A few years back, empathy was all the rage, at least in certain literary circles. Empathy was radical, empathy was compassionate, empathy was a prerequisite for social justice. It was elevated from closed therapy sessions to a very public emotion du jour. Empathy became valuable. It is not strength or grit or resilience but empathy that underlies the ability to understand others, and therefore gets you ahead in the world.
At least, that’s how I took it. I’ve long been branded sensitive, usually preceded by too. Too sensitive, too emotional, too worried about everyone else’s feelings. Now, suddenly, I had permission to be an empath! It was a superpower. It was an asset, not a liability.
In no small part, the age of empathy was sparked by Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, a book I devoured. There’s a quote of Jamison’s which sums it up nicely.
“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”
In other words, it’s not always easy or natural to be empathetic. We can be selfish. We can find it hard to be charitable toward difficult people. There’s a hackneyed creative writing rule that captures this concept: if you’re going to have a character do horrible things to your protagonist, give them a nuanced backstory. Make the villain more empathetic by sketching a rough childhood or a tragic loss. Their suffering, this suggests, makes the fact they inflicted suffering or harm on another more palatable, less black and white.
This has always felt facile to me, but particularly so now that I’m a mom watching two small humans engage their best and worst impulses. When my daughters fight, I try to avoid getting into an investigation, which only ends up justifying retaliation. (Dr. Aliza Pressman explains why). Yes, sweetie, I get that she took your toy phone, so you hit her, so she pinched you, so you called her a street rat and pulled her hair. (Yes, my sweet girls use street rat and gutter rat as insults. This is Kensington, Brooklyn, baby!)
Both of my children are capable of harm, and of being harmed. The best I can do is set boundaries, and show them both that hurting another person hurts them, too. Or….I could yell can’t I have even a SIP of COFFEE before you start? You’re both wrong!
In other words, I find empathy challenging when I’m annoyed, or hurt, or angry. But as a grownup who still suffers from the lack of empathy shown to me as a child, I think making my kids feel seen and heard—no matter how awful they’re behaving— is one of the most important things I can do as a parent.
And, as a person.
I suppose I’ve buried the lede. What prompted me to write about empathy this week is the British-Israeli writer and translator Joanna Chen, who chronicles the aftermath of October 7 in an essay published in Guernica magazine titled “From the Edges of a Broken World.” The essay is, among many things, grapples with the challenges of holding the pain of others as our own. “It is not easy to tread the line of empathy,” she writes.
I found the essay thorny and nuanced and uncertain and tragic, which sums up how I feel about the conflict. Not about Israelis or Palestinians, but about both. About the suffering that is part of the human condition, and the way our fates are bound up together.
But this is not how many people saw it. Guernica’s all-volunteer staff resigned, some calling it “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism.” The essay was taken down and retracted without explanation. And this, I fear, is a case in point of the hardening of opinions, of a rejection of empathy.
The essay made me consider the line of empathy as somewhat of a third rail in my own relationships. How do I begin to find empathy, and then forgiveness, for the people who’ve hurt me because they’ve been hurt? I realized I had to push myself to get to a place of empathy—if anyone is going to demonstrate empathy during challenging times, it’s not politicians or pundits, but artists and thinkers. It’s the sensitive souls who pride themselves on their intentionality, on working toward their higher selves.
So what does it mean when a select few decide that their certainty is more honest than another person’s doubt? What does it say when they decide one person’s commitment to run the marathon down the the line of empathy isn’t enough? What does it mean when empathy is treated with scarcity, and to determine that certain people, by virtue of their location or birth, are not worthy of empathy?
I…don’t know. I do know it goes both ways—all ways, really. And if I’m such an empath, I must be willing to acknowledge this.