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THE NEW WORLD
B.S.D.
Rabbi David Aaron
Excerpt from "Seeing G-d"
 Fundamental to Abraham's community consciousness was a
sense of the interdependence of all the parts within the whole. Hashem went on to tell Abraham, "Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed."
No person is an island. Your awareness influences my awareness; my awareness influences your awareness. Not only can we be a blessing or a curse to each other, but we inevitably are a blessing or a curse to each other and all those around us. If I am blocking the light of Hashem out of my world, then I am also casting a shadow on my neighbor's world. Imagine we are all in a boat together. Then one fellow, who feels thirsty, decides to drill a hole under his seat so he can
have a drink. Of course, we all start screaming: "What are you doing, we are all going to drown!"
"Mind your own business!" he snaps back. "This hole is under my seat, it's a free world and I can do as I please." This is the absurd attitude and behavior of people who are missing communal consciousness, excluding themselves from being part of the collective acknowledgment of Hashem. It's important to understand that we must be concerned not only with promotion of the awareness of Hashem, but also promotion of a communal awareness of Hashem. Many of the guidelines and directives of the Jewish spiritual tradition are for the sake of creating and strengthening community.
Once, my father and I were on the beach. We saw a man with his two sons. After they had finished their picnic, the man took the garbage, and threw it into the ocean. My father was appalled. He walked over to the man, and said, "What are you doing?" The man replied, "What's it your business?"
"What do you mean, 'What's it my business?'" my father persisted. "It's our business! What are you doing?" The man retorted, "I'm throwing the garbage out." "How can you throw your garbage into the sea?" my father demanded. "What's it your business?" the man sneered. That man had no community consciousness, no malhus. Community consciousness is the vessel that receives the light of Hashem. That man made it impossible for Hashem's presence to enter the world, to enter the sea that day, to enter the beach. He drove Hashem from the world.
A friend of mine was once at a rock concert at a stadium near Tel Aviv. The arena was packed, despite the high price of the tickets. As my friend was making his way toward his seat, he noticed a family climbing over the fence. They looked to the left and to the right to make sure that nobody was watching, and then they started lifting the kids over the fence. My friend went over to them and asked, "What are you doing?" The father of the family answered, "It's not your business." My friend looked him in the eye and said, "You looked left, you looked right, but you forgot to look up." This man actually thought that nobody, including Hashem, would see him. He lived in a world devoid of such awareness. Hashem was not in his world. And he was giving his kids their real education on that fence. He was teaching them that Hashem doesn't see. And even though Hashem does see, his kids would never see that Hashem sees. Therefore Hashem would not be in their world.
Unfortunately, these examples are not isolated instances. A sense of community is greatly lacking in most parts of the modern world. Self-sufficiency, individuality, and independence are valued more than interdependence and community. This was driven home to me during one recent visit to the
United States. I was staying with a family in a very wealthy area. I went for a walk alone on a Sunday morning. I couldn't have been more than two blocks away from my hosts' house, but I got lost. I didn't know how to get back to where they lived. So I thought, "OK, I'll ask somebody on the street for directions." Then I realized that there was nobody on the street. In my neighborhood in Jerusalem, I have to allow double the amount of time to walk anywhere because of the number of
people I "meet and greet" on the way. But here, nobody was walking on the sidewalks. So I thought, "OK, I'll knock on someone's door." Then I became acutely aware that one can't knock on someone's door, because every estate has a sign outside warning, ARMED RESPONSE, BEWARE OF DOG, or NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF OWNER. I realized that everybody here lived in his or her own world. So how was I going to get somebody to tell me how to get back?
Finally, I peered through a hedge, and saw a man sitting on his lawn. I said, "Excuse me." The guy jumped. I rushed to reassure him. "I'm harmless." I said, "I just want to know how do I get to so-and-so's house." "Never heard of him!" "OK, well, do you know where such-and-such a street is?"
"No, never heard of the street either." I said, "I'm sure this street is only about two blocks away. Are you sure you never heard of it? How long have you been living here?" "Fifteen years!"
I thought that was strange. Later, I shared this story with a fellow I know who lives in California. He said, "That's not strange. I live in a neighborhood where the homes are built on
cliffs, closely packed together. I don't know the names of my neighbors, and I'm sure they don't know my name, and I've been living there for ten years." There's no sense of community. Everybody lives in his or her own world. But if you really want to let in the light of the all-embracing, ultimate reality, then you have to plug into a collective consciousness. Through that collective consciousness, more of the light of Hashem will come into your life and the lives of others. Then, more of the blessings of beauty and truth and providence and wisdom can flow into our world.
Community doesn't mean we are all the same. A true community is like a corporation: Everyone has a different responsibility and plays a different role, yet each contributes to the whole. Indeed, the different roles are essential to the corporation's success. While the CEO may be a marketing genius, he can do nothing without the woman in product development who is the creative genius, and they both depend on the detail-conscious guy in the mail room who makes sure things go where they should. If the company consisted of nothing but marketing geniuses, it wouldn't succeed-what would it sell? If it was all creative geniuses, it wouldn't succeed because the world would remain uninformed of its products. And it wouldn't matter how organized and brilliant the top management
was, if the people on the bottom didn't do their jobs well. When people have collective consciousness, they appreciate such differences and understand each other's individual importance. In a community, uniformity depends on shared ideals and values within a structure that all respect. In a community, in a corporation, in any organizational structure, there is a commitment to unity, structure, teamwork, the mission statement, and team rules. Most of all, there is a sense of the
common good, of working together for mutual benefit, and of needing one another to achieve collective, as well as individual, goals.
In the final analysis malhus gets down to this: without a commitment to each other there is no community. Without a community, there is no community consciousness, and without a community consciousness, there can be no consciousness of Hashem. We won't see Hashem in our world.
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