Testing a Friendship

The workplace is where you meet people.  Unless you own the enterprise or have been given hiring authority, generally the people you encounter are not of your own choosing.  We used to have a small amount of experience with this in our first year of college when somebody in the housing office assigned us a dorm room and roommate.  This may have been done randomly in some places, or perhaps with intent to force interaction between people of different backgrounds.  A scion might need to share space with a student of need, an athlete with a bookworm.  And dorms have other rooms with other pairs of people that you have no choice but to accommodate when using the lavatories or attending dorm events or even sharing the elevators.  We used to have a military draft which mingled people of different backgrounds very effectively during World War II, much less so in the Vietnam era, and not at all now.  The dorm experience of my era has now given way to people choosing to live with their camp or HS friends, or opting for a homogeneous ethnic dorm with a hotline for every microaggression slight.  That delays our need to adapt to people we would likely not have selected on our own to the common missions of where we work.

My workplaces over a forty year career have been a few.  People leave.  New people get hired.  Residents complete their training and move on to be replaced by new graduates that The Match assigns.  We accumulate a lot of acquaintances with a subset of a few who become friends. 

“Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.”

― Benjamin Franklin        

That way work gets done, everyone benefits.  Some of the familiar persists when the sharing of work ends.  Business objectives move along to really holding a few people in special esteem.  Keep in mind that nothing is really permanent.  Couples divorce.  Kids run away or get disinherited.  Friends cheat each other.  But for the people you seek out in the workplace to bounce ideas off each other because of the respect they have earned, when the business deal is no more, the caring about them and the regard built in the best of times remains.  

A bit of a strain arose, not a personal spat, not even an interactive one, but a rift in what we believe and how we are scripted.  As we got into the closing days of Sukkot Israel came under attack.  I am a Zionist, for sure, but I also believe in standards of conduct.  And what Israeli voters have done to themselves does not exactly conform with what I aspire for the place that would be my default homeland if ever I were displaced.  I'm just not a hardball player.  The State has had its share of turmoil, more external than internal.   But it is the safety net for people like me, and certainly my not too distant ancestors, who got caught in systemic murders for being Jewish.  And there is also the need for sovereignty.  Of our Festivals, Sukkot has a universal message, applicable at least symbolically to the traditional 70 Nations of the World.  And ours is one of the seventy.  We need sovereignty, and for the last 75 years amid many challenges we have maintained it.

On a Festival that keeps the observant of us off electronic media, our State of Israel was attacked, and in a way that had no rules of restraint.  People celebrating, people no threat to anyone, were rounded up.  The infirm, the minors, women tending to their families, celebrants.  Whoever might be there for the taking.  Armed Gazans just gathered them or killed them outright.  They house their weapons in hospitals and mosques then complain that other military no longer respects the sanctity of healing and worship.  I once visited West Point with the Scouts.  We saw a parade.  As cadets were displaying what they had learned, the announcer summarized their curriculum as the Honorable Profession of Warfare.  There was nothing honorable at taking hostages or tossing grenades into civilian bomb shelters.  War is by definition destructive, but since international agreements after World War II, nations realized they could stop short of ruthless.  We saw ruthless, a complete denial of betzelem elokim, the image of God that would describe humanity in the Torah passage scheduled for the following morning.

Much to my surprise, my physician friend, a very capable professional who would not hurt anyone, starts posting distorted photos of Israeli soldiers maiming children.  I've met IDF soldiers.  They understand betzelem elokim.  But for the safety of the public, the military sites co-mingled with the population have to be deactivated, whether or not children are placed there knowing that the IDF will not shoot them dead or gather them into a cage indiscriminately.

It's the difference between success by character and success by technique.  The two sides are not equal, as the President of the United States affirmed in his international message a few days later.

But am I willing to Unfriend anyone, particularly a person who has much to admire professionally and personally.  So far I am not.  She knows what a hostage is.  But like many of us, she also knows who is in her tribe and what expressions of loyalty keep her in good standing.  The President described this attack as evil.  Taking an honorable person half a world away and create incentives to do things that are beneath my expectations of a friend reinforces the evil.