I had thought I was done with this verse, but it turns out that I had more things to say about the verse as a whole…
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.
What occurred to me was that I hadn’t pointed out that the three statements can be saying very different things if you look at them as three individual statements as compared to thinking of them as connected. And when you change the audience or the context, the verse changes as well.
To specify: Reb Joshua is telling us three things that are important in life: a teacher (because learning is important), a friend (because love is important), and your relation to other people (because society is important). Or alternately, he’s making very specific professional advice: find a teacher (to learn the Law), make a friend (to advise and consult), and judge with charity (to prevent miscarriage of justice).
Or again: If we take our cue from the first leg, we are talking about education, and the three legs apply to that thought, and emphasize the danger of relying overmuch on your own judgment. A teacher, because you will learn more from somebody else than from your own observation. A friend, so that you can talk out your ideas, and have the flaws pointed out to you. And the scale of merit, so that when you come across a new argument or writer or idea, you don’t dismiss it out of hand, but assume that your own learning can be improved by serious consideration of that new thing. They are all discussed in positive terms, but work also as warning against their opposites: don’t try to be your own teacher, your own editor, even your own judge. It’s about the pitfalls of arrogance, which is one of my own problems, and is useful to keep in mind for that.
Or again: If we take our cue from the center of the verse, it is about one friend, one close relationship, and we read the rest in the context of our closest relationship, which for most of us is marriage. In marriage, then: find a teacher. Not merely advice to marry someone in the educational field (which has its drawbacks as well as its joys), but to find in your spouse a teacher, to always be learning from your spouse (both in the sense of listening to what he has to say and in the sense of watching what she does), as well as about your spouse (so as to be a better spouse yourself). Acquire a friend. Treat your spouse as a friend. Befriend her. Advise, confide, sympathize. Assist. And acquire, because it isn’t cheap. And then: judge with an eye to the merit side. Don’t focus on the flaws, on the socks left on the floor, the dishes left on the table, the forgotten telephone call. Forget those, as best you can: focus on the extra grocery trip, on the lunch prepared, on the back rub. It’s easy to forget those and remember the other, but Joshua ben Parahyah says (in this interpretation) to judge on the merit side, not on the other.
Or, yet again: If we focus on the final command, it is about how we treat every man. Find a teacher. Everyone has something to teach you. Make every man your teacher; never be too proud to learn from anyone. Acquire a friend. Every person is potentially a friend. You have to work at it, yourself, to acquire that person as a friend, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. And how do you do make every person your teacher and your friend? By judging them in the pan of merit! Only when you form the habit of looking at the merit in everyone, can you make the whole world into teachers and friends, and then, says Joshua ben Parahyah (or, at least, he says it if I make him say it), then you will yourself be a teacher and a friend to everyone, and have inherited the wisdom of the sages.
That’s the sort of thing that keeps me going back to the Pirke Avot, over and over again. I haven’t been doing enough of that sort of thing, I think; I’ll try to remember to do it more as we go through the rest.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.