This week’s Torah reading of Vayakhel-P’kudey (Exodus 35–40), begins with Moses briefly reminding the Israelites to observe the Sabbath and then, reiterating God’s commands in Exodus 25–28, to construct the Tabernacle—the portable sanctuary where they would worship in the wilderness. In this seeming redundancy, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks finds the Torah’s “primer on how to build community.”

[The text] uses a single verb root, k-h-l, to describe two very different activities. The first appears in last week’s parashah at the beginning of the story of the Golden Calf. “When the people saw that Moses was long delayed in coming down the mountain, they gathered (vayikahel) around Aaron and said to him: get up, make us gods to go before us.” . . . The second is the opening verse of this week’s Torah reading: “Moses assembled (vayakhel) all the community of Israel and said to them: these are the things the Lord has commanded you to do.”

These words sound similar. Both verbs could be translated as “gathered” or “assembled.” But there is a fundamental difference between them. The first gathering was leaderless; the second had a leader, Moses. The first was a crowd, the second a community. In a crowd, individuals lose their individuality. A kind of collective mentality takes over, and people find themselves doing what they would never consider doing on their own. [The Scottish writer] Charles Mackay famously spoke of the madness of crowds.

The vayakhel of [Exodus 35] was quite different. Moses sought to create community by getting the people to make personal contributions to a collective project, the Tabernacle. In a community, individuals remain individuals. Their participation is essentially voluntary: “Let everyone whose heart moves him bring an offering.” . . . What united them was not the dynamic of the crowd in which we are caught up in a collective frenzy but rather a sense of common purpose, of helping to bring something into being that was greater than anyone could achieve alone.

In his new book A Time to Build, Yuval Levin argues that social media have undermined our social lives. “They plainly encourage the vices most dangerous to a free society. They drive us to speak without listening, to approach others confrontationally rather than graciously. . . . They eat away at our capacity for patient toleration, our decorum, our forbearance, our restraint.” These are crowd behaviors, not community ones.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.