empathy

Nuance is vital path to empathy

On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, I was in Vancouver, celebrating the holiday of Simchat Torah with my family. We woke up, my father went to synagogue, and I lay on the couch sipping coffee and reading a book. Four hours later, I was sitting on the couch of the Mizrachi family. Ben Mizrachi z”l was one of my brother’s closest childhood friends, a pillar of joy in our community, and an attendee of the Nova Music Festival in Israel on Friday evening. I watched for two days in helpless disbelief as his parents waited to hear whether their son was alive. On the third day, his body was identified.

By Oct. 9, I had already unfollowed one of my friends on Instagram. By Oct. 19, the number had become too many to count. I opened my friends’ Instagram stories with a pit of dread in my stomach, wishing I could stop looking, but feeling compelled to know where they stood. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is safety. I watched, feeling resentful and hopeless as friends with no lived experience in this conflict posted comparisons between the Israeli government and Nazi Germany, tokenized anti-Zionist Jewish voices, spread demonizing misinformation, labeled Israelis “European settler-colonialists” and justified sexual violence in the name of “resistance” and “liberation.”

Humans crave consistency. We naturally gravitate towards narratives with a clear villain and an undeniable victim. Research on cognitive dissonance theory has demonstrated that we experience intense psychological discomfort when faced with information that conflicts with a preconceived belief. In response, we can either change the preconceived belief, which requires us to admit we were previously wrong, or we can discount and discredit the new information to protect our self-image. The dominant narrative in liberal North American circles has become that Jews and Israelis are colonizers in a land stolen from Palestinians. In accordance with cognitive dissonance theory, if Jews and Israelis are oppressors, we cannot also be victims. So, we must not be victims, after all. This narrative feeds into classic stereotypes about Jews as powerful, wealthy, manipulative and, in modern parlance, privileged.

Prejudice and discrimination have psychological benefits. Research shows that the act of derogating a member of a stereotyped group has positive implications for self-esteem. One foundational study by Fein and Spencer (1997) found discriminating against a woman who fit the stereotype of a “Jewish American Princess” dramatically improved participants’ self-esteem after receiving negative feedback. In other words, putting others down makes us feel better. Many in my social circles would balk at the mere thought of discriminating against a marginalized group. Yet, if you can convince yourself that a marginalized group is privileged, you can reap the self-esteem benefits of derogation without suffering cognitive dissonance. If Jews are oppressors and not victims, then discrimination is not only warranted, it feels good.

In the study conducted by Fein and Spencer in 1997, research participants enacted their discrimination in private, by degrading the Jewish subject’s personality and job qualifications. Today, we can perform our discrimination publicly through social media. Public discrimination maintains the self-esteem benefits of private discrimination, with the bonus of entrenching belonging within a social in-group. Humans have a fundamental need to belong. We fulfil this need by affiliating ourselves with social in-groups based on race, ethnicity, disability, music preference and TV-show character fandoms. Posting socio-political stances on social media is not simply about sharing information, it is a means of signalling affiliation with a valued in-group of social justice advocates. The opportunity to simultaneously derive a self-esteem boost from the derogation of Jews is a heady combination.

Despite our pursuit of certainty in the face of cognitive dissonance, certainty is the enemy of knowledge, nuance and, in the context of the Israel-Hamas war and other conflicts or social divisions, empathy. Research in social psychology has shown that the more certain we feel about our socio-political opinions, the less likely we are to seek out information that might challenge our beliefs. Those who feel certain in their characterization of the current Israel-Hamas war as morally unambiguous cannot cave to nuance, lest their psychological well-being suffer. Yet, the embrace of two opposing truths is at the core of seeing each other as human, capable of being both villain and victim in the same breath. Sitting with cognitive dissonance is painful, but it is the only path to true empathy.

Shira Mattuck, MA, is a clinical child psychology doctoral student in the Genetics and Neurobehavioural Systems: Interdisciplinary Studies (GENESIS) Lab at the University of Houston. She was born and raised in Vancouver and is a graduate of Vancouver Hebrew Academy and York House School.

