When I was in college, my Muslim friend Alia and I, with the help of Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, who gave us $2500 seed money, created the student organization P.E.A.C.E: People Encouraging Acceptance through Communication and Education on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. We held P.E.A.C.E. events throughout the year and the organization flourished with interfaith dialogue and activities.

In 1988 I thought communication was the answer to peace between Israel, her neighbors and the Palestinians. I don’t think so anymore, given the current state of hostilities and blame. Instead, at this terribly low and tragic point in the Israel-Gaza conflict, compassion or as Rabbi Jill Jacobs, recently called for in her July 31st, 2014 Washington Post Editorial, radical empathy is what is necessary. The deterioration of the situation is too pathetic and fragile for something as basic and primitive as communication to be the fix-it solution right now. Communication requires among other things, someone to be the listener, and no one is listening. No one is available to hear the cries, feel the pain or recognize the fear and loss of real people living only a few minutes away.

So what comes before the basic human need for connectedness through communication? Love and compassion. I am not so saccharin to suggest that we must love everyone, particularly our enemies. On the contrary, in this case, a place to start is that we show love for ourselves by taking a stance of compassion. Compassion for the other is an ultimate goal; that one should eventually be so enlightened to be able to pray for one’s enemy. But for those who, like me cannot do that right now, yet want not to harbor hate, because we know that little can come from that, what are we to do? Developing self-compassion is one way that will enable us to eventually act with compassion towards others.

I am learning from my teachers at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality that staying with the pain and sorrow that we feel and not running away from it or suppressing it can indeed lead to more compassion and a loving heart, turning brokenness and pain into light and strength. The medieval philosopher and poet Yehuda Halevi writes, “I have sought Your drawing-near, Calling You with all my heart; And in calling out to You –I found You calling within me.”

The agonizing situation in Israel leaves me struggling for an answer as to how to cope with the reality of the fear, deaths of so many, suffering and loss. I feel the brokenness and a simultaneous need to engage in this world as part of the solution and not the problem.

The Kotzker Rebbe taught that “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” We are broken and we feel pain. In his song Anthem, Leonard Cohen writes, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light get’s in.” It takes courage to let the light in, to feel the brokenness and to stay with those feelings of pain. To feel the crack in a broken heart is to experience the pain of helplessness, of suffering with out judging ourselves for it, or criticizing ourselves for being weak. To feel pain, just like to feel joy, is part of the human experience.

The Rabbis of the Talmud teach “The Compassionate one desires the heart.” (Sanhedrin 106b). I know there are many ways that we navigate in times of great crisis such as these. Developing radical empathy, beginning with compassion for oneself is one place to begin. If I have a compassionate heart, I will be more peaceful. I will seek peace and pursue it. It will affect all my relationships and it will affect the world. I believe this to be true