TITLEHope EricksonH2PDr. Hoyer15 October 2015Community is a group of people seen as a whole because of their common values, attitudes and goals. The common threads differ from community to community, but are crucial to understanding unity. In Bruce Chatwin's Songbook, the indigenous people of Australia, or Aboriginal people, find community through common spiritual beliefs. Aboriginal people believe that totemic beings once roamed the land singing about what happened, which brought the land into existence. This common belief in creation binds Aboriginal people together. In Exodus, community is found through core beliefs, which bring people together even in today's world. The best known of these core beliefs: community is continually evolving and ties together the past, present, and future. Communities impact not only the present, but also the future. In the Exodus Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God. “And God spoke all these words, 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery'” (Exodus 20:1). God then proceeds to list the ten commandments that should be followed. This creates an instant community in the simplest way; binding a group of people together through similar beliefs. The commandments are also a way that God shows his promise to the Israelites. Instead of using symbols as in Genesis, God uses commandments to attempt to communicate his commitment to the entire nation. They are values ​​that a community of people can easily recognize and share. The commandments not only serve to provide guidelines on how they should behave, but are also a way for people to demonstrate their commitment to God. Even when the Israelites disobey the Ten Commandments of worshiping a golden calf, they do so together, as a community. After discovering this, Moses breaks the tablets with God. Their community created by chant lines and totems has persisted long enough into the future for Chatwin to be able to experience it firsthand in his quest to learn more about them. His journey allowed him to become part of the community to some extent, learning more about their attitudes, values ​​and goals, many of them through Arkady. Arkady is an Australian citizen of Russian origin, who earned the trust of the Aboriginal people so much that they approved of him learning their songs. Chatwin's new knowledge of Aboriginal culture included knowledge of their beloved totems and their desire for the land to remain intact. Due to the influence of past generations, the current generation of Aboriginal people believed that it was wrong to build a railway. They wanted to preserve their sacred places. This belief brought them together once again as a community and saw it as Arkady's task “to identify the 'traditional landowners'; drive them to their old hunting grounds, even if these now belonged to a cattle operation; and to induce them to reveal what rock, or liquid, or phantom gum was the work of a Dreamtime hero” (Chatwin, p..