​THE WALL OF SEPARATION

Kindness begins where necessity ends.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Kindness begins where necessity ends.  “Sally” in Amor Towles’s Lincoln Highway
 
The folk wisdom of my Jewish tradition posits that seat of behavior is the heart. Residing within its two chambers are competing inclinations, one to good and the other to bad. While those ancient Jews may not have known physiology well, they certainly knew that a person couldn’t live with half a heart. The “bad” inclination was perhaps more accurately the selfish or self-serving inclination – those yearnings that serve myself ahead of others. The appetites are located there, including a desire for wealth, physical gratification, fame, and dominance over others. Without those impulses, the same tradition teaches, there would be no commerce, no families, no homes, and no progress.
 
The other half of the heart is where altruism resides. Not surprisingly for a faith tradition, the aspiration to emulate the divine lives here, as well as all the finer qualities we associate with the loving, living God.
 
Religious or not, most everyone would agree that you can make your way just fine in this world by relying on the qualities attributed to the bad inclination, but it won’t make you beloved.  If you hope to be remembered well (or, as they say in religious circles, get to heaven), then you have to invest much more of your effort in promoting your good inclination.
 
Neither folk medicine nor religious thought gives much attention to the wall that separates the two chambers, so it gives me free rein to muse about it. I call it the wall of necessity. It touches on our better nature and our worse, the things a good person would like to think about themself and the things that person fears about themself, the proclivities a not-so-good person indulges and the proclivities that person gives into reluctantly. A person who does not address natural appetites cannot survive. A person who never considers others lives in unbearable loneliness. That wall is the neutral zone where choices are available because it represents equilibrium.
 
I think that we mostly worry about slipping to the “bad” side of that wall. Certainly, religious life is so often about misdeeds by any name – evil, sin, immorality, selfishness – that it is easy to conclude that the essence of living a life of devotion is avoiding the sin that crouches at the door. Yet, it is not true that the neutral setting of our lives – the wall of necessity – is what makes for a good or admirable life.
 
In Amor Towles’s novel, mostly concerning a road trip, but far more complicated than I can explain in a few words, the main character (a young man) is the beneficiary of an act of generosity by the young woman who bears an unrequited love for him. He protests that it is not necessary. She responds with the words at the beginning of this column: kindness begins where necessity ends.
 
Falling into the chamber of the heart that houses the bad inclination is all too common. It is, however, a choice. One can just as easily choose to lean into the good inclination, leaving necessity behind to immerse the soul – and by extension, another person – in kindness. People who are unnecessarily kind (and face it, all kindness is unnecessary) lift themselves along with their recipients.
 
I know – blah, blah, blah. But we are living in a societal climate in which kindness and other positive values are too often seen as flaws. And there are plenty of people – even admired public figures – who have attempted to attach dismissiveness toward others and sometimes cruelty to that wall of necessity. That is to say, they have tried to redefine bad behavior as neutral and compassion as weak. Don’t fall for it. On the cusp of another electoral brawl, it is worth giving some thought to what it means to be strong, which is different than what it means to be effectively self-serving. In the heart, kindness begins where necessity ends. So does cruelty.