Remembering Our Shared Humanity in a Divided World

Photo by Wylly Suhendra on Unsplash

In a society that often divides us into rigid classifications, we must remember something fundamental: we’re all human beings. It’s easy to fall into the trap of demonizing others for not sharing our experiences or perspectives. But our differences are not the enemy—dehumanization is.

Political affiliation has become a stand-in for identity, and that’s a problem. When we treat our political leanings as personal identities, we fuel polarization and shut down critical thinking. In a country with only two major parties, this binary thinking reduces complex human experiences to simple labels: red or blue, us versus them. But life, and democracy, are more complicated than that.

If you haven’t lived someone’s experience—whether they’re trans, Black, a woman, Jewish, Muslim, or an immigrant—you can’t fully know what it’s like. And that’s okay. You don’t need to have lived their life to respect their humanity. What’s not okay is assuming we understand their struggles or making policies that harm them without listening to their voices.

I am in regular conversation with people who admit they don’t personally know any trans people, yet that doesn’t stop them from weighing in on what rights trans people should or shouldn’t have. (News flash: all people deserve basic human rights and dignity.) The same happens with race—I often hear people who have no real relationships with Black people, explain what Black people think, feel, or need. That kind of certainty without relationship is dangerous.

This tendency to speak from a place of distance, rather than relationship, reflects a deeper issue: we’ve lost sight of what it means to be represented by leaders who truly serve the people. We must remember that our elected officials are supposed to work for us—not the other way around.

The Preamble to the Constitution articulates a core vision for our nation: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” More than just words, this is a declaration that the government is instituted to serve all its people.

Fulfilling that promise requires more than just well-intentioned leaders; it demands active, thoughtful citizenship. Just because you vote with one party doesn’t mean you owe it blind loyalty. We need to make space for complexity, for nuance, and for disagreement. That’s what democracy—and shared humanity—demands.

That same principle is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition.

Jewish tradition teaches that all human beings are created in the image of the Divine. This teaching affirms the inherent dignity of every person. Hillel’s famous words, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” remind us that empathy and mutual respect are central to Jewish ethics. This foundational idea compels us to treat others with care and humility, especially when their lives or identities are different from our own. When we forget that every person carries a spark of the Divine, we allow fear, ignorance and cruelty to fill the gap.

Furthermore, Jewish ethics caution us, 'Do not judge your fellow until you have stood in their place,' a stark reminder of the limitations of our own perspectives when considering the lives of others.

History shows us the cost of that dehumanization. We’ve seen it in slavery, in the Holocaust, in Jim Crow laws, in the marginalization of trans and queer people, and in our discourse about immigration today. In each case, harm began when people stopped seeing others as fully human. Empathy alone won’t solve everything, but it can stop us from heading down the wrong path.

So what can we do? We can listen more than we speak. We can get curious about lives different from our own. We can support policies that protect human dignity instead of punishing differences. And above all, we can resist the urge to assume or judge what we don’t understand.

Ultimately, we don’t have to agree on everything, but we must stop speaking with authority about experiences we haven’t lived. By treating people with respect and staying connected to our shared humanity, we can build a society that honors the dignity of all.