Many of us lack a sense of belonging to a community today. Changes in culture and lifestyle butt up against traditions, making us feel disconnected from each other. Long-distance commutes cut down on the amount of time we can actually spend in the towns where we live. In the United States in particular, families move so often that they don't have a chance to participate in a real communal feeling. Yet, at the same time that people retreat into living their own busy lives, making enough money to live comfortably, they will often complain at the absence of community.
How one finds a solution to this lack of communal feeling varies as greatly as do living conditions in midtown Manhattan and Manhattan, Kansas. But if someone has reached the point of seeing that living for oneself alone, or even just for one's family, isn't satisfying enough, there are certainly ways to change.
In thinking about this recently, I thought of the Biblical commands throughout the Old Testament, in which the Jewish people were admonished to care for the less fortunate among them. Alone among the nations of their day, their sense of a God of justice and mercy taught them that they must reach out to others. For instance, they were told, "When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands." Deut. 24:19.
