Friendship is an anomalous relationship in modern culture: We know the bonds that connect us to distant family, but even dear friends enjoy only a private connection, not one hallowed by legal or social title. While friends may provide for essential emotional and professional needs, our debts to friends—and the contours of our relationships with those friends—is not regulated by law or custom.
What, then, is friendship?
One prominent sociologist has written that friendships are essentially utilitarian and provisional—we make friends with people to fill specific needs, and when we no longer have that need, then the friendship falls apart. Friends, in this widespread contemporary view, must serve an immediate purpose or they cease to be friends at all.
Since our needs do change in the course of living, it goes without saying that there are no life-long friends. This cynical view is nothing new; the midrash Pirkei de-Rebbe Eliezer notes the opinion of some that “one has only three friends—children, money, and good deeds.” Unlike friendships, family may be bonded for life and don’t need to meet a specific need. Once an aunt, always an aunt. But friends come and go as a person develops and changes. Blood, the saying goes, is thicker than water.
The very fact that a popular saying affirms this callous and narcissistic definition of friendship shows how widespread it is in modern culture. Judaism, by contrast, understands that the line between friend and family isn’t so clear, and that the divine image in all people precludes their being discarded when they no longer serve a specific purpose.
In today’s Torah reading we encounter a false friend: Our ancestor Isaac faces a famine in the Land of Israel. Rather than leave his beloved homeland, he settles in the region of Avimelekh, the king of the Philistines, who pretends to befriend Isaac, even going so far as to protect Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, from the lust of his immoral countrymen. Isaac settles in the land and prospers. Soon, he is a wealthy man, with large herds and a bounteous household. His newfound happiness, however, threatens his friendship with Avimelekh, who apparently could only be friends with someone dependent on himself. Once it became clear that their relationship would no longer be based on dependency or adulation, Avimelekh terminates the association, sending Isaac a painful note: “Go away from us, for you have become far too big for us.”
Later on, when it again becomes clear that Isaac has God’s blessing, and Avimelekh sees the possibility of benefit from a relationship with Isaac, he again approaches the Patriarch to formalize a friendly relationship. Avimelekh is the kind of friend the Talmudic rabbis warned of when they said, “There are many persons who eat and drink together, yet they pierce each other with the sword of their tongues.”
Imagine how devastated Isaac must have been to receive Avimelekh’s abrupt termination of their friendship!
This secular notion of friendship denigrates people by viewing them as tools to be used, rather than hearts to be esteemed. Contrast that with a lovely midrash (found in Jellinek’s Bet Ha-Midrash) that speaks of the Jewish view of friendship—one that recognizes human beings as infinitely precious, worthy of our deepest loyalty and love:
The outcome of a war parted two friends who had previously lived in the same country…. One of them, visiting his friend by stealth, was captured and sentenced to die as a spy. But the man implored the king who had decreed his death: “Your majesty, give me a month’s respite so I may place my affairs in order. At the end of a month, I will return to pay the penalty.” The king said, “Who will be your surety?” The man answered, “Call in my friend, and he will pay for my life with his, in the event I don’t return.” To the king’s amazement, the friend accepted the condition. On the last day when the sword was about to descend, the first friend returned and placed the sword at his own neck. The second friend begged him, “Let me die in your place.” The king was touched, and pardoned them both, asking them to include him as a third in their remarkable friendship.
True friendship is not a utilitarian tool—friends are not objects to be used and then abandoned when they no longer serve our needs. A friend is a treasure to be cherished and guarded, a level of fidelity that takes constant effort: As Yalkut Shimoni understands, “it is difficult to acquire a friend.”
To offer the unconditional caring and love that one human being can bestow upon another, to see the chance to know someone else as an opportunity to witness God’s steadfast and reliable love is a great gift, both to the recipient and to the giver. Those who see friendship as a series of functional connections—to be used and then abandoned, can never know the joy, peace, and depth that comes with unconditional love.
True friendship is a form of hesed—love that need not be continually earned, caring that is its own justification. Only in the context of that hesed can we risk exposing our souls and our hearts to each other’s insight, only then can we risk healing each other’s wounds, and only then can we, in turn, allow ourselves to be healed.
True friendship is reliable—and the only kind worth sharing.
Shabbat shalom.