Empathy Is a Spiritual Force.

There’s a sad and loud and growing movement that treats empathy like a threat. That frames compassion as weakness. That calls caring for others a kind of moral failure.

You’ve probably heard it: Elon Musk calling empathy a civilizational weakness. Or the recent NPR story, where Christian conservatives claim empathy “aligns with hell,” or that “empathy is toxic.” Others suggest empathy makes women too emotional to lead.

Let me be clear: this anti-empathy movement is political.
Anti-empathy is anti-life, anti-community, anti-justice, and anti-God.

What these voices are really saying is:
Stop caring.
Don’t feel what others feel.
Don’t let your heart move you toward justice.

Because empathy gets in the way of cruelty.
Because empathy disrupts power.
Because empathy humanizes the “other.”

They don’t fear empathy because it’s ineffective.
They fear it because it works.

The people speaking out against empathy are conservative Christians; I guess they threw out the whole compassionate conservative approach. Judaism and Christianity share core sacred texts that teach the value of compassion.

We are commanded again and again to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.
To bind up the brokenhearted.
To see the image of God in every human being.

Love your neighbor as yourself.
Remember you were once slaves in Egypt.
Do not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor sibling.

These aren’t marginal teachings—they are central to our shared traditions. So how did we get here?

Because empathy makes domination inconvenient.

A society without empathy becomes a society without safety nets, without mercy, without repair. It becomes a place where the poor are blamed, the sick are discarded, and the oppressed are criminalized for surviving. Without empathy, justice becomes hollow—and cruelty becomes policy.

This growing rejection of empathy is political.
It’s being used to justify cruelty at the border, cuts to social programs, attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and efforts to roll back women’s rights—all in the name of God.

We’ve been here before.

Slaveholders in America had to suppress empathy—or twist themselves into moral knots—to own, beat, and sell other human beings. Frederick Douglass once said the most devout slaveholders were often the cruelest. Not in spite of their faith, but because of how they distorted it.

“The religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds... The man who wields the lash during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday.”
— Frederick Douglass

When empathy is removed from faith, faith becomes a weapon.
And when compassion is called weakness, we slide toward tyranny.

Judaism doesn’t see empathy as weakness. It sees it as holy.

We are commanded to love the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt (Deut. 10:19). The Torah gives us moral instruction. It tells us our pain must shape our compassion.

B’tzelem Elohim means every person is made in the image of God.
When we honor someone’s pain, we are honoring the Divine.

We don’t suppress empathy to be faithful—we nurture it.
Because our tradition, at its core, teaches us not to look away.