Balancing Individuality with Communal Responsibility

Rav Soloveitchik: Pirkei Avot and Jewish Ethics, From Sinai to the Men of the Great Assembly, pg. 19-29
Anonymity and Community
The anonymity of the hakhmei ha-mesorah, the sages of the masorah, is very characteristic. The masorah community is everything; the individual. however great and saintly, can not and must not separate himself from the community. He is always servant to the cause and to the people who identified themselves with the cause-ideal. Nobody is prominent enough to become a central figure, outshining others and self-sufficient unto himself. A scholar is not an independent entity but rather one to whom the community lays claims. He belongs to it and can never emancipate himself from the community's hold over him. Torah cannot be learned and understood in isolation, and the masorah is far from being a technical coalescence of individuals who just pass on their wisdom to each other.
Judaism, of course, believes in the creative role of an individual, the uniqueness of the human personality made in the image of God. Yet, it violently disagrees with the Robinson Crusoe figure that dominated the imagination of the period of the Enlightenment. The latter believed in "the idea of the self-sufficient individual, to whose existence the coming of a second and third individual does not essentially bring anything new," and therefore saw the emergence of the community within the framework of the social contract (Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative [London, 1937], p. 297). However, God has declared from the first morning of creation that a lonely existence is not good (Gen. 2:18) - and an individual existence is always a lonely one, notwithstanding the manifold relationship one maintains by virtue of the social contract. The dwelling together because of a contractual arrangement does not affect the ontological status of the individual. The pertinence of such being together does not transcend the bounds of the pragmos and utility. It can never become an existential community, which should redeem the individual from his being alone that is "not good." On the other hand, Judaism also rejected the Romantic theory of the community as an organism that is present wherever an individual existence develops.
Man, according to the story of Genesis, was created alone; therefore, the singular existence precedes coexistence. Man is lonely because he was created in the image of God, who is the loneliest Being because He is the only One, negating any other existence as such. In man's loneliness is hidden his creative capacity - his spiritual personality. Man is creative as an individual, as a being who is unique, different, indispensable, and one-timely. No one else can perform in the same manner; no one is like him. On the other hand, man is driven to share his destiny with others, to organize a communal existence not because of utilitarian motifs, but due to an inner anxiety which stems from the depths of a soul craving for a full existence, for a being that is complete. Existential loneliness is great in its being tragic; it is a blessing and a curse at the same time.
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The individual - when he comes the nearest to the masorah community and merges his destiny with that of his brethren, communicating to them something of his unique, hidden being, passing on not only formal but living wisdom, inspiring them with a great passion and a deep love, instilling in them emotions and cravings - becomes an idea, an archetype, an ideal, a supra-individual, in which everybody takes his share. Since individuality is transposed into an idea, the name of this particular person is irrelevant. On the other hand, the individual, in his backward movement from the community to himself, represents the antithesis of historical existence. In such an instance, he takes himself out of the historical order, which is synonymous with the flow of the stream of events within the communal bed. As such, his life has no pertinence for history and does not have to be recorded; it is beyond the reach of the historian since it is unique and inaccessible, concealed from the inquisitive eye of the outsider.
Even the lives of the patriarchs and prophets have not been recorded fully in the Bible. Our knowledge of them is fragmentary and meager. The Pentateuch has not passed on to us any information about the life of Abraham before he reached the age of seventy-five and departed for the land of Canaan, and even from this point on, the Bible did not write the full life story of Abraham, but relates to us single episodes that remain incomplete. Our curiosity is only the more stimulated; the unknown outstrips the known and comprehensible. The same is true of Isaac. Moreover, of him we know so little, and what we know has been presented to us in such a unique way, that the whole figure is shrouded in mystery. And what about the greatest of all prophets, Moses? We are acquainted with one incident of his youth, the encounter with the Egyptian and his flight to Midian, and then we meet him again at the Mount Horev when he reached the ripe age of eighty. What happened during this transitional period, in the course of which an Egyptian prince became a fugitive from the law, a son-in-law of a Midian priest, an ordinary shepherd who suddenly met God while tending to his flock? If we knew about these years, which embrace a full lifespan, we would better understand later event in Moses' life. Yet the Torah has suppressed any biographical data concerning sixty or more years of an active life.
