On Monday, at Yom Kippur services at the vulnerable-feeling, police-car-protected entrance to the Jewish Community Center gym in downtown Toronto, our community’s wise and kind Rabbi, Ed Elkin, during a 25-hour fast, between leading services from 9 a.m. and giving an incredibly moving, very personal Yom Kippur sermon about surviving trauma, loss and grief at noon, and four hours before concluding the “Closing of the Gates” neilah service at 8 p.m., at 4 p.m., our rabbi led a shiur, a public learning session, studying some ancient text and interpreting it in the light of our present reality.

The Yom Kippur Afternoon Shiur 5787/2026 was entitled “Pressed Together While Being Spaced Apart: The Individual and the Community in Jewish Thought.” And its text source is not the Talmud but a midrash – something between a text-based fable and a liberal interpretation of a line of sacred verse.

In this midrash was a discussion about how, in Jerusalem’s holy Temple, the people of Israel “would stand, crowded, but prostrate themselves, spaced.” And at the centre court of the JCC gym, the rabbi led a vigorous session, with much input from Narayever community members who had come to learn, ranging from a political scientist’s understanding of “the individual” and “community” to journalistic observation about living in our technological and increasingly virtual world, to more sociological observations about the difficulty, in a free society, of creating (without coercion) a congregation that is bounded and yet allows each individual his or her perspective, belief or political positions.

Rabbi Ed’s teaching about the individual and the community in Jewish thought, and the various comments and questions, provided a lot of food for thought.

But I want to go back to the earlier paragraph in that same midrash (Vayikra Rabba 10:9), where, in the Sinai desert, God commands Moses to “Assemble the entire congregation at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.” (Leviticus 8:3) And Rabbi Elazar rightly asks, in disbelief: “ALL of Israel? All 600,000? And you say, ‘at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting’? How can that possibly be?” And then Elazar, answering his own question, explains: It’s because the entrance of the Tent of Meeting is one of those places where “the lesser contains the greater.”

And I want to focus on that phrase used to explain how, in a small physical space, so vast an amount of people could be gathered.

The simple pshat........

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