"THIS THING CALLED. . . FRIENDSHIP"

May 31, 2002












Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana

About a month ago, I lost one of my closest and dearest friends, Juliette Gans Baker. She was a woman in her eighties and we have been friends almost from the moment I came to Macon, Georgia to become her rabbi. But don't make too much of the rabbi-congregant connection as the source of our deep friendship.

The fact of my vocation and its relationship to her provided only the initial impetus for our devoted friendship. Over the 30 years of our closeness, we were not fast friends because of what either of us did professionally, nor because of our geographic proximity, nor due to a similarity of age. In all of these we were, more than not, utterly dissimilar. Yet, when I think about it, we were always there to unconditionally affirm one another, to celebrate each other's victories, to comfort one another in sorrow, and to be unfailingly honest with each other. There was never ever a moment of pretense-no matter what, we were our genuine selves.

I tell you all of this in order to let you in on the fact that my world and its brightness has been irreparably diminished by the death of my precious friend. How was it expressed by Aristotle?

A true friend is one soul in two bodies.

How accurate, don't you think?

I don't suppose, in the course of a long and rich lifetime, a lucky person is gifted with more than a minyan of friends and friendships the depth of which I shared with Juliette. Ten such friendships would be a treasure of good fortune.

One of the Jewish mystics of the Middle Ages described God as Yedid Nefesh-our Soul's Beloved Friend. In Judaism, God is our ultimate Friend: constant, forgiving, understanding, and trustworthy. God is our quintessential Friend who knows our vulnerability and impermanence, our weaknesses and foibles, and yet loves us into loving, in spite of ourselves. God treasures and highly prizes each one of us because we are uniquely made and one of a kind.

And so it is that all of our human relationships are similarly based on this pattern of between Creator and created.

Moshe Leib of Sassov, a Hasidic sage of Eastern Europe, once said that he learned about true friendship from a peasant who, in a small tavern, sat with other friends on a cold winter's night. For a long time this peasant was silent amid the frivolity of those at tables nearby. Perhaps due to the relaxation of his guard owing to the effects of a few glasses of schnaps, he proceeded to inquire of the man across from him:

Tell me, do you love me or not?
And the other man, a friend since earliest childhood, was quick to reply:
Yes, I love you very much.
But then the first peasant pursued:
You say that you love me, but are you aware of what profoundly hurts me?
To which the second man admitted he hadn't much of a clue.
And after an awkward silence, the original questioner confided:
Well, if you do not know what hurts me, you cannot truly love me.

So we see how a real friend is one who makes our disappointment less hurtful, our problems more solvable, our grief less painful, our adversity more bearable. A friend is one who joyfully sings with us when we are on the mountaintop, and silently walks beside us through the lonesome valley.

They say, "A real friend is not known in prosperity." The friend walks in when the world walks out. And have you noticed this amazing fact about your really close friends? You don't even have to see them or even talk to them every day (or sometimes every year) for that special intimacy and closeness to stand firm across the miles.

But we must also say this by way of caution: people who look for faultless friends will have none. If you ever want to have long friendships, well then, you'd better develop a short memory. No one's perfect! And people sometimes say things we don't really mean.

Sometimes we are thoughtless and forgetful, grumpy and just plain cheerless and dumb. So, on occasions, even the most genuine friends will let us down. Get over it, and let all of the other occasions when that friendship was tested and proven remind you that here is a person who has always been there for you, and will be there in the future.

A fellow was once asked about the secret of his long and successful life, and he instantly explained, "I had a friend." And what difference it makes in your life and mine to discover the encouragement of friendship.

A treasured aspect of genuine friendships is that we wholeheartedly want only the best of everything for our friends, and that's a pretty rare commodity in life. I remember how Gore Vidal once remarked:
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
George Bernard Shaw once sent two tickets for the opening night of his new play to Winston Churchill, along with this note:

Bring a friend if you have one.
Churchill returned the tickets with a note saying,
Sorry, but I'm engaged that evening. Please send tickets for the second night-if you have one.

True friendship means presenting our unique, undiluted, unreconstructed self to others. It means forgetting all about the images we project- the "everything's great" glassy-eyed smile we project at class reunions and professional conventions.


Yes, friendship-deep, true, honest, and authentic-demands self-revelation. Says the poet of the freedom and bliss of friendship:

Oh, the comfort-the inexpressible comfort of
Feeling safe with another person,
Having neither to weigh thoughts
Nor measure words-but pouring them
All right out-just as they are-
Chaff and grain together-
Certain that a faithful hand will
Take and sift them-
Keep what is worth keeping-
And with a breath of kindness,
Blow the rest away.
May we find that kind of friend. Oh, and may we be that kind of friend.

Amen.