All the Torah is interested in are those events that form the juncture at which the individual meets the community and commits himself to its destiny and ultimate end. The lives of Abraham, Isaac and Moses have historical relevance in the oneness with Keneset Yisrael; however, the same heroes, though they were fathers and architects of our people, are outside our historical consciousness, which is a community awareness, if seen in their existential solitude and privacy, in the sanctum of uniqueness and exclusiveness. The individual in exile from the community, alone and for himself, severs his relationship and bonds with everybody. He meets only himself - and, of course, his Creator, since then and only then he discovers his affinity with God.
The biblical and masorah heroes must be treated under a double aspect. First, they are treated as ideas, or rather ideals, as hypostasized abstractions, setting standards of conduct - these ideals have been crystallized into a living personality who succeeded in emerging from the shadows of ontin seclusion and joining others in a great venture of living together and coexisting. Second, they are treated as individuals who could not free themselves from the ontic confinement into which their Creator cast them. However hard they tried to liberate themselves from the shackles of otherness, the incommensurability and non-conformity, they failed to tear down the Jericho walls surrounding their lonely existence and resigned themselves to the fate of living for themselves, within themselves and by themselves. There is the universal Abraham and also the individual Abraham, Moses within the community and Moses in his tent far away from the people. They were great in both roles. Yet, while in their first role they have been perpetuated in history, in their second one they became a great enigma, a persona abscondita, who is mysterious and incomprehensible.
God Himself is experienced in this dual - as Deus Revelatus sharing His existence with others, keeping us company, omnipresent and all-enveloping, and, on the other hand, as numinous and dreadful, unapproachable and hidden. The same psalmist sings and recites, "The heavens manifest the glory of God and the firmament proclaims His handiwork" (Ps. 19:2) - His will and wisdom are discernible everywhere - and "Awake, why do You sleep, O Lord, arise, case us not off forever; why do You hide Your face?" (Ps. 44:24-25); "You have covered Yourself with a cloud, so that prayer should not pass through" (Lam. 3:44).

Rav Soloveitchik, The Community, pg. 7-18
The very instant we pronounce the word "community" we recall, by sheer association, the ancient controversy between collectivism and individualism. Willy nily the old problem of who and what comes first (metaphysically, not chronologically) arises. Is the individual an independent free entity, who gives up basic aspects of his sovereignty in order to live within a communal framework; or is the reverse true: the individual is born into the. community which, in turn, invests him with certain rights? This perennial controversy is still unresolved.
Today the controversy transcends the limits of theoretical debate. People try to resolve it, not by propounding theories or by participating in philosophical symposia in the halls of academia, but by resorting to violence and bloodshed in the jungles of Asia and Africa. The political confrontation between the West and the East is, ipso facto, a philosophical encounter between one-sided collectivism and one-sided individualism.
Let us ask a simple question: what does Judaism say about this conflict?
And let us give a simple answer: Judaism rejects both alternatives: neither theory, per se, is true. Both experiences, that of aloneness, as well as that of togetherness, are inseparable basic elements of the I-awareness.
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Let us investigate this strange philosophy of man, which seems to embrace two mutually exclusive outlooks. Permit me, however, to preface the analysis with the following remarks. 1. Judaism deals with the problem of individualism versus collectivism, not at a socio-economic, but rather at an existential - metaphysical level. Judaism is not concerned with the problem which intrigued many philosophers of the age of reason _ whether or not man is a self-sufficient being, whether a Robinson Crusoe is reality or fantasy. Judaism asks a completely different question. Was the human charisma, the imago dei, bestowed upon solitary, lonely man or upon man within a social frame of reference? In retreat or in togetherness - where does man find his true self?
