עושה חשבון

You might be sitting at a restaurant with a friend. The check comes, and your dining partner reaches for his wallet. "No, no," you kindly remind him, "it's my turn."

This reciprocal gesture may be well-intentioned, but it immediately triggers a sense of disappointment bordering on offense. "Don't turn this into a transaction," he scolds, as he returns the checkbook to the wait staff before you have another chance to object.

There is an implicit recognition in this response that friendship, indeed any non-commercial relationship, must remain non-transactional. It is a moral offense to allow transactional logic to govern our actions in any domain that is not oriented towards the market. These traditional norms are fading in the rear-view mirror as we continue our great leap forward into a world where transactional market logic consumes ever more spheres of life, but some semblance of recognition remains in our culture that we ought not to treat our friends and family as we do street vendors: with cold, hard calculation of self-interest.

In a famous Israeli study, parents who were late to pick up their children from school were less likely to arrive on time when a fine on tardiness was levied. When picking up your child on time is subject to cost-benefit analysis rather than the non-negotiable, non-transactional obligation of parental duty, parents were more likely to do the right thing.

At the core of the Jewish tradition is a constant striving to differentiate the sacred from the profane. Friendship and parental obligations fall under the former category, while transactions fall under the latter; it is for this reason that handling money on the Sabbath is prohibited.