We close the week with a definition of community so simple and so precise that it is worth sitting with before anything else is said about it. It comes not from a community development theorist or an organisational researcher but from a religious leader whose lifelong work concerned the question of what makes people genuinely belong to one another.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, cited in The Connected Community, offered this definition: “A community is where they know your name and where they miss you when you are not there.”

Cormac Russell and John McKnight draw on this definition because it captures something that all the frameworks, inventories and listening campaigns of the preceding weeks are ultimately in service of: the simple, irreducible human experience of being known and being missed.

“A community is where they know your name and where they miss you when you are not there.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, cited in The connected community

What the definition includes

The Sacks definition of community includes two distinct but inseparable elements. The first is recognition: to know someone’s name is to have registered their existence, to have taken the trouble to learn something specific about them and to have placed them within the web of mutual knowing that constitutes a community. In a world where it is entirely possible to live within metres of dozens of people without ever learning their names, this simple act of recognition carries real social weight.

The second element is presence-consciousness: to miss someone when they are not there. This is qualitatively different from noticing their absence in an administrative sense, as one might notice that a chair is unoccupied at a meeting. To miss someone is to feel the specific texture of their absence, to be aware of what the space is without them and to care about why they are not there. This is the four-finger test in its most distilled form, and it describes something that only genuine community can produce.

What the definition excludes

The Sacks definition is as revealing in what it excludes as in what it includes. It excludes membership of a formal organisation, attendance at regular meetings, participation in a programme and subscription to a shared cause. All of these things can exist without community in Sacks’s sense: a person can attend a meeting every week for years without ever being known by name or missed when they are absent.

This exclusion is important because it directs our attention toward the relational quality of a group rather than its structural features. It suggests that the question we should be asking of any gathering is not whether people showed up, but whether they were seen, known and missed. And it implies that any group that cannot answer yes to these questions, however large, active or well-organised it may be, has not yet become a community in the fullest sense.

Building toward the Sacks standard

The practical challenge that the Sacks definition poses is the question of what it would take to build toward this standard in the specific community we inhabit. In a neighbourhood, it means ensuring that every resident is known by name to at least some of their neighbours and that their absence would be noticed. In a team, it means creating the conditions of mutual recognition that allow people to know one another well enough to care about one another’s presence.

This is the work of the connector, the learning conversation, the casual proximity and the mending fences practice. It is the work of the magnificent seven and the practice of neighbouring-up. It is, ultimately, the work of the active citizen who has decided that the standard articulated by Rabbi Sacks is worth working toward, one name and one relationship at a time.

Questions for reflection

Who is currently missing from your team or neighbourhood’s active circle, and has anyone reached out simply to let them know they are valued and missed?

What small operational habit can your group adopt to ensure that every individual feels distinctly visible and explicitly missed if they do not show up?

Think of a space, a workplace, a team or a street, where you feel genuinely known and would be genuinely missed. What are the specific conditions that have produced that experience?

What is one name of a person in your immediate community that you do not yet know, and what is the simplest possible step toward changing that today?

Inspired by: Russell, C. and McKnight, J. (2022) The connected community: discovering the health, wealth, and power of neighborhoods. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.