Shared responsibility for society

Rabbi Ammos Chorny

Following the festival of Shavuot, most congregations the world-over focus on the words of Parshat Naso, where we find a grammatical curiosity that teaches us an especially important lesson. In Numbers 5:6-7, the Torah states that when a man or a woman sins, they shall confess their sin. Now, in modern parlance, we use the third person plural “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, so the uniqueness of this verse might easily be overlooked. In Biblical Hebrew, however, the third person plural is just that: plural. Why does the text of the Torah move from singular to plural in the middle of this commandment?

The answer given by some commentators is that the shift to plural teaches collective responsibility. When someone commits a sin, others in the community should also ask forgiveness and do teshuvah (repentance), for perhaps there was something they could have done, through education, community services or by paying closer attention, that might have been able to prevent the wrongdoing.

That is not to say that others in the community bear direct and equal responsibility for someone else’s sin. Rather, the lesson is that, as the sages teach, kol yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh — “all Israel are bound to one another.” Further, in the same way, all members of a community – any community – are bound to one another.

Our actions ultimately affect those around us. We play a role in shaping the community that we live in, its accepted values, its norms, the communal structures through which we function. It may be that we never had the opportunity to literally stop that person from committing that sin, but did we play a role in creating a society that enabled his action? Or did we fail to work for the communal norms that might have made such an action less likely in our community?

This is what it means to bear collective responsibility. We each are accountable in some measure for the type of society in which we live. That is why the sages taught al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur – do not separate yourself from the community. Engage with it and help create a community that reflects the values of Torah and the will of God.

We play a role in shaping the community that we live in, its accepted values, its norms, the communal structures through which we function.

The lesson of shared responsibility for society is one that we need right now. Our actions can literally save or take away lives. It is extremely easy to look outside of ourselves to identify who we think is guilty of racism, wanton violence and the indifference that has wrought so much suffering of late. It is much harder to ask ourselves what could we have done to help fight racism, to create better understanding, to demand accountability from our government? What role could we play individually in creating the kind of society that we aspire to?

We may not be able to single-handedly make these problems go away, but each of us can play a role in the struggle to make our world a better place — le taken Olam!

May we be ever cognizant of the power we have to shape our world, and may we use that power for good.

Rabbi Ammos Chorny serves at Beth Tikvah.