EXOD339 Hillel said: Do not separate yourself from the community… Pirkei Avot, Perek II, mishnah 5. The community, the group living together holds a most important place in Judaism. To the group was given the Torah, and it is of the group, with its interrelations and collective activity, that the Almighty has willed to make "the kingdom of cohanim (priests) [this verse]. Indeed, the individual, in fulfilling his personal religious obligations, is often dependent on the community and its institutions. There is much in Torah that you cannot observe in isolation. For Hillel, the authentic, historic community in Jewry is even more. It is an implicit, immutable authority on normative Jewish law. Once a question arose: When the day before Passover occurred on the Sabbath, and people came to sacrifice the pascal lamb, were they allowed to carry their slaughtering knives to the Temple area? No one knew, and Hillel himself could not remember how his teachers had ruled. But he advised, "Let the people Israel (do as they are accustomed]. If they are not prophets, they are the children, the descendants of prophets." Once he saw what the people did, he remembered what he had been taught (T.B. Pesahim 66a). In an age when religious observance was a living force among the people, current practice, what people simply did or didn't do, could be relied on as a faithful, accurate reflection of the tradition.