Friendship Tested by Religious Values (Column 269)

With God's help

This column is dedicated to my five dear friends on the staff of the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham: Rabbis Yair Yaakobi, Uriel Eitam, Nir Weinberg, Meir Kahane, and Avraham Bleidstein. There is an almost familial bond of friendship among us, and the lovely surprise you arranged for my sixtieth birthday gave me great pleasure. What I will write here is a crystallization of thoughts on the matter that began to arise within me during the evening we spent together.

The reason that moved me to think about the question of friendship discussed here right now was the feeling that my somewhat radical views of recent years might (or may be liable to) trouble my good friends. I assume that my friends on the Yeruham staff and their spouses who sat with us that evening do not share, at least, a considerable part of these positions of mine, and I assume that at least some of them might (or may be liable to) be regarded in their eyes as mistaken and harmful. Among them are heads of yeshiva high schools, a rabbinical judge, a community rabbi, and a deputy head of a hesder yeshiva (to my shame, I am the only namtchek in the group), and it is clear to me that in their Torah work they may well have encountered ricochets of my positions in various areas. One of them even severely rebuked me a few years ago for my remarks about kitniyot (legumes) (see Column 2), and you have no idea how heartening and good it was to get a "dressing-down" (which I had honestly earned) from a good and loving friend (in the sense of "Fortunate are you, O Israel! Before whom are you purified, and who purifies you…"). That evening I was happy to discover that none of them allowed these disputes to cast a shadow over the strong friendship between us, and this stirred several reflections in me that I thought to dedicate to them.

Friendship Despite Differences in Worldview: The Dilemma

My immediate feeling was great appreciation for their ability to rise above the disputes. But in the end, this matter requires more systematic clarification. The question is whether, when your friend expresses such problematic positions, you are supposed to maintain a friendship with him, or whether one should instead overcome the feeling of friendship and act in the way that is correct ethically and ideologically (or religiously and halakhically), that is, distance oneself from a person with such problematic views (in your eyes). Is there not here a surrender to emotions and a subordination of truth and values to emotional pleasantness? Is this not the counsel of the evil inclination? All in all, it is more pleasant for all of us to remain friends than to get into quarrels.

A similar question arises regarding parents whose son has decided to abandon religious commitment (to become secular). There too, the parents' commitment to their child and parental feeling stand opposite the values and truth that ostensibly require dissociation from such a person. I have often been asked by people what they should do in such a situation (and such questions have arisen for me myself as well). It was clear to me that it is not right to damage the family bond in such a case, and not only because if the child receives proper treatment he may perhaps return, but because I assumed that the family bond (like friendship) ought not to be subordinate to beliefs and opinions.

On the other hand, I assume we would all expect a person not to cooperate, and perhaps also not to maintain a friendship, with someone who has committed a crime. Reuven murdered or raped. Should his parents not dissociate themselves from him, and perhaps sever ties with him? Should his friends maintain their relationship with him despite the act? From a religious perspective, abandoning religious commitment or holding views of "heresy" is perceived as no less serious than a moral crime. As is well known, the Beit Yosef maintains that the medieval authorities (Rashba and Tosafot) dispute whether one desecrates the Sabbath for a boy or girl who have been taken captive among gentiles and will be raised by them as gentiles. Rashba sees this as spiritual life-danger, more severe than physical life-danger, and therefore one desecrates the Sabbath for it.[1] Does this Rashba not tell us that people who do not fulfill their religious commitments are considered dead, and perhaps are worse than murderers? Is it right to maintain a friendship or family relationship with such people? Perhaps continuing the friendship in such a situation is really weakness and not a spiritual virtue?

From here on, the discussion divides into two parts: 1. The nature of friendship and the attitude it entails. 2. Religious values versus moral values (human being and Jew).

