מחויבותנו לפליטים מכוח סיפור יציאת מצרים
- Text 1: INDIVIDUAL VERSUS COMMUNITY NEEDS
- Text 2: CONFESSION LITURGY
- Text 3: ALL OF ISRAEL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ONE ANOTHER
- Text 4: MISSION STATEMENT: JDC
Key Educational Questions for this Section:
- For whom are we responsible, as humans and as Jews?
- What does the Jewish tradition suggest to us about responsibility?
- What form/s does Jewish responsibility take?
Text: Individual Versus Community Needs
This simple Rabbinic text is a complex and demanding statement about our personal responsibilities for the collective.
When the community is in trouble, a person should not say, “I will go into my house and eat and drink and be at peace with myself”.
Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Ta’anit 11a
Explanation of text:
This text is taken from the Babylonian Talmud, the classic collection that was developed primarily out of the scholars of Babylonian from the third to the sixth centuries when the Babylonian Jewish community was the largest and most important Diaspora community in the world. The concepts and idea contained in the Babylonian Talmud are still seen today, as the most important foundation principles on which Rabbinic Judaism came to be based.
If we try and understand the Judaism’s attitude towards the Jewish relationship between the individual and the collective, it is essential to examine Rabbinic Judaism’s position and in this regard there is no better place to start than with the Talmud.
The whole of the rabbinic world-view that developed as the basis for Jewish culture and life through the centuries is soaked through with the concept of the individual’s responsibility for the community as well as the community’s responsibility towards the individual members. Here we examine the first of these ideas.
The text puts forward a very clear position. Paralleling the later famous phrase of John F. Kennedy from his 1961 inaugural Presidential speech “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,” the Rabbis come out with a stronger statement in the form of a clear ideological directive: when the community is in trouble, you have a responsibility to take your part in facing the challenge.
It is not for you – you have no right – to ignore the communal needs and to retreat into the private world of your personal needs. A Jewish person must not only feel their community within them and around them, they must understand that it is their responsibility to act on behalf of that community and to see the community’s needs as their own.
This comment is one of many rabbinic statements on the issue and the attitude is consistent and clear cut. Being part of the community means acting for it when it is in need. You must feel that it is yours and that you have responsibility for it.
It is important to stress the reasons for the development of the concept, and the emphasis placed on it by traditional rabbinic culture that developed at the end of the second Temple period. It was clear to the Rabbis, those architects of Jewish collective norms in the period following the destruction of the second Temple, that it was necessary to impress on the Jewish people the fact that the nation would rise or fall together.
The Jewish People were entering a period of national crisis and if everyone did not understand their responsibility to the collective, there could be no happy end to the Jewish story. The Jews had to be welded as much as possible into a single unit that would aid each other whenever possible. The Jews were cast out into a hostile world without the safety of a sovereign state to help them and protect them.
All around them, throughout the different countries of the world, lurked potential dangers. Without the feeling of collective responsibility for the individual and individual responsibility for the collective, the future would be very bleak.
In addition it must be remembered that the rabbinic understanding of why the second Temple had been destroyed was not that that had been caused by the might of the Romans, but rather by the hatred and factionalism that had weakened the people and allowed their enemies to overcome them. The Temple, they stated bluntly, had fallen because of שינאת חינם – needless hatred. The future had to be based on something very different.
It should be remembered, that the Rabbis were not concerned with Jewish survival for the sake of mere continuity. They were driven by a sense of a Jewish mission in the world, a mission to bring the idea of a single God to the world, and an attempt to provide the world with a model of godly life.
This was essential for the future of the whole world. For that to happen, the survival of the Jewish people was essential. That, in turn, depended on Jewish solidarity and mutual responsibility: כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה.
All this sounds very nice to some but it is a demanding philosophy that might not always be comfortable for us. Are we to give up our individual needs for the sake of the collective whenever the community is “in trouble”? Perhaps we need to remember the equally famous Rabbinic phrase which begins אם אין אני לי מי לי וכשאני לעצמי מה אני… – If I am not for myself, who will be [for me] and if I am [only] for myself, what am I? (Ethics of the Fathers) It is a typical “golden rule” statement about the need for balance in our lives: we must not only be for ourselves (echoing the previous statement) and we must think about the collective but we also have to balance this with our responsibility towards ourselves. It is all a question of balance!
Extension Activities
Key Educational Questions for this Section:
- For whom are we responsible, as humans and as Jews?
- What does the Jewish tradition suggest to us about responsibility?
