Inextricably merged

What happens in a disaster is that people can see clearly how important to their individual well-beings is the collective well-being. 

Rather than turning into extremely selfish marauders the sensible and most immediate thing to do is to fortify that community to which one most belongs. The slow grind of daily life that imprisons people in isolated chambers comes during a disaster to a startling hault. Instead, solidarity and empathy enable a sense of connectedness and belonging beyond what ordinary life in today's world offers up. 

"The 'outsider' becomes an 'insider,' the 'marginal man' becomes a 'central man.' People are thus able to perceive, with a clarity never before possible, a set of underlying basic values to which all people subscribe. They realize that collective action is necessary for these values to be maintained and that individual and group goals are inextricably merged. This merging of individual and societal needs provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely acheived under normal circumstances." (Charles Fritz as quoted in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 108.)

Cultivate the virtues

We often need to discover the courage that lives inside of us. 

A society that collectively helps to cultivate the virtues that lie in individuals dormant, often unaware and unappreciated, would be a sturdier society than what passes for social organization today. 

The ability of a people to rise to the challenges of a disaster is a measure of its resilience

Self-direction

Leadership can infantalize and make servile the general population being led. It takes a special kind of leadership to promote the self-direction of the citizenry being led. 

Protracted disasters

The Great Depression, virtually all wars, the Genocide – these were all protracted disasters that served in the 20th century as agents of social change, if not progress. 

Xenophobic strangers

Anarchy has become 

"a synonym for mayhem, chaos, and riotous behavior because many imagine that the absence of authority is equally the absence of order." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 90) 

Scripture moved the locus of authority to a divine Other Who enters into covenant with an entire people. After God abdicated the treaty the rabbinic regime moved that higher authority to the imperial power or the state power of the diasporic, host government. In the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel, the gedoylim defined the government of the state as a surrogate for the host diaspora government, thereby denying the conundrum of whether or not God's treaty obligations with the people had been resumed. 

The central question the Jewish people must answer today is how to manage the problem of national authority. The disaster of the Genocide is offering a window during which time the Jewish people can arrange for an effective and radically new answer to that age-old question. We have another few generations to do our work and then the historical window will close and another crisis will have gone to waste. 

The mainstream religions are there not to impose authority over anarchy but rather to impose it over unruly mortal authority that, in the absence of a higher power, does not respect limits and exploits the fertile core, which will result in a resource curse on the general population. The problem of anarchy is not general lack of authority, the problem of anarchy is civil war where no central power holds sway over a variety of smaller powers. 

It was 

"the English Civil Wars that prompted the timid authoritarian Thomas Hobbes to imagine that the only alternative to chaos was a strong central authority. ... 'And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, not a culture or religion binding together a civilization, only a convenience. Men in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, blank, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 91) 

This Conservative view places as much emphasis as it does on the honoring of contracts because that contractual, strategic view of social cohesion is the only thing that binds people into a larger collective. A civilization of xenophobic strangers is what that view produces, alas. 

Reaching across

"Altruism and charity are distinct if not in the acts themselves at least in the surrounding atmosphere: altruism reaches across with a sense of solidarity and empathy; charity hands down from above." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 87)

Restrained & oppressed

Man's instincts are seen either as savage and unruly unless restrained by the authority and the power of the ruling elites, or as loving and compliant unless ground down and oppressed by the authority and the power of the ruling elites. 

Rationality is either the dominator of unreasonable passions or the suppressor of the spirit of community and of common purpose. 

On the one side lies fascism, on the other anarchism.  

Life becomes molten

"The word 'crisis' is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending. ... Life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, a purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules." (Henry Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change, as quoted in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 79). 

Ruts and routines

"Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are – helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths – or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 70) 

When they say that without the teachings of Scripture human nature would be horrible they are denying the best in the human spirit. Scripture doesn't alter human nature, it enhances it. It enables our best instincts to find a happy home in the political/economy so that the mechanisms of state are oriented in support of the mechanisms of individual autonomy and mutual aid. 