2. The community in Judaism is not a functional-utilitarian, but an ontological one. The community is not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality; I might say, a living whole. In particular, Judaism has stressed the wholeness and the unity of Knesset Israel, the Jewish community. The latter is not a conglomerate. It is an autonomous entity, endowed with a life of its own. We, for instance, lay claim to Eretz Israel. God granted the land to us as a gift. To whom did He pledge the land? Neither to an individual, nor to a partnership consisting of millions of people. He gave it to the Knesset Israel, to the community as an independent unity, as a distinct juridic metaphysical person. He did not promise the land to me, to you, to them; nor did He promise the land to all of us together. Abraham did not receive the land as an individual, but as the father of a future nation. The Owner of the Promised Land is the Knesset Israel, which is a community persona. However strange such a concept may appear to the empirical sociologist, it is not at all a strange experience for the Halachist and the mystic, to whom Knesset Israel is a living, loving, and suffering mother.
3. The personalistic unity and reality of a community, such as Knesset Israel, is due to the philosophy of existential complementarity of the individuals belonging to the Knesset Israel. The individuals belonging to the community complement one another existentially. Each individual possesses something. unique, rare, which is unknown to others; each individual has a unique message to communicate, a special color to add to the communal spectrum. Hence, when lonely man joins the community, he adds a new dimension to the community awareness. He contributes something which no one else could have contributed. He enriches the community existentially; he is irreplaceable. Judaism has always looked upon the individual as if he were a little world (microcosm); with the death of the individual, this little world comes to an end. A vacuum which other individuals cannot fill is left. The saying:
כל המקיים נפש אחד כאילו קיים עולם מלא
Whoever saves one life, it is as if had saved the entire world.
should be understood in this way. The sensitive Halachic rules pertaining to mourning (אבלות) are rooted in the Halacha's perception of the tragic singleness of man, in the awareness that man as a natural being exists once in an eternity. Because of that singleness, individuals get together, complement each other, and attain ontological wholeness. These two traits of the community (individuality and complementarity), we find in the Biblical portrayal of the marriage community. The latter consists of two unique personalities. The male and the female represent two different existential experiences; man and woman differ, not only as natural beings, but as metaphysical personae as well. Man is man in all his thoughts and feelings, while the same is true of the woman: she is a woman in her whole existential experience. When both join in matrimony a community of two "incommensurate" beings is formed. Woman and man complement each other existentially: together they form, not a partnership, but an individuality, a persona. The marriage-community is like the general community; its strength lies, not in that which is common to the participants, but in their singularity and singleness.
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How is the community formed? The answer is simple: two lonely individuals create a community in the manner that God created the world. What was God's instrument of creation? The word. The word is also the instrument with which man creates his own community. God, by saying יהי, which is identical with an act of recognition of the world, made it possible for a beside-Him existence to emerge, made it possible for finitude to co-exist with infinity, notwithstanding that, as a mathematical equation, finitude+infinity == infinity, or, in other words, that the co-existence of the infinite and the finite is an impossibility: God, in order to make "room" for the finite world, employed מדת הצמצום, the method of self-contraction or self-limitation, ,כביכול. He withdrew, and by engaging in a movement of recoil, כביכול, He precipitated "empty space" for the world. Otherwise the latter could not have come into existence, since it would have been "swallowed" by infinity. Thus, we may suggest the following equation: creation == recognition == withdrawal == an act of sacrifice.
