Texts on the Strength of Community

The idea of collective destiny and responsibility is more than a metaphor. It is constitutive of Jewish identity. The covenant at Mount Sinai was made not with individuals alone, but with a people – an entire people, righteous and not-yet-righteous alike. This principle has many halakhic ramifications. Among them, for example, is the rule that one person can recite a commandment blessing of behalf of another even though he has already fulfilled the mitzva. As Ritva explains, this is based on the idea that I am responsible for your fulfilment of the commands. Therefore even though I have already fulfilled my personal duty, I can make a blessing over yours and exempt you thereby, because your duty is, in a sense, mine as well.

In Parashat Beḥukkotai, in the midst of one of the most searing curses ever to have been uttered to a nation by way of warning, the sages found a fleck of pure gold. Moses is describing a nation in flight from its enemies: I will bring despair into the hearts of those of you who survive in enemy territory. Just the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to running, and they will run scared as if running from a sword. They will fall even when no one is chasing them. They will stumble over each other as they would before a sword, even though no one is chasing them. You will have no power to stand before your enemies. (Lev. 26:36–37) There is on the face of it nothing positive in this nightmare ­scenario. But the sages said: “‘They will stumble over each other’ – read this as ‘stumble because of one another’: this teaches that all Israelites are responsible for one another.”

Smartphones can do amazing things – few more amazing than Waze, the Israeli-designed satellite navigation system acquired by Google in 2013. But there is one thing even Waze cannot do. It can tell you how to get there, but it cannot tell you where to go. That is something you must decide. The most important decision we can make in life is to choose where we want eventually to be. Without a sense of destiny and destination, our lives will be directionless. If we don’t know where we want to go, we will never get there, no matter how fast we travel. Yet despite this, there are people who spend months planning a holiday, but not even a day planning a life. They simply let it happen. That is what our parasha is about, applied to a nation, not an individual. God, through Moses, set out the stark choice: If you follow My statutes and carefully obey My commands, I will send you rain in its season and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit…. I will grant peace in the land, and you will lie down and no one will make you afraid. (Lev. 26:3–6) If, on the other hand, “You do not listen to Me, and do not keep all these commands” (v. 14), then disaster will follow. The curses set out here at length are among the most frightening of all biblical texts – a portrait of national catastrophe, bleak and devastating. The entire passage, both the blessings and the curses, can be read supernaturally or naturally. Read the first way, Israel’s fate, at least in biblical times, was a direct result of its faithfulness or lack of it to the Torah. God was constantly intervening miraculously in history to reward the good and punish the bad. Every drought and famine, every bad harvest or military defeat, was the result of sin. Every peaceful and productive year was the result of obedience to God. That is how Israel’s prophets understood history. But there is also a more naturalistic reading, which says that divine providence works through us, internally rather than externally. If you are the Israelites in the Land of Israel, you will always be surrounded by empires and enemies bigger and stronger than you are. You will always be vulnerable to the hazards of rainfall and drought because Israel, unlike the Nile Delta or the Tigris-Euphrates valley, has no natural, reliable, predictable supply of water. You will always, therefore, find yourself looking up to the heavens. Even quite secular Jews often understand this – most famously David Ben Gurion when he said, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you have to believe in miracles.” According to this reading, the way of life set out in the Torah is unique in ways that are natural rather than supernatural. It is indeed the word of God, but not God as a perpetual strategic intervener in history, but rather, God as guide as to how to live in such a way as to be blessed. The Torah is a set of instructions for life issued by the Designer of life. That is what the Sages meant when they said that at the beginning of time, “God looked into the Torah and created the world.” Living according to the Torah means, in this view, aligning yourself with the forces that make for human flourishing, especially if you are a tiny people surrounded by enemies. What was unique about the society envisaged by the Torah is that every individual mattered. Justice was to be paramount. The rich could not buy special treatment and the poor were not left destitute. When it came to communal celebrations, everyone – especially the orphan, the widow, the stranger – was to be included.