Community is the unspoken engine of morality (including Shavuot tie-in) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, June 01, 2025

Community is the unspoken engine of morality (including Shavuot tie-in)

In my last post on the topic of Jewish ethics for the world, I discussed the importance of community in the context of extending “kiddush Hashem” to the world, and noted that community is a missing piece of most universal ethics models.

I didn’t go far enough.

Community is an essential component for any truly universal ethical system to work.

For a philosophy to work for everyone, it cannot only be a list of values. It needs to give people a reason to adopt the system.

Too often, with universalistic ethics, that can turn the ethical system into a coercive system - which itself is immoral. But how can you incentivize people to choose to adopt a morality system when the only choices are either to force them or to allow them to leave at will?

The answer is to look more closely at how Jewish ethics works.

Unlike Christian or Islamic ethics, Jewish ethics were not built with the entire world in mind. It was created for Israel and the Jewish people, who view themselves as a small, defined tribe or family. In other words, a community.

In Judaism the mitzvot (commandments) are commonly divided into two categories: those between man and God (bein adam l’Makom) and those between people (bein adam l’chaveiro.) What is not often mentioned is that while the obligations between man and God are covenantal, so are those between people - in a different way. There are covenantal style obligations and expectations between the individual and the community. The community takes care of its members and the members take care of communal needs.

When secularizing Jewish ethics, the covenantal piece between man and God obviously does not apply. But the concept of covenant bridges the gap between coercive ethical systems and those with no penalties for ignoring the values. People feel obligated to their communities naturally, a secular equivalent of the Talmudic phrase “All Israel is responsible for one another.”

In the Jewish context, the covenantal nature of the two are linked closely. A celebration, mourning, prayer all require a quorum of people (a minyan) to be considered complete. Community is not just convenient but sacred.

For the secular world, community isn’t quite that essential - but it is pretty close. There is a reason why prisoners are punished with solitary confinement. There is a reason why we regard senior citizens who cannot physically leave their homes as tragic figures. Losing community means losing a part of the self. A covenant does not have to be with God - it is also any ongoing, mutual pledge that binds people in shared purpose and accountability.

Ethics itself is largely dependent on being around other people. Much of ethics are built on the assumption that the person has relationships with others. The missing piece is understanding how critical community is to everyone - and how community provides the incentives for doing good that universalistic systems simply cannot match. A hermit is not an ethical person because a hermit has few ethical challenges.

Telling someone that they must do good for the betterment of mankind comes across as utopian and, to an extent, close to false. Dropping litter on the ground is not going to materially affect the world, and even knowing the consequences if everyone would do the same doesn’t affect the personal calculus in making that ethical choice. But if this is your community’s space, and one of your fellows will be the one who must pick it up, and you are not holding up your end of the deal - which is the covenant - then you are more likely to think twice and do the right thing.

It is difficult for people to feel responsible for the world. It is natural for people to feel responsible for their fellows.

When the universalist ethical systems fail, it is not because their values are bad. Most of them have values that are praiseworthy. But that is not enough - you need the framework, you need an engine, and the covenant that goes along with belonging to a community is the engine that allows one to practice these values, willingly.

What about those who can’t join the community for whatever reason - shut-ins, the sick, the mentally ill?

Jewish ethics, again, offers the answer: the true test of a community is how it seeks to include those on the margins. Commandments like bikur cholim (visiting the sick), pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captives), and the countless laws of hospitality and compassion place the burden of inclusion on the community itself. The real test and greatness of a covenantal community is not how it celebrates the joiners, but how it seeks, honors, and embraces those least able to participate.

The holiday of Shavuot is almost upon us. We tell the story of the ultimate outcast - Ruth. She loses her husband, her homeland, her people, but she wants desperately to be part of a covenantal community. She tells her mother-in-law, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” She took on both covenants, that between Jews and God and between Jews and the Jewish community. Even so she is an outcast and lonely, not welcomed as a full member of the community - until the kindness of a Jew brings in this outsider from Moab into the Jewish community where she ends up the ancestor of a family of kings. There are many lessons in the story of Ruth, but the importance of community and welcoming the marginalized into the community is a constant theme throughout.

So we have a third way in moral systems: not coercive universality, and not opt-in universalism, but a covenant of shared responsibility between the individual and their fellows.

The Jewish ethical view of communal responsibility is arguably much more demanding. The phrase I quoted above, “All Israel is responsible for one another,” can be translated as “All Israel are guarantors for one another.” That is a much higher bar for one’s obligations to community.

As we mentioned previously, community can be defined however one wants. Communities can be groups of people with similar interests, people who went to the same school, people who were born in the same neighborhood, people who join the same health club. Even online, people can help each other in many ways (although they are no substitute for physical community.)

Modern psychology and sociology confirm what tradition knows. Meaning, purpose, and ethical action flourish in belonging to something greater than oneself. Rules and values are resilient only when communities enforce, model, and celebrate them.

Not only that, but modern moral philosophy proves this as well. The most successful examples of modern ethics in action are not universal cases but those that are geared towards specific communities. Professional codes, like those for journalists, doctors or lawyers, work precisely because of members of these professions belong to a community. Breaking the ethical codes results in making the violators pariahs besides the professional consequences.

Similarly, co-ops, unions, trade guilds, fraternities - all of these are communities that create ethical codes for their members. The codes are not meant to be universal but particular - which is the entire reason why they work while their universalistic counterparts fall apart so easily.

Community isn’t an optional component of people’s lives and relationships. It is central, even more important to most people than their shared humanity with the entire world. Community provides the impetus that make people want to act morally, and the underlying reason is the unstated covenant between the community and the individual, to everyone’s benefit.

This is why a truly universal ethical system must be covenantal, and in the secular world this means it must be lived in community.

This is not just a Jewish insight. But Jewish interpersonal ethics is based on being part of a community, which is why it is successful. This can - and indeed must - be an axiom of any universal ethical system.