Bob Schwartz

A friend told me yesterday that one of his parishioners had suggested love as a solution to the current war in Israel.

I believe in the power and essentiality of love. In this case, though, I thought a more direct response—from those involved and those watching anxiously from the sidelines—is compassion. That led to my reviewing and researching resources on compassion. Here is some of what I found.

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The world is aflame with evil and atrocity; the scandal of perpetual desecration of the world cries to high heaven. And we, coming face to face with it, are either involved as callous participants or, at best, remain indifferent onlookers … We pray because the disproportion of human misery and human compassion is so enormous. We pray because our grasp of the depth of suffering is comparable to the scope of perception of a butterfly flying over the Grand Canyon. We pray because of the experience of the dreadful incompatibility of how we live and what we sense.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Solomon’s Crooked Crown

Solomon was busy judging others,
when it was his personal thoughts
that were disrupting the community.

His crown slid crooked on his head.
He put it straight, but the crown went
awry again. Eight times this happened.

Finally he began to talk to his headpiece.
“Why do you keep tilting over my eyes?”

“I have to. When your power loses compassion,
I have to show what such a condition looks like.”

Immediately Solomon recognized the truth.
He knelt and asked forgiveness.
The crown centered itself on his crown.

When something goes wrong, accuse yourself first.
Even the wisdom of Plato or Solomon
can wobble and go blind.

Listen when your crown reminds you
of what makes you cold toward others,
as you pamper the greedy energy inside.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

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Idiot Compassion

Idiot compassion is the highly conceptualized idea that you want to do good. Of course, according to the mahayana teachings of Buddhism you should do everything for everybody; there is no selection involved at all. But that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be gentle all the time. Your gentleness should have heart, strength. In order that your compassion doesn’t become idiot compassion, you have to use your intelligence. Otherwise, there could be self-indulgence, thinking that you are creating a compassionate situation when in fact you are feeding the other person’s aggression. If you go to a shop and the shopkeeper cheats you and you go back and let him cheat you again, that doesn’t seem to be a very healthy thing to do for others.

Chogyam Trungpa

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Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) is the best-loved modern Israeli poet. El Malei Rachimim—God Full of Mercy—is a Jewish prayer for the soul of a person who has died. In this poem he suggests that God has kept all the mercy for himself.

God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.

If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.

I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.

I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.

I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.

I, who must decipher riddles
I don’t want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.

Yehuda Amichai, translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav

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