Peoplehood - עמיות

Martin Buber, Judaism and the Jews, 1909

The People are for us a community of people who were, are and will be -- a community of the dead, the living and the yet unborn -- who, together constitute a unity. It is this unity that to young people is the foundation of their identity, this identity which is fitted as a link into the great chain. Whatever all the people in this chain have created and will create, they conceive to be the work of their own particular being. Whatever they have experienced and will experience the individual conceives to be his or her own destiny. The past of the People is her or his personal memory, the future of the People his or her personal task. The way of the People is the basis of our understanding of ourself. When out of our deepest self-knowledge we have thus affirmed ourselves, when we have said "yes" to ourselves and to our whole Jewish existence, then our feelings will no longer be the feelings of individuals. Every one of us will feel that we are the people, for we will feel the People within ourselves.

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan

If the Jewish people is the body to which the Jew can turn for making the most of life or achieving salvation [shleymut] then it follows as the night the day that it is the Jew's task to reconstruct the life of his people so that it shall actually function as a source of salvation. This, indeed, is the main paradox of the spiritual life: the way to achieve salvation [sheleymut] is to bend all of one's efforts to render the people to whom one looks for salvation capable of providing it.

Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, "Al Ha-T'shuva"

The Jew who believes in Knesset Israel is the Jew who lives with Knesset Israel where she may be and is prepared to die for her, who hurts with her pain and rejoices in her joy, who fights her wars, suffers in her defeats, and celebrates her victories. The Jew who believes in Knesset Israel is the Jew who joins himself as an indestructible link not only to the Jewish people of this generation but to Knesset Israel of all generations. How? Through Torah, which is and creates the continuity of all the generations of Israel for all time.

Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, "Community"

The community in Judaism is not a functional-utilitarian, but an ontological one. The community is not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality: I might say, a living whole. In particular, Judaism has stressed the wholeness and the unity of Knesset Israel, the Jewish community. The latter is not a conglomerate. It is an autonomous entity, endowed with a life of its own. We, for instance, lay claim to Eretz Israel. God granted the land to us as a gift. To whom did He pledge the land? Neither to an individual, nor to a partnership consisting of millions of people. He gave it to the Knesset Israel, to the community as an independent unity, as a distinct juridic metaphysical person. He did not promise the land to me, to you, to them; nor did He promise the land to all of us together. Abraham did not receive the land as an individual, but as the father of a future nation. The owner of the Promised Land is the Knesset Israel, which is a community persona.