Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

Jewish tradition encourages the study of Pirke Avot on Sabbath afternoons in the Spring and the Summer. As meteorological spring is here and hopefully the weather will soon become warmer (it was 35 degrees when I awoke this morning) I share a teaching (Chapter 1, Mishna 5) that will, I hope, encourage you to study on your own on Shabbat afternoon. The text of Pirke Avot can be found in most prayer books as well as online.

Joshua ben Perahiah …. used to say: Find yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person on a scale weighted toward the positive.

When I was a congregational rabbi, a very gifted student, a girl, asked to read a poem she had composed at tefillah, the prayer service that I led each Sunday morning with the students of our religious school. The poem was about the pain she felt because she was not popular among her classmates at school. Her poem reminded me of an encounter I had years before:

When I was a young man, I was a therapist and I worked with children. One of the children I was working with needed to see our clinic’s child psychiatrist. As usual, when the child psychiatrist saw children with whom I was working, I sat in on the session. The child told the psychiatrist that he was unhappy because he did not have many friends in school. The psychiatrist asked him how many friends he had. “Two”, he replied. The psychiatrist replied, “All you really need in life is to have one good friend. If you have two good friends, you’re doing pretty well.”

After the service I asked the girl if she had any friends. She did, she acknowledged, but she was envious of the more popular girls in her class. So I told her what the psychiatrist told my client. I don’t know whether my comment made an impact on this girl. I don’t know whether the psychiatrist’s comment made an impact on my young client. But the statement made an impact on me. It rang so true to me – all one needs is one or two good friends to get through life. A friend with whom you can share the joys of life and lean on in times of sorrow. A friend with whom you can consult, a friend you can trust. That friend can be a schoolmate, a brother or sister, a spouse, or a partner. And that friend has to be, in some way “acquired”, that is, there has to be a mutual investment in the friendship and real effort made to keep the friendship alive.

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