A Look at Friendship

Sarah Stroud, in her article, Epistemic Partiality in Friendship (group favoritism, or epistemic bias, in friendship), surveys the philosophical writing on friendship that, she claims, had recently emerged (her article was written in 2006), and adds another layer to it. She opens by describing the concept of friendship. If Reuven is Shimon's friend, we would expect that when he hears information that presents Shimon in a problematic light, he will tend not to accept it. Beyond that, we would expect him not to remain silent but to defend his friend and try to present him in a positive light. A friend should display moral partiality in judging his friend, both in relation to the information itself and in the ethical judgment of that information (judging favorably). Thus, for example, if Reuven hears that Shimon is abusing someone, he should scrutinize the information itself with utmost care, and afterward, even if it turns out that the information is correct, he should examine interpretive possibilities that justify Shimon's behavior (perhaps the other person provoked him, or wronged him in some way, and so on). Beyond that, even if it turns out that he really committed a wrong and has no justification, there is room to argue that the friend should maintain his relationship with him and treat him better than he would an ordinary criminal.

According to Stroud, this obligation of friendship raises two kinds of problems: 1. An ethical problem. Ostensibly, our ethical criteria are supposed to be impartial. If it is proper to treat a person who does such things with reservation or to condemn him, then that is how one should act even if he is your friend. Alternatively, if there is room to judge a person favorably in such a situation, I should do so with respect to every person and not only with respect to my friend. 2. An epistemic problem. In our knowledge of the world we have various criteria by which we decide what exactly happened (what reality is). These criteria are not supposed to depend on values such as friendship. A fact is a fact, whether it concerns my friend or anyone else. Therefore, a decision on the question of what happened should not depend on values such as friendship.

Stroud proposes several possibilities for explaining this problematic aspect. For example, she raises the possibility that regarding my friend I have information beyond what I have regarding a stranger, and therefore my judgment of his actions is made on the basis of broader prior information, which may change the outcome. Moreover, if I chose him to be my friend, I presumably saw good qualities in him (I believe he is a good person). If so, it is only natural that I judge his actions from that perspective and judge him favorably.

In Column 30 I dealt with the issue of judging favorably (see also Column 29), and I explained there that this is not a moral duty but simple reason. If you were to see Mother Teresa chasing an engaged young woman with a drawn knife in her hand, I assume that the interpretation that the young woman forgot the knife with her and she wants to return it to her is epistemically preferable (and not only ethically) in that situation. This is as opposed to a known rapist who performs the same act, where the reasonable interpretation is that he truly wants to do evil to that young woman (for if in all such situations we had to judge favorably, there would be no law of the pursuer in the world). The difference does not lie in our moral duty toward Mother Teresa, but in a clear-eyed assessment of reality itself (that is, this is an epistemic and not an ethical consideration). In light of this, one can perhaps explain Reuven's partial attitude toward his friend Shimon by considerations of reason on the epistemic plane. He knows him as a good person and knows many facts about his background and way of thinking, and therefore he can and should interpret his actions in accordance with that prior knowledge. This is not discrimination or bias, but common sense and sober perception.

But this explanation cannot entirely solve the difficulty. First, my friend is not always a good person. Sometimes I like him, or am his friend, for other reasons (this is certainly true with respect to family relationships). Second, it is commonly thought that the obligation of friendship requires from me something beyond merely sober interpretation. That is, the very fact that he is my friend obligates me to think and act in ways that go beyond what common sense alone dictates in the situation under discussion. If so, the state of friendship has added value with respect to such judgment, beyond the mere prior information that I have about the friend.

Stroud herself arrives at the end of the article at a proposal that seems to me completely absurd. She argues that if our epistemic criteria lead to a contradiction with the obligations of friendship, then we ought to cast doubt on them. If our ordinary epistemic considerations bring us to the conclusion that our friend is evil, and to the decision that he committed a wrong and we must abandon him, then we must re-examine those epistemic criteria. This is an absurd skeptical view that grossly ignores the naturalistic fallacy. Norms and values cannot be determined by facts, and certainly they cannot determine the facts. Reality is what it is, regardless of whether this is my friend or a stranger. Replacing my ways of knowing because they harm the values of friendship is a truly bizarre proposal.

What Is Friendship, and What Are the Obligations of Friendship? Contract Theory

But the question remains: what is the justification for giving preferential treatment to a friend as opposed to any stranger? This applies both to the moral plane and to the epistemic plane.

