THE COMMUNITY

“Moshe assembled the entire congregation of the children of Israel and said to them: These are the matters that the Lord commanded to perform them.” (Shmot 35:1)

The key verb in this sentence from which the parsha derives its name is vayakhel, “he assembled” or “congregated.” The root k-h-l appears more than a hundred times throughout the Tanach. It signifies the gathering together of a group of people, usually for a common purpose. In Judaism, the kehillah, community, is one of the most vital components of the religion. In several of his books on the weekly parsha, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, addresses the importance of kehillah in his essays on parshat Vayakhel. The following is a digest of his thoughts on the power of community.

“The book I wrote on this subject, The Home We Build Together, was inspired by our parasha and its name, Vayak’hel. It is the Torah’s primer on how to build community. It does so in a subtle way. It uses a single verb, k-h-l, to describe two very different activities. The first appears in the previous parasha at the beginning of the story of the Golden Calf. “When the people saw that Moses was long delayed in coming down the mountain, they gathered (vayikahel) around Aaron and said to him; Get up, make us gods to go before us.  This man Moses who brought us out of Egypt – we have no idea what has become of him” (Exodus 32:1).  The second is the opening verse of this parasha: “Moses assembled (vayak’hel) all the community of Israel and said to them: These are the things the Lord commanded you to do.” (Exodus 35:1) These sound similar.  Both verbs could be translated as “gathered” or “assembled”. But there is a fundamental difference between them. The first gathering was leaderless; the second had a leader, Moses. The first was a crowd, the second a community. In a crowd, individuals lose their individuality. A kind of collective mentality takes over, and people find themselves doing what they would never consider doing on their own. Charles Mackay famously spoke of the madness of crowds. People, he said, “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” Together, they act in a frenzy. Normal deliberative processes break down. Sometimes this expresses itself in violence, at other times in impulsive economic behaviour giving rise to unsustainable booms and subsequent crashes. Crowds lack the inhibitions and restraints that form our inner controls as individuals…The crowd that gathered around Aaron was in the grip of panic. Moses was their one contact with God, and thus with instruction, guidance, miracle and power. Now he was no longer there and they did not know what happened to him. Their request for “gods to go before us” was ill-considered and regressive.  Their behaviour once the calf was made – “The people sat down to eat and drink and then stood up to engage in revelry” – was undisciplined and dissolute…The Vayakhel of our parasha was quite different. Moses sought to create community by getting the people to make personal contributions to a collective project, the Mishkan, the sanctuary. In a community, individuals remain individuals. Their participation is essentially voluntary: “Let everyone whose heart moves him bring an offering.” Their differences are valued because they mean that each has something distinctive to contribute…What united them was not the dynamic of the crowd in which we are caught up in a collective frenzy, but rather a sense of common purpose, of helping to bring something into being that was greater than anyone could achieve alone.  Communities build; they do not destroy. They bring out the best in us, not the worst. They speak not to our baser emotions such as fear but to higher aspirations like building a symbolic home for the Divine Presence in their midst.” (I Believe – A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, pages 124-5)

“Judaism is a supremely social faith, built around the concept of vayak’hel, the act of gathering together as a community. Our holiest prayers cannot be said without a community. On the High Holy Days we confess publicly, together, not “my sins” but “ours.” We pray for the sick, and comfort mourners, by grouping them with “the others” who are similarly afflicted. Maimonides writes about one who “separates himself from the community”: “Even though he commits no transgression, he remains separated from the congregation of Israel, does not observe the commandments together with them, does not include himself in their troubles, nor afflict himself on their fast-days, but follows his own path as if he were one of the nations and not [a member of the Jewish people]. He has no share in the World to Come.” (Hilchot Teshuva 3:11). To be a Jew, in other words, is not just a matter of believing or behaving, but also of belonging. Martin Buber wrote a famous book about spirituality called I and Thou. It had a huge impact on Christian theologians, much less so on Jewish ones. The reason is self-evident. Judaism is less about I-and-thou than about we-and-thou. It is constructed in the first-person plural of togetherness. We know perfectly well that we are imperfect; that we lack something. Even Moses needed an Aaron and a Miriam. That is why davar shebikedusha, a holy act or prayer, requires a community (Brachot 21a), because what we lack individually, we hope to achieve collectively. All-of-us is greater than any-of-us.” (Judaism’s Life Changing Ideas pages 115-6)

“Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam become famous in the 1990s for his discovery that more Americans than ever are going ten-pin bowling, but fewer are joining clubs and leagues. He took this as a metaphor for a society that has become individualistic rather than community-minded…Years later, after extensive research, Putnam revised his thesis. A powerful store of social capital still exists and is to be found in places of worship. Survey data showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity, regardless of whether the charity is religious or secular. They are also more likely to do voluntary work for a charity, give money to a homeless person, spend time with someone who is feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, or help someone find a job. On almost every measure, they are demonstrably more altruistic than non-worshippers…Religion creates community, community crates altruism, and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good. Putnam goes so far as to speculate that an atheist who went regularly to a synagogue (perhaps because of a spouse) would be more likely to volunteer or give to charity that a religious believer who prays alone. There is something about the tenor of relationships within a community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.” (Essays on Ethics pages 140-1)

Lee, Chani Merryl & Naomi join me in wishing you Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Liebenberg

Rabbi’s YouTube message:  https://youtu.be/6BEAhQRa1XA?si=-ZJtqFmN-zkFu9gN

* PARSHAT PARAH

This Shabbat we read the third of four special parshiyot (portions) that began with Parshat Shekalim on the Shabbat coinciding with Rosh Chodesh Adar. The parsha is called parah, literally “the heifer,” and it describes the process whereby a person (or object) that came into contact with a dead body could once again attain spiritual purity (taharah). According to Jewish Law, one is rendered tameh, impure, when he touches or even comes into the proximity of a dead body. Although there is no prohibition against becoming impure – other than for cohanim who may not become impure except where the deceased is an immediate relative – there are, nevertheless, serious ramifications stemming from being in a state of impurity. One of these is that the impure individual may not enter the Temple grounds or eat consecrated meat. If a person had no business in the Temple, he could remain impure without being concerned, provided he informed others of his status. There were certain times of the year, however, when every Jew was required to purify himself and one of these was for the festival of Pesach. The Torah obligates every Jewish adult to bring a young kid or lamb to the Temple on Erev Pesach where it was prepared as a sacrifice, part of which was placed on the altar and the majority of which was eaten that night at the Pesach Seder. We read this portion now to remind us that we have to start preparing physically and spiritually for the festival of Pesach that will take place in less than 30 days.