Be Compassionate, Not Judgmental

By Laura Goodman

For many years, I was a high school English teacher in Northern Virginia. The county and state determined which topics and skills we needed to teach and review each year, but they left it up the individual schools to decide on the literature they would read to cover those skills. As you might remember from your days in high school, there was a basic canon of books that were read, though different schools might read them in different grades. At the school where I taught ninth grade, each year (up until the pandemic) we read a Shakespeare play, the Odyssey, a novel, a memoir, and an assortment of poems and short stories. The memoir we read was Night, in which Elie Wiesel heart-wrenchingly told of his experiences during the Holocaust, especially the horrific tragedy of being in Auschwitz. 

As a Jewish woman, I found teaching Night and about the Holocaust almost a calling. It was important to me that my students understood Wiesel’s experiences, as well as the experiences of other people in the Holocaust and to get a picture of what happened in one country through a required research project. But what you think you are teaching your students is not always what they need to learn.

Over the years, I realized that an important lesson that students needed to learn through the reading and the research was that they cannot judge people through the lens of their own lives and perceptions of themselves. We read books, fiction and non-fiction, to learn how different people react to the situations of their lives, not to see if they react the way we think they should. 

Sometimes students judge, rather than listen and learn. They think that they will always be strong heroes. Sometimes they expect people to behave the way they think they would, and that if they don’t, then there is something wrong with the other. This creates a divide between how we perceive ourselves and our criticism of others. This, in turn, creates a hierarchy, which is never healthy. Perhaps we need to teach compassion as a skill. 

They/we must see and acknowledge other people’s challenges and experiences. We cannot grow if we expect everyone to conform to our own standards and mindset. And that requires that we show compassion towards them and their reactions to their experiences. We need to honor their humanity as they go through the vicissitudes of their lives. 

I can remember the shock I would get each time a student would write that they, unlike Elie Wiesel, wouldn’t doubt God, they wouldn’t be angry at God, they wouldn’t waver in their faith, even if they were thrown into the hell of Auschwitz. On paper after paper I would write, “Don’t judge, analyze.” It would break my heart how readily some students would discount Wiesel’s wrestling with God, would speak with such surety in their God as if they didn’t come from the same humanity as him. 

Thinking that our reactions would be “better,” means that we judge. In that case, we are not analyzing to learn why a person does what he does, and, thus, we lose the lesson of another person’s humanity—life. Compassion, feeling for another, enables us to break through self-imposed divides, something, surely, that we need now. 

Next time you read a book or see a movie, don’t put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist, rather, stand beside them to absorb why they do the things they do. Be with them in their journey for it may end up enhancing yours.