The suffering in Gaza and the West Bank poses an uncomfortable question for people of faith: do principles of justice, mercy and compassion apply equally when our deepest loyalties are tested?

Meg Schwarz

I’ve been thinking a lot about faith lately and how much of what we learn as children stays with us, even as we grow older, question what we were taught and lose some of the certainty we once had. As a child, I looked up at priests and nuns with something close to awe. There was a power in the rituals of Mass – the smell, the clothing, the prayers, the silence and, for a long time, the Latin I didn’t understand but somehow knew mattered. I believed in limbo, purgatory and hell, and I had that innocent childhood understanding that there was a right and wrong way to behave and that our choices mattered.

As I grew older, something changed. The Latin gave way to English and suddenly I understood what was being said: lessons about kindness, forgiveness and justice, about how we treat others and what we owe those who are suffering. I didn’t know it then, but somewhere in those stories, those ideas were taking root, quietly becoming part of the moral framework through which I would come to understand the world.

I think that’s why, as I have thought about the violence in Gaza and around the world, I have found myself thinking not only about Christianity, but Judaism and Islam as well. I want to be careful here: these are three distinct faiths, with different histories, traditions, beliefs and understandings of divinity, not simply different versions of the same religion.

However, when you step back from those differences and listen to what the Torah, the Bible and the Qur’an ask of human beings, something is difficult for me to ignore. Again and again, the same teachings emerge about justice, forgiveness, protecting the vulnerable and refusing to stand by while people suffer.

Isaiah speaks about seeking justice and correcting oppression. Leviticus tells us not to stand idly by while our neighbour’s blood is being shed. The Qur’an calls believers to stand firmly for justice, even when it’s difficult and even when it’s against themselves or their own family.

These are different traditions, histories and understandings of the divine, but they share a remarkably recurring concern with how people should treat one another.

That’s where I find myself becoming uncomfortable.

It’s one thing to read those words, teach them to our children, hear them spoken in churches, synagogues and mosques and say that these are the values by which we live. It’s something else entirely to live by them when doing so becomes difficult.

We talk about compassion and human dignity. We teach our children that every human life is sacred and that we should help people who are struggling without discrimination. We pray for peace, the hungry, the sick, the frightened and especially for the children.

Then the suffering becomes ‘complicated’

It belongs to people whose history we don’t understand, whose religion and clothing may be different from ours, whose politics we disagree with, or whose suffering has become entangled with the grief and fear of another group. Suddenly those simple principles we were so certain about become much harder to apply.

I wonder whether the problem is actually the words themselves, or whether it’s us.

It’s relatively easy to believe in compassion when the person who needs it is someone we recognise as one of our own. It’s easy to grieve when the person who has been killed looks like us, speaks our language, shares our history, worships as we do or belongs to a community we already feel responsible for.

The harder thing is to look at somebody who is different from us and still see exactly the same value in their life.

Human life can’t become more or less valuable depending on which history we have inherited, which religion we follow, which flag we live under or which side of an argument we believe is right.

I understand that many Jewish people carry a history of persecution, violence and trauma. I also understand that Palestinians have lived through generations of displacement, occupation, violence and loss, with families facing unimaginable grief right now. Acknowledging one reality doesn’t require us to deny another. In fact, I think the great faith traditions should be some of the places where we are most capable of holding those truths together, because that’s part of what their teachings are asking of us.

When I think about those priests and nuns I looked up to as a child, I sometimes wonder what I would want them to say to me now if I were sitting in that church again and listening to them explain what the Bible meant in English.

I’d want them to tell me about the history and explain why the situation is politically complicated. I would want them to acknowledge Jewish history and the fear experienced by Israelis. I’d also want them to tell me that Palestinian families and their children are important and that some things should never become acceptable simply because they’re happening to people on the other side of a political divide.

I’d want the same courage from rabbis, imams and priests speaking to their own communities: not an attempt to pretend these religions are the same, but the courage to say that if we genuinely believe what our sacred traditions teach us about justice, mercy and human dignity, those principles can’t only apply when they’re convenient.

There’s a significant difference between believing that every human life has value and behaving as though every human life has value. There’s a difference between saying we believe in justice and being prepared to speak about injustice when it’s committed by people we support. There’s a difference between saying children are innocent and allowing ourselves to become so consumed by politics, history, fear or loyalty that some children’s suffering becomes easier for us to explain away than others.

This isn’t simply a reflection on religious leaders, but a question for all of us, because most of us like to think that we know what we believe until those beliefs are tested in ways that are uncomfortable or painful.

The violence in Palestine has made me return to some of the things I was taught when I was young and ask myself whether I still believe them when believing them is difficult.

When I was a child, learning about right and wrong and the expectation to have the courage to know the difference, I didn’t understand politics or history, or how difficult it could become to decide what was right when everyone carries their own pain and their own version of history. What I did understand were the words and stories I was being told.

All these years later, I have questioned so many of the values I was taught, changed my understanding of some and grown away from others altogether.

Maybe those early lessons were never meant to belong only to people who agreed with me, or to circumstances in which doing the right thing was easy.

If kindness, justice and compassion mean anything, they have to mean something when we’re called upon to live by them.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/08/what-do-faith-and-compassion-mean-when-they-are-tested/

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