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.
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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.