Individual and collective responsibility.

I once had the opportunity to ask the Catholic writer Paul Johnson.

What had struck him most about Judaism during the long period he spent researching it?

For his masterly a history of the Jews.

He replied in roughly these words.

There have been in the course of history societies that emphasised the individual,

like the secular West today, and there have been others that placed weight on the collective,

communist Russia or China, for example.

Judaism, he said, was the most successful example he knew,

that managed the delicate balance

between both, giving equal weight to individual and collective responsibility.

Judaism was a religion of strong individuals, but also of strong communities.

This, he said, was very rare and difficult, and constituted one of our greatest achievements. It was a wise and

subtle observation without knowing it he did in effect paraphrased Hillel's aphorism. If I am not for

myself, who will be? That's individual responsibility. But if I'm only for myself, what am I? That's collective responsibility.

And this inside allows us to see the argument of Parshot Noach in a way that might not have been

obvious otherwise. The Parshot begins and ends with two great events. The flood on the one hand

and Babel and its tower on the other. On the face of it they have nothing in common.

The failings of the generation of the flood are explicit.

The world was corrupt before God and the land was filled with violence.

God saw the world and it was corrupted.

All flesh had perverted its way on earth.

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