The same is true of man. If lonely man is to rise from. existential exclusiveness to .existential all-inclusiveness, then the first thing he has to do is to recognize another existence. Of course this recognition is, eo ipso, a sacrificial act, since the mere admission that a thou exists in addition to the I, is tantamount to צמצום, self-limitation and self-contraction. A community is established the very moment I recognize the thou and extend greetings to the thou. One individual extends the shalom greeting to another individual; and hi so doing he creates a community. The Halacha has attached great significance to casual greetings exchanged between two individuals. Rabbi Helbo said: "If his friend greets him and he does not return the greeting he is called a robber for it is said, 'It is ye that have eaten up the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses.' " What message does Shalom convey, if not encouragement and solace to the lonely and distressed. The Halacha commands us to return greetings, and in some cases to extend them, even during the recital of שמע. To recognize somebody by greeting him or responding to a greeting does not contradict the performance of קבלת עול מלכות שמים (acceptance of the yoke of Heaven). Halacha says to man: Don't let your neighbor drift along the lanes of loneliness; don't permit him to become remote and alienated from you, even when you are busy reciting שמע. If הקב"ה willed a world to rise from nihility in order to bestow His love upon this world, then loriely man should affirm the existence of somebody else in order to have the opportunity of giving love. Again the same equation prevails: recognition means sacrificial action; the individual withdraws in order to make room for the thou.
Quite often a man finds himself in a crowd among strangers. He feels lonely. No one knows him, no one cares for him, no one is concerned with him. It is again an existential experience. He begins to doubt his ontological worth. This leads to alienation from the crowd surrounding him. Suddenly someone taps him on the shoulder and says: "Aren't you Mr. So-and-So? I have heard so much about you." In a fraction of a second his awareness changes. An alien being turns into a fellow member of an existential community (the crowd). What brought about the change? The recognition by somebody, the word!
To recognize a person is not just to identify him physically. It is more than that: it is an act of identifying him existentially, as a person who has a job to do, that only he can do properly. To recognize a person means to affirm that he is irreplaceable. To hurt a person means to tell him that he is expendable, that there is no need for him.
The Halacha equated the act of publicly embarrassing a person with murder. Why? Because humiliation is tantamount to destroying an existential community and driving the individual into solitude. It is not enough for the charitable person to extend help to the needy. He must do more than that: he must try to restore to the dependent person a sense of dignity and worth. That is why Jews have developed special sensitivity regarding orphans and widows, since these persons are extremely sensitive and lose their self-confidence at the slightest provocation. The Bible warned us against afficting an orphan or a widow.
What kind of an affliction does the Bible prohibit? Murder, mutilation, causing of severe pain, destruction of property, etc.? Not only these, but lesser evils, as well. Whatever affects the peace of mind of the widow or the orphan is considered affliction. A word, a gesture, a facial expression by which the widow or the orphan feels hurt; in short, whatever causes an accelerated heartbeat - that comes under affliction.
וכשנאחזו רשב"ג ור' ישמעאל וגזרו עליהם שיהרגו היה ר"ש בוכה, ור' ישמעאל אמר: ברבי! בשתי פסיעות אתה ניתן בחיקן של צדיקים ואתה בוכה? א"ל: אני בוכה על שאני נהרגין כשופחי דמים וכמחללי שבתות. אמר לו: שמא בסעודה היה יושב וישן ובאה אשה לאול על נדתה על טהרות שלה ואמר לה השמש ישן הוא, והתורה אמרה אם עמה תענה אותו, ומה כתיב - והרגתי אתכם בחרב
When R. Shimon b. Gamaliel and R. Ishmael appeared (before the Romans), and were condemned to death, R. Shimon wept, and R. Ishmael said: "Sir, you are but two steps from the bosom of the righteous, and yet you weep?" He answered: "I weep because we are being executed as if we were murderers. . ." To which (R. Ishmael) answered; "Perhaps you were at the table or asleep, and a woman came to inquire about her ritual purity, and the attendant told her: 'He is asleep'; for the Torah said: 'If you torment them (the widow and orphan) . . . " and continued: 'Then I shall kill you by the sword.'"
What was wrong in R. Shimon's conduct? He had come home exhausted after a full day's work, and lay down for a short rest. It had been a busy day: the entire load of communal responsibilities pressed heavily on his frail shoulders. Cruel Rome continued its ruthless policy of religious persecution and economic ruin of the people. R. Shimon b. Gamaliel had to perform an almost impossible task, to negotiate with, as well as to defy the conquerors; to communicate with his Jewish brethren, telling them not to despair, and at the same time to ready them for rebellion and the supreme sacrifice.
