Abstract
Generally, in the Jewish tradition, a mitzvah is understood to be an obligation imposed upon, and carried out by, individuals. But some mitzvot operate differently. These mitzvot are not individual obligations; there is no one person responsible for carrying them out, and no one person can fulfill them. Instead, the community bears the burden of these responsibilities.
These communal obligations are distinct from individual obligations to serve the community (e.g., paying taxes). They are also distinct from individual obligations that, when fulfilled, contribute to developing a certain kind of community. Instead, in these cases, Jewish legal authorities declare that the obligations themselves are communal, calling them Ḥovot ha-Tzibbur (“Obligations of the Community”) or Mitzvot ha-Mutalot ‘al ha-Tzibbur (“Commandments that Devolve on the Community”).
This article names this category, identifies the relevant classical sources, discusses the central conundrum of the operationalization of communal obligations (i.e., who fulfills the obligation in practice?), and then—to promote the idea that communal obligations may serve as a resource for imagining Jewish community—distinguishes three modes in which these mitzvot function. An appendix presents the full dataset of over fifty communal mitzvot.