Faith Matters: In Praise Of Empathy

Inner City News

8 months ago

by Rabbi Eric Woodward

“Faith Matters” is a column that features pieces written by local religious figures.

I recently read an interview with Allie Beth Stuckey, an evangelical Christian podcaster, who wrote a book called, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Now, I’m not a Christian — I’m a rabbi — so I’m not going to weigh in on Stuckey’s comments about Christianity. But I am going to say that she’s a horrible reader of the Bible.

Stuckey told interviewer Ross Douthat that her problem with empathy is not with the emotion per se — it is with what it might lead you to do.

“It is allowing feeling how they feel [empathy] to lead you to justify what they are doing — which happens in abortion and the gender debate and the sexuality debate and the justice debate and the immigration debate. Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say, well, maybe deportation is wrong … That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.”

That is to say, the empathy we might feel for a person being deported by ICE might lead us to want to change our country’s policies around immigration. According to Stuckey, it is a toxic feeling, because it turns us away from deportation. “I’m for deporting people,” Stuckey says. “I really like Stephen Miller.”

She does not seem to like the Bible. Exodus 22:20 – 23 reads, “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan. If you do mistreat them, I will heed their outcry as soon as they cry out to Me, and My anger shall blaze forth and I will put you to the sword, and your own wives shall become widows and your children orphans.”

Exodus 23:9 reads, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:33 – 34 reads, “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.” Deuteronomy 10:16 – 19 reads, “Cut away, therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more. For your Lord God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

In each of these texts we read that empathy for the stranger (in Hebrew, the ger toshav, literally a resident alien) should lead us to protect the rights of the stranger. It could not be phrased any more clearly. Stuckey is not wrong about empathy being a tool — she is, rather, positioning herself strongly against God’s position that the tool of empathy should lead us to oppose ICE’s deportations.

In the Talmud, a series of wide-ranging texts on Jewish law and theology, we read that the Torah commands us 36 times to love the stranger. Biblical law has been clear for millennia that we must protect immigrants.

According to the CATO Institute — not a liberal group — 65 percent of people taken by ICE have no criminal convictions. If you count traffic and immigration issues (which are civil matters), 80 percent have no criminal convictions. The mass deportation of people in this country is an insult to biblical values; Stuckey’s moral relativism, in which she twists the words of God to support a godless and cruel political agenda, becomes simply another heresy.

May we all feel empathy and use it to support the Bible’s vision of a good and moral world.

Eric Woodward is the rabbi of Beth El — Keser Israel Congregation in New Haven.

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