On Friendship—Part Two

Part Two: Talmud, Kabbalah, and My 7 Principles about the Nature of True Friends.
You can read Part One here.
A Source Sheet with all these texts and more is available here.

 
Did the Sages of old have “friends”— in the way we use the term? After all, the books that they wrote—the Mishnah and Talmuds and the classic Midrashim—have so much to say about the most important relationships in life:  parents and children, sisters and brothers, married partners, teachers and students, and so on. Surely they had some insights about the love between individuals who are not family?

Let’s start with a question of vocabulary. The Bible generally uses the term רעה when it speaks of friends; that’s the word that’s used to describe Job’s three friends who come to comfort him in his loss and suffering. This linguistic root means “associate, neighbor, fellow” in Biblical Hebrew and, provocatively, “yoke” in Arabic and Ge’ez (ancient Ethiopic).[1] Thus the word implies someone whose fate is “hitched” to our own, whose destiny is interconnected with ours.

The Rabbis prefer the term חבר / chaver. The root חבר appears many times in the Bible, but only in one or two instances might it mean something close to “friend,” such as Psalm 119:63: 

חָבֵ֣ר אָ֭נִי לְכל־אֲשֶׁ֣ר יְרֵא֑וּךָ וּ֝לְשֹׁמְרֵ֗י פִּקּוּדֶֽיךָ׃
I am a chaver to all who fear You, to those who keep Your precepts.

But when the term appears in the Bible, it usually means bound together, as in Psalm 122:3 which celebrates Jerusalem:

יְרוּשָׁלַ֥͏ִם הַבְּנוּיָ֑ה כְּ֝עִ֗יר שֶׁחֻבְּרָה־לָּ֥הּ יַחְדָּֽו׃
Jerusalem built up! A city knit together [she-chubra lah yachdav].

 By preferring the term חבר, the Rabbis are saying that their chaverim are people whose lives are bound together with each other.

But that doesn’t mean that the Rabbis’ chaver meant “friend.” Oftentimes, a chaver is more accurately translated as “peer” or “classmate” or “fellow disciple of the Rabbis.” Chaverim were people who were similarly ideologically aligned to be part of the emerging class of Rabbinic Judaism, at a time (1st century BCE-3rd century CE) when there were other kinds of Judaisms that were competing for prominence.

So it’s not accurate to translate every appearance of the word chaver in the Mishnah or Talmud as “friend.”

Still, there are many occasions where the relationships between these peers—who together study Torah, celebrate and mourn, and share the meaning of Life—qualify as “friendships.”

Most famously there is a story of Honi the Circlemaker, a legendary figure who slept for 70 years and then tried to reintegrate himself into his community. He returns to his family home, only to discover that his grandchildren’s generation consider him a madman. Then he goes to the Beit Midrash, where the Rabbis are talking about Honi’s generation as if it were ancient history. There, too, he receives a chilly reception and he is not brought into the community. At the conclusion of this story, which preceded The Twilight Zone by 2,000 years, Honi gives up, prays for mercy, and dies. The story concludes with the words:

אוֹ חַבְרוּתָא אוֹ מִיתוּתָא
O chavruta o mituta
Either companionship or death! (Talmud, Ta’anit 23a)

The author of that story knew a thing or two about the desperate yearning people have for real human connections.

A striking description of friendship in Judaism comes from Maimonides’s commentary to the Mishnah. A well-known passage from Pirkei Avot says:

עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב, וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר
Get yourself a teacher [rav], and acquire for yourself a chaver… (Pirkei Avot 1:6)

Now, we might consider the word chaver here to mean what it usually means in classic Jewish literature: a peer, a committed study-partner. And that is probably what it means in its context. But Maimonides (1135-1204) takes this passage as a jumping-off point to create a taxonomy of friendships that sounds so… modern.

After spending some time discussing the unusual verb here—“acquire”—Rambam goes on to say:

.האוהבים ג' מינים: אוהב תועלת אוהב מנוחה ואוהב מעלה…
There are three types of friends:
A friend for one’s benefit [ohev to’elet],
A friend for one’s enjoyment [ohev m’nucha]
And a friend for one’s ultimate virtue [ohev ma’alah].