People are not bricks in a wall

Shabbat, Nov. 2
Noach, Genesis 6:9-11:32
Haftarah, Isaiah 54:1-55:5

W.C. Fields said, “Never work with animals or children, [they steal the spotlight].” Though no one ever accused him of being a Torah scholar, his insight was certainly applicable to last week’s Torah portion.

Parashat Noach, the second portion in the Book of Genesis (and my bar mitzvah portion) is perhaps the most universally known and, at least by children, most adored portion in the entire Torah. This is in part, no doubt, because it has not one animal, but all animals – and they come in pairs! So beloved and recognizable is this Torah portion that we tend to forget that there is more to it than the animals coming on the ark, two by two, the dove sent to find dry land, the rainbow, and our ancient ship builder, Noah. Tucked in at the end of the portion that bears his name is a small, poignant story about how the people (Noah’s descendants) focused their energies after the waters and fear receded, and they were once again on dry land.

We are told: “All the earth had the same language and the same words … they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there…. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over all the earth!’” (Genesis 11:1-:4)

A midrash explains: “Many, many years passed in building the tower. It reached so great a height that it took a year to mount to the top. A brick was, therefore, more precious in the sight of the builders than a human being. If a man fell down and met his death, none took notice of it: but, if a brick dropped, they wept, because it would take a year to replace it. So intent were they upon accomplishing their purpose that they would not permit a pregnant woman to interrupt herself in her work of brick-making when she went into labour. Molding bricks, she gave birth to her child and, tying it round her body in a sheet, she went on molding bricks.” (“Yashar Noah,” in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 1909)

How do you measure your day? I once asked my friend who is a bricklayer this question, and he explained that the universal standard for a good day of bricklaying is 1,000 bricks day. It got me thinking, what would my 1,000-brick-day look like? What is my universal standard for a successful day?

As a parent, I could say it’s getting all the kids washed, fed, off to school and then to soccer or hockey, and back home again. Then it’s getting them to do their homework, brush their teeth and get to bed at a reasonable hour.

As a working adult, I could say it’s getting to work on time and responding to all my emails and messages – the modern-day equivalent of bricks. Then it’s meeting with constituents, handling synagogue programs and business, and getting home in time for dinner with my family.

What makes those days good days is not the quantity of work I do or the number of interactions I have, it’s the quality. The bricklayer, if reasonably competent at his task, can be irritable, antisocial, half asleep and day dreaming as he lays each brick. He can take his anger out on the bricks; he can curse at the bricks as he shleps them up the wall. He can listen to music, talk on his cellphone; it doesn’t matter. As long as the wall is solid at the end of his day and it contains 1,000 new bricks, it’s a good day of bricklaying.

But people are not bricks: we can’t take out our anger on people without consequence. We can’t ignore them or tune them out if the purpose of our day is to interact with them with care, compassion and attention. The great sin of the Tower of Babel’s builders was that they treated people like bricks and bricks like people. They wasted the one thing that set them apart from machines, which, had they existed in ancient times, could have helped build the Tower even better – they neglected their own humanity. When the bricks of our life become more important than the people in it, we, too, build a tower that is an affront to the purpose of our creation.

The midrash continues that, after God confounded the people’s language and scattered the people throughout the globe, the tower

remained: “a part sank into the earth and another part was consumed by fire; only one-third of it remained standing. The place of the tower has never lost its peculiar quality. Whoever passes it forgets all he knows.” (ibid., Ginzberg)

When we treat people like bricks, we forget what we know about ourselves and about others. We forget that the measure of our day is not how many bricks we lay, how many emails we answer, how many lunches we pack, how many children we shlep: the measure of our day is whether each person we touch, including ourselves, feels valued as a person, a blessing and a gift from God in our lives – not a brick.

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is senior rabbi at Temple Sholom and author of The Men’s Seder (MRJ Publishing). He is also chair of the Reform Rabbis of Canada. His writing and perspective on Judaism appear in major print and digital media internationally. This article originally appeared on reformjudaism.org.