While he was dozing, a woman entered with an inquiry: is she ritually pure or impure? The attendant, knowing how fatigued R. Shimon was, advised her to wait until he awoke; he did not wish to disturb R. Shimon. How, then, the question arises, did R. Shimon afflict the woman? The woman was a poor widow, and extremely sensitive. While waiting for R. Shimon, the thought went through her head: had my rich neighbor come with a similar question, the attendant would have acted differently: he would have aroused R. Shimon. Because of my poverty and loneliness, she thought, he didn't mind making me wait; she sighed, and brushed away a tear. So R. Shimon did afflict a widow, and thus violated a Biblical prohibition. Her tear was responsible for the tragic death of R. Shimon:
אחד עינו מרובה ואחד עינוי מועט
"A great affliction and a small affliction are all the same." The degree of hurt is irrelevant; causing transient humiliation and causing severe physical pain are both subsumed under affliction.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Individual and Collective Responsibility (Noach 5777)
I once had the opportunity to ask the Catholic writer Paul Johnson what had struck him most about Judaism during the long period he spent researching it for his masterly A History of the Jews? He replied in roughly these words: “There have been, in the course of history, societies that emphasised the individual – like the secular West today. And there have been others that placed weight on the collective – communist Russia or China, for example.”
Judaism, he continued, was the most successful example he knew of that managed the delicate balance between both – giving equal weight to individual and collective responsibility. Judaism was a religion of strong individuals and strong communities. This, he said, was very rare and difficult, and constituted one of our greatest achievements.
It was a wise and subtle observation. Without knowing it, he had in effect paraphrased Hillel’s aphorism: “If I am not for myself, who will be (individual responsibility)? But if I am only for myself, what am I (collective responsibility)?” This insight allows us to see the argument of Parshat Noach in a way that might not have been obvious otherwise.
The parsha begins and ends with two great events, the Flood on the one hand, Babel and its tower on the other. On the face of it they have nothing in common. The failings of the generation of the Flood are explicit. “The world was corrupt before God, and the land was filled with violence. God saw the world, and it was corrupted. All flesh had perverted its way on the earth” (Gen. 6:11-12). Wickedness, violence, corruption, perversion: this is the language of systemic moral failure.
Babel by contrast seems almost idyllic. “The entire earth had one language and a common speech” (11:1). The builders are bent on construction, not destruction. It is far from clear what their sin was. Yet from the Torah’s point of view Babel represents another serious wrong turn, because immediately thereafter God summons Abraham to begin an entirely new chapter in the religious story of humankind. There is no Flood – God had, in any case, sworn that He would never again punish humanity in such a way (“Never again will I curse the soil because of man, for the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. I will never again strike down all life as I have just done”, 8:21). But it is clear that after Babel, God comes to the conclusion that there must be another and different way for humans to live.
Both the Flood and the Tower of Babel are rooted in actual historical events, even if the narrative is not couched in the language of descriptive history. Mesopotamia had many flood myths, all of which testify to the memory of disastrous inundations, especially on the flat lands of the Tigris-Euphrates valley (See Commentary of R. David Zvi Hoffman to Genesis 6 [Hebrew, 140] who suggests that the Flood may have been limited to centres of human habitation, rather than covering the whole earth). Excavations at Shurrupak, Kish, Uruk and Ur – Abraham’s birthplace – reveal evidence of clay flood deposits. Likewise the Tower of Babel was a historical reality. Herodotus tells of the sacred enclosure of Babylon, at the centre of which was a ziqqurat or tower of seven stories, 300 feet high. The remains of more than thirty such towers have been discovered, mainly in lower Mesopotamia, and many references have been found in the literature of the time that speak of such towers “reaching heaven”.
However, the stories of the Flood and Babel are not merely historical, because the Torah is not history but “teaching, instruction.” They are there because they represent a profound moral-social-political-spiritual truth about the human situation as the Torah sees it. They represent, respectively, precisely the failures intimated by Paul Johnson. The Flood tells us what happens to civilisation when individuals rule and there is no collective. Babel tells us what happens when the collective rules and individuals are sacrificed to it.
