My Hevruta, My Friend

I promised to tell you about my experience with Peter, my “other” hevruta (the word refers both to learning in pairs and to your partner in that learning).

     Anna (my wife) met Peter and Linda soon after she arrived in the U.S. from her native Netherlands. Fast forward a few years and the four of us had become friends. But after Anna and I had our encounter with Yeshua, things became awkward and the two couples drifted apart. We had little contact for about thirty-five years. In the meanwhile, they’d moved to Austin for work purposes. Then Anna and I moved to Austin a few years ago for family reasons, and we began to get together.

     Of course, Peter and I had both changed over the years. The very thing that had distanced us all those years ago was now a point of common interest. Though Peter has characterized himself as an agnostic, my impression is that God and Peter are playing hide-and-seek.

     Peter is a poet and well-read and interested in spiritual things (he’s learned enough about Buddhism to be familiar with its many schools and diverse philosophies and practices). When we re-connected here in Austin, he was reading a book edited by Sid Roth about Holocaust survivors who became Yeshua believers. At about that time, he was also reading a book by Jacob Neusner, probably the most well-known academic rabbinics scholar in the world. 

     As best I can remember, about a year and a half ago Peter expressed interest in midrash I was telling him about, so I asked him if he’d like to study (meaning learn) together. Since Peter had long ago forgotten his Bar Mitzvah Hebrew, he would be my first hevruta that could only learn in translation. I was not brimming with confidence about the viability of a havura consisting of a Messianic Jewish rabbi learning midrash with an avowed Jewish agnostic who doesn’t read Hebrew. May I tell you, my friends, that this is not a typical hevruta pair?

     But it does work because of the kind of person Peter is (and I suppose he could comment from his perspective about my contributions). As a poet, he’s very sensitive to language. Being well-read and thoughtful, he’s been exposed to and pondered the big issues of life. His response to new thoughts, even some that probably seem pretty strange to him, is to consider them seriously. Peter reads midrash, these intense writings about God and Israel, seriously and deeply. (We’ve learned Talmud together, too.) He seems to have no problem accepting my insights from the Hebrew text. I think it’s fair to say that nearly every time we’ve poured over these writings together we’ve both come away with a larger and deeper grasp of the midrash.

     Just about everyone who writes about hevruta learning mentions that the word hevruta is based on the same root as haver (friend). In our case, learning together has arisen from our friendship and has deepened it.