Caring and appreciating

Government institutions have a way of crowding out the cultural institutions every society needs to give its citizens a sense of membership and belonging and the kind of meaning that comes of performing mutual aid. 

Neither the marketplace nor the government’s halls can deliver what society craves and what the healthy human soul yearns for: a community where people can experience a good sense of belonging. 

We know why not the market but why not the government? Because the market says you don't have to be generous while the government says you don't have to appreciate the generosity. The charitable act needs the act of gratitude or it becomes stillborn. The point is not merely to alleviate suffering in the moment, it is to create a climate of mutual obligation that makes for a palpable sense of society as community. 

So if not the market and not the government, then what? The Constitution. Caring and appreciating needs to be written into the very code of compact. Others call it the Bible. 

Necessary for happiness

"Nature ... has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants that the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness. There is no period in life when this love for society ceases to act. It begins and ends with our being." (Quoting Thomas Paine’s  The Rights of Man in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 64.) 

Here is a simple statement of the distinction between the realm of scarcity, that which is necessary for existence, and the realm of abundance, that which is necessary for happiness. 

"Capitalism's fundamental premise is scarcity, while a lot of tribal and gift economies operate on a basis of abundance. Their generosity is both an economic and an ethical premise." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 89). 

Public self

"Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 62) 

By leaving out the possibilities of the public self we fail to acknowledge how much of our happiness and sense of well-being comes from our being embedded in a healthy society that supports the joy and love and sense of purpose that comes of true connection with one's fellows and one's God. 

Sharing the loss

The antidote to loss is sharing. It is not only that sharing mitigates the material burdens that loss inflicts on the less fortunate (what we call dispersion or spreading the loss), the experience of having the loss shared by others has the effect of actually lessening the impact of the loss, no matter how severe the loss is. 

When others join the bereaved in their experience of loss, the loss feels less onerous. 

Military temper

The kind of joy and sense of fulfillment people get when thrown together to manage the challenges of some disaster are not unlike the sense of fellowship and belonging soldiers feel in battle when they are part of an army dedicating themselves to the fulfillment of a higher cause. 

That sort of loss of self conjoined with a simultaneous discovery of a higher, greater self is likely what the Chumash means with the word 'tzvaot.' 

"The martial type of character can be bred without war ... The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper." (Quoting William James in A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 53.) 

The Chumash's mode of inflaming the civic temper is the imposition of a national sabbatical year. In James' terms, sheviit would be the moral equivalent of war. 

Aliens & locals

It is difficult for an alien, occupying force to do nation building because it is vital for the locals to take care of their own. The entire system has trouble getting off the ground because as soon as a foreign occupying force takes charge, that force cannot trust the locals to do the right thing. 

Under occupation, authority (the alien force) and legitimacy (the locals) have trouble cooperating. 

The key fact of the Mannah was that every family did its own food collecting so that it was not something the ruling elites could get their hands on. Only when Moshe is away are the ruling elites of Israel able to regain their power through the Molten Calf/ Disguised Wheel. God cannot abide among a stiff-necked people because the stiff-neckers are anti-God: they are anti-ordinary people and pro-ruling elites. 

Extreme emergencies

In a disaster the military doesn't necessarily know what it is doing, and neither do the city fathers and the commercial leaders, many of whom likely achieved positions of authority for the wrong reasons. 

Institutional instincts tend not to work well because in a disaster institutional leadership cannot think flexibly enough to deal with the problems on the street. Instead, institutional leadership turns reflexively to shoring up its own power first, which is the wrong thing to do in extreme emergencies. Disasters are not the time for institution-building. In the end, it's just people tackling situations for which they are, in all probability and at best, ill-prepared. 

Elite panic

The primary concern of the ruling elite is the protection of property and of property rights (contracts) and only secondarily the protection of people and their autonomy. 

A society that uses free markets to do most of its public and private allocation could well be expected to favor material property over the personal welfare of the population. 

Sabbatical years are about the temporary suspension of property rights. Disasters should be understood as mini-sabbatical years. 

The response of the ruling elite to protect property before the personal welfare of the population is what we call 'elite panic.' Elite panic is the attempt to countermand the sabbatical year character of a disaster. 

The greater the inequality in apportionment, the greater the upper class's fear that the lower classes will pillage and loot should the ruling powers lose control of the social order. Elite panic's severity should be in direct correlation with how far the upper class would fall should they become part of the lower classes. 

Covetousnous, envy, jealousy

In a society lacking in hoarding and abounding in acts of generosity, it makes little sense to covet the wealth of one's neighbor. 

Covetousnous, envy, jealousy all are signs of a society that is unwell, whose members are given to hoarding what they have and coveting what they lack. 

During disasters, covetousnous comes across as unbecoming because it stands in such stark contrast to the otherwise prevailing acts of generosity. 

Not-hoarding

Acts of generosity are acts of not-hoarding. 

We hoard to make certain our futures. When we cease to consider the future we become more generous and abandon our hoarding behavior. General equanimity likewise bespeaks a self-possession that argues against the myth of a terror-stricken populace unable to cope with the hardships of disaster. 

"... the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos ... [and] the general equanimity" were the two things that struck William James about the conduct of the ordinary citizens in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 55). 

The contrary image the ruling elites have of the people's character and the one they convey to the public these days is that of spoiled children devoid of strength and lacking in fortitude. The image of modern day society is of a people who lack virtue utterly. It is a mean and cold world we are brewing together. 

Sign of belonging

People act coldly to their fellow citizens according to how strongly they identify themselves with the ruling elites. 

If you see yourself as a man of the people, you care for the people; if you see yourself as one of the rulers, you demand for the people to take care of themselves. In an odd sort of irony, to be uncaring of the needy could well be understood as a sign of one's belonging to the ruling elite. 

When disaster strikes and the ruling elites seem to recede from view it's easier for people to see themselves as men and women of the people. 

Houseless vs homeless

Whether the houseless are homeless depends on whether the community is there to take them in and offer them support. 

Homelessness is a condition of the community's indifference, not of the conditions of one's real estate holdings. 

Kooky and illegitimate

Novel communities are often based around beliefs before those beliefs have been properly embedded in their practices. As a result, such communities tend to come across as kooky and illegitimate. 

It would be important for practice to lead belief in the process of transformation from the prevailing social order to a biblical utopia. So long as the practices are well understood, the belief systems needn't be emphasized. It's not how we couch the beliefs that counts, it's how we couch the values and virtues that support those beliefs. 

Non-revolutionary revolutions

Disasters are warm-ups for general collapses. They are practice sessions that reveal what, absent the impositions of the ruling elites' traditional conventions, what human nature wants. The true change agents could harness disaster just as, if not more effectively than, the old ruling elites. 

Disasters are non-revolutionary revolutions, as collapses would likewise be. 

The agents of utopian change need not foment revolution to accomplish true advances in the human condition. They do however need to develop and perfect the utopian program they would install to replace the collapsed social order both with respect to the betrayals of that utopia which strongman rulers would attempt in the early moments after the establishment of the new utopia, and with respect to the residual claims to power and authority the remnants of the ruling elites would insist onto the new order even in the face of the manifest bankruptcy of the old system. 

Uncharismatic

"Some religious attempts at utopia are authoritarian, led by a charismatic leader, by elders, by rigid rules that create outcasts, but the secular utopias have mostly been committed to liberty, democracy, and shared power. The widespread disdain for revolution and utopia takes as its object lesson the Soviet-style attempts at coercive utopias, in which the original ideals of leveling and sharing go deeply awry ... Many fail to notice that it is not the ideals, the ends, but the coercive and authoritarian means that poison paradise." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 19) 

The threats to utopia come not only from the resistance of the established power elites, they come also from the betrayal of legitimate utopia by the dystopia that comes from authoritarian utopia – the even lesser tempered hubris of the absolutist revolutionary or revolutionary cabal whose certainty crushes the human spirit it pretends to ennoble. 

