blogs/rabbi-joshua-hoffman

All About Friendship
Parshat Vayera 5779
Rabbi Joshua Hoffman

When was the last time you tried to define your understanding of friendship? Would you say that your definition, if you were able to come up with one, has changed over time? We think we know what a friend is or ought to be. We even think we know who are and are not our friends. But words won't ever quite adequately describe what we feel when we have a friend. Perhaps that is what makes these relationships so powerfully important to us.

Recently, a friend of mine shared with me a written piece by a modern writer, David Whyte. I'd like to share parts of it with you. In his poem entitled, “Friendship” he so eloquently states, “Friendship is a mirror to presence…” In other words, a friend is someone who sees you and is a reflection of you seeing them. A friend is the ultimate acknowledgement that we are present, that we matter, that we are cared for, and in some way this person feels cared by us too.

While the Torah doesn't speak of God and humanity as friends directly, and barely even between people, there's a lot to think about in Whyte's definitions of friendship when we study the relationship between God and Abraham.

Torah commentators frequently remark on how often the verb “to see” is used in this week's Torah portion, Vayera, “And God appeared,” also a word for being seen. Abraham sees God, he sees the strangers, he sees the city of Sodom after it is destroyed, he sees the ram in the thicket as the test of Isaac reaches its climax.  All this seeing is a mirror of God's presence in the world, from clandestine strangers, to outright arguments, to the serendipitous appearance of a ram to be offered in place of a child. The Torah uses sight to convey deep meaning in these moments, possibly because what is being seen cannot be described by words alone.

Whyte continues, “...the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another…”

More than sight, God speaks to Abraham all the time. While God tells Abraham to “Go!” one remarkable feature of Abraham's relationship with God is that the word mitzvah - commandment - never enters their relationship. There's only one mention of mitzvah in the Abraham story, in that God will command his children and future generations to adhere to God's eternal covenant with them. God always speaks to Abraham. Most importantly, Abraham and God are witnesses to each other, really neither trying to change the other, but sharpening the other in their common purpose. Essentially, God doesn't command Abraham because God has invited Abraham into a relationship, into a friendship.

Whyte concludes, “...to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Abraham does a lot of walking with God. Abraham has a lot of belief in God, and Abraham could never have completed his journey (including his traumatic encounter with Isaac on the mountain) alone. God walks with Abraham too, has a lot of belief in Abraham, and knows that without Abraham (and his progeny) God's journey to relationship with humanity will be totally alone.

Defining friendships with Whyte's words or crafting our own is a noble endeavor. Sharing our thoughts with our friends of what their friendship means to us is beautiful and holy and true.  I wonder what it means to see God as a friend for me. I can certainly describe what it feels like when I think God is my friend, and sadly when I don't. Seeing God as the mirror of my own presence feels quite real, immensely powerful, and very loving to me.