Community

This is from the Torah portion Vayachel -- it is based on the first word, which is mainly translated as "gathered." To set the scene, it is important to know that we've just dealt with the golden calf incident and Moses is gathering the people back together and is then going to have them help build the tabernacle. But let's look at what this who "gathered" thing means. Have you ever heard the word kehillah or community? It comes from the same root, so it was Moses gathering them into a community. Bringing them together as a community. What does it mean for them to be put in a community? What does it look like?
What does Vayakhel look like? Vayakhel is from the same Hebrew word as kehillah, meaning community. To return to Rabbi Lord Sacks, “As Jews, it is as a community that we come before God. Vayakhel was no ordinary episode in the history of Israel. It marked the essential insight to emerge from the crises of the golden calf. We find God in community…. When Moses gathered the people, he turned an unruly mob into a kehillah,a holy community.”

1) Work together in shared purpose.
Vayakhel looks like the Hasidic teaching that the mishkan was only completed because of a sense of unity and common purpose. In the building of the tabernacle, all Israel joined in their hearts; no one felt superior to his fellow. At first, each skilled individual did her own part of the construction, and it seemed to each one that her own work was extraordinary. Afterward, they saw how their contributions to the service of the tabernacle were integrated–all the boards, sockets, curtains, and loops fit together as if one person had done it all. Then they realized how each depended on the other. Then they understood that what they had accomplished was not only by virtue of their own skill alone, but that the Holy One had guided the hands of everyone who had worked on the tabernacle. They had joined in completing its master building plans, so that “It came to pass that the tabernacle was one” (Exodus 36:13). In their joint effort, the Israelites created not only the mishkan, but a strong sense of community.
2) When we stand together in support of shared values and vision.
Vayakhel looks like people coming together in solidarity of values, a cause, and mutual respect.
3) When we make God's Presence known through our action.The meaning of synagogue, or in Hebrew “Beit Knesset,” means house of assembly. The synagogue is where people go to gather, pray, study, and do good deeds. The mishkan, the tabernacle, or today’s synagogue is a place where God dwells. But a midrash teaches that it is only though the meritorious behavior of humanity that God’s Presence become noticeable (P’sikta d’Rav Kahana, Piska 1:1).
Rabbi Karen Citrin (2015)

The strength of community, as of ritual, lies in its potential to bring people together despite differing backgrounds and beliefs: to take them out of themselves and into a space "between" and then return to themselves, to their private spaces, transformed. The experience of Jewish community, the sense of lived connection to the covenants of fate and destiny, is what brings Jews back for more of the same...and bonds them more tightly to the Jewish people and Jewish traditions....
Arnold M. Eisen, Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 100.

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein ZT"L, Brother Daniel and the Jewish Fraternity
....The ger cannot embrace Judaism without simultaneously becoming a member of the Jewish people. He cannot, that is, accept the spiritual aspect of Jewry without the material....The [ger] embraces not only Jewry's present fortunes but its history as well.

In Judaism, the individual is a member of a community with obligations. We left Egypt as a community; we experienced Sinai as a community. We are obligated to one another by a system of mitzvot, which means not rights, but responsibilities....The very essence of relationship is the responsibility to engage the Other, to respond. Philosopher Martin Buber called this the "I-Thou" relationship. The Other is not an inanimate "It"; the Other is a personal "Thou" that demands a response....
This obligation to each other is rooted in the biblical notion that every human being is made in the image of God. The image of God is within, but the presence of God is found "in the between," in our relationships....Covenants form the foundation of "community" - a group of people bound together in relationships based on reciprocal responsibilities.
Ron Wolfson, Relational Judaism. pg 37-38

More than this: in Judaism, community is essential to the spiritual life. Our holiest prayers require a minyan. When we celebrate or mourn we do so as a community. Even when we confess, we do so together. Maimonides rules that “One who separates himself from the community, even if he does not commit a transgression but merely holds himself aloof from the congregation of Israel, does not fulfil the commandments together with his people, shows himself indifferent to their distress and does not observe their fast days but goes on his own way like one of the nations who does not belong to the Jewish people — such a person has no share in the world to come.” (Maimonides, Hilkhot Teshuvah 3: 11)
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

The Jewish endeavor is about learning to live in community. Something that previous generations took for granted, today we have to work at to achieve. Community does not come easily to us raised in a culture of rugged individualism. Live and let live is the American way. But living in community is the Jewish way. You can’t be a Jewish hermit; Judaism, if lived fully, demands of us involvement with others.
Rabbi Randall Mark - 2015

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan once taught that religious identity is based on the “three Bs” of believing, belonging, and behaving....What gives Jews their sense of identity is not primarily belief, but rather, belonging. It is the idea of “peoplehood,” the sense of belonging to the Jewish people, the Jewish community that distinguishes Jewish identity from other religious traditions.

For Jews, belonging is the foundation of who they are – like being part of a large family. The Torah is seen fundamentally as the record of our family tree, a family history if you will, where our ancestors told their stories about how they made sense and found meaning in the world and distinguished the sacred, the extraordinary from the everyday and ordinary in life.

Since Judaism is based primarily on belonging, the main reason and benefit for doing Jewish rituals, customs, holidays and celebrations, is to reinforce our sense of belonging to the Jewish people. It’s as simple as, when you do Jewish you feel Jewish.

....For most Jews, ...Jewish identity is simply a state of being, it is just who they are, and their loyalty to Judaism and the Jewish people is a given, having little to do with the level of their religious observance at all.
by Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, Ph.D.