In the Chumash God's immediate presence serves as the higher authority that keeps any leader or group from usurping the legitimate autonomy of the people. God is the divine Other with revolutionary intent Who hopes to devise a people that can support a paradise. 

"A certain kind of twentieth century utopian idealism has died, the kind that believed we could and should erase everything and start over: new language, new society, new ways of organizing power, work, even family, home, and more. ... But we have also learned that you can reinvent the government but not human nature in one fell stroke, and the process of reinventing human nature is a much more subtle, personal, incremental process." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 20) 

Utopias are a more intense version of the prevailing order: either more intensely authoritarian or more intensely anti-authoritarian; either a ruling elite that is stronger and more controlling or one that is either weaker or altogether absent. 

Social utopia

"The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation – hunger, ignorance, homelessness – and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 18) 

By that standard the Chumash is clearly angling to create a social utopia. Those two goals are precisely the two most oft repeated instructions in the Chumash: take care of the orphan and the widow; and be kind to the stranger for you were a stranger in a strange land. 

Default setting

"Utopia is in trouble these days. Many no longer believe that a better world, as opposed to a better life, is possible, and rhetoric of private well-being trumps public good, at least in the English speaking world. And yet the yearning remains ..." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 18) 

The trouble with the building of utopias is that many of the entrenched powers around the world are bound and determined to defeat any honest attempt at arriving at an alternative to the status quo. They view utopian experiments not as innocent attempts at making the world a better place but as ideological threats to their hold on power. The ruling elites would like us to believe we have no alternative to their rule, nor that we could materially do better for ourselves than the present situation. Utopia puts the lie to both those predicates; and disasters show utopias up to be part of our natural, instinctual way of organizing community. 

"The map of utopias ... needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 18)

Styles and species of well-being

Emotions have two dimensions: positive vs negative and superficial vs deep. 

A materialistic society may move people further to the positive than to the negative but at the cost, at the same time, of moving them away from the deep and toward the superficial. Furthermore, it could be the materialist approach might well reduce the swings of positive and negative feelings at the expense of lowering the average level of welfare. 

Another issue could be that there are various styles of happiness and welfare: satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment, joy, glory, etc. Material goods and services might well be able to be listed in a preference ordering, that is true, but the sorts of pleasure people derive from material consumption and production doesn't necessarily exhaust the full range of styles and species of fulfillment and well-being. 

Social calm

Disasters are disruptions of the established order. They challenge the ruling elites because they disrupt the social calm that is the ruling elite's claim to power. 

General disaster calls into question the legitimacy of the established order. Should the old order be replaced by something new and different, perhaps better, perhaps worse? Disaster is different from collapse, where the old order has been shown to be bankrupt and must be replaced without a doubt. 

Humor

• Disaster (dis-aster: a wrong star), 
• Catastrophe (cata-strophe: an unexpected twist in a story), 
• Emergency (e-merge: to come out from under, from submergence).

All these require, first of all, a sense of humor in order to keep things in proper perspective. 

Victim or victor

The opposite of victim is victor. 

To cast oneself or one's people as the victim is to deny the possibility of victory. 

To see oneself as a victim is the beginning of cowardice. Surely it is the expression of impotence and the envisioning of a lack of effective leadership. 

Servile affluence

The most powerful hold the ruling elites have over their subject peoples is the internal disqualification that says it is silly to believe that utopias are within reach. 

So long as people buy the story that they can't fundamentally improve their social systems, that the most people can hope for is perhaps to raise or lower the general welfare on the margin, then the status quo will remain in the hands of those rulers who cannot imagine a brighter day, who cannot imagine a society fed by the deeper wellsprings of fulfillment, satisfaction, and contentment. 

People’s own lack of conviction reduces them in conception to diminished selves and dismal societies, with moments of joy amid a sea of pain, isolation, and dejection. People have become servile in their affluence.   

