Thursday, January 12, 2012

the need for empathy

There is a vort in the Oznayim laTorah that gives me an excuse to go off on a little soapbox tangent.    Moshe Rabeinu as a baby was tossed into the river like any other baby, the only difference being that he was rescued.  Couldn't Hashem have found some way to spare baby Moshe so that he would not even come close to suffering the same potential fate as all the other children?  R' Zalman Sorotzkin answers the question with an anecdote from his family.  He writes that his brother, who was leaning in Volozhin and was a tremendous talmid chacham, was conscripted into the Russian army.  His mother had no doubt that his brother would be released, as "Kol ha'mekabel alav ol Torah..." is not burdened with the ol malchus, and so it was.  But he was bothered by the question: Why did this happen?  Why was there in shamayim a seeming hava amina of his conscription only to come to a different maskana?  His mother explained that this too was part of Hashem's bigger plan.  Since his brother would one day be a gadol, a rav u'manhig b'yisrael, he needed to taste the pain of his brothers, he needed experience in some measure what they experienced, so that he would later be able to empathize with their plight and understand their hardship.    

I want to ask a "dangerous" question: Do talmidei chachamim sitting in kollel today empathize with me; can they understand and relate to my life experience?  I don't know the answer to that, which I find scary.  I certainly don't feel it is an unqualified, confident "yes."  I think there is a vast difference between sitting in an ivory tower and writing a sefer on some narrow area of halacha (which we seem to see more and more of these days, with ever increasingly sophisticated chumros based in new lomdus and pilpul) and being a rav, a manhig, a real gadol.  Rav Shach, for example, could appreciate the burden of any and every Jew because he struggled to learn Torah when he had no winter coat and not much food in harder winters than we ever have.  I don't know if suffering is a prerequisite for the job of manhig, but appreciating the often harsh reality of life is.  Perhaps it is just the nature of things the individuals who can do that are indeed rare.

10 comments:

  1. great unknown8:32 PM

    very similar to the Ribbono Shel Olam testing potential manhigai yisroel by observing their behavior as shepherds.

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  2. Anonymous11:34 AM

    > was Moshe "tossed into the river", or carefully floated upon it?
    > could he, mere infant, process in a knowing, recollectible way, "the pain of his brothers"? (was he so precocious that come day 8 he started to pray--thoughtfully if not yet feelingly--for fellow babies?)
    > ask more-- couldn't Hashem "have found some way to spare" "all the other children" from suffering their "potential fate"? (or do we
    say that the majority of the infants were meant to be farmers b'eretz yisrael [not perpetual students b'midbar bedi'avad], & so HAD to correspondingly suffer THIS particular ol malchus b'mitzrayim?)

    {none of this to detract from the
    overall point of the post...}

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  3. May I suggest further resources to learn more about empathy and compassion.
    The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
    The Culture of Empathy website is the largest internet portal for resources and information about the values of empathy and compassion. It contains articles, conferences, definitions, experts, history, interviews,  videos, science and much more about empathy and compassion.
    http://CultureOfEmpathy.com

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  4. There is a mesoretic approach. Form a vaad on Rachamim. (Assuming "rachamim" is closer to "empathy", than mercy, otherwise find other sources for a dufferebt concept. Kabbalistic sources will map Rachamim to empathy, to Tife'eres, to the synthesis of Din and Chesed. But that's quibbling.)

    My point is, to worry about how to develop a middah without revisiting the work of the Baalei Mussar is needlessly reinventing the wheel from scratch rather than standing on the shoulders of giants.

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  5. You don't know the answer? Really?

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  6. chaim b.6:26 PM

    SB, I would say the answer depends on the individual in question, and it would not pay to generalize, so I didn't.

    Micha, your approach is mesoretic for those who accept mussar as their mesorah. I would venture a guess that mussar is not taken seriously (and no, 15 minutes of mesilas yesharim brushed off before ma'ariv doesn't count) in the vast majority of yeshivos b'zman hazeh. I would still venture a guess that most yeshivos still think they are inculcating values in some other way.

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  7. I meant is was mesoretic in the sense that it is part of /anyone's/ mesorah and flows from people with more "daas Torah" than we have looking for ways to be holier.

    But even a Sefarardi tahor who never had any such contact with mussar in his family line or chain of mesorah from rebbe to talmid needn't reinvent the wheel from scratch.

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  8. good answer.

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  9. anon18:56 AM

    Chaim,

    did you see RAharon Lichtenstein's recent talk about the problems with daas Torah and today's gedolim?

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  10. anon18:56 AM

    Chaim,

    did you see RAharon Lichtenstein's recent talk about the problems with daas Torah and today's gedolim?

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