Platonic Love

Click on the photo to hear Yedid Nefesh 

Dear friends, 

I remember one of the first times I was aware of the love I had toward a friend. I was fifteen, and whenever I could I’d go out to Mevaseret, outside of Jerusalem to my friend, Erez’s house overlooking the wadi. We would hang out in his room in the attic listening to Shlomo Artzi records and wander the deserted streets of the suburb at night looking at the stars. Erez’s father had passed away suddenly a few months earlier, which colored that entire hangout period in a deep, beautiful and sad blue. Erez was in an epic love affair with Shira that would last seven years. We were both straight, and there was nothing sexual about our friendship. There was, however, a strong intimacy and a magnetic closeness. It was, I would learn further down the line, distinct from, but similar in certain ways to being in love. 

Hebrew has two words for “friend.” The most common, chaver comes from the root of togetherness. Erez was certainly my chaver, a person I spent a lot of time with. But chaver can pale in comparison to yedid, the other word for friend, which comes from the root Dod, love. A yedid is a distinctly non-sexual lover. Erez was, and still is to this day, my yedid.

When Shabbat approaches, we sing a devotional poem to God called Yedid Nefesh: Soul Friend, or Lover of my Soul. It’s somewhere between a love song and a prayer from one 16th century lover by the name of Rabbi Elazar Azikri to his god.  

יֶעְרַב לוֹ יְדִידוּתָךְ, “Your friendship is more pleasing,” he writes, 
מִנּפֶת צוּף וְכָל טָעַם, “than the most perfect nectar, or any conceivable flavor.” 

It might be tricky for some to imagine the type of intimate friendship I had with Erez applied to God. For me, that longing, that platonic desire, makes perfect sense at the end of a long week, with its challenges, sprints and anxieties. God, that perfect lover sitting in wait for my most beautiful self to emerge, is the companion I find in my inner regions when I am at peace. Generations of ancestors have taught me how to seek an ephemeral, ungraspable, untouchable lover. Through their poems, their prophecies, their repudiations and consolations, through their music, their strange rituals, their expounding of verses, their laws – so many of which are attempts to express a deep and impossible love – through all of these and more I allow myself to understand what an intimate, platonic love with a not-human source of existence might be. It makes it possible for me to speak to the friend of my soul through ancient rhymes saying: מַהֵר אָהוּב, כִּי בָא מועֵד, "Quickly, lover, for the moment has come." הִגָלֵה נָא וּפְרשׂ, חָבִיב 
עָלַי אֶת סֻכַת שְלומֶךְ, "reveal yourself: spread over me your tent of peace."

Azikri wrote the poem in the forests of the high mountains of the Galilee, where our poetic Friday evening prayers were first assembled. Tonight we’re going to assemble in the dense human forest of Greenwich Village to bring in Shabbat. We’ll pay attention to the words and melodies of the main devotional poems that along with Yedid Nefesh make up our Kabbalat Shabbat prayers. Our good friend and collaborator, Seth Ginsberg will be there with his mandolin and some contemporary melodies as our musical guest. I hope you’ll come. Yedidut, friendship, is something we all need more of. 

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha