Having started with Judah Goldin’s translation, I’m going to continue with it for this verse, although I’ll need to talk about the translation a bit to talk about the verse.
Joshua ben Perahyah and Nittai the Arbelite took over from them. Joshua ben Perahyah says: provide thyself with a teacher, get thee a comrade, and judge everyone with the scale weighted in his favor.
The Hebrew in the first two legs is aseh l’cha rav, find yourself a teacher, but uk’neh l’cha chaver, (and) acquire a friend. Or purchase a friend, if you want to translate it that way. Nobody does, because the idea is preposterous. Well, Rashi does, to some extent, and we’ll talk about him later. But the difference in the verb seems to indicate that it is comparatively more work, more effort or expense or difficulty, to make a friend than to find a teacher.
To me, that’s counterintuitive. I would have expected the text to go the other way. After all, to find a teacher you are going to follow for years, to learn from both his teaching and his life, you need to know a great deal about his reputation, his scholarship, his virtue, his house—his town, since you will be living with him, his other disciples both current and past, as well as the lives of those he has taught, and how they have grown and lived since their student days. Friends just happen, right?
Except, of course, that they don’t. Friends are a lot of work. And expense, and energy, and compromise, and all that sort of thing.
Another aspect of this teaching is that within the context of the triple, the friend you are to acquire is part of the rabbinic process, that it isn’t just a buddy to play gin with, but a study partner, a disputant in matters of law, a confidential advisor.
I fairly frequently tell the story of a particular graduate of Bryn Mawr College, a fine educational institution, who said that later in life, she always knew that if she had access to a good library, she could learn anything. I responded that we Swarthmore alums were not so lucky; we need both a good library and another Swarthmore alum to discuss our reading with. This is why so many of us marry other Swatfolk; we are following the teaching of Joshua ben Perahyah, having found our teacher and chosen our friend.
Rashi (did I say I was going to go back to Rashi?) sides with the Mawrtyr, actually. He said that since the verb was acquire, and since you cannot acquire friends the way you acquire goods at a market, Joshua ben Perahyah must have been metaphorically talking about books. One should find a teacher and amass a library of books. Of course, Rashi writes books, so you have to keep that in mind, as well as a certain controversy in his day about whether writing a text was advisable, or whether it tended to deprecate the teacher-student relationship and diminish the memorization skills that are important to Talmudic study. On the other hand, Rashi is Rashi, after all, so one doesn’t like to say he is wrong. Probably best to do both the friend thing and the library thing, just to be safe.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Man, those poor kinesthetic learners are just out of luck, Rabbinic-tradition-wise, huh?
I actually had a weird reaction to the “provide yourself with a teacher” construction. That’s a different mandate than “go to a good school,” or “study under a wise guru,” or whatever. That whole “provide yourself with” construction wants teasing at, but I couldn’t quite find the right thread last night, and I still haven’t quite got it.
peace
Matt