By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde delivering her sermon Jan. 21, 2025 at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., with President Donald Trump in attendance (screen shot from YouTube video)
Since when did “compassion” become something to fear?
I’ve been thinking about this ever since the inaugural interfaith prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral led by the Episcopal Bishop of D.C., Mariann Edgar Budde.
I’m a great admirer of Bishop Budde, and not because we were fellow undergraduates at the University of Rochester during the late 1970s (she majored in History and I in English, demonstrating that the humanities – at least then, were not yet ready to be dead and buried). Rather, it’s what, through her preaching, emerges as expressions of innate empathy. She is also modest in her truth-telling: forthright, not self-righteous.
Many of you may recall that during this particular prayer service, Bishop Budde addressed – head on – President Trump’s declared intention to vastly accelerate the apprehension and detention of undocumented immigrants.
“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear they will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.”
Such sentiments found scant favor with the president, who said she owed him an apology for such grievous indecorum. None was given.
A caveat: I am not here to bash Donald Trump. If he was offended by the Right Rev. Budde’s perceived intemperance – well, presumably he will not be occupying his front pew again anytime soon. He can give the bishop as wide a berth as he deems appropriate. Already she’s survived to preach another day. Many other days, in fact.
What I am here for, in fact, is to acknowledge her plea for compassion, a plea for acting as gracious, spiritually and materialistically generous human beings. I was especially struck by her invocation that “God teaches us to be merciful to the stranger.” She may well have been alluding to the Torah’s multiple declarations that we “Love the stranger as yourself” (one translation I spotted online renders this as “Love the immigrant as yourself” – making no discernable distinction between a “legal” and “illegal” resident of our shores). What befalls others may, someday, befall you and me. If for no other reason, in the name of potential self-preservation it behooves us to act mercifully, compassionately.
“What renders a culture invulnerable is the compassion it shows to the vulnerable,” the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (whom I often like to quote) wrote in “To Heal a Fractured World.” Compassion and its close cousin, empathy, are foundations of living ethically. Indeed, one could be the proudest of atheists and still respect this moral imperative.
Still, all too often compassion is given a bad look. “Compassion is for the weak,” Nietzsche maintained, an argument that has endured from the ancients to Auschwitz. Call it virtue-signaling of the most perverse sort.
Contemporary America is awash in compassion-contradiction. Authorities seek out “illegals” not merely out of lawful objectivity, but out of a zeal spilling over into cruelty. Perhaps it is appropriate to swoop down on Morningside Heights and arrest and deport Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. But in our haste, must we rip him away from his wife and unmet newborn son and say, tough luck?
Is that who we aspire to be: gleeful in our zealous pursuit not of true justice, but of the quality of the anti-merciful? Bishop Budde might well be appalled. In the name of compassion, so should we all.
Andrew Adler is the Managing Editor of Community.