All I Want for Christmas is for All of Us to Have More Empathy for Other People

By Michael Gold

There’s a lot of hate out there in America right now.

Three college students of Palestinian descent were shot in Vermont, in November, just walking around Burlington.

A six-year-old Muslim boy was killed by his white landlord in Illinois, in October, and his mother suffered multiple stab wounds.

Two South Carolina men were recently indicted for allegedly targeting Hispanic men for robberies in 2021.

A New Jersey man was found guilty of threatening over social media to attack Jewish people, because of his hatred for them. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison in November.

Closer to home, we learned in March that Carmel High School students made racist TikTok videos, praising the KKK, threatening to lynch black and Hispanic students and bring a gun to school to shoot them.

A boy allegedly scrawled a swastika and “Adolf Hitler” on a tennis court at Carmel High School in September.

Unfortunately, I can go on.

The victims in these crimes weren’t attacked because of anything they did wrong. They were attacked because of their religious beliefs, ethnic background or the color of their skin.

As we enjoy Christmas, perhaps we may want to consider “the reason for the season” as my neighbor’s new yard sign states.

As I interpret it, the birth of Jesus should be a cause for celebration, because of his teachings about how we can make our way in the world and how we treat other people.

The text of the gospel of Matthew 22:39 states, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This teaching seems to have been influenced by the Old Testament’s statement from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The gospel of Matthew contains a number of passages that are notable for Jesus’ philosophy of compassion, including:

•  “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”
•  “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”
• “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”
• “Bless are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.”

Another critical passage, from Matthew 7:12, says “So, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them…”

The secret to hating other people is that it’s easy. Maybe it’s instinctive, from our evolutionary history; we are all members of different tribes. Anyone from another tribe is seen as an outsider trying to take our territory, resources and food. So, therefore, we must attack them.

I interpret Jesus’ message as a direct contradiction of the tribal hatreds we may have inherited from our ancestors.

Jesus called on his followers to reject the instant, instinctive urge to hate the “other.” He asked them to do hard spiritual work, to step into the shoes of others who are different and think of them as a member of a universal tribe called humanity.

The United States is an extremely diverse nation. The 2020 census indicated that along with about 204 million whites, the country includes 62 million people of Hispanic heritage, almost 47 million African Americans, almost 34 million multiracial people, 24 million Asians and almost 10 million Native Americans. (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-population-much-more-multiracial.html)

There are many Americans who don’t look like us or have the same religious tradition. But isn’t it possible that Jesus’ teachings about compassion could guide the way we think about others, instead of hating them?

Martin Luther King famously said, “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” To extend what Dr. King said, violence toward others doesn’t solve anything. It only creates more hate and the potential for more violence.

At this time, with so many people seemingly at each other’s throats, let’s recall that Abraham Lincoln once said, in a time simultaneously very different from our own, yet also eerily similar in certain ways, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln’s appeal feels as if it might have been inspired by the teachings of Jesus, who had a comprehensive and painful knowledge of both the good and evil of which we are capable.

The Beatles sang, “All You Need is Love.” I wouldn’t go that far. We also need food, shelter and children. But the Beatles were very close to capturing the essence of Jesus’ message.

I hope everyone has a happy Christmas, filled with the joy and warmth of family. But I also hope we all (including myself) take the time to do spiritual work, so we can see other people as more than a collection of imagined stereotypes, but as individuals, who generally need the same things we do – a job, home, family, compassion.

Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, the Hartford Courant, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.