GEN259 The Talmudic sage Rava compressed his understanding of the human condition into four Hebrew [(sic) - Aramaic - AJL] words: O havruta o mituta, “Either companionship or death.”  Without the possibility of human relatedness, man is empty.  Without an outside world of human beings, there can be no inside world of meaningfulness. Personality, liberty, love, responsibility—all that makes life worth living—depend upon a community in which man can locate and realize himself.  But man is more than the sum of his connections with others. There must be a self in order for there to be communication; there must be an inner existence to relate to the outer world.  If man is not an island, neither is he a switchboard, a maze of wires that transmits the messages of others but has nothing of its own to say.  God created man from the dust of the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, man became “a living soul” [this verse]. GOODSOC 3