The Exodus story’s defense of empathy: Yom Kippur 5786 • 2025
A lightly edited version of my Yom Kippur d’var Torah (sermon) at Congregation Beth Shalom of Bloomington, the hometown of Indiana University.
For the start of Elul, our month of reflection leading to the High Holy Days, we addressed the challenges of our times through a d’var Torah or sermon that looked in depth at the Israel-Gaza conflict. On Rosh Hashanah, we explored Judaism’s wisdom for healing and resilience. For Yom Kippur, I would like to talk about empathy.
I have heard the concern from many in our community that increasingly, the loudest voices, the most prominent figures in our politics and culture are those of extremism, aggression, and ultimately, selfishness. Those who say that what happens to other people does not matter.
I will never forget when one sixth grade Hebrew school student said to me, just after January 6, “The grownups are always telling us we have to share, but the man who lost the election — he won’t share.” In the last presidential election, over 59 million voters believed “the increasing number of immigrants will make things worse for people like them” — as if we should decide how to use power based on the welfare of only people like ourselves; as if the goal shouldn’t be to have enough to go around for everyone. This past February, Joe Rigney gained notoriety for his book, The Sin of Empathy.
Congregants have shared with me their concern that so few in Western media and society seem to care about the stories of Israelis’ suffering and fear, such as the stories of children for whom nighttime air raid sirens and running to the bomb shelter is a fact of life. Our people, too, deserves empathy. Congregants have also shared the concern expressed well by Rabbi Michael Marmur of Hebrew Union College’s Jerusalem campus: “I have an anxiety that we are losing our empathy, that to think of the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians who have lost their lives, and the [many more] who have lost their homes — even to think of them is somehow suspect” (in his address at the 2025 Central Conference of American Rabbis convention in Chicago, March 23-26). Both of these concerns are valid. It is possible to empathize with the human beings on both sides of this excruciating conflict, both our Jewish family in the Land of Israel and the Palestinians, who are children of Abraham as we are.
These are only a few of the ways our times assault the very idea that empathy matters. Studies in The Atlantic (here and here), from the American Psychological Association (here), and elsewhere have analyzed what Psychiatric Times poignantly called “The Lost Art of Empathy.” Our tradition wisely understands that there is a place both for care for others and care for oneself. In Hillel’s beloved teaching in Pirkei Avot, Chapters of the Ancestors, he says, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But when I am only for myself, what am I?” (chapter 1, mishnah 14). What makes this teaching profound is its ability to combine both care for self and other into one, and keep them in balance. The danger lies in imbalance. In our politics and culture, there are growing calls for the pendulum to swing far toward raw self-interest. Our task is to restore the balance of looking out for ourselves and for each other.
To explore what Judaism teaches about empathy, let us return to the founding story of the Jewish people: the Exodus. We think of this story as one of oppression and liberation. Yet before Moses’ grand showdown with Pharaoh, each turning point in the story hinges on whether empathy will prevail.
As we look at this story, I might suggest two things to watch for. First: The Exodus story’s deep empathy can anchor and strengthen us in a time of so much heartlessness and indifference. The story can help us answer these questions: How do we hold on to empathy, cultivate it, and spread it? What can we do in the face of destructive forces that seem larger than we are? Second: For all of us, there is always a temptation to think the problem lies only with someone else. The Exodus story can guide us in asking: How can we challenge ourselves to reflect on how we make choices — both on the macro level in society, and on the micro level of how we treat the people in our own lives — and move our status quo further toward empathy?
First: The Exodus story’s midwives, Shifrah and Puah, exemplify empathy for society’s “other.”
Pharaoh commands the midwives, when delivering Israelite babies, to kill all newborn boys (Shemot • Exodus 1:15-21). The text calls these women “the Hebrew midwives” or “the midwives of the Hebrews,” “ha-meyaldot ha-ivriyot.”1 The classic Jewish commentator Abravanel, among others, interprets this phrase to mean they were Egyptians who midwifed for Hebrew women. Abravanel writes, “They were not Hebrews, since how could [Pharaoh’s] mind be confident that Hebrew women would murder their own [people’s] babies?” Abravanel, who suffered the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, knew firsthand the way tyranny thrives in the absence of empathy.
Understanding that the midwives were Egyptian raises the stakes of the story. Pharaoh’s decree did not affect them personally. They had the option to follow orders, blend in with the rest of the Egyptian majority, and look out just for themselves. And they must have been terrified of Pharaoh’s supreme power.
