OU TORAH Reflections on Empathy Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

My long-standing interest in the concept of “empathy” has two sources. Early in my postgraduate training, I became familiar with the important role that empathy plays in successful psychotherapy. As the eminent psychotherapist Carl Rogers wrote, “Empathy is the accurate understanding of the other person’s world as seen from the inside.” In colloquial terms, a person possesses empathy if he can honestly say to another person, “I know where you’re coming from.” Borrowing from the language of Native Americans, empathy is the ability to “walk in the other person’s moccasins.”