I am often reminded at this time of year that our community thrives when it stands together.

One of the great privileges of my role as a leader of our Jewish community is the chance to engage with people from across perspectives. I hear gratitude and appreciation, along with anxieties and concerns.

The positive feedback I encounter includes so much appreciation for the vibrancy, diversity, and resiliency of our Jewish community here in Greater Boston.

At the same time, with an increasingly toxic political climate here in the U.S. and in Israel, I hear – and I share – real fears about the unraveling of the social and communal fabric that holds us together.

This is a threat to any society and to democracy; but it feels acutely scary to Jews who intuitively know just how small our global Jewish community is and how little we can afford to divide ourselves further. We also know from our history that, despite great threats from those who seek to do us harm in every generation, one of the greatest threats to our continued survival and thriving is “sinat chinam,” the baseless hatred for one another that weakens us from within.

The High Holidays are an intensely personal time focused on reflection, introspection, and the work of self-improvement that each of us must do on our own. There are moments in the liturgy when I feel like it’s just me and God, and I am standing before our personal Creator with whom we must account for the past year. That is part of the moral and spiritual gravitas of this time of year, and it can also feel lonely. While it is an important reminder that each of us has a unique role to play with responsibilities for ourselves and our collective future, it also misses an equally important dimension of these holy days.

Abraham Joshua Heschel captures this in his 1955 essay, “The Insecurity of Freedom,” when he writes: “The Jew does not stand alone before God; he stands in the community of Israel.”
In Judaism, community is a profoundly spiritual concept. For it is in community – standing in relationship with one another – that we experience the Divine, whether witnessing the miracle of the splitting of the sea, experiencing the revelation at Mount Sinai, or asking for and receiving the grace of forgiveness and atonement on Yom Kippur.

This is what it means to be part of an intergenerational covenant. In Moses’ words, “God did not make this covenant only with our ancestors, but rather with us, all of us, who are here alive today.”

This idea translated into ritual practice and law. According to Maimonides, during the time when the Temple in Jerusalem stood, the scapegoat of Yom Kippur brought atonement for the sins of all of Israel. The job of individuals was to show up, participate, and identify with Klal Yisrael, the Jewish People. It is as if God is looking down at us on Yom Kippur and asking not, “How much spiritual work has each of them done?” but rather, “Are they in this together? Do they feel bound up with and responsible for one another?”

There is something profound about this. Part of standing before God in community means that for God to forgive us, we need to learn to forgive one another. This would be countercultural in a climate where we tend to see those with whom we disagree as, at best, ignorant, and, at worst, evil. Rather than giving others the benefit of the doubt or seeking to find the positive values that motivate them – let alone seeing them as children of God, created in the Divine Image – it can be hard not to vilify those who interpret Jewish values and our story differently than we do.

This is a time to look at others with compassion, curiosity, and forgiveness, just as we hope they and God will do for us. This is a tall order that for many of us might feel spiritually and emotionally unreasonable or unattainable.

This is why, beneath these interpersonal ideals, it is the foundation of the covenant that binds us together and to which we can turn. The statement Kol Yisrael arevim zeh l’zeh – that all of Israel are bound up together and responsible for one another – is not a romantic notion of community where everyone agrees, is alike, or likes one another. The gift of being Jewish and being part of our diverse 3,000-year-old tradition is the beautiful, messy, sometimes painful, yet comforting and empowering notion that we always have been and always will be, in this together. And the knowledge that, as we begin another year, with God’s help, we will get through this and move forward, together.

Rabbi Marc Baker is the president and CEO of Combined Jewish  Philanthropies.