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36. Sarah Kaye
Senior Technical Writer at Google
Compassion
What it means?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, compassion is a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others, and a wish to help them.
Why it matters?
Compassion is the bedrock of any decent and civilized society.
In any country there will be the “haves” and the “have nots”. Whilst I’m fortunate to live in a unique country known for its “melting pot” culture and for the numerous works of chesed and charity, there is also a deeper-rooted more disturbing side of affairs.
And this is the deep ignorance and fear that many of us feel towards the “other”. And this, in turn, is what leads to the terrible hatred and violence and the ever-widening polarization of society.
How can we promote it?
At every stage, we have to ask ourselves, why do the [insert your specific demographic here] behave like that? Can we see that maybe they have a different narrative? A different set of cultural values? A different ideological belief system?
Maybe if we put ourselves in their shoes for a day and felt some compassion towards them, it would lessen our anger and help us realize that it’s our moral compunction, or even duty to help out people less fortunate than ourselves.