The friendship of slaves

Friendship is a form of relationship that we must reflect on in order to know and understand our existence and our mission in this world as human beings, and to grasp the nature of our relationships with other people.

In fact, we form friendships of one kind or another. Whom do we call a friend, and why; whom do we call an enemy, and why? With whom, and on what grounds, do we become friends,

and with whom, and on what grounds, do we become adversaries? Do we have a friendship with people whose company we enjoy? How much do we cooperate with people who are not our friends, merely because of the pleasures we derive from them or the interests we gain? Which kinds of relationships

with which people do we value, and how much?

The answers we give to these show in themselves what we are and what our direction is. Of course there are friendships based on pleasure, on interest, or on virtue, and which of them we prefer, and how much, reveals our direction and our quality as human beings. After all, this too concerns our choices.

Friendship is, before everything else, a form of relationship based on freedom, and it has a structure that admits no hierarchy within itself. Of course this does not mean that all relationships of affection among people are free of every kind of hierarchy and every kind of restriction. Still, a relationship decided upon freely is the most basic condition of friendship. Aristotle, who said "My friends, there is no friend," also said that there is no friendship of slaves, and that a free man cannot be friends with slaves. Being a friend lies in the activity of loving rather than the passivity of being loved, and for this a symmetrical balance in the relationship is required.

Seen from this angle, the struggle of the Prophet Moses to form a community of friends out of his people, who had been enslaved in Pharaoh's Egypt, can be considered very tragic. The Children of Israel, who had come to Egypt and settled there as free people, were enslaved after a while, lost their own will while living, and even lost the capacity to decide to be friends. The struggle that Moses waged shows that there was also a place for the responsibility he bore towards his own people, whatever they might be, because of blood ties, that is, out of brotherly feelings.

What he demanded of Pharaoh was of course that he not pose as a god and not make God's servants his own servants, but at the same time that he not oppress people, not destroy people's will, not dazzle his people and turn their minds with ideological-enchanting methods, and that he set his people free. At the end of Moses's long and arduous struggle, the Children of Israel are delivered from Pharaoh's oppression and control. They cross the Red Sea by God's grace and miracle, under Moses's guidance, but the real tragedy for Moses begins there. Despite the leadership he exercised over his own people, he cannot find a friend other than his brother Aaron who would understand him and stand in unconditional friendly solidarity with him.

For the people of the community he delivered to freedom were not in a state to know the value of freedom. They were not even aware of the blessing bestowed upon them. Perhaps they felt the relief of being rid of the whips that had struck their bodies and the burden of hard labor, but they were not in a state to feel the value and the virtue of freedom. For slavery had also had an effect that corrupts the nature of a human being.

After crossing the Red Sea, instead of savoring the taste of freedom in the Sinai desert and in its mountains and working to deserve and protect it, from the very first moment they began to throw tantrums at him. Instead of feeling the taste and the air of the happiness that freedom would bring on the mountaintop, they created a crisis over how they would fill their bellies; manna and quails, ready-made, were sent to them. After eating this food for a while, what they asked for is in fact an instructive case for all people whose economic and social condition improves after having been bad. They ask Moses for onions, garlic and lentils.

To forget the good that is in one's hands and to long for the worse that lies in the past, to yearn for it, to be nostalgic about it. "Would you exchange the better for the worse?" They do. It is not at all difficult to produce a sociological model from this story, from this transformation of demand. Nostalgia, especially when translated into political language, is it not often the delusion of preferring the worse to the better, of placing it above the better?

And what is to be said of people who were expected to breathe deep into their lungs a freedom released from the chains of servitude of one servant to another, asking their prophet to make them a totem?

With a prophet at their head who explained to them that no one and nothing other than God is worthy or deserving of worship, and who was trying to liberate them, how could people who fell into this state of mind have been friends to Moses?

Indeed, when Moses went to Mount Sinai to receive the tablets from his Lord, before he had even returned, the Samiri turned their minds, and they made a golden calf and even began to worship it. When Moses came back with the commandments that would establish friendship and law among them, he must truly have thought, at the sight he saw, that they were still "not friends" among themselves.

There were no friends, but there was friendship, and the friend who would carry the burden, the meaning and the requirement of friendship would come. To bring him, he had to prepare for it. Setting the tablets aside, until a time when they could understand the value of the tablets, the commandments and the law, he made them live in the mountains the way of life of being free from slavery.

He was in effect a shepherd to them. The reports say that he trained his people in the mountains for forty years, until they became fit to settle in the land of Palestine. This period in fact means a change of generation. For forty years they wandered in the mountains until no trace was left of the culture and personality of slavery, until they became able to bear the meaning and the burden of true friendship.

From the standpoint of friendship, the personal tragedy of Moses is that he did not see the fruits of his friends, that he could not establish that symmetrical relationship.

When compared with our Prophet, of course. Otherwise, as a prophet, he ultimately fulfilled his duty.

In sum, the friendship of slaves, comradeship on the road, and sometimes even comradeship with political allies, is full of such tragic examples.

With whom, for what, and for whose sake are we friends? On the road, are we a burden to our friends, or do we take one another's burdens? Do we show the way, or do we find the way together? Toward the place we are going, do we have a definite decision grounded in common virtues, or are we advancing with eyes closed toward some uncertain destination to which others are taking us? Do we even have a disposition, on the road, to prefer the worse to the better?

These are questions worth asking continually.