“The Talmud states that when a student is exiled, his teacher must be exiled with him. Not simply that he must go with him. He must be exiled with him.
Which tells us: If you truly want to teach, you must put yourself in your student’s space.
If your student has wandered far astray, tear yourself away from your own space; feel what it is like to be distant. If your student is in pain, let that pain become your pain. There must be nothing that lies between your student’s world and your own.
Teach in this way and you can bring even the most distant student to your own level of understanding. And yet higher: You will learn from this student that which you could never have learned from your own teachers and colleagues.”
This is just one example of the extreme caring that is part of being a Jew.
“All Israel (all Jews) are responsible for one another” is one of our important maxims.
If any Jew acts inappropriately, it is a reflection on all Jews. If someone commits a horrible crime and his name sounds like it could be Jewish, there are tremors throughout the Jewish nation. It’s not just that we are afraid of what non-Jews will think of us; it is a matter of internal shame on the rare occasions that one of our own turns aside from our collective mission of making the world a holy place.
This responsibility of one Jew for another is so significant that there is even an opinion that if you perform a certain mitzvah while your fellow Jew does not, you will not get credit for performance of that mitzvah since you are a guarantor for your fellow Jew. That is, in neglecting to make sure your fellow Jew performed the mitzvah, it is as though you did not perform the mitzvah yourself.