My title (Do ‘You Complete Me’?) paraphrases a line from a famous Hollywood movie. Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) says it to Dorothy Boyd (Rene Zellweger). It’s a popular ‘Awww!’ moment from Tinseltown. But what does he really mean, and does it relate to a moment in this week’s Torah reading? 

That moment occurs when Yehudah reports telling Ya’akov Avinu: If I do not bring him back to you. I will be guilty before my father forever’ (Breishit 44:32).

Yehudah’s statement is an acceptance of AREIVUT. This powerful Halachic concept expresses an individual’s binding responsibility for another. The best known expression of this principle is KOL YISRAEL AREIVIM ZEH B’ZEH (‘Every Jew is a guarantor for every other Jew’). The most common expression of this principle is when one Jew says a BRACHA on behalf of another Jew. In many homes Friday night, one person says Kiddush and everyone else answers AMEN, and everyone has fulfilled their obligation for the Mitzvah of sanctifying the Shabbat.

Often, however, we view AREIVUT in financial terms. In both modern and Rabbinic Hebrew an AREIV is a co-signer for a loan. I vividly remember when I first made ALYIA in 1983, and all of us new OLIM were co-signing for relative strangers on their mortgages. In those days, if someone was late even once for a mortgage payment the AREIVIM were sent bills for the full amount of the loan. More than once I received bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars, because a friend........

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