By SHANNON O. WELLS
The gulf between thought and action is among the conundrums that arise when community members gather — during deeply fraught and troubled times — to discuss the meaning of empathy and compassion.
“It’s easy to say turn the other cheek when it’s not our cheek that has been hit,” an audience member said during a recent forum at the University Club. “And I think that’s really the task … and the work that we need to do. Diversity is very easy to do: Just put a bunch of people together that don’t look alike, and then you have it.”
Transforming that mix into true unity and “inclusion,” however, “that’s what requires some really hard work,” the participant said.
Confronting and navigating uncomfortable realities and difficult questions was among themes that emerged on Dec. 5. Faculty, staff and students gathered for the second “Community United in Compassion” event, geared toward finding common ground and creating a more empathetic University community.
The early afternoon luncheon and open forum, hosted by Jennifer Murtazashvili, professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and Abdesalam Soudi, a teaching associate professor in the linguistics department, was a follow up to a similarly titled late October event held after war broke out between Israel and Gaza.
Welcoming the 45 or so gathered in the ballroom, Adam Leibovich, dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, noted that community gatherings are as necessary in times of trouble as they are for celebration.
“We’re here today because we recognize how important it is to stand together with and for each other — not wearing labels of faculty, staff, or students, but as the Pitt community,” he said. “There are many occasions in the life of our University that bring people together: convocation and commencements, Welcome Week and Homecoming.
“It is easy to gather over celebrating, but I think it is even more important for us to gather when we’re struggling and people are hurting or uncertain, because that’s when we need each other most,” he added. “So I hope this time together reminds all of us that in times of joy and in times of challenge, we’re here for each other.”
A place to call home
During the event’s main “fireside chat” segment, Soudi shared his experiences of growing up Muslim in a Moroccan village. He learned about compassion and empathy from his mother, who he called “a community giant,” and father, who served in a Moroccan unit of the French Army during World War II.
Despite lacking some “basic resources” like reliable water and electricity, Soudi observed the “extraordinary sense of community and shared responsibility that defined our upbringing in that small village,” he said. “My mom believed very strongly in bringing people together. I remember vividly my mom hosting other women under the shade of our Argan tree,” serving tea and cookies “almost every day after lunch.”
That space served as a “hub in our daily interactions,” where citizens gathered to support each other. “It was a gathering point where members of the village converged (to share) stories, laughter and solidarity that knitted our community together,” he added, in the manner of today’s proverbial office “water cooler” gathering place.
Calling his father a “grateful and an honorable man,” Soudi explained that, as Morocco was a French protectorate, Moroccan soldiers were not treated the same as French soldiers. “My father told me lots of stories of him walking in the snow, with sandals,” he recalled, adding that his dad balanced his “physical toughness as a soldier, as a father, as a hard worker, with his gentle care and love for his kids, my mom and our community.”
“Even though he passed away 11 years ago,” Soudi added, “he continues to shape my perspective in many ways, as I raise my own children in Pittsburgh.”
Finding a safe, comfortable niche in this geographical region, however, hasn’t been without its setbacks. “As immigrants living in Southwestern Pennsylvania, post 9/11, my path has not always been smooth,” he said, “as I have faced, myself, various forms of discrimination. Nevertheless, I really hold a strong belief that Pittsburgh — as we have seen (demonstrated) many times — is a wonderful city, and I generally love my life here.”
Community and compassion
Murtazashvili talked about growing up in Squirrel Hill, where she was raised in the Tree of Life Synagogue, and her service in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Teaching high school physics and mathematics to Uzbekistani students was, she said, “the most humbling experience of my life. I felt like I got much more than I gave …
“The students were great. They were smart,” she added. “The level of mathematics would blow our juniors in math here at Pitt away.”
Throughout her time in Uzbekistan and Central Asia, Murtazashvili said she “never experienced any kind of hatred towards me, either as an American or as a Jew. Not once.”
After resettling in Pittsburgh, the deadly 2018 shootings at Tree of Life shook the longstanding faith she had in her home community. Reflecting on the horrific tragedy, however, inspired her to work with Soudi, Leibovich, and Student Affairs’ Carla Panzella and Emiola Oriola and others to seek ways to unify through compassion and empathy.
“The community here in Pittsburgh came together in so many beautiful ways,” she said. “Soudi was so touched by that. I think that unity around that event truly inspired him to work on these issues together. And we can’t forget that. What I can’t forget are the many friends that I lost in that attack, people who are pillars of our community.”
