Collectives are tricky things. They have a life of their own.
It’s hard enough dealing with individuals. Getting along with our siblings and cousins. Our schoolmates and roommates and spouses. Our children, God knows. And our fellow congregants too.
It’s hard enough understanding them or even having the slightest notion of what moves them or motivates them. Why sometimes we get along so well and sometimes we don’t.
But moving to the level of collectives becomes mysterious. What is the personality of Ner Shalom, for instance? How will Ner Shalom respond to something? We might predict it based on what we know of the leadership. But you never know. Because the whole is greater than – or at least different from – the sum of its parts.
When we scale up to tribes and nations, I often shrug my shoulders, unable to understand why they do what they do.
If we compare a nation to a body and its people to the cells, we might ask if there is a cell that is actually running the show? In the human body we might point to the brain and say that is the control center; that cluster of cells is in charge. And that makes us feel good because we think of the brain as the seat of our intelligence and our reason. But the brain is also the source of our deep reflexes, our fear responses, our fight-or-flight. So noticing that the brain is in charge doesn’t mean that we will respond rationally in any given situation.
Isn’t that so for nations too? There may be a Prime Minister or High Lama or King or President. There might be cabinets and parliaments and legislatures. But are they clearly calling the shots? Aren’t they also entangled in a range of individual motivations and ambitions and fears and history? Plus they are responding to a population that is similarly entangled and complex. Together there is a collective impulse that may or may not be what any individual would want, given a chance to breathe in and collect themselves.
I ask this question for obvious reasons. I ask because of my bewilderment at what is happening in the Middle East and how it is still going on. Speaking about the collective that is the State of Israel, I can say that it is engaging in acts that don’t seem to be in concert with the desires of many or maybe any of my individual Israeli friends and loved ones. Instead I get the sense of a collective moving like, I don’t know what, a great lumbering creature responding as if cornered, answering threat with threat and violence with violence, unawareness of the magnitude of wounds it is causing.
I have also noticed people – good people – willing to condemn a collective or wish harm upon a nation that I think, I hope, they would never think to wish on an individual.
And none of this should come as a surprise. A case in point is this week’s Torah portion – Shemot. It is the first portion of the Book of Exodus, and it opens with the recitation of the names of the sons of Jacob who went to Egypt. These are the Joseph’s brothers who arrived during the famine and settled there. Torah says their names even though we already know them, maybe just to point out that they were individuals with individual identities. They were:
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah;
Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin;
Dan, Naftali, Gad, and Asher.
There are the eleven of them and, as Torah tells us, Joseph, who was already in Egypt.
Counting their families, there were a total of 70 descendants of Jacob who came to Egypt. And then, Torah tells us, that generation died. And that marks a shift in our story, where we move from being individuals to a collective. We stop being referred to by any individual names but only as the people. And the people, the Children of Israel, multiplied and grew until they were a large population within Egypt.
And then, says Torah, a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.
You might remember that Joseph was in close personal relationship with his pharaoh. He interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams and had come to be Pharaoh’s right hand man and favorite. He saw Egypt and the entire region through a seven-year famine.
But now, it is later. Maybe not the next pharaoh but five pharaohs down the line. And at last there is one who does not remember Joseph the individual. Does not remember the complexity of this person, and Joseph was indeed complex. His name means “extra” and Joseph was so extra.
Instead the new pharaoh only sees a collective, a large minority population. And his instinct, his reflex, is that of fear. Fear that he doesn’t have the loyalty of the Israelites and that if Egypt ends up in a war, the Israelites could rise up from within and support the enemy.
So Pharaoh, the individual, proposes enslaving the Israelites, as a collective. And the Egyptians, as a collective, do what pharaoh asks.
It’s a fascinating moment in Torah. This shift from our mythic ancestors as individuals to our mythic ancestors as a nation among nations. And soul-searching and moral reckoning are generally not the province of nations. When we lose track of the individual human, that is when it is possible to become inhuman, and to do so with impunity. And so the Egyptians as a body are able to act monstrously toward the Children of Israel without the inconvenience of qualms. Later in Torah, so are the Children of Israel.
But I would like to amend this discouraging sketch of national collectives being uncontrollable bodies reacting to stimuli in the basest way.
There’s a Jewish concept that arises in rabbinic literature of antiquity, and that is the concept of the sar. It’s the same Hebrew word from which we get the name of Sarah our matriarch. Sar means prince or maybe minister in a governmental, non-clergy sense. But here it means a more-than-human entity. The idea is that every collective, every nation, has an angel that represents it. Maybe the angel is divinely assigned or maybe the angel emerges from the collectivity itself. But while the nation is scrambling below, the sar has a higher and broader view. It can represent the best instincts of its people, the instincts that sometimes get lost in times of terrible trouble. In some ways the sar is responsive to the mood of the people and in someways the sar holds our highest aspirations and best natures.
The name of the sar of the people of Israel is Yisrael – the name that Jacob was assigned when he wrestled with an angel.
In a moment such as this one we might offer our prayers to the sar, the angel of Israel, seeking guidance and protection. We might ask her to call us and uplift us to be our best selves. We might ask her to pursue peace in our name. We might ask her to maintain the broad view and gentle touch that is hard for us, as a collective, to muster in a moment of crisis. We might ask her to remind us of love.
Collectives are tricky things. But the angel of this collective, like the angel of this congregation, is listening.