Dr. Erica Brownis Yeshiva University Vice Provost for Values and Leadership and Director, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership
We feel a sense of belonging when something or someone lays a claim on us – family, friends, an organization, a workplace. We experience ourselves as an active part in a master narrative of family, community, or nation. Belonging suggests a meaningful affinity, a state of comfort where we can be ourselves, where we are welcomed, cared for, well-adjusted, and loved. And because of this, belonging is one of our most basic human needs.
Joseph Myers, in his book, The Search to Belong, delineates four categories of belonging: intimate, personal, social and public. This division captures those closest to us, a broader extended group of family and friends, our general social circles and external groups of which we are members. Belonging offers us a framework to be part of something greater than ourselves; we often discover ourselves in relation to others.
The opposite of belonging, estrangement, can be painful and disorienting. In David Aberbach’s 1988 book, Bialik , he writes that Nahman Bialik, one of our greatest Jewish poets, suffered the pains of alienation as a child. He was lonely and had an orphan-like status; he longed to reconnect to family and community. His description of loneliness is one of the most profound I’ve ever encountered: “The misery at home, the bitter orphanhood, weighed heavily on me. I was invited by relatives to a wedding party. The light and music filled my heart, which thirsted so badly to feel joy again. Like a madman I danced barefoot to feel joy to the music. I forgot myself, but my heart longed to join the circle, to cleave to something, to belong.” We all desire, as Bialik did, to join a circle, to cleave to something, to belong.
In a remarkable internalization of displacement, Moses named his first son Gershom after his own feeling of dislocation: “I have been a stranger in a foreign land” (Ex. 2:22). He was removed from his people as an infant, raised as an Egyptian and then found refuge among the Midianites. Perhaps he was able to withstand forty years of complaints simply to find a way home.
Sometimes we, too, experience existential loneliness. At other times, it’s more momentary and finds relief in the simplicity of a warm greeting. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in his influential Tradition essay “The Community,” poignantly describes about how belonging helps us experience self-worth:
Quite often a man finds himself in a crowd of strangers. He feels lonely. No one knows him, no one cares for him, no one is concerned about him. It is an existential experience. He begins to doubt his own ontological worth. This leads to alienation from the crowd surrounding him. Suddenly someone taps him on the shoulder and says, ‘Aren’t you Mr. So-and-so? I have heard so much about you.’ In a fraction of a second his awareness changes. What brought about the change? The recognition by somebody, the word!