Perhaps, we can take this further – to the heart of Jewish identity and life directly through HaShem – which is to say that the Torah ideal is not a network of towns (even though there ARE towns) but a network of sovereign individuals who are, at once, judge over themselves, but without power to legislate beyond their own self. The Law isn’t something which comes from without, but from within. It’s acceptance and application always rests with the individual according to their own particularities. Any agreements one enters into with other individual Jews forms a contract of an amorphous social life that has no permanent function other than to facilitate the life of the Jewish people – which is embodied with each, individual Jew who is that nation wholly. So long as there is ONE Jew in existence, the Jewish nation will exist.

Jewish life is not, at root, institutional. When an institution is eliminated, so are all of those tied to it in an identity sense – sometimes altogether. This is true for everyone tied to things in stasis – who derive their identity not from within but from without.

That we’ve picked up these disintegrating habits of organization and identity is a product of having constantly found ourselves in and identifying with ‘Egypt’ – the epitome of the external, institutional, and degenerating.