More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Blah
“It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them.
Slaves in Egypt, the Jews are not capable of running their own lives. They were not even capable of being saved by others. They are described as hopeless, dejected, passive, apathetic, and in despair. Fear has caused them to close in on themselves, to become secretive, inert, and weak. Reduced to a childlike state by oppression, they are unable to accept responsibility for themselves.
God must build a people capable of upholding His covenant, capable of exercising agency and accepting responsibility for their own lives.
Exodus is not just describing a ragtag group of people wandering around in the desert. It is describing how resilient people are made.
Our common salvation comes through works and good deeds.
Lol
In my semi-secular world of Jewish New York, we put peoplehood before faith. We were living in the shadow of the Holocaust, so survival was not taken for granted. We celebrated effort, work, smarts, discipline, accomplishment, achievement.
What must such peace and tranquility feel like?
For example, my first six months as a columnist for The New York Times were the hardest months of my professional life.
Any other attitude—hatred toward them or fear of them—is emotional suicide.
Every time you can shift your attention away from the external situation that caused your pain and focus on the pain of humanity in which you participate, your suffering becomes easier to bear.”
If you think about that for a bit, you are confronted by the possibility that we are connected not just with the souls living now, but with the souls of all the people who have ever lived, from generation to generation,
awe is not an emotion; it is a way of understanding.
When Haidt returned to the United States, he missed being surrounded by people who felt the vertical spiritual dimension in everyday life. He began to think of the United States as “Flatland,” a thinner realm.
I received about three hundred books about faith in those months, only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Then, as now, I try to hire people who have some progression on their résumé that doesn’t make sense by the conventional logic of the meritocracy. I want to see that they believe in something bigger than the conventional definition of success.
And this is a crucial lesson for anybody in the middle of any sort of intellectual or spiritual journey: Don’t try to lead or influence. Let them be led by that which is summoning them.
The name of my condition was pride. I was proud of who I had become.
because they are further from pride and self-sufficiency.
It was relatively easy to perceive God’s presence up at American Lake. It was going to be a lot harder to actually practice a faith. I was always proud, striving, taking control. They don’t make the eyes of needles big enough.
corporate life meant working for a big company. For them, it meant worship in community.
But I find that as long as there are five or ten people in your life whose faith seems gritty and real and like your own, that keeps the whole thing compelling.
One doesn’t really notice it day by day, but when I look back at who I was five years ago it’s kind of amazing, as I bet it is for you in your journey.
The best part of having taken a weird, strange trip over the past five years of my life is that it reminds me of the possibility that I might take another weird, strange trip over the next five or ten or twenty. So nothing is dismissed as too outrageous. When you’ve tied yourself to a spirit you can’t comprehend, nothing shocks you anymore, but everything brings you into a state of awe and wonder.
As C. S. Lewis observes, every second thought we have seems to be about the self.
“My will is my glory; it is also what gives me the most trouble.”
the middle voice, which is conversation and response:
(Every time a pastor begins a sentence with the phrase “The culture,” he should interrupt himself and lie down and take a nap).
We are not cold reasoners; we learn with passion.
But there is something contagious about faith that is unafraid to express itself.
“human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” My prayers are like that.
Why would Dietrich Bonhoeffer have returned to Germany to resist Hitler—with a good chance that he would get killed in the fight, as indeed he did? Don’t these people know there are beach vacations to be taken and nice restaurants to be experienced?
The natural impulse in life is to move upward, to grow in wealth, power, success, standing. And yet all around the world you see people going downward.
That is why religion is hope. I am a wandering Jew and a very confused Christian, but how quick is my pace, how open are my possibilities, and how vast are my hopes.
In a rich community, people are up in one another’s business, know each other’s secrets, walk with each other in times of grief, and celebrate together in times of joy.
Maybe it’s time we began to see this as a war. On the one side are those forces that sow division, discord, and isolation. On the other side are all those forces in society that nurture attachment, connection, and solidarity. It’s as if we’re witnessing this vast showdown between the social rippers and social weavers.
Most of us are part of the problem we complain about.
Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community.
But community life—care for one another—is built on friction, on sticky and inefficient relationships.
Many of our social programs are based on that theory of social change. We try to save people one at a time. We pick a promising kid in a neighborhood and give her a scholarship so she can go to an Ivy League school. Social programs and philanthropic efforts skim cream in a thousand ways. They assume that the individual is the most important unit of social change.
Obviously, it’s possible to do some good on an individual basis. But with this approach you’re not really changing the moral ecologies, or the structures and systems that shape lives.
Said the exact opposite earlier in book
Americans move less these days, not more.
really? Based on what?
But, in fact, the honest, brutal story is the kind of story that produces combustion. We spend much of our time projecting accomplishments, talents, and capacity. The confrontation with weakness can have this detonating effect.
Communities don’t come together for the sake of community; they come together to build something together.
Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future.
The good neighbor is the one who invites others over for dinner.
half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
“To turn a group of individuals into a covenantal nation, they must build something together.” A people is made by making, Sacks continues; a nation is built by building.
The better community-building conversations focus on possibilities, not problems. They are questions such as, What crossroads do we stand at right now? What can we build together? How can we improve our lives together? What talents do we have here that haven’t been fully expressed?
Randomized controlled experiments seek to tease out distinct cause-and-effect relationships between one input and one outcome. Social science often seeks to disaggregate. But actual lives are longitudinal and relational.
Not the point of a study
