Opening one’s heart is a daily exercise.
Compassion is the ability to emotionally relate to a condition of either a person or group and to respond with kindness and concern. Humanity survives because of the compassion which Hashem shows to us as well as the compassion which we give to one another. It is not judgmental, it does not point fingers. It seeks to raise another person’s soul and make life easier to bear.
Meditation
Daily Questions
What were the seeds that started to erode your compassion today? Judgmentalism? Apathy?
Did you encounter anyone today who needed compassion? What was your response?
Do you frequently judge people before you know their situation?
If you were on the verge of being apathetic to someone’s situation, what did you employ that brought you into their reality and helped you to have compassion?
Were you able to use prayer or meditation to increase your compassion for someone or a situation today?
Do you often let the news harden you so that you lack compassion? What measures could you take to prevent this from happening so you can be actively practicing compassion?
Are you compassionate to a fault, or are slow to compassion?
Featured Articles
Quotables
"Give, and it will be given to you; they will return to your lap a beautiful measure pressed, crammed full and overflowing. For with the measure that you use to measure, it will be measured to you."-- Mashiach Yeshua, Luke 6:38, DHE
Hillel stated: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah. The rest is the explanation; go and learn."
"Therefore, a man should take care to be generous according to his means, to be magnanimous where magnanimity is called for…weighing all in the scales of Torah." -- The Ways of the Tzaddikim, The Gate of Miserliness, page 323
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." — Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I would rather make mistakes in kindness and compassion than work miracles in unkindness and hardness." — Mother Theresa
"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too." — Frederick Buechner
"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in." — Morrie Schwartz
"Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive." — Dalai Lama XIV
"Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it’s beauty." — Albert Einstein