What happens when caring for someone means not simply taking their side?

Moral indignation offers a particular intoxication that we don’t often admit to. The rush of anger. The delicious clarity of knowing exactly who is right and who is wrong. The satisfaction of standing so safely on the side of the good that we can feel not only right, but somehow better than those who stand on the other side.

We get the pleasure of anger and the reassurance of virtue at the same time.

The trouble begins when truth refuses to play along. When facts do not cooperate by arranging themselves according to our script. When heroes do bad things and villains do good, that moral high gives way to something far less satisfying: complexity.

There is no simple, clean side to stand on there. No easy righteousness. The facts ask us to resist reshaping them to fit the story we came in with, and to accept that more than one thing can be true at once.

One of our outreach workers was recently grappling with exactly this.

A client she knew well was upset that his encampment was about to be cleared. As he described what had happened, she expected to hear a familiar story: a vulnerable person being treated unfairly by a powerful system. She was ready to be indignant with the city.

But as she listened, something unexpected happened.

By the client’s own account, the process sounded respectful and, in fact, fair. He had been offered support and several options for shelter, and he had declined them all.

What unsettled her was not that she couldn’t understand his position. She could. She simply didn’t agree with it. In fact, she found herself agreeing, at least in part, with the city.

For an outreach worker, that can feel almost like a betrayal. If being a good advocate means standing with the vulnerable person, what happens when standing with them does not mean agreeing with them?

That was the distinction she needed to make.

She could respect his right to choose without believing that the choice he was making was the best one available to him.

He had every right to decline the options he had been offered. But respecting that decision did not require her to agree that living in an encampment was his best possible option. If that was all he could see for himself in that moment, perhaps part of her role was to hold the possibility of something more, something better, until he could see it for himself.

So she went back to him and, with care and honesty, told him that she disagreed with his decision and explained why.

She had worried that doing so might damage the relationship. It didn’t. Her honesty deepened it.

The easier path would have been to avoid the discomfort altogether. She could have affirmed his anger, blamed the system and walked away feeling reassured that she had been a compassionate advocate.

Instead, she stayed with the messiness of what was actually in front of her.

She kept the person, rather than the narrative, at the centre.

That distinction matters to me because there is a subtle danger in our desire to be on the side of the vulnerable, the marginalized or the person who has been wronged. The instinct itself is a good one. But if we are not careful, our need to occupy the morally correct position can become more important than the person we believe we are defending.

We begin responding to the role they occupy in our story rather than to the human being in front of us.

And those are not always the same thing.

It is much easier to fit someone into a tidy narrative, victim or aggressor, right or wrong, than to encounter them in all their complexity. A person can have been treated unfairly and still make a poor decision. A system can be deeply flawed and still act reasonably in a particular circumstance. We can stand beside someone, respect their dignity and care deeply about what happens to them, without agreeing with everything they believe or every choice they make.

Perhaps that is where compassion becomes harder.

Because genuine care does not always ask, “Whose side am I on?”

Sometimes it asks, “What does this person actually need from me?”

And then comes the more difficult question, “What does my responsibility to them require?”

In these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I keep coming back to this.

If moral indignation turns our gaze outward, Yom Kippur asks us to turn it inward. But that means more than asking whether we have behaved well. It asks whether we have been willing to see clearly when reality complicates the story we would rather believe.

That is the harder work of caring – to look closely at the person or situation in front of us without forcing them into our familiar, comfortable narrative. To be honest with ourselves about what we see, even when agreement would be easier and righteousness so much more satisfying.

Our outreach worker did exactly that in a place where these questions are not theoretical. Her work asks her, moment by moment, to navigate vulnerable people, imperfect systems and choices with real consequences. She resisted the easier story, looked honestly at what was in front of her, and had the courage to act on what she believed care required.

Surely we can ask the same of ourselves.

Perhaps that is the work of Yom Kippur. Not simply to ask whether we were good or bad, right or wrong, but whether we were willing to look hard enough to see clearly, speak honestly about what we saw, and ultimately live up to what we owe one another.

With gratitude,

Cari Kozierok,
CEO, Ve’ahavta