NOTES for Eze 18:20

The idea of collective responsibility for a crime committed by a person was spread everywhere in the antiquity. Moreover, and today it is met not rarely. But the prophet on behalf of God rejects this idea, rejects it completely and absolutely. Certainly, in large part because it is hard to consider initially just the collective responsibility.

The opinion according to which the children have to answer for the crimes of the parents and - the widest - the members of a big patriarchal generation assume the responsibility of the acts of one another, appeared when the generation appeared as an entire entity, living the same life, such that it was impossible to identify and to distinguish in it [the generation] individual lives.

However, it's hardly worth today to say that it is not, at least, always true. But it is not only a problem of injustice. The collectivism is terrible not only by the fact that it can lead to the punishment of the one who has maybe no direct relation with the crime.

It is terrible because for a human personality who is unique and exceptional there is no place in the collective. There is no separate "I" in it, there is only a big "we". But before God there is always a concrete person in all his originality and uniqueness, and not a collective. And that is why God does not need everything that pulls man behind, into any collective. He wants to deal with individual and not for with mass, nor crowd.