Yet these Egyptian midwives put themselves in harm’s way to save the Israelite baby boys. They did so because, the text says, “the midwives held God in awe,” “va-tirena ha-meyaldot et ha-Elohim,” or, we might say, they revered something greater than themselves. They valued goodness over their own welfare. They knew the Divine Presence was greater than Pharaoh and the call to care about the lives of others is not optional. One of the great themes of the High Holy Days is the idea of God’s sovereignty, according to how we each understand this — as we sing in the morning service, with its iconic, evocative High Holy Days melody, “the Sovereign,” “Ha-Melech” — a Presence greater than any of us, summoning us to live by justice and love. By contrast with Ha-Melech, any human claim to absolute power is not only unethical, but delusional. No one understood Ha-Melech better than the midwives Shifrah and Puah. Their devotion can steer us.
Their story also epitomizes the cherished teaching from Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot, Chapters of the Ancestors: “It is not upon you to complete the task, but neither are you free to abstain from it” (chapter 2, mishnah 16). The midwives must have so wished they could stop Pharaoh altogether. This they did not have the power to do. But they used the power they had, in their work as midwives, to find the good they could do, and to work for the values they knew their moment needed. So must we all.
The story’s next turning point, continuing the theme of the midwives’ story and raising it to a crescendo, is the empathy of Pharaoh’s daughter.
By now, Pharaoh has ordered all Egyptians to throw all Israelite baby boys into the Nile River (Shemot • Exodus 1:22-2:10). With unimaginable courage, one Israelite, Yocheved, hides her newborn boy for three months, then sends him in a basket to float on the Nile — her sole hope for his survival. Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the bank of the Nile, sees the basket, and, the text says, “she opened it up, and she saw the child, and, look, it was a boy weeping.” We might understand “she saw” to mean she paid attention to what was happening; she did not ignore it. The “other” was no longer abstract — it had a face. A baby crying is the most primal expression of distress. The text shows us her response: “And she had compassion for him.” The verb here for “have compassion,” “va-tachmol,” comes from a root, chet-mem-lamed, that in Akkadian and Arabic means “to bear” or “suffer” — that is, she bears the baby’s pain herself as if it were her own (Even-Shoshan Dictionary: Revised and Updated for the Years of the 2000s).2
Then Pharaoh’s daughter, like the midwives, acts. She says, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children,” removing any doubt that she is aware of the risk she is taking. Knowing this baby is deemed “other” by the orders of Pharaoh — her own father — seems only to strengthen her resolve and compassion. Miriam, the baby’s sister, again with extraordinary daring, approaches Pharaoh’s daughter and offers to find a Hebrew wet nurse — meaning, their mother. Pharaoh’s daughter agrees and guarantees to personally pay the nurse’s wages. Then Pharaoh’s daughter adopts the baby to raise herself in the palace.
It must have been unbelievably difficult for her to break the decree of her own father. In that difficulty, we see how much empathy mattered to Pharaoh’s daughter. Her determination can inspire us. Like the midwives, Pharaoh’s daughter turns her focus not to what she cannot do, but what she can do. She was able to save only one baby. Yet as the Talmud teaches, “a person who saves one life saves an entire world” (Talmud Yerushalmi • the Jerusalem Talmud, Masechet Sanhedrin • Volume on the Supreme Court, chapter 4, halachah 9).
Because of these seeds of empathy, Moses survives and becomes the leader of the people, ultimately challenging Pharaoh, “Let My people go.” Judaism’s defense of empathy against the forces of inattentiveness, selfishness, othering, and brute force was countercultural in the days of Pharaoh. It is countercultural now. Yet as much as empathy may seem outgunned, the Exodus story also testifies to the sturdy, self-renewing power of empathy. Even Pharaoh cannot squash empathy. Empathy is like the grass between cracks in the sidewalk: It always grows back.
And empathy can have unexpected political consequences. The empathy of three Egyptian women — Shifrah, Puah, and Pharaoh’s daughter — and the courage of two Israelite women — Yocheved and Miriam — transform a patriarchal, oppressive society. As the Talmudic rabbis observe, “It was thanks to the righteous women of that generation that the Israelites were redeemed from [slavery in] Egypt” (Talmud Bavli • the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Sotah • Volume on the Sotah Ritual, page 11b). Their steadfast chemlah, kindness born out of “bearing” someone else’s pain like our own, can guide and bolster us.
Moses grows up, and he too comes to feel empathy for the enslaved Israelites whom he learns are his kin. He kills an Egyptian taskmaster in defense of an enslaved Israelite, encapsulating both Moses’ empathetic passion for justice and the inevitable moral complexities of translating our empathy into political action. We then come to this classic scene which shows us another facet of empathy (Shemot • Exodus 2:13-14):
And [Moses] went out the next day, and, look, two Hebrew men were brawling. And he said to the one in the wrong, “Why should you strike your fellow?” And he said, “Who made you prince and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”
This Israelite shows no empathy and no respect. First he starts a fight with a fellow Israelite. When Moses tries to stop him, he responds with a sarcastic put-down. (My grandmother would have had a word for this: It is rude!) In a midrash, a rabbinic story that fills in the Torah’s gaps, Moses thinks, “[Now I see] there is lashon hara, harmful talk, among [the people].” Here, our ancestors show us what is at stake in lashon hara, harmful talk or gossip, literally “evil tongue.” In the stories of Shifrah and Puah and Pharaoh’s daughter, we see that empathy transcends societal divisions between self and “other.” At the same time, we see in this story that empathy begins close at hand. Empathy begins among our friends and our families, in Jewish community, and in our workplaces. Empathy begins in the next conversation we have.
