Aren’t the prophets who call for justice and compassion Judaism’s greatest gift to the world? I see it that way.
When I was researching my book on A Spirituality Named Compassion (1979), I was thrilled to find a message that brought together the struggle for justice with the experience of love and contemplation.
I criticized the over-emphasis on “contemplation” in the history of Christian spirituality because it was often spoken of as climbing a ladder away from matter and earth and mother and the feminine to a sky God that was an abstraction. I was thrilled to find the word compassion so central to Jewish thinking.
Indeed, I learned for the first time that in Judaism, “compassion is the secret name for God.” That meant to me that for Jesus, compassion is the secret name for God.
As a Christian attuning myself to Jesus’s Jewish lineage, it thrilled me further to return to his teaching recorded by Luke (6.36): “Be you compassionate as your Creator in heaven is compassionate.” He was clearly letting the great secret of Judaism out of the bag–the secret name of God. Compassion.
We need a calming of the reptilian brain that we can call “contemplation” and which is also an influx of peace (and delight as Aquinas insists). It comes with gazing on the Divine in any form or none. Aquinas says that not only God is an object of our contemplation but any being whatsoever.
This would include surely the earliest beings of the universe that Webb Telescope is pumping into our computers and i-phones daily.
It also means those who suffer from attacks in Israel and those who suffer from attacks in Palestine today.
Meister Eckhart reminds us that “compassion means justice” but also he names the union of action and contemplation, of justice and love, wonderfully when he cites the (Jewish) psalmist: “Compassion is where peace and justice kiss.”
We need this kissing in the Middle East today.
See Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion.
Banner Image: Around 200 peace advocates organized by Jewish Voices for Peace rallied in front of the White House on 10/16/23 to protest the collective punishment of civilian Gaza for the horrific terror attacks by Hamas against folks in Israel. Photo by Stephen Melkisethian on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you yearn to see humanity’s capacity for compassion, both justice and love, assert itself in the Middle East and world over today? Can humanity survive without compassion?
Recommended Reading
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register
2 thoughts on “Where is Compassion, & the Kissing of Peace & Justice?”
Asserting compassion, is to join one’s feelings and thoughts with the Truth. It’s a movement towards this union with… claiming this Truth, through being in relationship with. God is the living Spirit, the essence of compassion. We are created in this same image and likeness, for this living Spirit of God, this essence of compassion dwells within.
The incarnation is the continuous movement towards this union with; the daily unfolding, evolving and emergence of claiming this Truth, converging with this, joining our feelings and thoughts with this indwelling spiritual essence that is already present in its presence within each one of us all.
Where compassion is… there is movement towards intimate union with… a sacred Oneing With the Truth of who we are. Life and death offer us all holy moments of kissing, feeling, thinking, and claiming this living Spirit and essence of God from within.
The choice is ours to make… to acknowledge and respond to this Truth or to deny and reject it.
❤️. Israel from its inception has defied its prophets and teachings. So sad and unnecessary. Palestinians and Jews could have lived together in harmony. But fear and trauma and hate won out.