We are hardwired to be kind

Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency physician at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. (photo by Christopher Wahl)

According to Dr. Brian Goldman, author of The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy is Essential in Everyday Life (HarperCollins Publishers, 2018), we all have the innate ability to be kind, gentle and to give of ourselves without the need to get anything in return.

Goldman, who works as an emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said the idea for The Power of Kindness had been germinating in his mind for a long time.

“I had originally pitched a book on empathy and health care,” he said, “and my publisher, HarperCollins, came back to me and asked why I don’t instead aim a little broader and write a book about empathy in the world at large, not focus just on the hospital.”

About the concept, he said, “The wise physician knows how to say, ‘I don’t know.’ The book doesn’t say how it feels to say ‘I don’t know’ 17 times in a row. At some point, you’re terrified that they’re going to say, ‘Why don’t you get us someone here right now who can answer our questions?’ And you’re afraid of being unmasked as being inadequate.”

In recognizing this in himself, Goldman decided to travel the world to speak to some of the kindest people to hopefully internalize their kindness and find ways to pass their enlightenment onto others. In doing this, he said, “I found answers and, for the rest, you’re going to have to read the book. But, I will tell you one thing. I found that some people are born with empathy.

“I found one extraordinary child,” he said, by way of example, “who was nicknamed ‘Ta Ta.’ And he, at the time that I met him, was [almost] 3 years old. His mom, Shala, adopted a man on the streets of Sao Paulo who had been homeless for nearly 40 years and called him her soulmate. The striking thing about her situation is that her son, as a toddler … without ever having known what his mom had done, adopted his own homeless man. You can’t make that up.

“At a time, whatever nurturing she provided had set the stage for him to be as empathic as her. But, he [also] feels things and understands things intuitively about Adriano, the man who he befriended in the same way that Shala did.”

Goldman met people for whom empathy comes naturally and some who are gifted in empathy, but he also realized that we all share the same common experiences – adversity, disappointment, shock, loneliness, physical ailments and failure.

“I think, more often than not, it’s these experiences that are the engine for empathy,” said Goldman. “Because, after that, you can either die or you can pay it forward. And the way you pay it forward is to provide comfort and empathy for people who are going through what you went through. That was probably the common denominator that I saw again and again.

“Shame-based people tend to absorb the idea that they cannot make a mistake. If they do, it will be the end of everything.

“My intuitive guess is that a lot of health professionals feel that way and that’s why they go into the health professions … because they are hoping that, if they can do enough good works, it will make up for the one mistake they made.

“I was very much like that. I wasn’t totally like that, because, if I were more like that, I’d be unaware of all the things I’m saying right now.”

According to Goldman, kindness and empathy are the ability to imagine what it is like to be somebody else, to see things through their eyes and act accordingly, to put yourself in their place.

“Unless you have a narcissistic personality disorder, in which your brain circuits will show you’re less capable of empathy, you’re capable of empathy,” said Goldman. “Everyone is hardwired for empathy. But, the thing is that, at the highest levels of executive function, empathy is a choice and we are constantly being distracted by competing priorities – my needs versus yours, my family versus your family. I’m running around like a pinball … boy, that’s a dated metaphor … but I can’t be all things to all people all the time. It’s impossible. Somebody is going to judge what I’ve delivered as unkind care.

“To become more kind in everyday life,” he said, “first of all, believe in your hardwiredness to be capable of being kind and empathic. Know that there are things that get in the way and they are very stereotypical – lack of face-to-face time, spending more time on social media, contacting people on social media, and less time on listening and face-to-face and being able to recognize cues that say that somebody’s more unhappy than their words are telling you.”

Goldman suggests learning which factors get in your way and to start creating ways that work for you to push those distractions aside. In The Power of Kindness, he talks about breathing exercises – about how we get distracted by unpleasant thoughts and feelings and how to re-centre ourselves and allow the negativity to float away.