- What form/s does Jewish responsibility take?
Text: Confession Liturgy from Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement
אָשַׁמְנוּ, בָּגַדְנוּ, גָּזַלְנוּ, דִּבַּרְנוּ דפִי, הֶעֱוִינוּ, וְהִרְשַׁעְנוּ, זַדְנוּ, חָמַסְנוּ, טָפַלְנוּ שֶׁקֶר, יָעַצְנוּ רָע, כִּזַּבְנוּ, לַצְנוּ, מָרַדְנוּ, נִאַצְנוּ, סָרַרְנוּ, עָוִינוּ, פָּשַׁעְנוּ, צָרַרְנוּ, קִשִּׁינוּ ערֶף, רָשַׁעְנוּ, שִׁחַתְנוּ, תִּעַבְנוּ, תָּעִינוּ, תִּעְתָּעְנוּ.
Ashamnu – we have trespassed, bagadnu – we have dealt treacherously, gazalnu – we have robbed, dibarnu dofi – we have spoken slander, he’evinu – we have acted perversely, v’hirshanu – we have done wrong, zadnu – we have acted presumptuously, hamasnu – we have done violence, tafalnu sheker – we have practiced deceit, ya’atsnu ra – we have counseled evil, kizavnu – we have spoken falsehood, latsnu – we have scoffed, maradnu – we have revolted, ni’atsnu – we have blasphemed, sararnu – we have rebelled, avinu – we have committed iniquity, pashanu – we have transgressed, tsararnu – we have oppressed, kishinu oref – we have been stiff necked, rashanu – we have acted wickedly, shichatnu – we have dealt corruptly, ti’avnu – we have committed abomination, ta’inu – we have gone astray, titanu – we have led others astray.
Siddur and Yom Kippur Liturgy
Explanation of Text:
The Ashamnu prayer is part of the daily ritual of the traditional Jew, appearing as a silently-said part of the morning service.
It is more familiar to many Jews as a prayer said on the High Holy Days and most especially notably on Yom Kippur. In that context it is said loudly and demonstratively as part of the general confession of sins which all Jews are required to say. As a prayer it is known from the 8th century although some of its roots are biblical and can be seen as part of the prayer of Daniel in the ninth chapter of the book that bears his name.
The reason it is brought here is that it forms a classic example of a tendency that is very central in Jewish prayer, namely, the fact that so much of it is said in the plural form rather than in the singular. Prayer in theory might perhaps be expected to be predominantly in the singular since it is supposed to be an expression of a personal relationship with God.
When one prays, the assumption is that you are talking personally to God – or at least trying to make some kind of a personal connection. But in Judaism more often than not it is the plural forms that are used when addressing God. It is as if the collective rather than the individual expresses itself in prayer through the mouth of the individual, or perhaps more accurately, prayer happens when the individual submerges her or himself in the collective.
The roots of this ideology are in the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, but the Rabbis, who were the people who, more than any other group, developed the prayer service and Jewish liturgy as whole, extended and deepened the idea.
The Ashamnu prayer is a superb example of the practice, because it is a confession of sin. What could be more personal than a confession of this nature? The whole idea of a confession can be expressed as the need of the individual to confess his or her own sins.
But in the “Ashamnu” we don’t express our own sins, or if we do, it is done within the framework of a communal confession in which the individual Jew takes responsibility for the sins of the collective, whether or not they are things which the individual feels that he or she has done themself.
Why on earth would an individual confess sins which he or she has not performed? – because of the idea that communal responsibility, responsibility for the collective, rests with the individual. The Biblical idea that God judges the collective, seeing the collective as an entity which either does right or does wrong and calling down reward or punishment on the collective according to the behavior of the individuals inside it, is here affirmed.
In the previous text we saw how the individual is expected to take responsibility for the collective: here we see that the collective will be judged by the deeds of its individuals and the whole collective will carry the responsibility and will be rewarded or punished.
Thus, from a theological point of view, the whole community will rise or fall together, held accountable for the actions of its constituent members. In the traditional Jewish outlook, the fate of the individual is inextricably tied up with the fate of the collective of which he or she is a part.
Extension Activities
Collective Responsibility without Limits
Key Educational Questions for this Section:
- For whom are we responsible, as humans and as Jews?
- What does the Jewish tradition suggest to us about responsibility?
- What form/s does Jewish responsibility take?
