Acquire a Friend

יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה וְנִתַּאי הָאַרְבֵּלִי קִבְּלוּ מֵהֶם. יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן פְּרַחְיָה אוֹמֵר, עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת:  

 
“Joshua ben Perahiah and Nittai the Arbelite received [the oral tradition] from them. Joshua ben Perahiah used to say: make a teacher for yourself, and acquire a companion for yourself and judge all with the scale weighted in their favor.”

This idea from Pirkei Avot, the wisdom book of the Talmudic era, is bold in its language. It’s expecting us to do the opposite of what we as people in general expect from teachers and friends. We don’t “buy” friends, right? And we don’t “make” our own teachers, right? Those ideas seem antithetical to what friends and teachers are. They aren’t people who you have to buy or bribe. They have wisdom and a teaching relationship ready-made for you. For that matter, prejudicing people in their favor is also against our understanding of what is true about human beings.

One thing I have learned in my life is that for relationships to work, we can’t demand their existence. We have to invest in creating the mutual interests that keep us coming back to each other.

I recently finished Jesse Appell’s book “This Was Funnier in China:” his story about learning to apprentice for a master of the traditional Chinese comedy called xiangsheng. He describes learning to run and fold the robe of Master Ding’s, his master (teacher’s). He saw how much work Master Ding did for him, writing promotional material for him and sending it out all over China so that Jesse could get work. Running to fold the master’s robe, or do any small favor for him, was the work of “creating” this relationship. Folding the robe was an action superficial as labor, but deep in recognition of all the subtlety that took place within the experience of having a man patiently teach you a complex art form in a foreign country was not going to be taken for granted. The mutual interest, as shallow as it might be, had to be created to at least psychologically have a sense of balance. This is what it means to “make” a teacher.

I think back to my first Yiddish teacher, Rabbi-Cantor David Kane of blessed memory. He didn’t ask to teach me Yiddish. I asked him, and he invited me over so that I could pepper him with questions about how to say various words. Eventually, he told me what the true spirit of the language was. He berated me until I learned to speak melodically, not, in his view, Germanicly. He made me speak with him. At the end of the year, I could speak Yiddish. I came and gave him company, a sense of a future, and made him something that he was not: a Yiddish teacher. He became one. I made him a Yiddish teacher.

This pattern of making “teachers” or “masters” is something I still do. I think of my friends, the ex-Hasidic Forverts writer Yehoshua Kehane, and the last secretary of the Yiddish Culture Club, Shulem Londner. I quite literally offered Yehoshua what I could financially to keep him locked in the car with me as I chatted in Yiddish with him for hours. His Belgian Yiddish was superb, and this was my chance. But I also ended up acquiring a friend, as we used to take walks on the beach and talk about our life’s problems — all in Yiddish. And I think about how Shulem wonders what precisely he is teaching me as he tells the same dirty jokes in Yiddish over and over to me, but I remind him, as Jesse’s book reminded me, comedy, especially comedy in a tradition is a cultural treasure, and as the talmudic adage goes, “this too is Torah and I must learn.” (A reference to the moral of a very odd Talmudic story about rabbinical students sneaking under their master’s bed to watch him with his wife.)

In Israel, I ran away from my Hebrew ulpan and ran into the arms of two language teachers, who I bribed to the best of my abilities until they became my teachers, who then became my friends. One was an older gentleman, originally from Kyiv, who I would travel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to see and learn Russian from. He never was terribly interested in teaching me Russian. He taught me more important things: how pleasant it was to spend an evening sipping tea in a Tel Aviv cafe as I struggled to get the perfect Russian accent, and the art of Soviet-Jewish jokes. 

Eyal was my age, a librarian at the National Library of Israel. Based on my experience of Israelis, I knew that nobody would have the patience to teach me Hebrew, let alone force me to converse in it, so I took him to a nice cafe near Jaffa St. and got him tea. But once we started our weekly meetings, wherein I learned more sophisticated Hebrew, we became mutually entranced with our conversations. He was a trained tour guide, often leading Americans around Israel, and found out how little he actually understood of American and American Jewish culture. I found out the same thing about myself and Israeli culture and history. Sometimes I think about the idea of reaching back out to him, to have us tour each other's countries.

The underlying principle I think about is making a foundation of mutual benefits, or empowering others, from which you can build a relationship that exists at a higher level. All people can truly deserve to be judged favorably, to become a true equal and friend, to become a teacher and master, if only we begin from a point of humility. This is the method of community organizing and learning I have come to embrace.