“I use the metaphor of a parade,” he said. “There are beautiful floats and they represent nice thoughts – happy things that have happened or that I’m looking forward to – and you let them float by without judging them. Then, every once in awhile, there is a lousy float that’s ugly – the boss who is yelling at you, the coworker or somebody who you think is whispering about you behind your back, or the person who gave you the finger in traffic when you were both driving.

“The reason I like the float metaphor is that, with a lousy float, you let it go by – you imagine you’re in the stands, reviewing the floats as they go by. If it’s a parade, you let it go by, because there will be another nice one down the road in a couple of minutes.”

As for what sort of reception the book has garnered so far, Goldman said it has been very positive.

“Maybe the world is ready for a book like this because we’re all living at such a time when … people are going for kill shots on Twitter and there’s so much nastiness…. We’re watching, in the United States, kids being separated from their parents and put into cages. We need kindness.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Reacting to others’ suffering

Gun violence in America is an intractable, apparently unsolvable crisis. This month, it has intersected catastrophically with other tenacious American ailments: race and police violence. These issues have been inextricable in many ways for decades, of course, but the pervasiveness of video-recording and social media have helped turn what was once a matter of competing testimonies into irrefutable proof of police overreach, including murder.

The police killings of black civilians in Louisiana and Minnesota last week, followed by the revenge killing of five police officers in Texas, created a climate of crisis in the United States. Such times are, sometimes, opportunities for progress. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s was advanced by the widespread awareness among Americans of all races of injustices being perpetrated against black Americans. However, anything involving guns in America seems somehow impervious to reason.

Race is a unique flashpoint in American life and approaches to it have very often split directly along color lines. This may be changing, with more white Americans recognizing the injustices experienced by their fellow citizens of color. Like sexual orientation equality, issues of racial justice seem to be advancing because of a wider appreciation that transcends personal identity and relies on human empathy for those who are different from ourselves.

Still, Americans – and Canadians in somewhat different contexts, and all peoples – struggle to find balance and moral approaches to confounding issues. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, a counter-campaign declares “All Lives Matter.” After the police killings in Dallas, “Blue Lives Matter” became a slogan. While the veracity of these statements cannot be refuted, they are nonetheless unhelpful and dismissive. Responding to Black Lives Matter with an appropriated variation is disrespectful. It is akin to the complaints by members of the majority when gay pride events occur and the question arises, “When do we celebrate straight pride day?” The answer, as empathetic people know, is that straight people (or white people) don’t need special days to celebrate their situation in society.

The insensitivity of such approaches has been slyly critiqued in social media recently, with one cartoon showing a house on fire while firefighters douse the house next door in water, declaring “All houses matter.” Similarly, a man in the doctor’s office with a broken arm is told, “All bones matter.”

The message should be clear: the perennial problems America has around race are particularly enflamed right now and attempting to dilute these through banal attempts to universalize what is a very particular problem effectively exacerbates the issue. Just last week in this space we noted that the specious way some people respond to any mention of the Holocaust is to note that Jews aren’t the only people to have suffered. Replying to the suffering of one group by an erroneous universalizing of race-particular situations is not a healthy response.

Another development seen recently is the attempt by “pro-Palestinian” activists in the United States to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent catastrophes to their own narrow ends. Students for Justice in Palestine at New York University declared that those responsible for the “genocide” of Palestinians are likewise responsible for the “genocide” of African-Americans, a circle they attempt to square with the fact that a small number of U.S. police have received anti-terrorism training from the Israel Defence Forces.

There are plenty of issues competing for the attention of people of goodwill. There are injustices everywhere, God knows. There is racism, homophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia and every range and permutation of human misery that deserve attention. Yet, when something as systemic and pernicious as the murder of African-Americans by those entrusted to protect American citizens becomes epidemic, this is not the time to elbow one group out of the way or try to co-opt their tragedies.

