Reclaiming Community in a Fractured World (Sukkot 5786)

All Jewish holidays emphasize the importance of community, but none does so as much as Sukkot. On Passover, for example, the main celebration is familial, and during the High Holidays, we reflect on the way we’ve treated our friends, family, and neighbors, but on Sukkot, the focus of the holiday is on coming together as a collective. While individual families build their own sukkot, there are communal sukkot everywhere. Receiving guests, even strangers in the sukkah, is a mitzvah. Yes, our seders are open to the needy, but receiving guests is a secondary aspect therein.

Beyond the aforementioned mitzvah, many of the ancient customs of Sukkot are designed to make us feel the centrality of community. Simchat Bet Hashoeva was an event in which the people would march in a joyful procession to draw life-sustaining water from the Gihon Spring to the Temple Mount. It was, the Mishna tells us, an event in which the hierarchies of ancient Israel didn’t apply, as though to signify the intrinsic equality of every member of the people. It was a clear sign that the entire community was “in it together.”

Another ancient custom was the Hakhel (“assembly” or “ingathering”), a meeting of the entire community every seventh Sukkot, in which the king and the people were required to study the Torah together. Here too, everybody was supposed to attend, including children and foreigners, for they were also part of the community of Israel.

Since Robert Putnam wrote his classic Bowling Alone, we have come to understand how the weakening of the sense of community has been eroding American society and our capacity to live together. As Francis Fukuyama wrote, prophetically, “A nation’s prosperity and stability rest not only on laws and institutions, but on the social capital of trust — the shared values and norms of community that make cooperation possible.”

It has long been assumed that community is weakening because of the rampant individualism of our time.  Conservative thinker Patrick Deneen wrote, “Liberalism has failed because it has succeeded: it has liberated individuals from family, from community, from tradition — and left us in a wasteland of loneliness and dislocation.” Progressives, surprisingly, agree. Here’s left-leaning political philosopher Michael Sandel: “When the common good is eclipsed by individual striving, community withers. And when community withers, resentment festers, fueling the politics of anger that disfigures our public life.”

Folks like Putnam and Fukuyama warned about this before the advent of social media and its community-torching impact. Initially, it was thought that social media would disprove them – after all, it was meant to be a tool for building community. Alas, social media ultimately reinforced isolation and dislocation – replacing genuine community with online clickbait and trolling, fragmenting us further by ushering us into echo chambers and poisoning civic dialogue by rewarding outrage over empathy

However, individualism (and social media-induced unsociability) is only one part of the problem. Two additional forces of our time are destroying our idea of community. One is the universalist, multicultural paradigm; the other is neo-tribalism. These two tendencies are, perhaps, sneakier and more pernicious because they create an illusion of community. In universalism, we are supposed to shed our particularity and develop an allegiance to humanity as a whole. That is a fallacy of course, because humanity is an abstraction. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote, “The globalizing thrust of modernity dismantles the bonds of community in the name of universalism, but it offers no real substitute.” You can’t have solidarity with “humanity” if you haven’t first developed solidarity toward your own. Or to put it another way, you can’t feel true empathy for a tragedy you see on the news half a world away when you can’t do the same for the family across the street.

Neo-tribalism, on the other hand, offers another poor substitute. Matteo Maffesoli, author of The Time of the Tribes, wrote, “The decline of institutional communities has given rise to neo-tribes — emotional, fragmented, and ephemeral groupings. They provide belonging, but without responsibility, and can just as easily turn hostile.” The neo-tribalism of today consists of groups who believe the same online conspiracy theories. In the best of cases, it binds some together solely by excluding others. It is a tribe based on what it is against rather than what it is for. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, “Neo-tribalism is community without covenant… and it cannot sustain a free society.”

For Jews, as Sukkot shows, the idea of community is central. And yet, we too live in these times in which communities are disintegrating, and our community is also a victim of these three phenomena.

We are as individualistic as the next person. We have our own pseudo-universalists, who think that solidarity with our own people is anathema, and that “humanity” always takes precedence over their fellow Jews. And sadly, we have our own neo-tribals, who present a distorted view of Judaism based on hatred for the other.

The beauty of the Jewish concept of community lay in the delicate balance it offered between these elements. We are a people with a strong particular identity, but have a universalist vocation, since our patriarch Abraham was tasked with being a blessing “for all the families of the Earth.” Our particularity is necessary for us to give something unique to the world. We are indeed a tribe, but a tribe in which foreigners are loved and welcomed, and a tribe bound by a common purpose and a positive vision of the world, not just hatred for those who are different. Finally, we honor the individual, since we believe that each human being is created in the image of God and therefore has, as an individual, inalienable dignity. Yet we believe that, paraphrasing Hillel, when we exist only for ourselves, we are nothing.

For Judaism, community is the umami of living together – the element that adds depth and balances all flavors of existence: the individual, the universal, the particular, and the tribal. It harmonizes rights and obligations, freedom and responsibility, togetherness and solitude, inward looking with openness to the world.

Tragically, Sukkot will be forever linked to the memory of October 7, 2023. But that day, too, should make us reflect on the importance of community.

John Green, in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, recalls his work as a chaplain in a children’s hospital. In that role, he was present when terrible news was given to parents. He noted that some parents, upon hearing the news, collapsed into themselves, while others collapsed onto each other.

Faced with the biggest tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people since the Shoah, faced with a world that is more threatening than ever in recent memory, we will, at times, collapse. But we can choose to collapse onto each other. That’s the choice that Israeli civil society made on October 8^th. While political leaders stoked division, Israelis demonstrated the community's capacity to provide relief and hope. We have short memories, but it wasn’t the grandstanding of politicians that kept the country afloat in its darkest hour; it was the power of the community.

But what can we do, as funders and leaders, to strengthen – or perhaps save – our concept of community? That could be the subject of an entire book, but I’ll offer some headlines.

Communities need serious discussions about who is in it and who is out, because, by its very definition, communities have boundaries. Having a conversation about the boundaries of community that doesn’t descend into hatred is essential in our times of “anything goes.”

Communities need shared norms and standards, because without them, trust, the glue that holds communities together, can’t exist. 

Communities need to know their shared history and be bound by rituals, texts, and common practices; that’s why there won’t be a community without significant investments in Jewish education.

Communities need spaces of physical proximity. Yes, the virtual world can be an addition, but there’s no replacement for the power of being together.

And finally, in times of entitlement and egotism, community means rights and obligations.

In our positions of leadership – or even without them – we have enormous agency in each of these dimensions. It’s on us.

Thousands of years ago, our sources warned us against isolation, and encouraged us to build links of inter-dependency and solidarity.

For if they fall, one will lift up his companion;
but woe to the one who falls and has not another to lift him up.
Again, if two lie together, they keep warm,
but how can one keep warm alone?
And if someone might overpower one alone, two can resist him.

That text, of eternal poignancy, is from the book of Ecclesiastes. You won’t be surprised to learn that we read it during Sukkot.