The first question that arises in this context is whether friendship is a value. The friendly bond between Reuven and Shimon is a bond formed between them by mutual agreement. I could have chosen any other friend for myself, and no one would have seen anything wrong with that. This arbitrariness ostensibly indicates that it is unlikely that this is a value. After all, the choice of Shimon to be my friend is arbitrary, so how is my commitment to him a moral one? I could equally have chosen Levi, and then the obligation of friendship would have been toward him and not toward Shimon. Can a person choose his values arbitrarily and still regard them as a valid and binding norm? If one cannot fault Reuven for not being Shimon's friend, then by the same token one also cannot condemn him for not giving Shimon proper friendly treatment.

There may perhaps be value in choosing some friend, whether Shimon or Levi, rather than living in loneliness without friends. Once the friend is chosen, he is my friend, and now my obligations toward him are moral obligations. That is, there is value in my having a friend, and this includes obligations of friendship toward him, but the choice of the friend (the decision who he will be) is in my hands. One may perhaps compare this to choosing a spouse. There too many will see the mutual obligations between spouses as a moral duty, even though the choice of spouse is arbitrary and wholly left to me. I could have chosen a different wife, and then the obligations would have been toward her and not toward my wife.

The obvious conclusion is that the obligations toward the friend are a kind of contract. When a person chooses a spouse and forms a marital unit with him or her, this obligates a special kind of regard between them, that is, bias and preference for the spouse as compared to the way one relates to strangers outside that unit. Similarly, a person creates a unit of friendship (which need not be specifically marital). The unit of friendship is a kind of contract like marriage, and therefore it too includes mutual obligations, including of course preference and partiality as compared to one's relation to strangers.

The Nature of Contractual Commitment: Law and Morality

There is room to discuss whether this obligation is moral or merely contractual. Think of Reuven, who borrowed money from his wealthy friend Shimon. Now Levi, who is destitute, comes to ask him for charity. Reuven wonders whether to give charity to Levi and then be unable to return the money to Shimon (he does not have enough money), or to repay the loan and then be unable to give charity. Ostensibly, giving charity is a moral value, and therefore it should override the obligation to repay the debt, which is a legal-contractual value. It seems to me that most people (and certainly Jewish law) would tell you that the contractual obligation to repay the debt takes precedence over the moral obligation to give charity.

On its face, this could be understood in two ways: 1. Keeping a contract is a legal value and not a moral one, but the legal value takes precedence over the moral value. 2. Standing by the terms of a legal contract is a moral value (keeping one's word), and therefore it overrides other moral values. In the context of a loan, it is relatively easy to understand that this is a moral value. The lender did me a favor and lent me money, so I have a moral obligation to repay my debt to him. That is perceived as a moral duty. But what about another business contract, one that is not a loan? Does fulfilling it take precedence over giving charity? Usually people would say yes. If you undertook an obligation, you must stand by it, even if this harms moral duties that you have toward others. Legal duties take precedence over moral duties. The explanation for this is probably that if I signed a legal contract with someone, then my debt to him is a right that he has against me (see in my article here). Therefore, if I give charity at the expense of fulfilling the contract, this is tantamount to giving charity from someone else's money (robbing wealthy Reuven in order to give charity to poor Levi. Robin Hood). It is no wonder that the legal obligation takes precedence over the moral one.

Be that as it may, if friendship is a kind of contract, there is room to see it as an obligation that takes precedence over moral obligations. True, this is not a legal contract in its full sense, but it is a kind of moral contract, and as such it takes precedence over non-contractual moral obligations that I have toward other people (strangers, who are not my friends).[2]

Implications

It seems to me that this is the correct formulation of friendly relations and the obligations they create. Friendship is a kind of mutual contract that we have signed implicitly. But now we must examine the questions raised above. Indeed, my friend is not necessarily the most perfect person I know. I do not think he even has to be a good person in my eyes. Once I have entered into a covenant of friendship with him, mutual obligations arise between us. But this truly cannot change my epistemology. That is, if in some situation I arrive at the conclusion that a person who did such an act is wicked, then that is also the conclusion I should adopt with respect to my friend. I do not see how proposals such as Stroud's can be justified. Sometimes there is a situation that admits of several interpretations, and then one can say that the contract of friendship obligates me not to decide in favor of the negative interpretation, even if it is more plausible. Because he is my friend, I must presume him innocent until proven otherwise. But this requirement does not concern reality but rather my attitude toward it (in analytic-Talmudic language: a presumption is a rule of conduct and not a rule for clarifying facts). If you ask me what happened, I will say that probably X happened (as I would with respect to any other person about whom I heard this information), but my attitude toward my friend should be as though it were based on Y having happened.