The value of duty, empathy

When Vancouver-based philanthropists Rosalie and Joe Segal announced a lead gift of $12 million towards a new centre for mental health, I felt deeply moved. I had had occasion to visit a loved one at the old facility a few years ago. By any measure, it was a depressing, dilapidated and lifeless space. The new facility promises the kind of physical atmosphere of compassion and dignity so necessary to recovery.

The planned $82 million centre is slated to open in 2017. In recent Globe and Mail coverage, a reporter asked Joe Segal what brought them to this latest philanthropic decision.

I’ll depart here for a moment to mention that there is a common journalistic convention whereby the writer introduces a quote by paraphrasing. In this case, the reporter said that the Segals’ decision “came from a place of empathy.” Then came the actual quote from Joe Segal: “You have an obligation, if you live in the community, to be sure that you do your duty.”

Are empathy and duty the same thing?

The two vantage points at first seem quite different. Empathy is about actually experiencing the plight of another. There is clearly an affective component. Duty somehow feels more legalistic, perhaps even at odds with emotion. As philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said, “Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.”

If empathy is more about feeling, experience and emotion, and if duty is more cognitive and legal, it seems we need to be concerned with how to summon both values across society. I turned to colleagues to help me better understand the relationship between the two concepts. For some, a viscerally emotional connection between the two is indeed present.

International theory scholar Daniel Levine points out that, for a sense of duty to function, citizens need to feel reverence for institutions, even those that we ourselves have created. Or, perhaps having created laws and ways of living for ourselves is precisely what motivates a sense of duty, “we revere it precisely because it’s ours; we are the sovereign,” Levine suggests. “We are free because we legislate and judge for ourselves.”

For professor of Jewish philosophy Zachary Braiterman, the cognitive and emotional elements are intertwined, “duty has an affective element, an excitement of the senses around a task at hand.”

And, for Jewish filmmaker Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, “duty flows from empathy, in that moment when I connect the suffering of another to my own experience and that touches a kind of primal anger which motivates action.”

In Jewish tradition, philanthropy – or tzedakah – is considered a legal imperative. The Hebrew word itself shares a root with righteousness and justice, and it does not contain the affective aspects that the Greek-based word philanthropy does, meaning love of humankind.

Empathy in general seems to be less obviously discussed in Judaism, until one realizes that the Torah’s golden rule – “Love your neighbor as yourself” – is ultimately an empathy imperative.

When it comes to mental illness, it’s especially important to keep both duty and empathy in mind. Empathy can be extra hard to summon towards those who are in the throes of the disease. Some forms of mental illness cause sufferers to refuse treatment. Some victims act socially or otherwise inappropriately. Sometimes the sufferer no longer even seems like the actual person.

The Segals are clearly aware of how insidious and invisible mental illness can be, and the challenges around recognizing it and treating it. As Joe Segal told the Globe and Mail, “Mental health was under the rug, and we tried to lift the rug so it can become visible.”

It’s a powerful reminder of how empathy and duty are important elements in building a better society – both for helping those in personal crisis and for enabling us all to live the values of kindness, generosity and compassion.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. This article was originally published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

Empathy, failure ‘n’ improv

Ilana Ben-Ari at work, play. (photo by Laynna Meyler)

For her design diploma thesis project, Ilana Ben-Ari created a toy that people with visual impairments could play with their sighted classmates, developing a language around communication and empathy. The formation of her company, 21 Toys, came after what she saw happen with that project.

“The toys really had an incredible way of using play to teach this abstract and difficult skill [empathy],” said Ben-Ari. “I don’t think we emphasize empathy in schools or in education…. We also don’t teach failure, critical thinking or complex problem solving.”

Ben-Ari, a former Winnipegger now living in Toronto, started 21 Toys with the hope of designing a whole fleet of toys honing often-undeveloped skills in both schools and today’s workforce, including creativity and innovation. These skills, Ben-Ari said, “are really hard to understand … to assess, practise or see.”

