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.

Last Sunday marked the eighth anniversary of a Saudi-led alliance’s intervention in the Yemeni civil war, intended to defeat the Iran-backed Houthi militia that had overthrown the previous government. In the wake of the rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran, diplomats are hoping that the talks between the Saudis and the Houthis—which have been ongoing since last summer—will finally succeed in ending the war. To Nadwa Al-Dawsari, such an outcome seems highly unlikely:

The Houthis’ military gains have allowed them to dictate the path of international diplomacy in Yemen. They know Saudi Arabia is desperate to extricate itself and the international community wants the Yemen problem to go away. They do not recognize and refuse to negotiate with the [Riyadh-supported] Presidential Leadership Council or other Yemeni factions that they cast as “Saudi mercenaries.”

Indeed, even as the Houthis were making progress in talks with the Saudis, the rebel group continued to expand its recruitment, mobilization, and stockpiling of arms during last year’s truce as Iran significantly increased its weapons shipments. The group also carried out a series of attacks. . . . On March 23, the Houthis conducted a military drill close to the Saudi border to remind the Saudis of “the cost of no agreement and further concessions.”

The Houthis are still part and parcel of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance.” With the Houthis gaining international political recognition, . . . Iran will have a greater chance to expand its influence in Yemen with the blessing of Western powers. The international community is eager for a “success story” in Yemen, even if that means a sham political settlement that will likely see the civil war continue. A deal with the Houthis is Saudi Arabia’s desperate plea to wash its hands of Yemen, but in the long term it could very well position Iran to threaten regional and international security. More importantly, it might set Yemen on a course of protracted conflict that will create vast ungoverned spaces.

Meanwhile, tensions in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and its ostensible ally, the United Arab Emirates, are rising, while the Houthis are developing the capability to launch missiles at Israel or to block a crucial Middle Eastern maritime chokepoint in the Red Sea.