I have been thinking a lot about the energy at Knicks games lately. With the high ticket prices and all the focus on celebrities courtside, it feels like we have turned a basketball game into a massive, high-stakes theater.

It is easy to look at that frenzy and think it is just about sports, but I think it is actually something much deeper. We are all starving for that feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves. When the arena erupts, those invisible walls between people disappear for a few hours. We get that rush of being totally unified.

Emile Durkheim, the sociologist, famously called this "collective effervescence." He observed that when people come together for a shared ritual, they enter a state of heightened energy that transcends their daily, individual lives—it acts like a religion, binding them together in a way that feels almost sacred. But the irony is that we are looking for this oneness in a place built on exclusivity, where the best seats are only for the few. We are essentially outsourcing our need for transcendence to a game and to celebrities.

It reminds me of the Baha’i way of building community, which tries to create that same kind of excitement but in a way that actually lasts. In those circles, you don't go to watch a performance or cheer for a team; you go to be the team. The goal is to build real connections through service to humanity, where the focus is on the dignity of every person you meet. As the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once suggested, our primary drive is the search for meaning, and I believe we find that meaning not in the theater of the elite, but in the simple, profound act of serving others.

There is a different kind of thrill in working with your neighbors to build something good, in realizing that our interconnectedness is not just for special events but is the foundation for our daily lives.

We are so hungry for that feeling of being one. We just keep looking for it in places defined by the cost of admission.

What if we took that same passion we pour into a game and put it into the people right in front of us? What if we built communities where the excitement wasn't about a win or a loss, but about the joy of seeing what we can actually do when we truly act as one?

We do not need a buzzer to tell us when to connect. We just need to start.