I remember reading the passage as if it were yesterday. It was one of the first times I encountered the truth of fiction. Like most of the boys my age, I didn't pay all that much attention when our World Literature teacher tried to point to particularly profound excerpts from the writings of western civilization. But this was different. I accepted the assignment with my general lack of enthusiasm but then I began to read.

The book was Erich Maria Remarque's classic, All Quiet on the Western Front. I had never encountered a book like this before. Almost instantly I found myself identifying with the narrator as he vividly described not just the horror of war but the cynical manipulation of a nation's psyche, of how a people can be taught to hate.

The passage itself comes near the end of the book when the soldier who has been telling the story blindly defends himself in a muddy foxhole by stabbing an enemy French soldier through the neck. The Frenchman takes a long time to die and during that horrifying interlude the narrator ruminates in a manner that seared itself into one particular high schooler's heart and soul..."But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony...forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"

That stunningly true testimony has returned on innumerable occasions during the course of my life and it made its reappearance this past week as I pondered one particularly divisive problem in our community.

Demonizing one's opponent is a tantalizing temptation for all of us. It is so much easier to find fault in another's argument if you imagine the arguer as utterly evil. Such a polemic protects us from any error. After all, if our opponent is so vile a person as we believe, there certainly can be nothing redeemable about their argument. Of course, all hope for compromise is lost in this process of polarization. There must be a victor and there must be the vanquished. Either/or. Win/lose. Victory/defeat.

I am convinced that most of the time, such an attitude has all of us losing. A healthy community needs diversity to be sure but that can be accomplished without animosity and acrimony. In my own work, what I am most proud of is that I am part of a religious community that understands that it need not be in total agreement about anything. Passionate arguments, intense debates, clashes of conscience...all of this can be accomplished without creating an enemy, I believe, but it takes work and wisdom.

Compassion. It means, literally, "to share hearts". That is, to be compassionate is to try and understand the source of another's thinking, feeling or faith. It is to try and discover what makes your opponent tick. Such a discovery often leads to understanding rather than misinterpretation, reason instead of guesswork, sympathy in place of cynicism.

Judging from the pattern of repetition, our wars have taught us very little and solved even less. But surely we can all recognize the danger of turning the dissenter into a demon or the stranger into Satan. Many of us learned that back in high school.