Perhaps you've heard the slogan: "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty”

There is a wonderful story from the Jewish Talmud-a collection of instructive legends passed down through the ages. This story tells how God decided where to locate the holy city of Jerusalem and his Holy Temple. In ancient times, two brothers, one who lived alone and one with a large family, shared a field and a mill, and each night they divided the grain they had ground evenly. One day, the single brother thought, "It isn't fair for my brother, who has so many children, to get only half of the grain." So he began to secretly carry some of his grain to his brother's granary each night. Then the other brother thought to himself, "I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one." So he began to sneak some grain into his brother's granary each night. One night, the brothers met each other on the way to their covert acts of kindness, and, realizing what was happening, they embraced each other in love. God witnessed their meeting, as the legend says, and proclaimed: "This is holy ground. This is where my temple shall be built."

It is easy to take on the world's cynicism, to focus on how cold people can be. We see random violence and meanness and destructiveness, or the coldly planned violence of an act of terrorism, and we naturally want to close in upon ourselves, make a shell that shuts strangers out, and conclude that the rest of the world is on an express train to hell. The current political climate, in which compassion for immigrants, minorities, the elderly and the poor is giving way to callousness, expresses this kind of hard shell of self-protectiveness.

In this world, where sometimes even long time neighbors don't know each other, where strangers and those who are different from us may seem to be a threat, many people do tend to circle the wagons of their spirit in defense, and include in that circle only a small group of people.

Kindness is an act, whether it be random or not, in which we treat another as we would treat our close kin, it is an act of generosity which expands the circle of caring, recognizing that in fact we are all kin. Through an act of kindness, we transcend ourselves and open a door to the sacred, and from that vantage point we can see how interconnected all people are, how interdependent all life is.

As the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tsu said: "I am kind to others who are kind to me. I am also kind to those who are not kind to me. Thus, there is an increase in kindness."