It was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the thinker who laid the foundations of modern politics in his classic Leviathan (1651), who – without referring to the Flood – gave it its best interpretation. Before there were political institutions, said Hobbes, human beings were in a “state of nature”. They were individuals, packs, bands. Lacking a stable ruler, an effective government and enforceable laws, people would be in a state of permanent and violent chaos – “a war of every man against every man” – as they competed for scarce resources. There would be “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such situations exist today in a whole series of failed or failing states. That is precisely the Torah’s description of life before the Flood. When there is no rule of law to constrain individuals, the world is filled with violence.
Babel is the opposite, and we now have important historical evidence as to exactly what was meant by the sentence, “The entire land had one language and a common speech.” This may not refer to primal humanity before the division of languages. In fact in the previous chapter the Torah has already stated, “From these the maritime peoples spread out into their lands in their clans within their nations, each with its own language” (Gen. 10:5. The Talmud Yerushalmi, Megillah 1:11, 71b, records a dispute between R. Eliezer and R. Johanan, one of whom holds that the division of humanity into seventy languages occurred before the Flood).
The reference seems to be to the imperial practice of the neo-Assyrians, of imposing their own language on the peoples they conquered. One inscription of the time records that Ashurbanipal II “made the totality of all peoples speak one speech.” A cylinder inscription of Sargon II says, “Populations of the four quarters of the world with strange tongues and incompatible speech . . . whom I had taken as booty at the command of Ashur my lord by the might of my sceptre, I caused to accept a single voice.” The neo-Assyrians asserted their supremacy by insisting that their language was the only one to be used by the nations and populations they had defeated. On this reading, Babel is a critique of imperialism.
There is even a hint of this in the parallelism of language between the builders of Babel and the Egyptian Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. In Babel they said, “Come, [hava] let us build ourselves a city and a tower . . . lest [pen] we be scattered over the face of the earth” (Gen. 11:4). In Egypt Pharaoh said, “Come, [hava] let us deal wisely with them, lest [pen] they increase so much . . .” (Ex. 1:10). The repeated “Come, let us … lest” is too pronounced to be accidental. Babel, like Egypt, represents an empire that subjugates entire populations, riding roughshod over their identities and freedoms.
If this is so, we will have to re-read the entire Babel story in a way that makes it much more convincing. The sequence is this: Genesis 10 describes the division of humanity into seventy nations and seventy languages. Genesis 11 tells of how one imperial power conquered smaller nations and imposed its language and culture on them, thus directly contravening God’s wish that humans should respect the integrity of each nation and each individual. When at the end of the Babel story God “confuses the language” of the builders, He is not creating a new state of affairs but restoring the old.
Interpreted thus, the story of Babel is a critique of the power of the collective when it crushes individuality – the individuality of the seventy cultures described in Genesis 10. (A personal note: I had the privilege of addressing 2,000 leaders from all the world’s faiths at the Millennium Peace Summit in the United Nations in August 2000. It turned out that there were exactly 70 traditions – each with their subdivisions and sects – represented. So it seems there still are seventy basic cultures). When the rule of law is used to suppress individuals and their distinctive languages and traditions, this too is wrong. The miracle of monotheism is that Unity in Heaven creates diversity on earth, and God asks us (with obvious conditions) to respect that diversity.
So the Flood and the Tower of Babel, though polar opposites, are linked, and the entire parsha of Noach is a brilliant study in the human condition. There are individualistic cultures and there are collectivist ones, and both fail, the former because they lead to anarchy and violence, the latter because they lead to oppression and tyranny.
So Paul Johnson’s insight turns out to be both deep and true. After the two great failures of the Flood and Babel, Abraham was called on to create a new form of social order that would give equal honour to the individual and the collective, personal responsibility and the common good. That remains the special gift of Jews and Judaism to the world.