No, I don’t mean in terms of the sanctity of human life, that’s another issue. What I mean, is how important are humans to other humans? How important is it to live with other people? Or is going it alone a viable alternative?

In his play, No Exit, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” His idea of eternal damnation was to be forced to suffer the company of certain others with no exit, ever.

Terry Anderson would disagree. Anderson, a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, was held captive by a terrorist group in Lebanon from 1985 to 1991. In his memoir, Den of Lions, he describes it as an agonizing form of mental torture, in which the mind ultimately disintegrates into “a formless grey-black misery…a mind “gone dead” from lack of anyone to talk to. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” Anderson writes.

Similarly, John McCain has written of his forced isolation during his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese P.O.W. camp, that “it crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” This, from a man who was subjected to brutal physical torture.

In his recent New Yorker piece on the widespread use of solitary confinement in American prisons (over 25,000 inmates in supermax and other prisons), Atul Gawande uses the testimony of Anderson, McCain and others to buttress his case against the practice.

It is an extreme but effective illustration of the extent to which human beings need other human beings. Not a mere comfort, but as a psychological necessity. For without it we simply fall to pieces.

The Gawande piece put me in mind of the emphasis Judaism places on interpersonal relationships. To start with, half of the Ten Commandments pertain to our treatment of others: from not killing and stealing to not coveting others’ property. Many of the positive commandments also mandate right social behavior: loving thy neighbor, giving to the poor, looking out for the orphan and the widow, and so on.
Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi in his classic, Kuzari (3:1), writes of the common misconception that piety consists in isolating oneself from society, the proverbial image of the holy man on the mountaintop. With rare exceptions—such as actual prophets—going off on one’s own is not the path to holiness. On the contrary, it is in the company of others that one must seek God.

Even prayer, that quintessentially individual form of communication with God, in Jewish law requires a quorum of ten. The Sages say that the prayers of the community will not go unanswered, though no such guarantee is offered for the prayers of the individual.

An extraordinary argument for the importance of humanity is found in Maimonides’ Introduction to the Mishna. He posits that God, the source of all wisdom, created the world out of His infinite wisdom. Why is it then, asks Maimonides, that the earth is so populated with fools and ignoramuses?

One of his answers is that in any generation the truly wise are very few indeed. And if only they would exist, and no others, the world would be an unbearably lonely place. So God filled the world with people who lack wisdom in order to provide a society for those for whom the world was created. In other words, it is worthwhile to create an entire society so that no man should be alone.

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