There are some texts out there that travel with me everywhere that I go. They are my foundation. And these texts come from everywhere. To those who know me well, they would agree that if all of these texts were put in a big mixing bowl, I would be the product of this rich textual batter.

Here are a few:

“You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by” as sung by Crosby Stills Nash and Young constitute the reasons - unrelated to the Jewish law - why I am observant and why I actively choose to take on the commandments. The Jewish reasons stem from Leviticus where God tells Moses to say to the people: be holy because I am holy.
Great impetus.

“Go you go”, the words that God initially says to Abram, are often the words that get me up in the morning and offer me courage to enter the darkness.

Similar to that text is “if you dream it, it will not be a fable or a story to be a free people in our land, Zion and Jerusalem” which is attributed to Theodore Herzl. That text often lights a fire and is one of the reasons for my frequent trips to Israel and the ability to reach and stretch further than others think I can.

Dr. Louis Finkelstein’s “When I pray, I speak to God. When I study, God speaks to me” is why I am in the classroom every day. The preparation I put into the classes that I teach is holy work. Period. I never forget that.

Those are some of the texts that represent me.

When I was a rabbinical student, I took a class called Text as a Spiritual Mentor, where we had to collect our central texts that define us, and then present them to our class. Many of us broke down when sharing these texts because in essence we were undressing and really getting to the core of who we were.

My breakdown text is found near the beginning of Genesis. This is not a creation vs evolution issue, rather my breakdown text, is a text that is so much a part of me that I often weep when I hear it being read, yet its power is only described in five words.

Genesis chapter 2, verse 18.
And God said “it is not good for man or person to be alone.”

As I have grown up and developed so has my understanding of the verse. I doubt that I ever really looked at the verse with an absolute eye for the simple meaning of the text. I doubt that I ever initially looked at it as “a person should not be alone.” I am sure I first learned it in day school and understood it that everyone needs a romantic life partner, a husband or a wife, someone to spend their life with and have kids and grandkids.

That understanding stood with me for a long time and often would stick its tongue out at me when friends got married and used the quote on their bencher, or friends got married and the rabbi used the quote under the chuppah, or friends got married and the groom used the quote in the speech… because there I was alone.
I really learned to hate that verse.

“It is not good for man or person to be alone.”

Well, if that is the case, here I was doing mitzvot galore and because I was unattached, how was I not good enough?
Couldn’t be.
So, I went to the sources.

First I checked out the Targum Onkelos, the official eastern Babylonian translation to the Torah. My Aramaic is not stellar, but it seemed that the Targum would have said “it is not proper for Adam to be one.” And according to the English translation the verse meant: it is not right that Adam should be solitary. My question is solitary what? Should he be cloned? I wish had access to a commentary on the Targum, that would have been cool.

Rashi says it is not good that a man should be alone so that people may not say there are two deities, so people will not think that Adam is also a god. According to Rashi, God was the only One among the celestial beings that did not have a mate. If Adam was ‘alone’ then people would think because he was mateless, he was a God too. The “not good” was that God would lose God’s specialness. But, if it was the first week of Creation, with a capital C, who else had celestial beings yet?

Sforno, the Italian commentator and philosopher during the 1500s, went in a different direction. He said that if man was alone, or if this first Adam was alone, then how would he have time to try to live in the image of God if he had to supply the needs of life. I think Sforno was saying that Adam needed a housekeeper or a butler so that Adam could go out and do mitzvot. But I could be projecting.

Three classic commentators, and none of them said he needed a wife. Yes, the next part of the verse is about creating an ezer knegdo which is frequently understood as helpmate, but we do not know how the verses were parsed back then, or how much time passed between the two parts of the verse.

Those early ideas from Associated Hebrew School were coming back. You need to get married. You need to get married.

This is where I am at with it lately, and it fits with where my life is. And this new understanding is new. I received an advanced copy of a chapter from the book Gift of Soul, Gift of Wisdom: Spiritual Resources for Leadership and Mentoring written by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson. In the very first paragraph of this book, he writes
At the very core of Judaism is a love relationship:
between God and the Jewish people,
between Jewish communities and their leaders.
He goes on to say
A central assumption of all Jewish spirituality is that only in a relationship with another (God, Torah, people, creation) can one possibly grow to incorporate holiness in one’s identity.

A light bulb went off when I read this.
The verse “It is not good for man or person to be alone” is universal and not particular. People need God. People need community and people need Torah.

I need God, and God and I are at a great place now.

I need community, and the community where I moved to 16 months ago has been the most welcoming and open community I could have ever expected.

I need Torah.
It is my backbone. I am in an eternal relationship with Torah.

And, very often I encounter moments of radical amazement when I see leaves turn color or another pregnant woman.

Yes it is not good for a person to be alone, because when you are alone, without God, nature, friends or Torah, your life can be lonely.

Rabbi Robyn Fryer is a Rabbi-in-Residence at the Chicagoland Jewish High School