How to be — and to have — a good friend

“I am your friend, and I am telling you: you need a haircut.”

This week, I took a haircut after a long while. Not because I like long hair — it had gotten way too long! — but because I am in the first months of mourning after the passing of my mother, of blessed memory. According to halacha (Jewish law), when in mourning, we grow our hair as a sign of sadness.

So why did my friend tell me to take a haircut? Because when the Talmud discusses this law, it says:

“When mourning [relatives other than parents], one may cut his hair after 30 days. When mourning a father or mother, one has to wait until his friends have rebuked him [for his hair being too long].”

So my friend was fulfilling the Talmud’s words and rebuking me for my long hair. Thank you, sir! Rebuke accepted!

Now, the Talmud didn’t actually require the friends to rebuke the mourner; it was only giving a timeframe. If your hair is so long that your friends would rebuke you, it’s time to take a haircut (measured as three months without a haircut).

Still, I find this choice of language very interesting. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt that the Talmud is not only discussing the laws of mourning, but actually teaching what the definition of a good friend is.

If you want to be a good friend, don’t only validate and compliment your friend. If you see that they are heading down the wrong path, you have to be willing to go and “rebuke” them, pointing out things they are doing that might not be good for them. Because this is what good friends do.

A day later, someone posted an interesting question on social media.

A friend of his owns a company, and he noticed that the bookkeeper is “taking small amounts of money” (i.e., stealing) from it. Until now he felt bad about confronting them because “maybe they really need the money” and “they were with the company for such a long time.”

Should he confront him or not?

So I posted the following reply:

“It’s actually a Mitzvah! There is a Mitzvah that when someone wrongs you, don’t keep it inside, but share it with them — so the Torah tells us to bring up the issues and deal with them!”

Between these two teachings, it became clear to me what type of society the Torah envisions. Western values seem to promote an extreme kind of individualism: “mind your own business.”

The Torah, on the other hand, says, “mind everyone’s business”: try not only to be a good person yourself, but also to help others be good, even when it means gently pointing them in the right direction.

And yes, fulfilling this mitzvah takes a lot of courage. It is so much easier to ignore, pretend we didn’t see, or that we can’t do anything about it. But it’s a mitzvah, and it’s the right thing to do.

You might think: if I comment on people, they will get offended, and it won’t help anyway!

And you might be right. Because for rebuke to work, it has to come from a loving heart.

Rabbi Sholom Ber Gordon was a young rabbi in Newark. He found that his community members weren’t receptive to his sermons, and he consulted the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok.

The rebbe told him: “Have you been to a banya (a Russian sauna)? As you climb to a higher step, your body gets warmer and warmer, and then, at the top, an attendant stands with a bunch of twigs and hits you.

“It feels good.

“But what if the same people meet on the street, and the attendant starts hitting the other guy with twigs? He will obviously be very upset.

“Same story with one big difference: when you lift people and warm them up, they will be happy for gentle encouragement to do better.”

Rabbi Mendy Kaminker is the rabbi of Chabad of Hackensack and an editorial member of Chabad.org. He looks forward to your comments at rabbi@chabadhackensack.com.

Opinion