This may perhaps explain a very puzzling rule that appears in the Chafetz Chaim regarding defamatory speech, namely, that in certain cases it is forbidden to accept it, but one must take it into account (or: it is permitted)—one must, or may, be concerned about it. That is, if I am about to enter into a business deal with someone, and negative information about him now reaches me, I may not accept that information so long as it has not been proven, but I may fear it and refrain from entering that deal with him. Ostensibly, this is an unreasonable instruction. For if I do not accept this defamatory speech, that is, if I do not really conclude that this person did such-and-such, then why should I fear doing business with him? Ostensibly, I am required to live in contradiction. In light of what I have said here, this can be explained as follows: if the information that reaches me seems reliable, then from my perspective there is indeed a reasonable concern that this person did the act. That is the reality as I see it, and therefore I will not enter into a joint business venture with him. But my attitude toward him should take into account that perhaps this information is mistaken, and therefore in any matter that does not involve my own loss, I may not change my attitude toward him. Admittedly, if I am asked what reality is, in my estimation (without entering into the laws of defamatory speech), I would say that the reality is indeed negative. One cannot command me to change my epistemic relation to reality (this is exactly what Sarah Stroud tries to do in her conclusion), for as I have already written here several times in the past, there is no authority over facts. If I have reached the conclusion that the factual reality is X, no command can cause me to change my position unless I am convinced that I was mistaken. One cannot command me to live with a picture of reality different from the one I truly believe in (that is exactly where Stroud is mistaken). But one can command me not to derive behavioral conclusions from that reality.

Interim Summary

The conclusion up to this point is that one may indeed demand that a person give partial treatment to his friend, even where, had it involved a stranger, reality and morality would have required a different attitude. This is a result of contract.

But it still seems to me difficult to derive from this the giving of friendly treatment to a proven criminal. If my friend were a murderer or rapist, it is not reasonable that the contract of friendship between us would obligate me to continue seeing him as a friend. On the contrary, here the moral duty to dissociate oneself from such acts and to condemn him overrides the contractual duty toward the friend. What would we say about a person who does not condemn murder because the murderer is his friend? This is plainly immoral conduct. Some would say of such a situation that I did not undertake the commitment on that basis, and therefore the contract of friendship between us is void (though not necessarily retroactively, that is, not necessarily that there was no friendship here from the outset). Be that as it may, friendship does not have unlimited validity. There are kinds of acts and kinds of people with respect to whom continued friendship is a moral crime.[3] Here I come to the second part of the column, which deals with the relation between moral values and religious values.

A Jew and a Human Being

My late father was the principal of the technological school near Bar-Ilan University (today in Giv'at Shmuel). One of the sayings his students used to quote in his name was: Before you are Jews, first of all be human beings. In recent years I have returned to these words again and again, for they have several non-trivial aspects and yet seem to me very true.

First and foremost, the meaning of these words is that our moral commitment exists alongside our commitment to Jewish law (in my view, Judaism is only Jewish law). The commitment to Jewish law does not replace the moral commitment but is added on top of it. This has several halakhic implications (see, for example, here regarding the obligations of minors and gentiles). In Rabbi Kook's terms, one can say that the Jew is not a complete level that replaces the level of the gentile, but rather a second level added on top of the universal level of all human beings (see on this here in an article on Parashat Noach).

