Have you ever met someone who just always has lots of people in their life? Someone who for a lack of a better term: collects people. Not in a narcissistic way or a Hannibal Lecter kind of way, but someone kind and charismatic who just manages to bring people into their life and keep them close.

In our Torah portion this week, we read about Avram and Sarai and how they have all of these people with them. “Avram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the wealth that they had amassed, and the persons that they had acquired in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan.”

Unfortunately, many of those people were ones they acquired through sale. They had slaves. It does not matter that slavery was different from the chattel slavery of the modern world or what we still see today. It was an exercise in power and abuse and when we read the story of Hagar, we are reminded how horrible it was, even then.

Avram and Sarai did not build up their household into a powerful one simply by purchasing people. So how did they do it? Dr. Ellen Frankel in the “Five Books of Miriam” asks the same thing. She notes that in the ancient world while people could be acquired through capture or sale, it only meant acquiring their physical bodies, not their spirits.

You can win friends and influence people as the book says, but they are not genuine or healthy friendships. Where those come from is through real human connection, through the give and take of something of meaning.

The Hebrew suggests something that our translation does not.
ואֶת־הַנֶּ֖פֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר־עָשׂ֣וּ The souls that they made. Made not in a sense of procreation, but by making a soul, bringing them into community through shared values and morals.

The commentators tell us that Avram and Sarai acquired souls by converting people. Avram the men, Sarai the women, both bringing people under the wings of the Shechinah. From the very beginning, we read that this is the way to create family and community. It does not matter that Judaism did not yet exist for Avram and Sarai, let alone the mechanism for becoming Jewish.

The Talmud makes mention of this part of the story and according to Resh Lakish, “The verse teaches us that whoever teaches his friend Torah, it is as if he created him, as the verse says, ‘The persons they acquired in Haran’ [12:5]. Rabbi Abahu said: whoever brings his friend to fulfill a commandment; it is as if he created him.” (B. Sanhedrin, 99b.) In the Torah, we make, or acquire people, by illuminating their lives with our values.

Thousands of years later, how do we acquire people? How do we “make” friends? How do we build community? Much of it is the same – we seek out people who share our values or have the same interests and hobbies. And right now, there are epidemics of loneliness, there is distance and estrangement, and so many things that conspire against our building of friendship and community.

Maybe that is where the work of creation can help us. Not that we should be molding or shaping other people to be like us or our puppets, but that sharing our values and teaching our wisdom has so much potential. Early in the pandemic I was in a zoom with an Introduction to Judaism group. Some were there pursuing conversion, others were there to learn. One frustrated student unmuted himself and said, “why do I need this? I don’t believe in God, I’m not going to pray to a made-up thing.” I started talking about community and what it offers. He defiantly remarked that he had the people he played video games with and how they were his community. What I wish I had asked was about what they do when one of them suffers a loss – a job, a friendship, a death in their lives. How do they support one another? What rituals do they have? How, even through a computer screen, do they share their love?

They may be a robust group of emotionally mature middle aged men. They may all freely share their feelings and comfort one another. Or not.

I do not know if as Resh Lakish said, we build someone by teaching them Torah. I do know we build them up when we do. And I do not mean that we bury people in our learning in their time of need. Robotically quoting scripture to a grieving widow seldom works. What tends to be more effective, is sharing the wisdom we have learned the hard way, through our own experience, grief, and pain. When we pass along words that are holy not because they were necessarily written on a piece of parchment or a page of Talmud, but because they offer consolation or support.
That is how we build AND sustain friendships and community. The community that Avram and Sarai took with them was made up in part, by people who they connected with. People who shared their values. And from that, as God promised, they became a great nation. A nation that we are now a part of. It was and is something different. We are still unique in the world. Our community offers a closeness and connections that no other has. Rabbi Samson Raphel Hirsch taught that when you asah a nefesh when you create a soul, as Avram and Sarai did, it is creating something new, fresh formed. In creating community, in sharing our values, we have the opportunity to build something that has never existed before. So we acquire people, not to pad our numbers or hold them captive, but to build something new, and unique, and meaningful, together.