Why Is "All Israel Are Responsible" Hidden in the Curses?

Parashat Behar-Bechukotai (Leviticus 25:1–27:34)

These ideas grew out of reading and meditating on Rabbi Sacks's 10 to 15 weekly essays on the parasha, and on his books and worldview.

In the final parsha of the book of Leviticus, in the midst of one of the harshest passages of rebuke in the Torah, the Sages found a remarkable moral truth hidden within the curses. Moses describes a nation fleeing in terror from its enemies:

“Just the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to running, and they will run scared as if running from a sword! They will fall even when no one is chasing them! They will stumble over each other as they would before a sword, even though no one is chasing them! You will have no power to stand before your enemies.” (Leviticus 26:36–37)

At first glance, there appears to be nothing hopeful in this vision. It is a portrait of fear, panic, and collapse. Yet the Sages focused carefully on one phrase: “They will stumble over each other”, read this as “stumble because of one another”: this teaches that all Israelites are responsible for one another. From here they derived the principle: Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, all Jews are responsible for one another.

This is an exceedingly strange passage. Why locate this principle here? Surely the whole Torah testifies to it. When Moses speaks about the reward for keeping the covenant, he does so collectively. There will be rain in its due season. There will be good harvests. The principle that Jews have collective responsibility, that their fate and destiny are interlinked, could have been found in the Torah’s blessings. Why search for it among its curses?

The answer is that ordinary collective responsibility exists in every society. Citizens of any nation are bound together by shared conditions. When the economy prospers, most people benefit. When crime rises or society becomes unstable, everyone suffers. Human beings are social creatures, and our opportunities are shaped by the communities in which we live.

All of this applied to the Israelites so long as they were a nation in their own land. But what about when they suffered defeat and exile and were eventually scattered across the earth? They no longer had any of the conventional lineaments of a nation.

They were not living in the same place. They did not share the same language of everyday life. While Rashi and his family were living in Christian northern Europe and speaking French, Maimonides was living in Muslim Egypt, speaking and writing Arabic. Nor did Jews share a common fate. During the Crusades, Jews in northern Europe suffered massacres and persecution, while Jews in Spain were living through a cultural golden age. Later, when Spanish Jewry faced expulsion and wandering, Jews in Poland experienced periods of unusual tolerance.

In what sense, then, were they still responsible for one another? What constituted them as a nation?

Judaism introduced something unique: a form of collective responsibility that survives even exile and dispersion. The Jewish people remained bound together by a covenant with God and by a shared sense of responsibility for one another.

This is why the principle appears specifically in the passages of rebuke. Only there does the Torah describe a future in which the Jewish people are exiled and dispersed among the nations. The covenant had to prove itself precisely under those conditions. If Jewish unity depended only on land or political sovereignty, it would not have survived exile. But the covenant created a bond deeper than geography.

This becomes especially clear when comparing the rebukes in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The curses in Deuteronomy end in bleakness and despair. But the curses in Leviticus conclude differently:

“But despite all that, when they are in enemy territory, I will not reject them or despise them to the point of totally destroying them, breaking my covenant with them by doing so, because I am the Lord their God. But for their sake I will remember the covenant with the first generation, the ones I brought out of Egypt’s land in the sight of all the nations, in order to be their God; I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 26:44–45)

Even in their worst hours, according to Leviticus, the Jewish people will never be destroyed. Nor will God reject them. The covenant will still be in force and its terms still operative. This means that Jews will always be linked to one another by the same ties of mutual responsibility that they had in the land, for it was the covenant that formed them as a nation and bound them to one another even as it bound them to God. Therefore, even when falling over one another in flight from their enemies, they would still be bound by mutual responsibility. They would still be a nation with a shared fate and destiny.

This idea became one of Judaism’s greatest contributions to political and moral thought. Covenant means that responsibility belongs to everyone, not merely to rulers or governments. In covenant societies, people understand themselves as partners in shaping the moral future of the community. The Pilgrim Fathers, as they set sail for America, expressed this idea in the phrase “We the people”: society is not divided simply into rulers and subjects. Everyone carries responsibility.

Yet Judaism’s understanding of responsibility is not limitless or abstract. Judaism does not teach that every individual is responsible for every wrong in the world. Responsibility extends only as far as one’s capacity to influence. The Talmud explains that if a person can prevent wrongdoing in their household and does not, they bear responsibility for their household. If they can influence their community and remain silent, they share responsibility for the community.

That is how Rabbi Abraham, the son of Maimonides, interpreted in his father’s name the phrase “a kingdom of priests.” The priest of any congregation is its leader. Leadership in Judaism is therefore not confined to kings, politicians, or famous individuals. Leadership means accepting responsibility.

If we are all responsible for one another, then we are all called on to be leaders, each within our sphere of influence, within the family, the community, the school, the workplace, or society at large. Responsibility is practical and personal. It begins wherever we have the power to make a difference.

In late summer of 1999, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks was in Pristina making a BBC television programme about the aftermath of the Kosovo campaign. He interviewed General Sir Michael Jackson, then head of the NATO forces. To his surprise, the general thanked him for what “his people” had done. The Jewish community had taken charge of the city’s twenty-three primary schools. It was, he said, the most valuable contribution to the city’s welfare. When hundreds of thousands of people become refugees and then return home, the most reassuring sign that life has returned to normal is that the schools open on time.

Later that day, Rabbi Sacks asked the leader of the local Jewish community how many Jews lived in Pristina. The answer was astonishing: eleven.

How could eleven Jews rebuild an educational system? The answer was collective responsibility. Early in the conflict, Israeli medical teams working with refugees noticed that aid agencies focused mainly on adults while children remained traumatised and unsupported. The Israelis contacted youth movements back home, and volunteers from across Israel, secular and religious alike, immediately organised teams to help.

These young volunteers created summer camps, sports activities, music programmes, and educational support for Muslim Albanian refugee children. Their efforts won high praise from UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s organisation. In the wake of this, “the Jewish people”, Israel, the American-based Joint, and other Jewish agencies, were asked to supervise the return to normality of the school system in Pristina.

This story reveals the extraordinary power of covenantal responsibility. A tiny community achieved something far beyond its size because it understood itself as part of a global people bound together by obligation and purpose.

Another powerful example is the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda. In 2004, on the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Anne Heyman, a Jewish woman in New York, watched a documentary about orphaned children left behind after the massacre. Her immediate reaction was: “I’m Jewish. We have to do something.”

Inspired by the Israeli youth village Yemin Orde, she contacted educators, psychologists, and Jewish organizations around the world. Together, they built a youth village in Rwanda for hundreds of orphaned children, helping them rebuild their lives through education, emotional healing, and leadership training.

Again, what stands out is not only the humanitarian achievement, but the distinctly Jewish impulse behind it: the belief that suffering creates responsibility. When the Jewish people join hands in collective responsibility, they become a formidable force for good. Again and again throughout history, small Jewish communities have had an outsized impact because they understood themselves as part of something larger than themselves. We are small, but we are never little.

Each of us makes a difference to the fate of Judaism and the Jewish people.

The prophet Zechariah captured this powerfully: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord Almighty.”

The Jewish question is not, “What can the world give me?” It is, “What can I give to the world?”

Judaism is God’s call to responsibility.