Privatization of desire

The privatization of society not only moves the institutions of commerce into the private sector but, more important, it moves the self-understanding of the members of society into atomized units who cannot presume the proper functioning of a social order to justify their own acts of generosity and their own pursuit of caring and contentment. 

The privatization of society is, in effect, the Sodom-and-Gemmorah-ization of society. 

The privatization of desire and imagination results in getting us to believe we are not each other's keepers. 

Pre-planned disaster

The phoenix is reborn from its own ashes. It must be consumed in fire and thereby purified before it can be reborn anew. 

Disaster is the fire that burns out the old and allows for the new to be reborn. 

The sabbatical year is an artificial, pre-planned sort of disaster that requires the sort of solidarity common challenges tend to bring out in people. 

Human nature in disaster

"... the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 8). 

Marauding bands

"... the citizens any paradise would need – the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough, and generous enough – already exist. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 7). 

The problem with that picture is not how people behave immediately after a disaster has struck but how people will behave later, when they will have had the chance to assemble marauding bands to plunder the countryside. 

For that reason the Chumash introduced the notion of sheviit and miqdash, to limit the accumulation of material wealth and to afford the society the room to promote a better system where meaning trumps worth and where neighborliness prevails over local warlords and where God's empire keeps the peace.  

A mediocre ruling class

The Industrial Revolution enabled the ruling class to promote to the general public an abundant materialism that concealed the possibilities of joy and fulfillment which would come from a sense of embrace and belonging that is typically afforded by general collaboration. 

The European societal defect of a mediocre ruling class found its way to the New World in the form, first, of Southern plantation owners and then in the form of Northern industrialists. Such a ruling class was focused on the material gains that can come from the extraction and exploitation either of slave labor or of the natural environment. 

It is a ruling class intoxicated with the possibilities of organizing society according to the values of worth rather than of meaning. It is a ruling class that has made its peace with a God they had long since deemed irrelevant. Such a ruling class replaced the simple joys and sorrows of a meaningful, simple, humble, local society with the attractions of a gaudy, complex, hubristic, global system whose skyscrapers resemble the Tower of Babel. 

Civic possibility

Disasters unveil a social desire and a vision of civic possibility that ordinarily lies hidden behind the too-fast, alienated hustle and bustle of modern-day life. 

Disasters force us to dust off our simple virtues to deal with the demands of the moment, and it doesn't matter that the demands are for the welfare of others or for ourselves. 

Disasters reveal how valuable meaning can be in our lives; and how much more meaningful value matters to us than all the worthy value we accumulate for ourselves but then rarely really use properly. 

A sense of belonging

That society is happiest which affords its members the opportunity to experience a sense of belonging. To feel that belonging is to know an embrace and a joy that is incomparable. People cannot on their own provide themselves with such an experience. 

A sense of belonging is the other, mundane side of feeling the divine gift of God's grace. It is to know oneself in a firm identity in a way that absent such self-knowledge leaves one thin and unanchored. 

To be able to live a public life and a civil society that has about it inclusion, purpose and power is to be able to be multi-dimensional in a way that fufills and satisfies deeply. The present becomes clear while the past and the future tend to recede quickly and with not too much residue. 

Generosity requires generous society

In order for people to be able to help each other the society must be sufficiently well organized that their help would be both appreciated and reciprocated. 

Generosity requires a generous society as a prerequisite. 

Theories of political development that start from individuals on their own cannot ever get to the station of having society organized as generous. The chumash's story, on the other hand, of God providing the Children of Israel with a fully built up political/economic infra-structure is all about the possibility of individual generosity having already been enabled by a God Who provides not only the requisite abundance for such generosity but also the social system that can endorse such generosity. 

Collective abundance

Qayin kills Hevel because Hevel's offering is fatter than Qayin's, and God favors it. 

Qayin wanted Hevel's place with God, not Hevel's greater material wealth. It wasn't what Hevel had that compelled Qayin, it was his closeness to God that he envied. Hevel is killed because he fulfilled the obligation to appreciate God's bounty more exquisitely than did Qayin. 

If there is a lesson here, it is that it is better for the abundance to be delivered to God by the collective before it turns into an arms race. 