Being “robbed” of her sense of safety and seeing a community ripped apart by violence makes it “hard to look at the world the same way. After that event, I felt incredibly guilty,” she said. “I didn’t feel that I fully appreciated or understood the pain of my Afghan friends until I experienced the kind of pain I saw here — pain that I couldn’t go in and out of, but that was part of the community.
“Going to Afghanistan, for me it was a choice, but violence hit this community in ways that wasn’t a choice for me,” she added. “One of the reasons this is really important for us to do — and for me personally — it’s because I don’t want to lose this community. I lost that sense of safety that I had at Tree of Life, but I don’t want to lose all of you.”
A key element of compassion in this context, Murtazashvili explained, is fostering an environment that encourages dialogue — including disagreements — in a humanistic, life-affirming way.
“We’ve seen what’s happened on so many of our campuses across this country,” she said. “We should disagree about things. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be fulfilling the purpose of this University. We have a calling to disagree with each other. But what we can’t do is to dehumanize each other. We have to have compassion.
“And it is a gift to be able to talk to you, to speak to you and learn from you today. And I’m just so blessed that Soudi created the space for us to share the stories, to talk about who we are as people. And as we heard earlier, that it’s not just about empathy; it’s about compassion, and these are not the same thing.”
Life lessons
An audience participant mentioned that too often, compassion is “episodic: Something happens, folks gather and then there’s this slow forgetting,” she said. “So compassion, to be genuine and meaningful to me, means that when I am not in your face and you’re not in mine, I’m still committed to you and to justice on your behalf.”
She recounted a long-ago incident in New Orleans when she and a friend stole some glasses from a mobile drugstore and got caught by the owner, who “went straight down that racist road,” she said. “And he was going to put us underneath the jail if he could. He was really angry with these two black girls. And we were trying to lie, trying to get out (of it) and do all these things.”
An older Black woman the two friends didn’t know appeared and vouched for the wayward pair. “She supported our lie and said, ‘No, that wasn’t them. They weren’t doing that. I know for sure!’ And she spoke so loudly that (the owner) backed up because he was angry. … Our lives were going to be over as far as he was concerned.”
The Samaritan vouching for two young women she’d never met — whose innocence she couldn’t prove — made a significant impression on the speaker.
“To have compassion while we were doing wrong, I think, speaks to a depth of love, a depth of commitment, something that woman walked into that drugstore with before she even met us, and yet she rescued us.”
As opposed to fostering a life of crime, the speaker decided she didn’t “want any part of that anymore. I wanted to be a person who lives upright and who could be vouched for because I was doing right, not wrong,” she said.
Another forum participant, Jordan Herbert, defined compassion as “being passionate about the help and service of others around you. You know, that extra level of care,” he said. “I think if you’re compassionate about something, it evokes that extra sense of emotion and when you get your emotions involved, … then you can really start to cross bridges and move the needle.”
As a real estate developer, he admitted his work connecting homeless veterans and individuals with affordable housing started just “as a line of work.” After several years, however, that transformed into “me being compassionate about serving this community. And when you work with the underserved and overlooked populations, you can quickly see how that extra level of care will go a long way versus ‘just caring’ about these folks,” he said. “It makes you want to go the extra mile do things that people aren’t typically doing for these folks, so that they can be in a better situation.”
Sometimes, as one woman in the audience suggested, compassion isn’t enough to overcome a force as powerful and ingrained as antisemitism. She asked the panelists how to deal with “someone who wants to hate you as much as he can? … I’m not quite sure where compassion can really fix it at a certain point.”
Soudi responded with his own story when someone aggressively approached him and said, “ ‘That’s him. You are a terrorist.’ Right in my face.”
Rather than hatred or retaliation, Soudi responded with pity. “I actually felt bad for the person, because I said to myself, ‘This person is using the most wonderful country in the world, the United States. He can pretty much do anything he wants to do, but he has chosen for his imagination to be so narrow.’”
Moving ahead
Reflecting on the two United in Compassion forums this fall, Soudi and Murtazashvili said they were pleased with the events, which Soudi said “successfully brought together a diverse group, encompassing students, University staff, faculty, community members and religious leaders. Participants actively delved into the exploration of compassion, sharing personal perspectives and recounting experiences rooted in their upbringing, cultural influences and religious backgrounds.”
Noting that some individuals who met at the October forum have since formed regular gatherings to foster meaningful, compassion-rooted dialogue, Soudi and Murtazashvili said the “collaboration between a Jewish and a Muslim professor holds a unique power in these circumstances, a living example that exemplifies unity and bridges cultural and religious divides.”
Such a partnership, they added, “carries the potential to break down stereotypes, challenge prejudices and foster a sense of shared humanity and mutual respect between individuals with different religious beliefs and backgrounds.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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