Pity them all

Pity them all is the first principle in the ten commandments Boaz Brandstetter gives his mother, Ilana Sommo. It distills a change in his response to conflict: where family turmoil once turned his distress into anger, he now argues for restraint and for recognizing other people’s humanity, even amid national antagonism.

Place in Boaz’s commandments

Ilana records the commandments in a letter reflecting on her past and on what drew her to Alexander Gideon. She presents them as her son’s own words, in a random order; Pity them all comes first. The remaining principles reinforce its ethical direction through opposition to bitterness, mockery, hatred, violence, killing, and treating people as something to be consumed. The short opening imperative thus introduces a set of rules for how to live with others, rather than a claim about abstract doctrine.

From family anger to restraint

In conversation with Ilana, Boaz looks back on his childhood, when his parents’ shouting and fighting made him think that he was the cause. He connects that confusion and anger to violent impulses directed at people associated with his family’s conflicts. He says that he has since rejected beating others unless they strike first, and now favors working and taking life more easily. Against this history, Pity them all reads as more than a general plea for kindness: it marks a deliberate effort to refuse the retaliatory pattern that once shaped his conduct.

Compassion amid political conflict

Boaz extends the principle beyond the family. He describes himself as a Zionist concerned with people’s well-being and with everyone contributing something, however small, to the country. He criticizes political and religious argument when it displaces ordinary living, and insists that Arabs remain human beings despite hostility between Jews and Arabs. His warning that the conflict could end in mutual destruction gives the commandment an urgent setting: compassion is not a denial of danger or disagreement, but a refusal to make either a reason to disregard human life. The phrase’s force lies in that tension between Boaz’s concern for his country and his insistence that concern must not stop at the boundaries of his own group.