After catastrophe strikes

When a catastrophe occurs the key event is the instantaneous ineffectuality of the ruling elite. Authority breaks down in the first moments of a crisis and all that's there to service the situation is legitimacy – people helping each other. 

What is on display after a catastrophe strikes is what society might look like without the insidious shaping of the human heart the governing authorities impose on their subjects for the sake of making it easier for them then to impose order on the society. 

The bottleneck

How much do the ruling elites stand in the way of man's bond with God? Is their impoverished vision of human potentiality the bottleneck that keeps people from knowing what man might achieve under His guidance? 

Maybe what we need to know about God we need to know on our own, individually. Maybe the basic knowledge of God cannot be mediated through intermediate, mortal rulers. 

To be able to be thankful

Freedom is manifest not so much in the ability (i.e., to be at liberty) to choose as it is in the ability to appreciate and to reciprocate in gratitude. 

To be able to be thankful is the true expression of freedom. 

Evaluating through gratitude

When we appreciate a gift we are evaluating through gratitude. 

Appreciation is evaluation within a social context the same way the ordering of preferences is evaluation within a selfish context.

Like love

Gratitude must be freely given. Like love, it is not authentic if it is obliged. 

Natural drivers of myths and stories

"For giving and gratitude create and sustain memories; they and their opposites are natural drivers of myths and stories." (The Gift of Thanks, Margaret Visser, 2008; page 3)

Moral memory of mankind

Georg Simmel calls gratitude the 'moral memory of mankind.' (The Gift of Thanks, Margaret Visser, 2008; page 2) It "contributes to the spiritual well-being of every person ..." 

Gratitude enables grace

If gratitude is the sentiment the undeserving feel towards the deserving, then a sense of gratitude is in a way a sense of one's undeservedness. 

Gratitude is the positive manifestation of what otherwise would have been experienced entirely as a negative sentiment (this sense of undeservedness), which the receiving of a gift was not meant to invite, and which, if that negative sentiment were all that were possible, would make the giving of a gift a futile exercise. 

Gratitude therefore enables grace. It lifts the burden of the receipt of beneficence and propels it forward either in time or to others. 

Gratitude & insolence

• Gratitude is the engine of civil society. 
• Gratitude is the ground of custom. 
• As such, gratitude situates deservedness and undeservedness at the base of customary conduct. 
• Insolence – the violation of what one is used to – challenges the customary behavior but in so doing fortifies it. 
• Insolence would not be understood as meaningful were it not for the prior general acceptance of what was customary. 

If it would please you, it would please me

• To say 'please' is to say 'if it would please you, it would please me.' 
• 'Please' therefore is meant to stimulate the initiative of another and to communicate non-command. 
• 'Please' speaks to the intention of the other and emphasizes their autonomy and self-determination. 
• 'Please' is the ground of diplomatic sensibilities. 
• 'Please' is the expression of self-limitation and submission in recognition of the self-possession of the other. 
• 'Please' and 'thank you' address the chuqim of social intercourse. 

Acknowledgement of meaning and value

When we demand thanks for a generous gesture we are not demanding reciprocation, we are demanding appreciation. 

We don't want something back; what we want is acknowledgement of the meaning and value of what was offered. 

Undeserved beneficence

Children don't learn to say thank you spontaneously until the ages of from four to six. 

Since children spend the first years of their lives bathed in undeserved beneficence they do not really know how to recognize and appreciate their undeservedness until they acquire a considerable measure of social intelligence. 

Mutual aid and common purpose

Deeper even than the gratitude that engenders reciprocal gift exchange is the sense of mutual aid and common purpose that fuses people into a single unit and has them working together to achieve a joint objective. Then expressions of gratitude convey a sense of distancing rather than of fellowship because mutual aid is a closer form of relationship than is reciprocal gift exchange. 

We don't waste food

Gratitude has two dimensions: the acknowledgement of the other's autonomy in that they didn't have to give the gift; and the appreciation of the value and meaning of the gift so that there is a correspondence established between the valuing of the gift by the recipient which is commensurate with what the grantor of the gift has and had in mind. 