He then proceeds to explore the meanings of each of these categories. But before we go there, note that the word for “friend” has again evolved. Where the Bible used רעה  and the Sages employed חבר, Rambam prefers the word אוהב / ohev. If it didn’t sound so weird, we would translate the term as “lover”: a non-erotic sort of intimacy that true friends understand. Rambam already has tipped his hand: He’s not talking about “peers” or “associates”; he’s talking about two human beings who truly love one another.

Here's how he describes each of these three groups, in increasing levels of intimacy:

“A friend for one’s benefit / ohev to’elet”—This is like the friendship of two business associates, or of a king and his retinue.

[My comment: This may be Rambam’s lowest level, but it still connotes real friendships. Many of us might have warm and rich relationships with our co-workers. We may enjoy spending time with them, celebrating birthdays together or talking about our lives and our families. We probably don’t spend time with them outside of work, but still, when we’re together, we generally enjoy each other’s company.]

“A friend for one’s enjoyment / ohev m’nucha”—There are two subcategories: (a) a “friend for pleasure” and (b) a “friend for confidence.”

The “friend for pleasure” is like the friendship between men and women and so forth. Whereas a “friend for confidence” is a person to whom you can confide your soul. You don’t keep anything from that person, either in deed nor in speech. And you will make that friend know of all your affairs—the good ones and even the disgraceful ones—without fearing that you will experience any loss, either through the friend or through another person. When a person has such a level of confidence in another, you will find great enjoyment in the other’s words and in their friendship.

[I’m not sure why these aren’t distinct categories. Still, the “friend for pleasure” sounds like the sort of person whom we hang out with; someone whose company we enjoy as we share similar interests—like going to a ball game or a concert together. Life is more enjoyable when it’s shared with those sort of companions.

But maybe your buddy who goes to the game with you doesn’t want to hear about your fears about your career, or your marriage, or your finances.

The “friend for confidence” is on a different plane: someone with whom you can comfortably drop your pretenses, and to whom you can really open yourself up. As Rambam says, life is deeper and fuller when you have someone like this—someone who you can truly trust not to betray your confidences. And that sort of friendship is a blessing.

 
“A friend for one’s ultimate virtue / ohev ma’alah”— This is when the desire of both of them and their intention is for one thing alone, and that is the Good. Each one wants to be helped by the other in reaching this good for both of them together. And this is the friend which the Mishnah commands us to acquire, and it is like the love of a teacher for a student and of a student for the teacher.

This is something much rarer. This is a relationship in which each partner is committed to making the other a better a person. It is built on such a rock-solid foundation of trust that one can hear the criticism of the other, knowing that what she’s saying is reliable and not encrusted with her own inadequacies or schadenfreude.

A friend like this may come along only once in a lifetime—if we are lucky! Such a loyal and loving and selfless friend is something to be cherished.

Further: it may sound strange to us to hear the Rambam throw in the relationship between a student and teacher at the end. But that serves to show us how far removed we can be from the idealized model of the teacher and students that existed in classical Judaism. The teacher of Torah has only the student’s well-being in mind, and considers him as a whole entity and as a unique individual. And the teacher is better because of the relationship with the student.

There were times and places where that deepest degree of friendship was actively cultivated by likeminded spiritual seekers.

For instance, Lawrence Fine has written about a Kabbalistic community in late medieval Jerusalem called Beit El.[2] Here was a group of rigorous mystics who were determined to forge a unique community of prayer, study, and mystical contemplation with one another. In order to achieve spiritual excellence, they also swore eternal allegiance and friendship to one another—to exemplify the sort of the relationships that Rambam described in his highest level of friendship, above.

They went one step further: They wrote a “Ketubah” declaring their commitments to one another. (Literally, a Ketubah—a “marriage license”! Consider for a moment: If you were to write a Ketubah for the best friends in your life, what would be the terms of the relationship? What would be the commitments you’d make to each other?)

In part, the “Ketubah” says:

From now and forever after we are met together, we are associates, we are joined, we are bound to the others as if we were one person, we are companions in all matters of every kind. Each of us resolves to help, encourage, and give support to his associate, helping him to repent, rebuking him and participating in his tribulations, whether in this world or in the next, and in all the ways of faithfulness and ever more so…

It is a remarkable level of commitment: To trust the other so fully, to integrate so completely into each others’ lives, so as to make each other the best person they can possibly be and together to come to understand the reality of God. 