In the indelible words of the great early 20th-century Rav Kook, we are called to replace sinat chinam, causeless hatred, with ahavat chinam, causeless love, or, we might say, giving love for love’s own sake. We have the chance to nourish ahavat chinam together, in a time with far too much sinat chinam and lashon hara. Yet this can be deceptively difficult, especially when we are stressed, rushing, or tired after a long day. Our tradition shows us that we can treat each other with greater kindness. When we pause and are attentive to how our words and actions might make another feel. When we assume the best about each other. When we compromise. When we apologize, and forgive. Then, we fulfill the legacy of these five women and Moses.
The Exodus story shows us the many layered nuances of empathy. First, empathy is necessary for all of us to survive and flourish. Without the empathetic deeds of the Exodus story, the Jewish people would not have survived. Then, when we remember the help we needed in our time of trouble, we must acknowledge that others’ need is just as valid. The mitzvah repeated the most often in the Torah, in varying ways, is: Love the stranger, ha-geir, literally “one who [comes to] reside,” or “migrant,” for you were geirim, migrants, in the land of Egypt (the Talmud mentions one rabbi who found this principle in the Torah thirty-six times, and others who found it forty-six times!).3
When we commit to others and to values greater than ourselves, we find that empathy goes deeper than physical survival. By telling and retelling the stories of Shifrah and Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter, Yocheved and Miriam, and Moses — by celebrating their values as a wellspring of our own and living by them — we make ourselves who we are, as individuals and as a people. Empathy gives us a reason to be, a way to leave our world better than we found it. It means our lives hold love and not only fear and isolation. The Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal, for example in his 1997 classic People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority, describes these multiple dimensions of Jewish law and texts generally as “normative” and “formative.” Normative: meaning, empathy shows us what to do. Formative: meaning, empathy makes us who we are. And the story of Moses and the two fellow Israelites shows us that chances to give empathy, as goes the spiritual teaching of the side-view mirrors of our cars, are always “closer than they appear.”
The great modern, female British-Israeli Torah commentator Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg observes that as soon as Pharaoh begins his project of enslavement, we largely stop hearing characters’ names and dialogue. She writes, “[A] world is composed where [people]... have a faceless, unindividuated quality… [and with] the silence of all voices but Pharaoh’s” (Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, 2001).4 The first characters to be named and have their own dialogue, Zornberg notes, are the midwives Shifrah and Puah. Names and speech, the ultimate markers of our humanity, are absent until these characters empathize and act — symbolizing that honoring another’s humanity is the only way we ourselves have humanity.
We also see this idea, that empathy gives us our humanity, in the most underrated part of Hillel’s teaching that we discussed earlier: “if I am only for myself,” he says, “what am I? [mah ani?]” What kind of person have I become if this is how I treat other people? We might say by extension: If we are only for ourselves in our society, mah anachnu — what kind of society are we? Is this the world we want for our one short chance to live?
We can each ask ourselves: What can I do to put more chemlah, more empathy, into the world? From a kind word to a waiter or an Uber driver to the emails and texts we send, from what we ask of our government in how it uses power to the organizations we give our money and time to if we are able, from our words at the oneg and kiddush to our words at the dinner table — the sum of the small choices we make add up to a portion of our world that is vaster than we know.
In Modeh Ani, the traditional first prayer of the morning, we thank God for restoring consciousness to us “be-chemlah,” “in compassion,” the same root used to describe Pharaoh’s daughter’s empathy for the weeping baby before her. One of the ways we can come to know the Divine Presence is in the presence of empathy itself, the empathy for all of us inherent in the fact that we are given the chance to live. May we show empathy to others, and bring into our all-too-human world that much more of the Divine Presence.
Torah translations drawn primarily from Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, 2018, with my modifications including portions of Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 1995.
Accessed through Apple’s macOS Dictionary app, 2023.
Talmud Bavli • the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Bava Metzia • Volume on Damages, Part II, page 59b. Note that the rabbis of the Talmud are using the word “geir” to refer to one who converts to Judaism; this is an example of the changes from Biblical Hebrew to rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic and from the sociological and religious world of ancient Israel to that of rabbinic Judaism.
Pp. 21-22, Kindle Edition.