The former (recognizing autonomy) refers to the choq, the latter (appreciating the gesture) to the mishpat. It resembles the dual decision-making that goes into every market transaction: (a) do we want to do business with you; and (b) at what price. 

Those who belong to the same home need not qualify the choq. They can take without asking so long as they appreciate the mishpat by saying 'It is good.' 

The demonstration of an under-appreciation of the value of a gift comes in the form of waste. If you waste what is given to you, you are implicitly not appreciating it. We don't waste food out of respect to God's providence for having granted it to us. 

An excess of meat

Qerev is the essence of membership, as pesach is the essence of strangership. 

Each member gets a share of a kill. As such, animals as food differ from fruits and vegetables as food, since vegetables come in quantities more easily personalized to the individual consumer. Animals, in contrast, require co-operation for the kill and animals also produce an excess of meat once their having been killed. 

The zevach pesach defines the lamb or kid as the basic consumption unit because it typically extends the unit of consumption beyond not only the individual to the family, it also extends beyond the family to the clan or the neighborhood. 

The qorban delivers to God His portion of the animal so that God may join as a member of the people. 

Insurance pools

When hunters and gatherers shared their catch or their kill with each other they were doing it not as an act of generosity so much as a form of insurance. 

The sharing of food production at the communal level does not elicit gratitude to those who do the sharing because the understanding is next time someone else will be lucky. Participation in the pool of insurance is not so much a matter of reciprocal gift exchange as it is a signal of membership in a people. 

Insurance pools is how we handle differential allocations of fortune rather than how we allocate the fruits of individual productivity. To the extent differential levels of productivity come into play, those differentials are managed in the political system through praise and by the conferrings of dignity and social status rather than through differential apportionments of wealth. 

The only member who is rewarded for His actions in matters of fortune is God, Who is understood to be the master of fortune. 

Decency

The matter of property that accompanies the allocations and apportionments of justice are governed by values of decency as well as by values of merit and deservedness. 

• Decency is defined as the contribution to the collective. 
• Decency is demanded by the collective and its fulfillment is an indicator either of membership in the collective or of a desire on the part of a stranger to reside next to or in the collective in peace. 
• Decency is the token and the measure of the regard we pay to our peers. 
• Decency is the ur-value that manifests sometimes as the impulse to equality. 
• Equality before the law is a token of common membership in that legal system which defines the society. 
• Equality before the law is a choq. 
• Decency in the treatment of each member of a collective is a token of the recognition of each member as member and of each peace-loving stranger as potentially either a charge of the God of fortune, and so entitled to the basic needs for survival, or as a representative of another collective which shares in God's bounty at the collective level. 
• Decency regulates the qualifying of persons or collectives to engage in trade and inter-marriage. It establishes the first condition of intercourse: do we want to do business with you. 

Defining private property

The matter of property affects not only the question of mishpat, of how much of something each one gets; it also affects questions of choq, of whether people can reasonably expect to be secure in their possessions. 

Errors in defining private property or collective property impair legitimate security in two ways: 

1. If people cannot expect to get enough to care for the basic needs of life, they will resort to plunder and pillage because the imperatives of subsistence will eventually overwhelm the basic respect decent people have for the long-term domestic tranquility of society. Their acute needs will override in their minds the justice of the chronic needs of the collective. 
2. If the well-to-do have too much alienable wealth, the mean forces in society will organize to relieve them of the excess and to transfer it to the more cunning, and, to their minds, the more deserving. Property claims therefore have to operate within the constraints of the security considerations they engender. Property rights that lead to insecure affluence should be deemed per se as suspect, and likely unjust. 

God's membership

The qorban is the demonstration of God's membership in the people. 

As God provides His bounty to the people every day so do the people of Israel make offerings to God in reciprocation of His daily gifts of grace. 