Text: All of Israel is Responsible for One Another
And for all transgressions of the Torah is not the whole world punished? Lo, it is written, “And they shall stumble one upon another” (Leviticus 26) – one because of the iniquity of the other; this teaches us that all Israel are responsible for one another. [Soncino translation] (Shavuot 39A)
A quick contextualization: the phrase kol yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh means, “all of the people Israel are responsible for one another.” It originates from the Talmud (Shevuot 39a) where it is discussing the potential chain reaction of sin that occurs from one to the other (see also Sanhedrin 27b). The two moral implications of the phrase are that 1) Jews must stop Jews when they are on the verge of sinning and 2) that Jews must care for the basic well-being and needs (food, housing, clothes) of other Jews…Pointing out the original Talmudic source, however, is important because it differs from the later rabbinic versions to conclude with zeh ba-zeh instead of zeh la-zeh [which] alters the translation to say, “all of the people of Israel are in it [i.e., “mixed up”] with each other.”
Being “mixed up with each other” can be understood in two ways. Rabbi and philosopher, Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993) claimed that Jews are bound by two covenants: a covenant of fate and a covenant of destiny. The covenant of fate is involuntary and it inescapably unites Jews through shared history and shared suffering, which are linked to shared responsibility toward other Jews. In contrast, the covenant of destiny is voluntary and it represents the individual commitment of each Jew (and ultimately the Jews as a whole) to aspire toward and maintain Jewish values and dreams…
Soloveitchik’s covenant of fate holds that Jews are inextricably bound together and responsible for each other, even our actions. This is true. Jews are linked by their past, as a nation that was brought from slavery to freedom; that experienced a destruction of a Temple and national center; that blossomed with creativity through Rabbinic literature and sagely wisdom; that endured excommunications, pogroms and a Holocaust; and that witnessed the birth a Jewish State and a strong and healthy American Jewish community. All Jews are united by this past…Soloveitchik’s second covenant, the covenant of destiny, however, leaves room for diversity and pluralism among Jews. Accordingly, we share mutual responsibility for the Jewish people and to represent Jewish ideals, yet we are simultaneously each individually responsible for doing it in our own way…We cannot entirely take responsibility for every Jew and every Jewish community – that is God’s job not ours.
(Rabbi Paul Steinberg, myjewishlearning.com)
Explanation of Text:
This text anchors the directive of kol yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh (all Israel are responsible for each other) in Soloveitchik’s conceptual framing of the covenant of fate and the covenant of destiny. The joint mutual responsibility Jews should feel for each other is based on a long history of shared sufferings and celebrations they experienced throughout history. From that platform grows a covenant of fate requiring every Jew to feel responsible for the well-being of every individual Jew as well as the Jewish collective. It also calls for responsibility for the way all Jews act in the world.
The covenant of destiny which is voluntary, forward looking and vision setting, places a responsibility for the Jewish ethical and social well-being. Every Jew is responsible that individually and collectively Jews pursue Jewish values and their collective destiny reflects the Jewish ethos and vision.
Extension Activities
Key Educational Questions for this Section:
- For whom are we responsible, as humans and as Jews?
- What does the Jewish tradition suggest to us about responsibility?
- What form/s does Jewish responsibility take?
Text: Mission Statement, JDC
JDC is the world’s leading Jewish humanitarian assistance organization, works on behalf of the North American Jewish community and others around the globe to fulfill the following mission:
- Rescue Jews in danger or crisis
- Relief for Jews in dire poverty and need
- Renewal of Jewish life and communities
- Partnering with Israel to ensure that its most vulnerable people can participate in its success
(JDC Mission statement)
Explanation of Text:
The Joint Distribution Committee’s mission statement is a clear reflection of the notion of Kol Yisrael Areivim zeh La-zeh (all Israel are responsible for each other). The mission statement is expressed in very concrete and practical terms: “Rescue Jews in crisis”, relieve “Jews in dire poverty and need”, assist Israel’s vulnerable and “renewal of Jewish life and communities” . But when you ask yourself what value does that mission statement express and what justifies the existence of an organization whose raison d’être is to provide those services, the answer is clearly the notion of Jewish joint responsibility. Indeed it is not surprising that the organization’s website introduces it in the following way: Since 1914, JDC has exemplified that all Jews are responsible for one another and for improving the well-being of vulnerable people around the world.
It is important to note that while being an American based Jewish organization JDC operates throughout the globe. Its mandate is global and it has provided an inspiring modern expression of an age-old Jewish value.
Extension Activities
All of Israel is Responsible for One Another
