Struggling can train us love, however all too typically we let it train 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. However the Bible encourages us to take the other tack: I used to be oppressed, and nobody got here to my support; due to this fact I’ll by no means abandon somebody susceptible or in ache.
Many individuals who’ve 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 now we have 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 train us to care increasingly deeply for others. By the mandate to like the stranger, the Bible instructions us to nurture the latter impulse moderately than the previous, to let our struggling train us love.
At a second like this, the mandate to like the stranger can appear to be chatting with broad and intractable geopolitical conflicts, and in reality, it’s, however it additionally addresses us personally, on the most intimate ranges. I do know each these voices solely too effectively. Having misplaced my father as a toddler and been left alone with a mom who lacked the emotional instruments to mum or dad any little one, not to mention a grieving one, I wrestle at instances with feeling entitled to disregard different individuals’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’s this impulse that the Bible seeks to nurture in me and in every of us.
This week, after we retell the Exodus story, we should keep in mind its implications: Since we all know vulnerability, the plight of the susceptible — 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. However however, it’s elementary to the heritage of human civilization, and thus it addresses each individual and each individuals who hear it. Maybe, having suffered, you’re tempted to be taught indifference and even hate. Refuse that temptation. Let your reminiscence train you empathy and your struggling train you like.
