The Truest Form of Friendship - Rosh Hashanah Day 1 Sermon

This past May, my daughter Amalia came into the world and it took nearly an hour before Ayelet and I finally saw one another smile. It wasn’t that we weren’t happy, and I promise you, we were each grinning ear to ear. But our joy was hidden behind our masks, meant to keep ourselves and others safe but unwittingly providing much more than a physical barrier between us and the world. 

Eventually we got into our own room and removed our masks. I gave Ayelet a kiss for the first time and in that moment,  I was finally able wholly share my happiness with another. But it was a closed system. Only my wife could see my face. We were separate from the world. The intimacy of marriage on steroids. Ayelet was the only person in the world, for whom it was safe enough to fully encounter my joy. 

I’m not alone, everyone is encountering the world with a mask on. And no matter who you are, or what you do, this pandemic necessitates that a piece of yourself must remain at a distance from those around you. 

Last night, I spoke about how to cultivate an inner resolve during this time, but as we know, life is not lived in a vacuum. COVID-19 has changed the very nature of our relationships, and today I want to spend a little time reflecting on what that change means for us. 

Though some of us are blessed to have abiding love with a spouse, deep kinship with a sibling, or meaningful connection with a child, the most pervasive relationships in our lives are usually our friendships. Through sheer number, our friendships win by a longshot. And if we do marriage or parenthood or family right those relationships too will share many important features with our most meaningful friendships. 

But as we know all know, COVID makes it very difficult to foster friendships and build community. Not only can we not physically see one another, but in an effort to protect our collective health, we are all forced to keep some of our most intimate relationships at an arms distance. And in the breach, we miss a lot. I will again never take for granted the power of the casual encounter or the hallway run-in. In a given synagogue program, I could talk to dozens if not hundreds of people. Walking through the crowd I could get a pulse on where your lives were. Today, I have to be mindful and seek out congregants, an impossible task with our numbers, and I end up missing some in the process. 

As an aside, if that is you, please reach out! 

For those I do speak with, we are separated by a mask or a screen. If communication is mainly about subtle body language cues, I miss much of what you say because I don’t have access to all the information I did before. And if we are lucky enough to see one another in person, I spend much of that encounter distracted by the chorography of our conversation: are we standing far enough apart? Are either of us touching something we should not be? 

Today, the fabric binding us to our friends and community have been torn asunder. Yet, the essence of our friendships remains if we only know where to look. 

A millennium ago, Maimonides, Judaism’s greatest philosophical mind, sketched out four different categories of friendship. His framework is instructive for this moment. 

The first he calls a friendship of utility. These are friendships based around the benefit and value each party gets from that friendship. They are the business partner we meet for golf, the parent who we bond with while our kids play together, the restaurant owner who spends hours greeting his regulars. Here, the friendship stands on the shoulders of something else and can easily break. We are friends because of what we get from the other. 

Maimonides calls his second category, a friendship for pleasure. Here too, there is a utility that one gains through their friend, but rather than gain presage or power, one gains enjoyment, amusement, and entertainment. This is the friend you do things with. It’s the friend you go into the city with, that you try new restaurants with, the particular friend that can make you belly laugh over wine and cheese. 

In truth, the bulk of our friendships fall into these first two categories, and that’s what makes COVID so hard on us. COVID robs us of the business dinners, the ruckus parties, the causal run-ins that end hours later over a cup of coffee. If you are feeling lonely, trapped, even bored during these past number of months, it’s because these avenues of friendship are not available to you. 

Luckily, Maimonides saw his categorization of friendship as hierarchal, and the second two categories, though rarer, are more available to us at this time. 

The third category, which an offshoot of pleasure, is a friendship of confidence. If we are lucky we have a handful of these friendship. As Maimonidies explains a friend of confidence is one in which a person can “confide his soul.” He continues, “He will not keep [anything] from him - not in action and not in speech. And he will make him know all of his affairs - the good ones and the disgraceful - without fearing from him that any loss will come to him with all of this, not from him and not from another.” 

If you are lucky, these friendships have become a lifeline for you. And the reason is simple. 

If you want to understand loneliness, picture two people. Between them lives all their secrets, all their shames, everything they aren’t ready to share with most of the world. The more stuff between two people, the larger the chasm and the further away they feel from one another. As two friends become more intimate, sharing what is buried deep within, the gap between them is bridged. Loneliness lives within the space between you and others and is alleviated when we have people who can close the abyss and come together to truly see one another. Only through sharing our full self, can we combat the ever-present loneliness around us. 

Sadly, these friendships are growing ever rarer. Studies have shown that in 1985, the average person had three people in their lives in which to confide. By 2004, that number had dropped to nearly 2. Today it’s between 2 and 1. 

