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(deliverered on the day prior to Rabbi Kviat's ordination)
One set of words has followed me from my first day as a rabbinic student. They hung on the wall in the vice principal’s office and they always struck me as wrong or messed up.
‘Yehoshua ben Perachia said Make for yourself a rabbi and acquire for yourself a friend!’ (Pirkei Avot 1.6).
This saying from Talmud from the pirkei avot, the sayings of the fathers, makes more if they are switched around: ‘acquire yourself a rabbi’, using the Hebrew word ‘koneh’ which translates as buy etc., and ‘make yourself a friend’. We are used to the idea of acquiring a rabbi, it usually comes automatically with paying a membership fee, and friendships are something you grow and make.
So how are we to understand ‘make yourself a rabbi’? What does it mean to make a rabbi? It could mean how do we get to know our rabbis?
We meet rabbis through education classes, sermons like these, endless committee meetings, volunteering, through lifecycle events, both the happy ones like birth, bar/bat mitzvahs and weddings and the difficult ones like divorce, death and mourning. But listening to and sitting in meetings with the rabbi does not necessarily make the rabbi our rabbi. If so I should have approximately 20 rabbis myself. So what is it then? Is it purely time? Having known them for years makes them ‘ours’?
Perhaps what is behind this saying is the realisation that to have a rabbi means that we actively have to make them our own by engaging with them. It is a relationship as any other in that sense, though because there is only 1 or 2 rabbis to hundreds of people means that the role of the rabbi is not to be your best friend, but to be someone who has time to listen, to give space, and maybe give a different perspective on the situation at hand.
But this relationship does not spring up over night. As a recently ordained rabbi shared with our class, upon graduating she was surprised that throughout the first two years of working she barely had any pastoral work to do. But she realised this is because pastoral work hinges on relationships created with people. If they don’t know and trust you as a person, then they will be unlikely to come to you when problems arise. But people also have to have made the space in themselves to allow an individual to become their rabbi.
A daring interpretation of the sentence could be that it means to make yourself into a rabbi? That all of us are to strive to become rabbi! A rabbi today is not necessarily just an arbiter of justice, or a service leader but a teacher and in order to teach we have to acquire knowledge. We have to learn and then teach and then learn from the teaching that we do. We all have the potential to discern for ourselves on the basis of traditional and contemporary knowledge and experience. A rabbi is a quality not just a title.
And what then about acquiring a friend? At first sight it seems unethical to want to buy a friend. Some modern commentators see ‘acquiring’ in a spiritual sense – to support us in our religious and personal growth, others take form it the importance of investing in friendship, and others again that we have to spend more effort in our friends than in our rabbis because the relationship to the rabbi is passive and one-way. It is true that friendships do require prioritisation and investment in a way the relationship to the rabbi might not, but the commentator who states that the relationship to the rabbi is passive has obviously never received feedback on a recently delivered sermon! Being on the very cusp of becoming a rabbi (hallelujah) and having worked with congregations for some time now, I have witnessed how ones relationship to a rabbi is almost entirely dependent on an active personal engagement with that rabbi, or else they are but a rabbi in name only. Traditionally a person only became a rabbi when he had a congregation and in a way this is still true today – we are only rabbis and teachers when we have someone to ‘rabbi’ for.
But the saying ‘make for yourself a rabbi, acquire for yourself a friend’ does not stop here, though for years I did not know that. It continues ‘and judge every person favourably’!
Not only are we to create the relationships ourselves we also have to show the rabbi and other people some mercy! We have to look at the whole person, not just the individual traits that aggrevate us nor assume the worst, something I am guilty of.
In this week’s parasha we hear about the change as Miriam and Aaron leave the congregation of Israel. I am leaving Northwood but in my case to now work with the Crouch End Chavurah. But it will, and is, difficult to leave NPLS behind.
The relationships I have created with the staff here, with students, particularly the Kabbalat Torah class with whom it has been the utmost pleasure to learn and travel with; to see them grow in just this past year. Relationships with all those members who, like the Crabbe’s, helped us invest in exploring our heritage and our learning. This also included the faithful group who turned up Thursday after Thursday to discuss God and protest, as well as all those other people whom I have met for longer or shorter periods of time over this past year.
Perhaps the saying from pirkei avot; ‘Make for yourself a rabbi, acquire for yourself a friend and judge every person favourably’ is not so much about the differences between a friend and a rabbi, but rather about what I have experienced here this year, I have made myself into a rabbi, been made a rabbi by others, made for myself two rabbis and two friends, acquired many new friends and hopefully helped others to make them and for themselves their rabbis. And all I hope favourably and fairly. |
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