_______________________ 

In conclusion: I’ve written these entries because I’m increasingly aware of the blessings of friends in my life—and because of the crisis of loneliness that pervades so many people’s lives in our increasingly isolated times. I pray that each of us merits a true and treasured friend in this lifetime—and that each of us is capable of reciprocating such love to those who need us.

Judaism has a lot to say about the nature of friendship; we’ve only scratched the surface. But I’d sum it up this way:

Seven Principles from Judaism about Friendship (NG)

1.    A friend doesn’t disappear when times are rough. Friends don’t give up on the other person, and are committed to the relationship for the long haul.

2.    Even if friends don’t see each other often, or are separated by a long distance, a friend is present when needed.

3.    A friend doesn’t project his or her own issues onto the other, but listens carefully to what the other person needs.

4.    Friends aren’t afraid to share their shortcomings and failures with the other, because they know the other’s love will not falter and the other person can be trusted.

5.    Friends share delight in the other’s successes, and aren’t competitive, envious, or guilty of schadenfreude.

6.    When one makes a friend with this level of trust, it is a pleasure and delight to be in each other’s company.

7.    Real friends make the other person a better person. They’re not afraid to share criticism—as long as it clearly comes from a place of love. Conversely, a friend listens carefully to the criticism of the other, because the other person is trustworthy and committed to a friend’s well-being.

[1] Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, p.945.

[2] Lawrence Fine, Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period (Princeton University Press, 2001), 210-214. The “ketubah” I’m discussing can be accessed on my Shavuot Source Sheet – check it out; it’s a fascinating document.

On Friendship—Part One

The Problem, and a Biblical Model of Friendship

 I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of FRIENDSHIP in Judaism, and had the pleasure of teaching some texts about this topic at our recent Shavuot celebration. This essay, in two parts, is an abridged form of that program. (If you want to see the Jewish sources I assembled for that evening, you can access the Source Sheet here.)

I.               Introduction to the Topic, a Crisis

There is a crisis of loneliness in the modern world that’s been building for a long time and which was exacerbated by the pandemic. In past year or so, there have been a spate of articles (in the New York Times, Psychology Today, NPR, The Atlantic, and many more) along the lines of, “Why is it so difficult for adults to make new friends?”

There are many reasons for our increasing social isolation, but the burning irony is that all of our online technology somehow makes our distance from one another even worse. True, there is potential in social media and ever-present smartphones to keep people connected. I’m no Luddite: I have many friends and family members who are far away, and thanks to my devices I’m able to have a window into their lives.

But just as often, these tools worsen our ever-increasing estrangement from one another. So many of us are consumed with our own feeds and personalized diets of entertainment that our self-absorption is worse than ever. Sure, every generation of adults thinks the next iteration of technology is a calamity. (Remember when violent cartoons were going to be the destruction of all those ‘70s and ‘80s kids? Where’s Wile E. Coyote when you need him?) Yet it’s remarkable that people today can actually be nostalgic for the act of watching TV together as a family—as opposed to another evening with each family member subsumed in their own private screen.

Suffice to say that many psychologists identify loneliness and isolation as a health risk and a social crisis. The author Robert Putnam diagnosed this American syndrome in his classic study Bowling Alone (2000).

Of course, there is a big difference between “loneliness” and “being alone.” Plenty of people, not just the introverts among us, crave private time to be alone, for self-reflection, creativity, or simply to think. But that is very different from loneliness: the intense yearning for real connection with other people, but the failure to find someone who can reciprocate.

I’m also writing from a personal place. A few years ago, I went through a crisis that was both professional and personal. It was the most traumatic experience of my life, prompting therapy and lots of self-reflection. Of course, my family—especially my extraordinary wife—were my rock during this time. But I also discovered a few lessons about the nature of friends.

My discoveries were twofold. On one hand, I realized that the betrayal of a friend is surely the most painful experience in the world. I was saddened, to say the least, by the failure of some friends—people who said they loved me—to be there when I needed them. Perhaps you’ve had similar experiences, and if so, I empathize with that pain and loss.

But I discovered something else, too: I am blessed to have some truly extraordinary friends who stood up at that time. These friends were present, sympathetic, honest, and compassionate. Some were people who up to that point I didn’t realize were such good friends, and they revealed themselves to be loyal, loving, and partisan on my behalf. What a blessing!

