Good friends can be lifesavers. In the Bible, the friendship between Jonathan and David is now legendary. The Jewish scriptures hold theirs as a model:
Whenever love depends on some selfish end, when the end passes away, the love passes away; but if it does not depend on some selfish end, it will never pass away. Which love depended on a selfish end? This was the love of Amnon and Tamar. And which did not depend on a selfish end? This was the love of David and Jonathan (Avot 5:1)
But good friendships, like the other most valuable things in our lives, are not relationships that we are in the position to choose to have, and thus the presence or the absence of a close friend in our lives proves just how little control we exercise in our lives, despite what we think. Yet we are not completely at the mercy of invisible forces.
Many of us have plenty of friends of the lesser kind. Aristotle, writing about friendships, identified these imperfect relations as friendships where a utilitarian calculus is at work: we use our friends and get used by them; we are friendly with people who give us some sort of pleasure and vice versa. In our culture of competition and individualism, these relationships based on exchange are remarkably ubiquitous, so much so that they seem to be the norm: deeper connections often seem suspect, even threatening because of their apparent inflexibility and demand for commitment, and therefore are at odds with a cultural narrative of change.
A culture of change is a culture of climaxes, one that reflects the reality of consumerism: we are forever on the move from one climax to a new and better one. Not only products must keep up, their manufacturers introducing new and better iterations; friendships, too, must keep up with us and our changing lives and changing interests. To try and hang on is to invite madness. But these relationships of convenience, as all relationships based on any accounting, always ultimately disappoint, leading to a feeling of emptiness and alienation, because they never recognize the other as itself, only its capability signaled by its surface. Jewish sages write, “Anyone who establishes a friendship for access to power, money, or sexual relations; when these ends are not attainable, the friendship ceases…love that is not dependent on selfish ends is true love of the other person since there is no intended end.” (Magen Avot – abridged and adapted translation) But true friendship is a celebration of the self as it is: we don't love our true friend because he can do something for us, but because of who he is apart of his abilities.
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