COVID makes everything about intimacy harder. Usually, friends take turns falling apart. A person loses a loved one and many people, who are not grieving, come to their aid. A person gets divorced, loses a job, struggles with a child with mental illness and their friends are able to hold them through it. But today, everyone is broken. I’ve had people confide in me that they stopped confiding in their friends because they know a friend is also struggling. Or they feel like with everyone stretched too thin they don’t want to burden their friend with their troubles. 

But that’s not how friendship is supposed to work. Love necessities honest sharing. 

I’ve always loved the story by Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev about a scene he once observed while visiting the owner of a tavern in the Polish countryside. When he walked in, he saw two peasants at a table, gloriously drunk. Arms around each other, they were protesting how much they loved each other. Suddenly, Ivan turned to Peter, “Peter, tell me, what hurts me?” Bleary eyed, Peter looked at Ivan. “How do I know what hurts you?” Ivan replied disappointed: “If you don’t know what hurts me, how can you say you love me?” 

Though the distance makes it harder, we can’t give up on cultivating friendships of confidence. Many of us are blessed to have supportive partners or loving children, but we can’t rely solely on them to be seen. Our era necessities that we have the courage to reach out and be honest with others outside our home. As hard as it is to find the time – as a parent of a newborn and toddler I get it – knowing that others see you, warts and all and still love you, will help give you the strength to persevere. 

As important as finding friends in which to confide is, however, Maimonides emphasizes that there is an even greater friendship. And he calls this a friendship one of virtue. So what exactly does he mean by a friendship of virtue? 

In a perfect world, our deepest relationships will help us to grow. In fact, if we do friendship right, we will become better through our interactions with others. How many of us have become more patient, or more forgiving, or more loving, because someone in our lives taught us to be so. And how many of us have helped others grow, through honest dialogue, thoughtful engagement, and open sharing? 

Where a friendship of confidence receives a person exactly as they are, friendships of virtue do the opposite. They encourage us to push, to probe, to prod, until together we and our friends have risen to a higher rung of goodness. 

Friendships of virtue are hard to cultivate. You need trust and have history to make them work. Otherwise you are just another busybody. But when done right, these friendship are what will carry you through life, especially now. 

Last night I spoke about the need to not press pause on life. And I spoke about creating an inner resolve to do this. But sometimes we need friends to also hold us accountable. We need friends who will name when they see us being self-destructive, when they observe us fading inward, when they know we are at our wits end, and then we need them to help us figure out what to do. 

Temple Ner Tamid wants to be your partner in this. We have launched and will be launching a number of groups to foster exactly this open sharing, a group for people dealing with aging parents, another for parents of school age children who just need support as they try to balance everything, and another group individuals dealing with the pain for being supportive grandparents from afar. We can add this to the work we are already doing with our seniors as past of the Drurian fellowship and the work we will continue to do with our teens this year through youth group, Wednesday night classes, and boys and girls Rosh Chodesh groups. And I know there are other groups we still need to reach be it at-home college students or 20 somethings. 

But you don’t need to join a support group to support one another. Reach out. The worst that can happen when you offer support is that you find out it is unwelcome. 

You cannot fix this for others. COVID is too heavy a burden and it’s not your job. But you may give someone strength to fix one problem, insight to tackle one challenge, fortitude to push on for one more day. 

Imagine that we each have one key to a door that brings us one step closer to wholeness in this rocky time. Yours might be perseverance, mine might be compassion. How wonderful it would be if our friendship allowed us to exchange keys from time to time? Over time, would we not cope better with life’s greatest challenges? All we need to do is let others in enough to exchange those keys. 

In essence then, the two best forms of friendships involve full acceptance of another and the courage to grow in reciprocity. To foster confidence and strive together for virtue. 

In a word, to love your fellow human being, simply and fiercely with no strings attached. 

The Talmud teaches, “Any love that is dependent on something, when that thing perishes, so too does the love. [But a love] that is not dependent on something, does not ever perish” (Avot 5:16). 

The things on which our love has rested are no more. COVID took our routines, our hobbies, our pastimes away. But it cannot rob us of our souls. And even now, separated by a computer screen and behind a mask, those souls are craving connection. 

Times of crisis form an opportunity for us all, for they strip away the façade. Because can’t build friendships dependent on the usual things, we are forced to go deeper, faster. If you have the courage to seek out others in which to confide and grow, you will leave this crisis for the better. With so much of our lives on hold, our relationships are at least one thing we have the agency to foster. 

There is an ancient teaching that “anyone who stands beside their community in distress will merit seeing the consolation of that community” (Ta’anit 11a). We are all in distress in some way, but we are also able to stand beside others in it. I have faith we will see consolation one day. But until then, we hold one another up, stronger together, ready to support one another in whatever the next moment brings.