We Are One

 

 Looking at Sakaria, I was reminded of the IDF soldiers I had recently met on my trip to Israel. The Sikh community is much like ours. Small; like us. Maligned; too often. Family oriented. And like us, believe in caring for the other as well as themselves. I see the Sikh community as great friends of the Jewish people. 

It was glorious to see young people there; young children brought by their parents so that they can learn, almost by osmosis, of the importance of Israel and the meaning of caring for one’s brother; also the name of the operation to find our children. Because they are our children. For we, the Jewish people, are one people: Am Yisrael.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain tells us to look at Abraham to understand who we are. The Torah says that God told Abraham “Walk before me.” (Gen 17-1) The Rabbi interprets that to mean taking collective responsibility as well as moral and personal. And he tells us that “They will stumble over each other” ( Lev. 26: 36), teaches us that “all Israelites are responsible for one another.” 

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz sees us as a family. “Throughout the Bible and Jewish literature, the Jewish people are referred to as ‘the Children of Israel’ a reference to the fact that we are all the physical or spiritual descendants of the Patriarch Jacob who was later called Israel. In other words, we are part of his extended family.”

There are responsibilities and obligations that come with being one family. As we care for each other, we also share in all our joys and sorrows, collectively as Am Yisrael, Kol Yisrael.

I recently reread Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik’s Kol Dodi Dofek: It is the Voice of My Beloved That Knocketh, in which he reminds us over and over that we are one. “Haverim kol Yisrael. All Israel are knit together.

He says we learn from Psalm 91:15:”I will join him in trouble” that “There is unity.” We must share in the troubles of our community, a burden that we must all carry. WE. AM YISRAEL.

He tells us in his avuncular way that “A collective ethico-halakhic responsibility devolved upon the entire Jewish people. The individuals coalesce into one ethico-halakhic unit, possessed of one conscience…all Jews are guarantors of one another.”

He said “A special covenant was made in order to effect the mutual arevut (suretyship) of all Jews for one another…From peoplehood, the covenant of mutual arevut directly followed…We are all mutually responsible for one another, we are all each other’s guarantors, as the verse states: ‘but the things that are revealed belong unto us and our children for ever, that we may do all the words of the Law‘ ” (Deuteronomy 29:28).

He is telling us that we are never alone, left to fend for ourselves. No one will be abandoned as long as we remember that we are responsible for each other: “If boiling water is poured upon the head of a Jew in Morocco, the fashionably attired Jew in Paris or London has to scream at the top of his voice, and through feeling the pain he will remain faithful to his people.”

We have been one family, held together over the centuries and the millennia by a collective sense of joy and sorrow, shame and guilt. It is in our emotional DNA. Last night, at the rally, I felt that oneness, again.

We were all at the mountain where the cloud hovered, and the Presence was felt, and the Word was given. And all of us, we, together brought those revolutionary morals and values out of the desert, what Thomas Cahill calls the Gifts of the Jews to humanity. “The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside-our outlook and our inner life. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact-new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice-are gifts of the Jews.”

We must never forget our eternal, absolute response to God: “We hear and we will do.” We hear the call of our Jewish family in Israel and we will do whatever it takes to BringBackOurBoys.