the future, who were capable of feeling and problem solving and art making and put these exalted beings in charge of the whole show? What could possibly go wrong?

It could be that God had some misgivings, because just before deciding to give it a rest some last minute items were thrown into the cart, some afterthoughts that needed to be included before all activity stopped for the first shabbes. And one of those items was the rainbow which was designed to explain to humanity that light is made up of many colors and to make it clear that the sun will shine through the rainiest day and the dove of peace will survive the flood. And God saw all that God had made and found it pretty good, but with room for improvement. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.


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