My first prayer for you is that you should be blessed with such friends in your life.

So that’s the background for my inquiries:

·      Did our ancestors in antiquity have “friends”—or is that a modern construct?

·      Are there good examples of friendship in the classic Jewish literature?

·      Jewish sources have so much to say about the most important relationships in life—do they have anything to teach us about how to be a good friend?

II.             Friendship in the Hebrew Bible

 If you believe, as I do, that the Bible is holy because every facet of experience is found there, then surely there are examples of good friends in its pages. But that’s easier said than done. Why not stop reading for a few moments and ask ourselves—“Who are the Biblical examples of true friends?”

Did you come up with any? It’s harder than it seems—especially if you take off of the table family relationships, on the assumption that the place of authority between, say, parents and children distorts what we mean by “friendship.”

Then there’s David and Jonathan—a relationship that is often held up as a true model of friendship. Even the Mishnah (Pirkei Avot 5:16) perpetuates this idea.

But with due respect to the Mishnah, I don’t buy it. David, as presented in the Book of Samuel, is a far too complex and contradictory figure to be a paragon of friendship. If you read carefully, you’ll notice that everyone keeps falling in love with the charismatic and gifted David: his various wives (at least at first); “all Israel and Judah” (2 Sam. 18:16); and, indeed, King Saul’s son Jonathan. Time after time, people profess their love for David, and periodically they save his life because of their devotion to him.

The problem is: David is always the object of another’s love, the Hebrew verb אהב. Never does the text position David as the subject to declare, “David loved ________.” It’s hard to know if David ever loves somebody else.

I propose that such one-sidedness is no model for a real or authentic friendship.

Instead, I can think of one Biblical model that strikes many of the notes of genuine friendship: the three friends of Job.

After Job’s devastating losses—of virtually everything he has—the text reads:

When Job’s three friends heard about all these calamities that had befallen him, each came from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him.

When they saw him from a distance, they could not recognize him, and they broke into loud weeping; each one tore his robe and threw dust into the air onto his head.

They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights. None spoke a word to him, for they saw how very great was his suffering. (Job 2:11-13)

Read that passage carefully and consider what an extraordinary group of friends Job has!

1.     They live far away. We can tell by their exotic names and the epithets that the Bible gives them. (I know I have many cherished friends who live far away, and it can be a long time—sometimes years—between moments when we see each other.)

2.     But when they hear of Job’s pain, they come. A time of real crisis is not a time to disappear, or to be too busy. They come to be with Job—without being asked.

3.     They tear their clothes—an act of mourning—when they see his distress. His pain is their pain because of the intimacy of their feelings for him.

4.     They sit on the ground with him (another ritual of mourning) and remain silent for days (surely the first example of sitting shiva). Regarding this silence: Yes, sometimes, a situation calls for a carefully chosen kind word. But just as often, what is really necessary is presence. Job’s friends don’t speak—at least, not right away; what is needed is their act of showing up and being present for their friend in his anguish.

Later, Job’s friends will have many things to say. Some of those words are helpful, others, not so much. But I’m struck by so many elements of their behavior, and their desire to bring compassion and healing to their ailing friend.

It’s a model that surely resonates with immediacy in our own age of distance and isolation and ever-creeping solipsism.

Coming in Part Two: The Rabbinic and Kabbalistic traditions offer some remarkable perspectives of genuine friendships. Stay tuned.  

Image: “Friendship Matters,” Psychology Today, June 19, 2015

Elegy for… a Character: A Tzedakah Story

Even a poor person—one who is sustained by Tzedakah funds—
is required to give Tzedakah to another person.
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah
Laws of Giving to Poor People 10:5
 

My friend Renee was a character. She was well known in our town; you couldn’t miss her. Her frizzy salt-and-pepper hair was often bound in a pigtail like a schoolgirl’s. She drove an SUV that was constantly breaking down, packed to the roof with the telltale possessions of an inveterate hoarder. She had weary eyes that conveyed years of adventures.

She lived on the precipice of homelessness. For a while she stayed in emergency shelters—scary places that she would recount with stark tales. In recent years, she found more stable housing, finding cheap rooms to rent in residential homes around Natick. And she knew how to work the system, making her rounds to get the food, gas money, and, especially, the money for medications that she needed.

