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.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.