The Power of Community: The Treasure We Are Holding

Look around you. The youth running barefoot between the houses, the sister who brings a plate without being asked, the elder whose name every young one knows. It is easy to walk past these things on an ordinary day. It is easy to forget that they are not ordinary at all. This reflection is rooted in Village of Peace.

We are holding a treasure. Sometimes we hold it so close that we can no longer see its shape. This is an invitation to step back for a moment and look at the community we have built together, because it is rarer and more precious than any of us can say in a single breath.

What the Science of Community Now Confirms

We did not need a laboratory to tell us that we need one another. But it is moving to watch the world's researchers arrive, slowly, at what our grandmothers already knew.

In 2010, researchers led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad brought together 148 studies following more than 300,000 people. Their finding was striking: people with strong social relationships had a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival than those without them. The effect was comparable to quitting smoking, and larger than the risks of obesity or physical inactivity. It held across age, sex and health status. The strongest protection came not from simply living with others, but from being woven into a community.

Read that again slowly. Belonging is not a luxury. It is medicine. It sits beside Food, Water, Rest, Exercise and Cleanliness - the five medicines of our Live-It - as something the body and the spirit cannot live well without. When we are woven together, we live longer and we live better. When the threads loosen, all of us feel it, even those who cannot name what they are feeling.

Where the Wise Have Always Pointed

Long before any study, the Psalmist sang it plainly: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" (Psalm 133:1). Not how profitable, not how clever. How good, and how pleasant. Unity is described as a sweetness, something to be tasted.

When Nehemiah rebuilt the broken walls of Jerusalem, the work was not done by one great builder. Each family repaired the section of the wall in front of its own house. No one could see the whole wall rising from where they stood. They only saw their own stones. Yet section by section, family by family, the city was made whole again.

Across the world, teachers of the spirit have arrived at the same place. The Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh taught that the awakened one his tradition awaits may not come as a single person at all. "Maybe he will take the form of a Sangha," he wrote - a community practising understanding and loving kindness together. In southern Africa, the Nguni proverb says it in three words: *Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu* - a person is a person through other persons. Our humanity is not something we own alone. It is something we hold in trust for one another.

An African Community the World Has Rarely Seen

Search the world for communities built deliberately around spiritual principle. You will find the ashrams of India, the monasteries of Asia, the old religious villages of Europe, the kibbutzim that surround us here in the land. Each carries the wisdom of its own people.

Now search for a community of Africans, gathered from the diaspora, who built a whole way of life on spiritual principle: their own food, their own schools, their own music, their own health system, their own governance - sustained across more than half a century. The examples are very few. Ours is one of them.

Remember how it began. In 1966, H.E. Ben Ammi Ben-Israel received a vision. In 1967, a few hundred Hebrew Israelites left Chicago for the forests of Liberia, a wilderness that purified us before the journey home. In 1969, the first families reached the Negev, and Dimona became the heart of it all. Then came the long years: 34 of them before permanent residency was granted in 2003. Years of uncertainty. Years with no guarantee of tomorrow.

And look at what was built in those very years:

• Schools raised and filled with learning

• The plant-based Live-It, lived daily for more than five decades

• More than 1,150 natural births through the House of Life, with no infant mortality recorded

• Music that carried our voices to the Eurovision stage in 1999, and again in 2006

• That same year, Ghana's Ministry of Health invited a team from Dimona to help with its national health and nutrition programmes; today our partnerships in health reach Ghana, Uganda, Togo and Benin

None of this was the work of one person alone. It was the work of community. Ben Ammi gave us the vision, and the vision was carried by a people. Every meal, every lesson, every birth, every song was held up by many hands. This is what community can do. This is what we did.

The Small Stuff, and the Treasure of Community

So why does it sometimes feel as though the threads are loosening?

The Sedona Method, developed by Lester Levenson, offers a simple and honest observation. Our heavier feelings, he taught, trace back to a few deep wants: the want for approval, the want for control, and the want for security. In a family or a community, these wants rarely announce themselves. They come dressed as a principle. They sound like "I am only saying what is right." They show up as the need to be proven correct, the need to be seen, the need to have the last word.

Every one of us has felt this. It is human. But notice what it costs. Winning an argument and losing a brother is a poor trade. Being proven right while the wall beside us goes unrepaired is no victory at all.

Levenson's gift is a question anyone can ask in the middle of a hard moment: could I let this want go? Not the principle. Not the truth. Just the grip of wanting to be right. Most of the time, when we loosen that grip, we find the other person was also holding something heavy, and was also hoping someone would reach first.

Here is a small practice for this week:

• When a disagreement rises, pause and ask quietly: am I wanting approval, control or security right now? Could I let it go?

• Greet someone you have drifted from. Nothing more is needed than a real "Shalom."

• Thank an elder by name for something they built that you have benefited from.

• Bring the youth to the next gathering, and let them see what a people looks like.

Our Community Is Standing in the Prosperous Future

It is tempting to speak of a prosperous future as something still ahead of us. But consider this. The ones who crossed from Chicago to Liberia to the Negev were praying for exactly what we now walk through every day: a home, a people, a way of life, youth born into health, a name that is respected in the land.

We are not waiting for the treasure. We are holding it. The only question is whether we will see it, and whether we will hold it gently enough, and together enough, to hand it on whole.

The world has shown us, study by study, that community is medicine. The prophets showed us that unity is good and pleasant. And Dimona has shown the world that an African people, built on spiritual principle, can do what few thought possible.

If you are reading this from further away, we warmly invite you to come and see this community for yourself. And for those of us at home: let us not trade the treasure for the small stuff. Let us rebuild the wall, section by section, family by family - together.

*Shalom* from Village of Peace, Dimona. The treasure is in our hands.