The Weight of Witnessing: Why Your Heart Feels Heavy for Others
What happens to you when someone close to you is hurting? When you sit by a loved one who cannot get out of bed, or when you hear, again and again, the news from Israel, Gaza, and the Ukraine, and feel it in your body, even though you are far away? Those moments can leave you anxious, tired, unsettled, and you may wonder if you are even “allowed” to feel this way when you are not the one at the centre of the crisis.
Looking at the 10 plagues at the beginning of the Exodus narrative, I think they not only strike Egypt but also pass through the Israelite houses as sound, fear, and memory. The Israelites may be spared some of the blows, but they still live with the cries in the night and the knowledge of what is happening next door. Their identity is shaped not only by their own suffering, but by what they have witnessed in others.
Most of us are more often witnesses than protagonists. We watch someone we love in the grip of depression, anxiety, psychosis or burnout. We see their “plague of darkness” from the edge of the room: the closed curtains, the empty chair in shul, the unanswered messages. We might not be the ones in crisis, yet the experience marks us. Sleep changes. Worry grows. The world feels less stable, less kind.
Psychologists call this secondary trauma (1): the impact on those who live close to pain, who listen to stories and hold fear without being able to make it go away. That impact is real. It is not self-indulgent to feel shaken when a friend is suicidal, or when the news from Israel and Gaza leaves you nauseous and tense. Feeling affected does not mean you are centring yourself; it simply means your heart is working.
Perhaps the inner question is this: when you see someone struggling, what happens in you? Do you tighten, go numb, change the subject, because it feels too much? Or do you allow a small crack to open, enough to say: “This is hard for you. I am here. This is also hard for me to see, and I will not look away.” Both kinds of truth can sit in the same conversation.
If you are living beside someone’s anguish, your own feelings count. You are not required to be endlessly strong or endlessly calm. You are allowed to seek support, to say to a friend or a professional, “Being near this suffering is taking a toll on me.” That honesty does not diminish your compassion; it protects it.
Perhaps the blessing we can offer one another this Shabbat is simple and demanding: that no one should have to endure their own darkness alone, and that no one should have to carry, unacknowledged, the weight of standing at the doorway, listening.
Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi Adrian M. Schell