February 13, 2026
As we continue our journey to nurture our soul, I hope that you have taken time this past week to work on strengthening your patience. As a reminder, Mussar practice helps us grow and nurture the middot—virtues or measures that live within our soul.
This week, I would like to focus on the middah of compassion. As a Semitic language based on a root system, Hebrew allows us to learn much about words through their affiliation with other words. Just as we saw last week with the Hebrew word for patience being tied to burden, the Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, also offers a meaningful connection. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch notes that this word is closely tied to the word rechem, which means womb. He explains, “Compassion is a feeling of empathy which the pain of one being of itself awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned are they to re-echo the note of suffering which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart.” We learn from Hirsch the powerful insight of connection resulting from the pain one feels and how it is impressed upon another. For Hirsch, compassion is a feeling. However, compassion needs to be more than that.
Compassion is expressed as an action. When we encounter another person and empathize with their suffering, that empathy is certainly important; however, taking that empathy to the next step means doing something to lift up another person and bringing a measure of healing to their soul. The rabbis teach us that visiting the sick takes away one-sixtieth of their pain. The act of visiting stems from rachamim, compassion. If we are quick to dismiss that person, or we act harshly toward them, then we have to ask ourselves if we are truly acting with compassion. And yet there are times when a loved one might need tough love. Contemporary Mussar master Alan Morinis teaches in Everyday Holiness that, “There is ‘compassion in the form of compassion,’ when our feeling along with the other leads us to act kindly, softly, and gently. The second type of compassion comes as ‘compassion in the form of judgment.’ In this case, our shared feelings with the other call for action that is firm, hard, or possibly even harsh.” More often than not, our loved ones need that gentleness. However, if we see our loved one heading down the wrong path in life, tough love may be what is needed to help that person navigate back to the right path.
Alan Morinis teaches us that we can use the following phrase to guide our practice: “Care for the other—we are one.” It is a reminder that compassion is rooted in the connectedness between two individuals.
For a practice, Morinis suggests in his book Every Day, Holy Day that we might try the following:
- Identify a person or people with whom there is a heaviness in your relationship, then act toward them in a way that reaches beyond what is required in order to relieve them of their burden.
- See the part of you that lives within the other and take care.
As we move about our week, let us nurture the compassion that lives within our soul.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rick Kellner