Friendship and Community
Ages ago, when Der Nister began, you could not find a bigger enemy to the idea of “community” than myself. I gathered deep suspicions to the concept after seeing how it became used as a mechanism to empower some at the expense of others — how at Jewish summer camps, you could see how an “in” crowd developed to exclude an “out” crowd, how in religious life, you could be guilted into volunteering when it was bad for you, etc. I more or less banned the word at the beginning. The goal was to see a group of people become friends.
And this is exactly what happened. As time went on, people saw each other over and over again, going out on excursions with each other, visiting each other — and you can hardly imagine the diversity of these groups.
Indeed, a community, if it is anything, ought to be people who are friends, who willingly decide to spend time with each other, and welcome in others as they come and as they are.
It is why in Hebrew, a community member and friend (aka comrade and friend) are the same word, Chaver.
Chaver comes from the root that means to connect, and was originally used in the Mishnah to distinguish someone you could trust to tithe their grains (versus the Am HaAretz, the ‘person of the land’ who is presumed to be negligent or ignorant).
Chaver in this case was exclusionary; it was a system of trust and loyalty to the priestly laws. But in Yiddish and Modern Hebrew, Chaver became the ultimate word for comrade in the early 20th century (in the left-wing sense), and was used ubiquitously throughout the Yiddish world and in socialist Israel in that context for decades. Regardless of political opinion, the flowering of the ambit of the expression is reminiscent of the promise in Torah that the Children of Israel will all one day be priests, that the “crown of priesthood” will expand from one family in one tribe to a much wider group.
This “connectedness” is more than a relationship between two people in Jewish thought. Connectedness implies a social order of trust and support. This is what we would call a community, though in Jewish languages, a community is translated as “kahal.” However, kahal is better translated as “public,” as it comes from “gathering” and is used to describe a polity more than a willingly-created series of connections.
Connectedness — friendship — is better suited to describe a social order of implicitly maintained relationships. While friendships are deeply personal, a series of friendships is a logistical, organizational challenge. Logistical challenges are somewhat of a cold remove from the warmth we associate with the idea.
These are the challenges that I see in Der Nister and many other places. I can no longer shy away from the word ‘community’ as I once did. Now, we need people to be together to create a sense of stability, and this involves a new level of organization that we will engage in, as long as they are premised on “friendship.”
