On the Art of Friendship

As was said earlier, when the virtue in one mensch encounters that in another, it naturally begets the spark which marks the beginning of friendship; the art is in making and tending a single fire in two bodies. (This highlights the fact that friendship is a two-way street; that, like the proverbial horse to water, you can lead another mensch to friendship, but “you can’t make him drink.”) First, choose wisely. As Dr. Samuel Johnson tells us, “Books, like friends, should be few and well-chosen.” In Pirkei Avot 1:7, we are told what not to do; namely, “do not befriend an evil person.” (For to be evil is to be unwell.) Second, remember that no one is perfect. Cicero admits that the man worthy of friendship is rare, “indeed, all excellent things are.” And later: “Most people unreasonably…want such a friend as they are unable to be themselves and expect from their friends what they do not themselves give.” Emerson adds, “What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!” And he observes that friendship may require “natures so rare and costly…that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured.” Dr. Johnson goes one further when he says friendship is so unlikely that “the greatest part of mankind content themselves without it, and supply its place as they can, with interest and dependence.” The bar for friendship is set by nature almost impossibly high to begin with (as was indicated at the outset), so, let us not for those who would be our friends raise that bar to an impossible height (that is, set all up to fail), because a mensch with no friends is no mensch at all. Emerson presages those sitcom relationships when he writes, “Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.”

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that “un-equals can be friends; they can be equalized.” To equalize a pair of unique and ever-evolving individuals takes art, takes human interference. (Man’s ever-evolving nature is the reason friends are sometimes said to “grow apart.”) Again, Dr. Johnson: “Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent.” Cicero tells us to apply this “golden rule”: “put yourself on a level with your friend.” He continues, “those who possess any superiority must put themselves on an equal footing with those who are less fortunate, [and the] latter must not be annoyed at being surpassed in genius, fortune, or rank…the superior are bound to descend, [fortunately,] so are they bound in a certain sense to raise those below them.” There is no getting around this: the two who recognize similar virtue in each other will inevitably notice areas where they differ, where they are unequal. Hence the idiomatic call to “set aside our differences” when they may interfere with good works (e.g., a lasting friendship). George Santayana is less idealistic than the rest when he says that “friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.” This is of course related to the idiomatic call for men to “find common ground” when their present positions seem poised to lead them on to bad works (e.g., ending a worthwhile friendship). There is among authors one unanimously forbidden compromise, one outlawed accommodation: virtue to a friend should never bend.

Now let us consider Jonathan and David. They cannot have all things in common, for logic dictates that two cannot be the chosen one; they must set aside this rather large difference and find common ground. Favoritism, and the resentment which follows it, rips apart the siblings in Genesis: Cain and Abel; Ishmael and Isaac; Esau and Jacob; Joseph and his brothers. G-d no longer favors Jonathan’s family; rather, His favorite is David, and naturally the reader expects this will come to a violent end. But Jonathan sets this aside, so to speak, and finds common ground with Israel’s “sweet psalmist” by choosing chavruta, which is to act in accordance with G-d’s will. Jonathan might agree with Emerson when the latter says, “The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” The former, whom you might call the mensch of menschen, understands that G-d has no equal; he understands that, according to one American thinker, “the assumption that man is G-d…[is] the fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.” Erring and sinning are both things which a chavruta ought to prevent one from doing, and neither bode well for one’s wellbeing.