I suppose that’s where I came in. She started dropping in on me years ago at the synagogue where I worked. At first she came for Tzedakah money, knowing that people gave me funds to distribute in emergency situations. But she would linger, telling me stories, asking about my family, and, I think, looking for some human contact that can be the harshest thing people who are very poor lack.

Like many such characters, she tested the nerves of those who didn’t “get” her. When she began to show up at the synagogue—ensconced in one of the wealthiest Zip Codes in America—some people whispered behind her back. Being Jewish herself, she accepted my invitation to come to Friday night services. Sometimes the bar/bat mitzvah families with out-of-town guests would murmur about the woman who looked funny and took too much of the food that was offered before the service began. The staff grumbled when she would sit on the couch outside my office, waiting without an appointment to grab a few minutes of my time. Hebrew school parents and kids kept their distance.

She was funky. She looked funky, she talked funky, and sometimes she smelled funky. Initially our relationship was based on shnorring—she needed money, and she knew that I was usually reliable to help her pay her heating bill during the cold winter, or fill a prescription for her urgently-needed heart medicine.

Sometimes she exasperated me. I know, of course, about the social service agencies in our area that are there to provide a safety net. I begged her—I insisted—that she connect with them. She would reply that her nonconformist hippie soul wouldn’t be part of their “system.” That made me crazy; I threatened to cut her off if she didn’t take their assistance. But she would inevitably show up with a bill for heart medication, and of course I would help pay for it.

After a while, the dynamic of our relationship changed. She knew I was going through some rough times personally, so one day she invited me to lunch. I demurred—where in the world would she get the money from?—but she insisted. So a few days later, she took me out to a local diner. I’m sure we got a few stares. But the gesture meant so much to me: she considered me a friend; she knew I was down, and she treated. She didn’t even let me cover the tip.       

Yes, she was a character. She wasn’t invisible, but she became one of those offbeat folk who populate a suburban town who are tolerated as long as they don’t become too much of a nuisance.

But because she was my friend, I knew things that others didn’t.

I knew that she had a Master’s degree in counseling from the University of Wisconsin. I knew about her daughter at American University, of whom she was very proud. I knew that she had spent time in Israel, and spoke a limited but comprehensible Hebrew. And I knew she still saw herself as a “Sixties Person”—committed to volunteerism and social activism. She once told me stories about working on the Clearwater Project on the Hudson River with Pete and Toshi Seeger.

But now I’ll share something with you that very few people knew (including her daughter, until I told her). She couldn’t stand just being on the receiving end of the cycle of caring. “This isn’t me,” she’d say, insisting that her younger self was alive and well inside her rather emaciated and graying body.

So one day she handed me a large folder. “I know you see a lot of hurting folks throughout the course of the day,” she said. “So when you feel it’s appropriate, please give people one of these.”

Inside the folder were ten envelopes labeled “For You.” In each one was a handwritten personalized note. Each was a gentle message of compassion and tenderness. For instance:

To remind you
How unique and
Wonderful You
Are—
every day,
every hour
—And to wish you
extra energy for the things you’re
currently tackling…

Or:

Please accept this
as a symbol
of some
great things
comin’ your way—
for example
Brightness
Fairness
HAPPINESS…
Enjoy your
wonderful
future.

And enclosed in each card was a $2 bill. (A $2 bill!) The instructions were not to keep this money for yourself, but to take it and use it to brighten someone else’s day.

Look at what an extraordinary Mitzvah that is. She did it completely anonymously; she left it to me to identify the adults, teens, or kids who needed cheering-up. I was not to tell the recipients where it came from; it was just from “a friend, someone who cares.” And the cards were designed to trigger a chain reaction of compassion and human kindness. This is Tzedakah—but Tzedakah with the personal touch, rooted in compassion and a desire to make a connection with people who may be desperately lonely.

Renee died last week; her heart finally gave out, surely not helped by the on-the-edge lifestyle she was living. There weren’t obituaries in the paper or online; few people noticed. Many who encountered her over the years may have forgotten her, or figured that she just skipped town. But she deserves a better memorial.

I know many more juicy stories that she shared with me, but I won’t tell them here. Suffice to say that she was a character, and she lived out the Rambam’s principle that everyone’s (everyone’s) task is to bring kindness and caring into the world, not indifference and lies. I just wanted to say that she was my friend, I’ll miss her, and she made a difference.