When one sees oneself as an isolated individual, cast in the Western mold of what sociologists call sovereign selfhood, there is no reliable Rock to which to cling when one’s own learning and reasoning processes break down. As the social psychologist Roy Baumeister teaches, the self is not meant to carry its own weight.
The message of personal participation in community behavior and fate is rather, as Jewish theology teaches, that we must see our individual selves as irreducibly communal. We will perish as individuals, or we will survive because we come to see that we are part of all of existence. It gives us our meaning even as we “till it and tend it,” as the first mitzvah of Genesis commands.
May we learn what we need, each of us, to understand to survive and thrive. Foremost, that we are not meant to do this alone.- Rabbi A
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