קוֹל דּוֹדִי דוֹפֵק Kol Dodi In his famous work "Kol Dodi Dofek" (The Song of Songs 5, 2), Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik begins by addressing the issue of evil and suffering in the world: "One of the deepest of mysteries, troubling Judaism from the dawn of its existence, is the problem of suffering. At a propitious moment of Divine compassion, Moses, the master of all prophets, pleaded before the Lord of All to be enlightened as to the workings of this impenetrable phenomenon." And he refuses to deny the existence of evil: "Evil is a fact that cannot be denied. There is evil in the world. There are suffering and agony, and death pangs. He who would deceive himself by ignoring the split in existence and by romanticizing life is but a fool and a fabricator of illusions. It is impossible to conquer monstrous evil with philosophical-speculative thought." Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs says that in his work Kol Dodi Dofek, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik finds 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.