Ancient Wisdom

By David Wolpe

Sunday, June 14, 2026

 

Alexander Selkirk is not a name many people know these days, but he was the inspiration for one of the most famous books of all time: Robinson Crusoe. It was reading his story (along with those of other castaways) that led author Daniel Defoe to imagine a man on the island, creating a life in splendid isolation.

 

Selkirk, sailing with a group of buccaneers in 1704, ironically stranded himself on an island west of Chile in the Pacific. He had a dispute with his captain, Thomas Stradling, insisting that the ship needed repairs. Stradling offered Selkirk the chance to disembark and he did, assuming the crew would back him up. It didn’t, and when he begged Stradling to take him back, the captain refused. Selkirk proved correct—the ship later sank.

 

While Robinson Crusoe spent more than two decades alone in the book and underwent a spiritual awakening, Selkirk, who was alone for four years and four months, was miserable on the otherwise uninhabited island, suffering from isolation, loneliness, and a desperate desire to see other human beings. When he was rescued, he was overwhelmed at the vision of his rescuers—he was both distrusting and joyous.

 

That core insight, that the idea of individualism is incoherent without an accompanying community, animates one of the central books of sociology, Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, published in 1953. Its insights have increasing relevance for our situation as a nation and, as technology spreads, for the world.

 

Nisbet, who taught at Berkeley and Columbia among other universities, recognized that individualism alone was insufficient to create a functioning society. The difference between the medieval world and the modern world was the prevalence of local associations. Guilds, churches, villages, and more gave people a community in which to feel a sense of belonging. Although some persisted into the modern age, they were far less all-encompassing. Paradoxically, individualism has the capacity to thrive when embedded in a network. The solitary individual is left without resources and power.

 

Though Nisbet does not mention it, writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, the paradigm of the lone individual in the woods thanks to his book Walden, was an integral part of Concord, Massachusetts, society. Walden’s cabin was some 1.5 miles from Concord’s city center, and Thoreau walked there frequently for various needs, including for his mother to wash and fold his laundry. Ironically, having a mom and a community helped him be a loner.

 

Decades before sociologist Robert Putnam coined the term “bowling alone,” Nisbet wrote that the more that voluntary, close associations are abolished, the greater the power of the state becomes. “The political enslavement of man requires the emancipation of man from all the authorities and memberships (obstructions to popular will, as the Nazis and Communists describe them) that serve, in one degree or another, to insulate the individual from external political power,” he wrote.

 

Our epidemic of isolation is not merely anecdotal. To cite just one recent study, the American Psychological Association reported last year that more than half of adults periodically feel isolated, alone, and subject to the resulting depression and anxiety that isolation can bring.

 

Here, modern conditions and Nisbet’s insight can help us understand the wisdom of Judaism’s response.

 

Certain central prayers cannot be said without a minyan—a gathering of at least 10 worshippers. Holidays are an inevitable time of assembly. The prayers are almost always collective—praying for what we, not I, need. Even the confession of sins on Yom Kippur is in the plural: “For the sins which we have sinned.” Society enables and restricts, and together these guardrails ensure that the idea of peoplehood (not just personhood) is as primary in Judaism as faith itself.

 

Community is not only a function of religious obligation—the obligation creates a community even for those who are not traditionally observant. I remember a man named Irv who lived alone and would come each morning to services at my synagogue in Los Angeles. He would attend the morning minyan at 7:30 a.m., even though he did not know the prayers. He came just to ensure that he would not be alone. Again and again, he would tell me how, as a child, he would accompany his father, who was a furrier, on his rounds. Once, his father sold a fur to Ella Fitzgerald, and she sang to Irv, who was a small boy, until he fell asleep. I sometimes think what Judaism meant to him was that he had someone to whom he could tell that story, as he did to each new member of the minyan.

 

That is why I argue against the association of houses of worship with particular political parties. What makes such associations perilous is that primary loyalty tends to shift to party, even if certain party positions are at odds with the tradition itself. Such standards, such as those notable in the civil rights era, will often be in opposition to the government. The separation of church and state, while never absolute, protects both institutions. Once you place an “R” or a “D” metaphorically on top of the spire, the religious meaning of the establishment is diminished. You are joining a party as much as a church.

 

Judaism has survived, generally speaking, by avoiding this temptation while still insisting Jews do not survive alone. In his 1926 book Religion in the Making, British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that religion is what one does with his solitude. But in Judaism, religion is what one does in community, in mutual aid. It is not a tradition of hermits on mountaintops. Moses spent 40 days at Sinai, but then even he had to come down and be with the people.

 

When Jews fight against the existence of Israel, I believe this is the part of Judaism they miss—the essential connection of peoplehood. I don’t mean those who object to the government of Israel or its actions, but those who demonstrate little or no care for the survival and security of its people. There is a phrase from the Talmud, often repeated in Jewish circles: “All of Israel is responsible for one another”(Shevuot 39a). Community is central to a tradition that Genesis depicts as a family grown into a people.

 

Nearly half of all Jews live in Israel, and built into our tradition is a natural solidarity. When, in the Bible, two and a half tribes wanted to live on the other side of the Jordan, Moses assured them that they could, as long as they fought for the land. To extend the meaning of the political philosopher Edmund Burke’s phrase, “little platoons” are essential to the Jewish undertaking.

 

Hillel, perhaps the greatest of the early rabbis, said, “Do not separate yourself from the community.” Our age is constantly diagnosed with the flip side of individualism: loneliness. Judaism carries within its spiritual DNA the cure, and it is one that America once understood better than it does now. It is not an online community, but a real and living gathering of human beings, who know each other’s joys and sorrows and dreams. We have become a nation of Selkirks waiting for rescue. But that rescue will not come on a screen.

 

We have to get ourselves off the island.