Thread by @rabbisacks

Here is a thread from my Covenant & Conversation essay on #Behaalotcha called "Camp and Congregation". You can read it in full here: bit.ly/2IuewNW and download the accompanying Family Edition here: bit.ly/2WV9jYl. #ShabbatShalom

#Judaism in the past two centuries has fissured and fractured into different edot [communities]: #Orthodox and #Reform, #religious and #secular, and the many subdivisions that continue to atomise #Jewish #life into non-communicating sects and subcultures.

Yet in times of #crisis, we are still capable of heeding the call of collective #responsibility, knowing as we do that Jewish fate tends to be indivisible. No Jew, to paraphrase John Donne, is an island, entire of him- or herself.

We are joined by the gossamer strands of collective #memory, and these can sometimes lead us back to a sense of shared #destiny.

The duality was given its first expression this week in Beha’alotecha, with the command: “Make two trumpets of silver; make them of hammered work. They shall serve you to summon the congregation [edah], and cause the camps [machanot] to journey.”

Sometimes the clarion call speaks to our sense of faith. We are God’s people, His emissaries and ambassadors, charged with making His presence real in the world by healing deeds and holy lives.

At other times the trumpet that sounds and summons us is the call of fate: Jewish lives endangered in #Israel or the #Diaspora by the unremitting hostility of those who call themselves children of #Abraham yet claim that they, not we, are his true heirs.

Whichever sound the silver instruments make, they call on that duality that makes #Jews and #Judaism inseparable. However deep the divisions between us, we remain one #family in #fate and #faith. When the trumpet sounds, it sounds for us.