Kol Dodi Dofek: The Righteous Suffer

By M Michel Benhayim

קוֹל דּוֹדִי דוֹפֵק

Kol Dodi DofekThere are, says Rabbi Soloveitchik, two ways in which people become a group - a community, a society or a nation.
The first is when they face a common enemy. They band together for mutual protection, knowing that only by so doing can they survive. This phenomenon extends far beyond Homo sapiens. Animals too come together in herds or flocks to defend themselves against predators. Such a group is a מַחֲנֶה machaneh - a camp, a defensive formation.

There is a quite different form of association. People can come together because they share a vision, an aspiration, a set of ideals. This is the meaning of עֵדָה edah, a congregation. Edah is related to the word עֵד ed, a witness. עֵדוֹת Edot (as opposed to חֻקִּים chukim and מִשְׁפָּטִים mishpatim) are the commands that testify to Jewish belief - as Shabbat testifies to creation, Pesach to the divine involvement in history; and so on. An edah is not a defensive formation but a creative one. People join to do together what none of them could achieve alone. A society built around a shared project, a vision of the common good, is not a machaneh but an edah - not a camp but a congregation.

But we are no longer a congregation. Instead we have fissured and fractured into different עedot: orthodox and reform, religious and secular, and the many subdivisions that continue to atomize Jewish life into non-communicating sects and subcultures.

Our identity as Jews is not just as a camp but also as a congregation. We need to recover our vision of what it is to be God's witnesses on Earth.

Rabbi Lord J. Sachs

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GQ9KYSYZ
• ISBN13: 9798249703134
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"