The movement from the zevach pesach, which is eaten by the people of Israel to the exclusion of God because He is as yet a stranger, an alien, to the qorban, which expressly includes God as a familiar, as a member of the people of Israel, dramatizes the establishment of the people of Israel as God's chosen people, where chosen means His being a member of them. 

The rules of hospitality

The stranger as foreigner is subject to, as well as benefits from, the rules of hospitality. 

The traveller becomes a temporary member of the group and is offered a share of the bounty because the host is by presumption wealthy while the guest is by presumption impoverished. 

Ghostis

'Ghostis' is the root of the word 'host' as well as the root of the word 'guest.' 

The host and guest play the two sides of the ghostis relation. Hosts could be hostile sometimes, and they might turn their guests into hostages, who, in its original manifestation, were 

"held as a guarantee to a treaty of peace between two previously antagonistic sides." (The Gift of Thanks, Margaret Visser, 2008; page 23)

The whiff of obligation

"... the more obligatory giving is, the less receivers feel grateful." (The Gift of Thanks, Margaret Visser, 2008; page 27) 

The growth of government programs, which have about them the whiff of obligation, would therefore reasonably have the effect of lowering the quotient of gratitude in a society. 

Our conjecture is that miqdash is about tempering such obligatory giving and returning into the social order the possibilities for the appreciation of gratitude. 

The empire of liberty

The United States is the empire of liberty. Its failures are the failures of an excess of individuality, self-reliance and autonomy. 

The United States has overshot the ethic of individuality so that it has eradicated the ordinary functioning of the communal sector. 

In a society where no-one wants to be obliged to anyone else, everyone ends up isolated and atomized. 

Grace serves security

The possibility of the exercise of abusive power is present both from host to guest and from guest to host. 

The rituals of hospitality are meant to disarm both sides so that the guest can express gratitude for, while the host expresses honor at, the presence of the guest in the host's domicile. Here is where grace serves as an instrument of security rather than as an instrument of justice. 

Avraham is the host par excellence. He exemplifies hospitality for travellers, foreigners, strangers. 

Rights wants laws to defend contracts

Rights displace receipt of gifts. 

One must not give thanks for obtaining what is one's right. As rights proliferate, the faculty for appreciating gifts atrophies. 

A world defined by rights wants laws to defend contracts in contrast to a world defined by gifts, which wants appreciation for the promotion of social intercourse. 

A culture with God

The true objective of the Torah's teachings is not, as ChZL would represent it, to have the people submit to God's commandments but rather to create a culture with God at its center. Its drive is to get people thinking and framing reality in a certain way, not merely for them to follow some set of prescribed dictats. 

Sumimasen

When the Japanese use the word 'sumimasen' to connote both thanks for the receipt of a gift as well as sorrow for imposing one's needs on another they are implicitly addressing both the mishpat side of gift giving as well as the choq side of imposing oneself across the boundary of another's autonomy. 

The sorrow is for the need to violate and encroach on another's space, to impose a cost and thereby to entail oneself in indebtedness to another; the thanks are a gesture of appreciation for the value of the gift. 

What can and cannot be taken for granted

In the same way that desert also at the same time signifies property rights so gratitude and apology also signify class distinction. 

What can and cannot be taken for granted is often a matter of class membership or national membership. 

Authority becomes indifferent

At the bottom of class distinction is a person’s applying emotion and affection to people who are not immediately known to them. 

It is when emotion has been drained out of the class relationship that the exercise of authority becomes indifferent, and resentment rather than affection comes to regulate the social order. 

An existential orientation

Gratitude is an existential orientation. It is a posture of being in the world. To be in a state of gratitude is to be in response to something or someone who has bestowed some object or performed some action that puts one on the receiving end of a relationship. It therefore presupposes and implies the existence of a relationship, a relationship that is definitive of one's being; it sets the tone of that relationship as being colored by loving kindness and gentle caring; and it presents a set of guidelines for how to behave. 

Gratitude is a response to some primary act of beneficence. It is not clear how one can orient oneself into a posture of gratitude without having some providential god on the other side of the relationship.