"Do not slacken your hand from seeking friends and those who love you."
I'm sitting here reading the Orchot Hayyim, thinking about moral instruction (yes, my job -- towards myself and towards all of you...), sitting with the austerity of Rabbeinu Asher's many imperatives ("Do not be overly happy. Remember that your life is but wind...") when this one jumps out, sings out to me. "Do not slacken your hand from seeking friends and those who love you." Friendship has been on my mind of late, both its sweetness and its arduousness. In some ways I'm happily situated in that middle period in life, when I'm not moving every four years to another part of the world and neither are most of you, when I'm married to my closest friend, when I measure many friendships in decades rather than days Things just don't change as mercurially as they did when I was younger. I seldom fight with friends, seldom lose them. I still make new friends, but not that often anymore. And the flip side of that sweet stability is sometimes that I forget to keep things exciting with the people I love the most.
I spend a lot of time in this column writing about community, and between columns trying to cultivate community. One of the things I appreciate most about life in community is actually its difference from life in friendship. There is a funny kind of impersonality about community. It doesn't depend on personality, on likeability, on vibes or attraction or connection, at least not very much. If you are here and so am I, then we share a bond of community. I will help if you are sick; you will come to my simcha. We will greet each other when we see each other. We'll ask after each other when we don't. These bonds of community provide a great sense of safety and pleasantness. And, as demanding as they can sometimes be, they aren't THAT demanding.
Sometimes I think I have a million friends because it takes me so long to collect my mail at the post office, because I don't stop in Corners in the afternoon to pick up a lemon unless I have an hour to schmooze. I forget sometimes that friendship is a more intense and more selective kind of relating. It's not something you do with hundreds of people. "Aseh l'kha rav oo-k'neh l-kha khaver," says R. Yehoshua ben Perachya in Pirkei Avot. "Get yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a friend." That friend doesn't just say hi at the post office; he or she asks tough questions, pushes you along in your studies, knows your strengths and weaknesses, is interested in the details and sits through a lot of the uninteresting details as well. A khaver in the context of traditional study, which is the context of R. Yehoshua's mandate, quizzes you, argues with you, sits across from you all day and pushes you to your edges. Then you turn around and do the same. A khaver can tell when you are weaseling out, when you are not trying, when you are afraid, when you are exhausted. A khaver doesn't extend the same level of attention to everybody in his or her life; he or she saves it for you. If you have more than a few true khaverim in life, you will be exhausted!
So I am interested, provoked by that phrase from Rabbeinu Asher: "Do not slacken your hand from seeking friends and those who love you." I realize that he's not talking about quantity, but about the intensity of seeking out my true khaverim and maintaining the tautness of my attention towards them and them towards me. It's easy, for me anyhow, to let it slip, to let my attention to my close friends get flabby, exactly because they are so steady. But I can feel summer in the air. And even though with all the b'nai mitzvah, weddings, the women's retreat and early High Holy Days my summer won't be like the summers of my youth, it still feels like time is coming to play, to reconnect, to deepen. Time for friends!
Copyright 1999 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 05/23/99 (rge)