Ben-Ari created the Empathy Toy in the belief that the attribute of empathy serves as “not only the basis of communication and collaboration, but the backbone of innovation in design, business and other realms. Not only are these skills not being taught when they should be,” she said, “but they [educators] don’t have the right tools to teach them…. This is why a toy – an aid, tool – comes in handy.”

During Operation Protective Edge, a couple of manufacturers from Toronto sent toys, including Ben-Ari’s, to civilians on both sides. “We wanted to send toys to help in the best ways that we could,” said Ben-Ari. “It’s easy to feel helpless watching the conflict from so far away. We saw this as a chance, in some small way, to insert empathy into the heart of the conflict – by using fun and play to create moments of relief.”

Most recently, the toy is being used in a psychological lab established at Bar-Ilan University for kids and adults suffering from trauma.

Ben-Ari described the Empathy Toy as “3-D, abstract, wooden puzzle pieces that are played blindfolded. One player is given a build pattern of abstract wooden puzzle pieces and one or more players is tasked to recreate that same pattern. The challenge is that everybody is blindfolded while playing.

“Today, we need to focus on getting kids to understand what collaboration is, to start being a bit more creative and, in a way, unlearn what schools have reinforced…. When talking about empathy, it’s not just a soft, fuzzy feeling.”

Saint John’s High School in Winnipeg is using the Empathy Toy for its anxiety, language and literacy classes as a foundation of its new leadership program.

“Looking at someone else’s point of view, putting yourself into someone else’s shoes, and being able to work with and understand other people, [their] thinking and perspectives is very much at the heart of what skills you need to develop, to be able to learn,” said Ben-Ari.

“We’ve found that teachers use it for so many applications. What the toy does is let you introduce empathy in this playful way, but then it acts as a mirror to the lesson. It lets teachers be a lot more creative in how they approach their lessons. If we want kids to be innovative thinkers and creative, we can’t teach them that play is a bad thing, that toys, having fun and playing games are things that happen outside of learning.”

photo - The Empathy Toy home version sells for around $100 — The Empathy Toy home version sells for around $100. *(photo by Robyn Harrison)*

There are three versions of the Empathy Toy: a home version (also referred to as the “light version”) that sells for around $100; a school version that sells for $150-$200, with the price per unit going down with the more toys a school buys; and a version designed for organizations that sells for more than $200.

Schools typically ask 21 Toys to come in and do a professional development workshop with their staff. “Our toys are being used by Free the Children for their staff training,” said Ben-Ari. “We’ve done workshops with the Alzheimer’s society and children’s hospitals. There are a lot of opportunities for training for adults as a professional development tool.”

In British Columbia, Ben-Ari is aware of three places, so far, that are using the Empathy Toy – Holly Elementary in Surrey, the Discovery Centre for Entrepreneurship (Canada’s first Entrepreneurial Leadership Academy) and Coquitlam Open Learning. It is also being used at Winnipeg’s Gray Academy of Jewish Education and at Toronto’s Heschel School. The only place that sells the home version of the toy, apart from the 21 Toys website, is the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Next in 21 Toys’ design sights is the Failure Toy, for which the company has nearly finished the prototype. “This toy will look like a cousin to the Empathy Toy,” said Ben-Ari. “It’ll be an abstract puzzle with funny game dynamics.

“The point of that toy will be to say, ‘Look, failure isn’t this fantastic thing, [but] it’s a very important part of the learning process and we shouldn’t give this signal that it’s bad and something to be avoided.’ Because, not only are we [preventing] ourselves from growing and from pushing ourselves and trying, but there’s no way we can be innovative or creative or even collaborate without having a healthy relationship with failure. You need to understand failure and develop it as a skill.”

Ben-Ari said that entrepreneurs need to go through stages to succeed. She referred to empathy as “the research phase, understanding where you are, context, the people you’re designing for and working with. Then comes failure with prototypes. Then comes the third toy in the fleet, which will be about improvisation. This stage is a lot like brainstorming and being able to build on other people’s ideas.”

For more information, visit twentyonetoys.com.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.