NAVIGATING A WORLD OF ANGER

SANDI DOLBEE: IN TIMES OF DISCORD, HOW DO WE HIT THE RESET BUTTON? HOW DO WE WAGE PEACE WITH OUR WORDS? THREE PEOPLE OFFER THEIR THOUGHTS

Rather than argue whether this country should have open borders or put children in cages, ask people in a neutral way what they like about those policies. What are they worried about? Are they worried about border security? Are they worried about their well-being?

Raise your hand if you’re tired of the rage. Weary of the tirades on Twitter, poisonous posts on Facebook, malicious misinformation popping up online and tacky tantrums over wearing a face covering.

Not to mention an election campaign that is elevating us-againstthem partisanship to a new art form.

How do we hit the reset button? How do we wage peace with our words? Dismiss the hounds and harness our shared spirituality, the best qualities of our human spirit, like compassion and patience and harmony?

My search for answers led to a Jewish leader who believes in bringing people to the table over and over again, a teacher of nonviolent communication with an interfaith approach, and a Christian who looks for the image of God in every person.

Embracing discourse

Rabbi Alexis Berk, leader of Temple Solel in Cardiff, warns against running away from tough discussions. That is not the way forward.

“I think as leaders and community conveners, we need to teach people how to have hard conversations, not avoid them,” Berk says.

She points to her Jewish heritage. “I feel like I’m a descendant of a tradition that has always embraced discourse, disputation and respectful disagreement. So it doesn’t feel new to me and it doesn’t feel strange that we should have this disagreement. The whole Talmudic tradition is the minutes of meetings where rabbis disagreed about really important things, from rituals to public life to how we manage our relationships.”

So, how may we do this for ourselves?

“I think in congregational communities, we have to invite people to the table to come back and back again.”

Temple Solel holds a weekly discussion on Zoom about the topics of the day. Not everyone agrees during these sessions, but that’s OK. “A community of faith is one that wrestles together and worries together,” she says.

Berk likes to ask people to share their questions. “I’m of a general mind that people don’t want to sit around and hear somebody talk at length about what their personal perspective is, but people are very patient to hear one another’s questions. And sometimes, there’s a lot of kinship in shared questions.”

Rather than argue whether this country should have open borders or put children in cages, ask people in a neutral way what they like about those policies. What are they worried about? Are they worried about border security? Are they worried about their well-being?

We may disagree with how to address that worry, she says, “but it’s very hard to disagree with a person who has a worry. Having a worry is a universal experience.”

Practice empathy

John Michno was working as an engineer when he took a class on nonviolent communication. He has spent the last 10 years leading workshops and discussion groups on peace-filled conversations. He shares this story.

“I met a man at his brother’s deathbed, and we stepped into the next room to make small talk,” he begins. “I asked him how his day was, and he said he was pissed. I wanted to know why. He said he was pissed off at those people in Iraq, and he thought we should nuke Iraq.”

Michno resisted the impulse to react. “I really worked hard at just listening to him and trying to be curious to what brought him to make this statement. I tried to understand what he valued about the situation in Iraq.”

He thought about how to devise a one-sentence question to invite this person to empathize with the Iraqis. “And so I ended up saying something like, ‘I wonder how the parents feel about their children in Iraq?’ ” Michno could feel his voice break a little. The man heard it, too.

When it came time to leave, the man told Michno that what he said had made him think about things differently.

Michno, who now works for a San Diego-based nonprofit group, speaks of tapping into two kinds of empathy.

First is self-empathy — understanding your own emotions and dealing with them. He likens it to the preflight instructions about putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting someone else.

The other empathy is for someone else. Step into their shoes. It may help you see that they aren’t necessarily bad people, they just may have a different set of experiences. “If I understand what those stories meant to them in their own personal life, then maybe I could start to have a conversation with them.”

He praises organizations like Humankind and Braver Angels, which builds bridges of understanding by gathering people from diverse backgrounds for conversations.

Michno describes his spirituality as interfaith. His role models include leaders of the nonviolent civil rights movement and Gandhi, who used the principle of ahimsa, doing no harm, to guide his own campaign of nonviolence.

Imago Dei

Kim Berry Jones wonders how our conversations would be different if we saw the image of God —

imago Dei — in the other person. “So much of our conflict is based on our inability to do that and to see people that way,” she says.

Jones, director of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation at Point Loma Nazarene University, muses that it may be part of our human nature to see people who don’t agree with us as “the other.” But lately, it’s gotten worse. “There’s something going on in our culture that’s accelerated that or is feeding that.”

She says social media has changed our social fabric profoundly. “It allows us to put our opinions out into the world technically at low risk. There are things we’ll say in social media that we wouldn’t say to their face. We see that not only in the things we post but in what we’re willing to comment. Would you say that if you were saying that face to face with someone?”

And we have an obsession with convincing people that we’re right. Which brings her back to imago

Dei. Her best friends are conservative Christians, while she describes herself as a progressive Christ follower. “I don’t think there is anything they could say to convince me or anything I could say to convince them to change their political perspective,” she says. “But I don’t have any desire to do that. It doesn’t threaten my relationship with them or threaten my faith in who they are as human beings or who they are in their faith. It’s a level of recognizing that it’s OK to be different. It’s OK not to agree.”

Jones chooses to spend less time arguing about values and more time living them. That, she says, speaks louder than words.

‘Start there’

Rabbi Berk read an advice column recently where someone was asking how to respond to neighbors who put up a “Blue Lives Matter” sign after that person put up a “Black Lives Matter” sign. The advice: Ring their doorbell and introduce yourself — but don’t mention the signs. If a friendship develops, then maybe you can go there.

Berk liked that. Not every conversation has to be a tough one.

As the High Holy Days draw to a close — Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins this evening — she rejects the assumption that we have to be conflict-laden.

“We are by nature human beings who need love and relationship. We need empathy and understanding. We need compassion and kinship. And so where are the sources for that? It is not in the content of an argument. It is in the necessity of human contact.”

Rather than wallow in our divisions, she offers this suggestion: “Let’s presume we all have a need to be together. And start there.”

Dolbee is the former religion and ethics editor of The San Diego Union-tribune and a former president of the Religion News Association. sandidolbeecolumns@gmail.com

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