Empathy

In this book The Giver, I believe that they lack empathy for one another because they don't know how anything actually feels.  They think they do but only The Giver and the Receiver actually know how it really feels.  They have never known pain or anything like that, because they just take a pill and it all goes away.  They have never known what it feels like to have sunshine or rain so then how could they know what someone else is feeling.  In this community everything is like perfect so they don't really ever feel like sad or anything.  They don't know that people actually die because they have just been told that they are released, so they don't know what anything feels like so they can't feel anything toward someone else.
I think that Jonas starts to feel empathy for other people because he knows what pain is like and he knows what it is like to feel things.  He knows because The Giver has given him memories of pain and nobody else knows what pain feels like so if he sees say somebody who has had there fingers caught in a door, he has a memory of that pain so if he sees somebody go through that he knows what it feels like.  Another example could be when Jonas goes into The Givers office and The Giver is feeling awful.  Jonas now knows what it is like because he had that memory of pain and he can understand in this instance what The Giver was going through.
This is why I think that the community in the book The Giver lacks empathy for one another and how Jonas starts to feel empathy for the others in the community.