GEN530 The verse embodies two fundamental truths about man—the dignity of each human being created in the Divine image, and the unity of all men derived from a single ancestor.  The biblical lawgiver, prophet, and sage all emphasize the thought that the entire human race is a unit, both “horizontally,” through space, and “vertically,” through time.  All the members of a single generation in space have a common destiny they cannot escape, and the various links in a family through time are also indissolubly joined together, both for good (“the merit of the fathers”) and for ill (“the sins of the fathers upon the children”).  … Each human being, particularly in an age when individualism has run riot, likes to think of himself as a discrete entity, an independent soul, sharply demarcated from all his fellows.  The fact is, however, that by a thousand invisible threads, each human being is associated, for weal or woe, with the entire human race.  He is organically linked in time with all the generations of his ancestors before him and his descendants after him.  He is inescapably joined in space with all men and women who are his contemporaries.  The wicked sin and the innocent suffer—that is a consequence of the interdependence of mankind.  GORLAW 90-1