Non-Random Acts of Kindness

Many of you are familiar, I’m sure, with the ubiquitous bumper sticker that says, “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty.” I will confess to you (with all due apologies to any of you who may have this sticker on your car) that I am not a big fan of this particular message.

Of course there is nothing wrong at all with encouraging kindness and beauty. But personally speaking, I would argue the exact opposite. I would argue for “Non-Random Acts of Kindness and Mindful Acts of Beauty.” If you really think about it, kindness shouldn’t be random – frankly, it should be mandatory. (God forbid if we could only depend upon the kindness of strangers when they happened to be “randomly kind” toward us…)

Actually, I think this slogan reveals something very important about contemporary American culture. As a society that values individual initiative, it is natural that we will view compassion as a random, voluntary enterprise. So we act compassionately whenever we feel compassionate. And to be sure, we might well feel a great deal of compassion for others – for our loved ones, and even for people we don’t actually know. The problem, of course, is that feelings cannot be guaranteed. They come and go. Feelings are, by definition, elusive and transient.

Jewish tradition provides us with a different model. Compassion is not random – it is an imperative. Even love itself is commanded: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “You shall love Adonai your God.” “You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.”

In other words, compassion should not be reduced to random feeling. Judaism teaches that compassion should be a mindful, ongoing conscious practice. We should teach ourselves how to be compassionate even if we are not feeling particularly compassionate – even if we are too overwhelmed to feel compassionate. Compassion is, for lack of a better word, a discipline.

The most well known Hebrew word for compassion, “rachamim,” comes from the root rechem, or “womb” and suggests the kind of unconditional compassion that comes with parental love. More broadly, we might understand rachamim as the kind of compassion that we show toward those with whom we have a unique personal connection. The word “chen” is usually translated as “grace.” This form of compassion generally refers to gestures of favor or goodwill.

And then there is “chesed,” a word that is usually rendered as “lovingkindness,” but might be more accurately renedered as “covenantal loyalty.” Chesed is the kind of love and compassion that comes from a deeper sense of mutual obligation and communal accountability. When people live “covenantally,” it is with the explicit understanding that the community is accountable to the individual just as much as the individual is accountable to the community.

Though the Torah presents this covenantal model in a Jewish context, I would suggest that as Americans we would do well to apply it to our national community at large. Too often, it seems, American culture venerates individual freedoms to such an extent that we often view the suggestion of communal obligation as a personal violation. In a covenantal context, however, our individual freedom is necessarily refracted through the experience of our mutual responsibility to one another.

Clearly this notion has very real political implications – and in the end, I’m not sure what it would take to create an authentic sense of convenant in our increasingly divided American body politic. But I do believe that as long as we view our mutual responsibility to one another as random or voluntary, true compassion will be in increasingly limited supply in our country. If we affirm that our compassion is not dependant on how we happen to feel, but is rather guided by a sense of obligation and responsibility to one another, then maybe, just maybe, we might find that our compassion is not as limited or arbitrary a commodity as it often seems.

So here’s my new bumpersticker: “With Compassion Comes Responsibility.”