Why Do Jews Have Friends? The Religious Anthropology of Friendship & Family

This episode explores the contrasting approaches to friendship and family within Jewish and American Protestant Christian cultures. Through a detailed comparison, the speaker discusses how Jewish holidays and observances often include non-family members, contrasting this with the more insular family-focused events in certain Christian traditions. The discussion extends to examples from other cultures, including Catholic, Muslim, and Mormon communities, highlighting the social dynamics and the impact on community cohesion and individual behavior.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone.

Today. We asked the question. Why did Jews have friends? This question may seem odd at first to someone, but when I go through it, you're going to be like, Oh, wow, that is actually kind of weird. Specifically, what I will be laying out is that if you look at most Jewish holidays or religious festivals Or religious observances, they are encouraged to invite non family members, sometimes even non Jews. However, if you look at, and I'm talking about my own cultural background you know, coming from a Christian culture, from one category of Christian culture in America, and we'll do some diversification of the various Christian cultures, but the Christian culture that I come from, American Protestant Christian culture There are very few religious events or [00:01:00] celebrations in which you would invite people who are not extended family.

If I am inviting somebody to Christmas or to Thanksgiving That is basically an indication that I plan on marrying them. Like it's not even, it's seen

Simone Collins: culturally as one of those big leveling ups in a relationship. If you go to your girlfriend or boyfriend's house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, cause that is a sign of serious commitment.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it made me realize how distant the culture I grew up in was from Jewish culture when we had a very Chabad guy very, you know extreme what's the word? I'm looking here very orthodox jew come to our house. He's a fan of the show really like the guy. He's actually inspired a number of episodes and he was talking with our son and he said something that sparked this whole chain of logic for me

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: He was interacting with our son and he said, Do you [00:02:00] have any friends? And my son said, Yeah, I have two friends. And he goes, What are their names? And he goes, Torsten and Titan. And those are our two other older kids names. And then he goes, Well, those are really your friends. Those are more like, Your siblings, do you have any friends?

And in my head, I'm immediately thinking, wait, what are you talking about? Your siblings are always your best friends. Why would you ever like all other friends come after family?

Burdened with new friends and tormented by the bounty hunter chains,,

Malcolm Collins: And a lot is bigger than water. Yeah. Yeah. That was said all the time to me growing up. Interesting, and that is a very bad metaphor to use because in the context of the Bible where it's being written, it is the blood is not thicker than the water of heaven.

It is, it is used to argue against this idea,

The original wording is the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, where it water. It's supposed to be familiar where relationships and blood is supposed to represent chosen [00:03:00] relationships. Whereas today it's often used where blood represents familiar relationships and water represents chosen relationships.

It reminds me a lot of another commonly misused phrase where people say.

I am not my brother's keeper. And I'm like D. Dan do you know the context of that line? Do you know the context of that line? That's a guy. Saying to somebody accusing him of killing his brother when he did kill his brother. Oh, I I'm not, I don't always know where he is. But people say that to like, legitimately be like, well, you know, I'm not responsible for him.

but it got me realizing that when I started to go through many of the Jews who I know, or many people who are descended from Jewish cultural groups, they are really big, Unmaintaining friend networks. Whereas if I go through the people who are closer to me culturally, they very rarely have wide friend networks and they [00:04:00] really prefer to have strong relations with family members.

And when I say strong relations with family members, I might be on the extreme side of this because I'm from that backwoods American, like greater Appalachian culture mixed with some of the Puritan American culture. But like I started a company with my wife, my brother started a company with his wife when I was thinking when the Jewish guy was over and he's like, well, who in the area do you hang out was or would you feel comfortable with your kids spending time with?

Like, I would never take my kids to spend time with like a friend from school, but like my brother's family, of course my dad worked on a company with his sister. Before that, he worked in a company that his grandfather founded. Right now he gets dividends, which pay for his living expenses from a company, a cousin started that he invested in.

Like this idea of working and keeping it within the family is very and we've even looked at this ourselves. Like when we have our kids like play work games, you encouraged them to work together and I can play a little. clip here where they're making paper airplanes as a group to [00:05:00] sell because they decided they wanted money to do things together to get guns for the group so they could all shoot at each other.

Simone Collins: Yes, this was to buy XJOTGUN.

Speaker 5: And then it's gonna go to triangle one. So, and now we gotta fold the wing, right? and make anotheR one

I will get them.

Speaker 6: Oh, Torsten. Let's

Speaker 5: put this wizard on our place

Malcolm Collins: yes. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to bring receipts for this because some people might be hearing this and they might be like, if you don't know a lot about Jewish culture, you might be like, maybe he's exaggerating how much friends are invited. We're going to then go deeper into Christian culture, at least the Christian culture I'm from, that is very sort of antagonistic to friends outside the family.

We're going to then go over other Christian cultural groups, which do the same thing. And then we're going to contrast these with other religious and cultural groups that are actually closer to Jews in terms [00:06:00] of, you know, The Christian cultural groups that do this are actually quite unique. There's very few cultures on earth that are this focused on extended family networks in their traditions itself.

Simone Collins: I'm excited to dive into this.

Malcolm Collins: Some Christians may hear this and they'll be like, Oh no, no, no, like what about going to church? That's engaging with people who aren't your family. And I'd say, you haven't gone to a historic American church recently, have you? If you go to American churches that are over 100 years old, What you will notice is that they are laid out so that each family had a private booth where you would not interact with people outside of your family.

Well,

Simone Collins: not necessarily. I mean, there would be like the family pew, and you always sat in the same spot. I would, I see it as akin to having that lunch table. In high school, where it's like, no, no, this is the popular girls table. You don't sit there. That's for

Malcolm Collins: them.

Simone Collins: It's