When one looks at the issue of friendship from this perspective, one may perhaps distinguish between a person who transgresses on the moral plane and a person who transgresses on the religious plane. Indeed, if my friend is a murderer or rapist, I must condemn him and also dissociate myself and distance myself from him (though at the same time it seems proper to try to correct him and his deeds, and perhaps as a friend this is a duty that falls on me more than on others). But if my friend holds different views, even if in my eyes these are mistaken and harmful views, then I have a duty to condemn him but not necessarily to dissociate myself and distance myself from him.

On second thought, the distinction is not necessarily between moral values and religious values, but between an honest mistake and criminality and wickedness. If my friend holds mistaken views, but they are indeed his views, that is, he acts in good faith, there is no duty to distance myself from him (but there is a duty to try to correct his views, even more than with any other person). If he turns out to be wicked, there is a duty to sever the friendship, or at least to use it only for his correction and not to go on as if nothing had happened. The reason the initial inclination is to distinguish between moral values and religious values is that on the moral plane there is broad agreement, and therefore if a person acts immorally this was probably not done in good faith; whereas on the religious plane there are disputes, and therefore disagreement grounded in considerations reached in good faith is more common there.

The Question of Certainty and Normative Duality

In the background of these matters lies also the fact that a person ought not be convinced that all truth is in his possession. There is always a chance that I am mistaken, and that itself ought to affect my attitude to different opinions. Religious fundamentalism identifies religious faith with certainty (see the introduction to the first book of my trilogy). But a believing person is first of all a human being, and as such he can err and must be aware of this. This is another reason not to dismiss out of hand those who hold different views, at least so long as their actions do not involve plain moral wrongdoing (and perhaps even if their actions do involve moral wrongdoing, so long as the matter is done in good faith). In Column 265 I pointed out that the existence of other opinions also has value (as a way of clarifying and sharpening my own views autonomously). The value of friendship is a positive reason for this; that is, not only is there no necessity to abandon the friendship in a situation of dispute, but there is an obligation to preserve it even in such a situation. The meaning of the conception of friendship as a value is that continuing the friendship in a state of dispute is not merely an option but part of the very obligation of friendship itself.

But perhaps one can say something beyond all this. Even if we assume that from a religious or moral standpoint there is a duty to distance oneself from that person and condemn him, still on the moral plane the obligation of friendship remains in force. If friendship is seen as a value (moral, contractual, or other), it seems that it is not contingent on opinions and perhaps not even on actions. Perhaps even if the friend acts wickedly and not in good faith, there is still value in preserving the friendship between us. My own feeling is that even if one sees religious values as an expression of moral conduct (I think most of the world sees them that way, unlike me), it is still possible to disagree and forcefully condemn the opinions and actions, and at the same time preserve the friendship.

In more precise terms, one can say that even if I am convinced that I am right and my friend is wrong, and ostensibly the religious duty instructs me to distance myself from him and condemn him and his views, the obligation of friendship (whether moral or contractual) remains in force. At the beginning of the third book in the trilogy I discuss the issue of normative duality. I show there that a person can (and even should) be committed simultaneously to several normative systems, even in cases where there is an internal contradiction between them (that is, one sees a given act as a transgression and the other sees it as a commandment). For example, between Jewish law and morality, Jewish law and the law of the state, morality and the law of the state, and the like. Within this conceptual framework, the value of friendship can remain in force even where I am convinced of my own position, and even if I am convinced that the other position is mistaken and harmful, and therefore in my view the halakhic duty requires me to distance myself and perhaps even relinquish this friendship altogether. Even so, because of the commitment to the moral value-system alongside the halakhic one, there is room not to give up the friendship, and in my view there is also great value in that, and therefore there is an ethical flaw in such renunciation. Here I return to my late father's saying, that a Jew must first of all be a human being.

[1] See on this Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli's article, "Life-Saving in a Spiritual Danger," Techumin 2.

[2] For something akin to this, see my article on gratitude (especially from note 38 onward, where I explain that gratitude is a moral contract and distinguish between such a situation and a moral obligation that is not the product of a contract).

[3] Similar questions also arise regarding the relation of parents to their children (or between siblings): are parents supposed to ostracize their child who murdered or raped? I am not sure. The obligation of parents is a contract of much stronger force than the contract of friendship.