just the school that educates the child, it’s not just the police who keep the town safe, it’s not just the hospital that keeps the people healthy. It is the shared way of living. People are safe when the streetscape is active. People are healthy when healthy eating is the norm. Kids are educated where adults talk to and encourage the young. It’s the norms and behavior of the neighborhood. It’s the people puzzling together to find the best way to live.
Coming in under. Hermann Hesse wrote a short story called “Journey to the East,” in which a group of men take a long journey. They are accompanied by a servant named Leo who does the menial chores and lifts the group’s spirits with his singing. He takes care of the little things. The trip is going well until Leo disappears. Everything falls into disarray, and the trip is abandoned.
Many years later, one of the men stumbles into the organization that had sponsored the journey and discovered that Leo is, in fact, the leader of this great organization and not some functionary. This story inspired the concept of servant leadership. The lesson is that a community leader is often the person doing the “menial” tasks, the supportive person. As George Eliot observed in the famous last sentence of Middlemarch: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
The least are the most. Communities are defined by the treatment of the least among them: the young, the poor, the disabled, or the very sad. Jean Vanier built communities for the mentally disabled. “I come here to tell you how much life these people have given me,” he once told an audience at Harvard. “That they have an incredible gift to bring to our world, they are a source of hope, peace and perhaps salvation for our wounded world….If we keep our eyes fixed on them, if we are faithful to them, we will always find our path.”
The sin is partly my own. Mutual fallibility is one of the glues that hold community together. We understand that we’re all weak and selfish some of the time. We often contribute to the problems we ourselves complain about.
“True community is different because of the realization that the evil is inside—not just inside the community but inside me,” Vanier writes. “I cannot think of taking the speck of dust out of my neighbor’s eye unless I’m working on the log in my own.” Community is a place of pain because it’s a place where the truth about one another comes out. But it’s also a place of loving through the pain, of disagreement that can be expressed freely precisely because of the unconditional love.
THE VILLAGE COMPACT
In his book The Home We Build Together, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that in the Bible the description of the creation of the universe in Genesis is covered in a mere thirty-four verses. But then there is this weird episode in the book of Exodus that takes up an entire third of that book—hundreds and hundreds of verses. It is the instructions for the building of the tabernacle.
Why should the building of this one structure—with specific instructions about the length of the beams and all the different woods and ornaments—require such minute attention? It’s because the Israelites are not yet a people. They are an oppressed and disparate group of tribes and individuals. As Sacks puts it, “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.
Sacks tells the story of the British diplomat Victor Mishcon. In the early 1980s he was trying to negotiate a peace deal in the Middle East, so he invited King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres over to his house for dinner. They had the meal and a pleasant conversation, and eventually they got up to leave. Mishcon told them they weren’t going anywhere. They had to do the dishes. He put King Hussein by the sink and Peres by the drying rack and had them work side by side, washing and drying. This was the point of the evening to him.
Prince Holmes is director of Youth Rebuilding New Orleans. He brings together