Contemporary philosopher Diego Maradona once had an interaction with a journalist during which he blurted, “Shut up, you don’t exist, muppet!” That phrase, “no existis,” pronounced with an s instead of an x to imitate the great man’s shantytown accent, became a classic Maradona-ism and was an archetypical example of his rough but endearing manners.  

But Maradona, misunderstood as always, wasn’t being intentionally offensive. He was simply referring to a deep philosophical and scientific truth. 

The night sky in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Alex/Adobe Stock

You see, you may observe the universe down into the smallest recesses of existence, but the body doesn’t have an existence as an indivisible entity. You may say, “My body exists — I’m using it now.” In truth, it only exists as the elements in relation to each other. It’s a collection of interacting cells, and those cells are a combination of molecules, and those molecules are an assemblage of atoms, and so forth.

That is probably the most radical discovery of quantum mechanics: that the universe does not exist in the static state we perceive with the naked eye but constantly comes into being through the interplay of the inter-related phenomena. If our vision was powerful enough, we wouldn’t see tables, chairs and Maradona, but protons, photons and electrons interacting with other particles. 

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch said it way before Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr: 

“[God] created an abundance of forces, intermingled and functioning closely together, according to His Word — and then He separated them so that each had to sustain the other: none was henceforth able to exist and function by itself but had to be sustained by its fellow creatures and, in turn, had to help them exist and function. In this way, everything contributes according to its strength, however much or little, to the existence of the whole.”

When we consider this idea, a puzzling feature of Rosh Hashanah starts to make sense. 

Rosh Hashanah celebrates a symbolic anniversary of the creation of the world, so it would be appropriate to read the first chapters of Genesis, the story of the Creation. Surprisingly, however, the Creation story is all but absent for the liturgy of that day. Instead, we read from the Torah about the relational problems of the patriarchs: the rivalry between Sarah and Hagar; the conflicts between Isaac and Ishmael; the heartbreak of Abraham in facing those conflicts; and finally Abraham’s heart-wrenching commitment to offer his son in sacrifice only to have him saved in extremis. 

The message seems to be that relationships create the world. Rosh Hashanah has for millennia told us that the world isn’t truly there until we build meaningful relationships with each other. We may have been created, but without relationships, we don’t truly exist. We are like particles wandering aimlessly in the quantum realm without ever encountering each other.

Our world of hyper-empowered, autonomous individuals believes in the fallacy that we are all “self-made,” that we build our own identities and that we don’t belong to anything but ourselves. We are not bound to others; we are separate, self-contained entities. The Other exists only to increase our pleasure and “self-fulfillment.” The dominant paradigm today is not that of the “relational person” but of the “self-built” person. Thus, we see the task of building our own identity as a personal quest, not a collective one, and we believe that the ultimate source of truth lies in our own personal, subjective feelings. 

We love the first part of Hillel’s dictum, “If I’m not for myself, who will be for me?” but we ignore the second, “But when I’m for myself alone; what am I?” This echoes the critique made by philosopher Martin Buber, who decried that we too often relate to others in the I-It model, treating them in a purely instrumental form. We forget that the wholeness of life can be achieved only in I-Thou relationships, those that make us feel that we are part of the same living tissue as those around us. 

This concept can be found across cultures. For example, the Zulu greeting “Sawubona”–“Shiboka” is translated as “hello,” but literally, it means “I see you”- “Therefore I am.” Whether it’s Hillel’s wisdom, Buber’s philosophy or the Zulu worldview, they all share the profound insight that we achieve true existence through our connections to others — a truth even quantum physicists affirm. 

In that light, the choice of texts becomes more understandable. Because the High Holy Days are times of personal introspection, there’s the risk of thinking that we alone, divorced from the community, are the locus of existence. Maybe that’s why even prayers that are deeply personal, like the Viduy (confession of sins), are said in the plural: to remind us that even when we examine our own hearts, we are part of a web of relationships. 

But there are many biblical texts about relationships, so why these ones? Why ones that relate to our first patriarch? 

I think that choosing the intersection of family and peoplehood is not casual. 

There are no silver linings to what happened on Oct. 7; it was an unmitigated tragedy. But there is something that we rediscovered that day: the inextricable way in which we are connected to other Jews. We relearned that we are part of the same living body. We felt the pain of Nova and of Kibbutz Be’eri. Many of us considered Hersh Goldberg-Polin almost like a family member. 

Relationships are key to existence — but relationships can only expand in concentric circles. In these times of multicultural integration, we believe that we can relate to humanity as a whole. But that’s a fallacy. Jews tend to be universalists to a fault, sometimes forgetting that only our strong, particular identity allows us to interact meaningfully with the world. Only by being who we are as a people can we contribute something unique to the conversation of humanity. 

On Oct. 7^, we learned that lesson the hard way. We found ourselves lonely and abandoned, realizing yet again and with horror that we can only count on ourselves. If we learned anything that day, it’s that we can’t neglect our internal bonds. We remembered the obvious: that solidarity works in concentric circles or not at all. 

Cells have a membrane, a porous wall that separates them from the world while allowing them to interact with it. If there is no porosity, the cell dies, and if there’s too much of it, and the cell dissolves. As the Jewish people, we fight to be a part of the world while resisting being dissolved in a sea of hatred. 

Rosh Hashanah tells us to look into our hearts and plan our own life journey, but it reminds us that the journey is not and cannot be a lonely one. It’s one that we share with our close relationships and with our own people. It tells us that our entire world is built upon connections of mutuality and responsibility and that our very existence depends on others. 

Without our people, our lives are as inconsequential as that of a lone electron amid the lonely vastness of the universe. With them, however, we are bright and powerful, like a million dots of light.

Andrés Spokoiny is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network.