Jewish Word | Chaver: Friend or Lover?

In English, there’s no shortage of words to describe someone you’re in a relationship with (or would like to be): a crush, a fling, a main squeeze, a “situationship.” In contrast, not only does Hebrew not have these terms, the word chaver (masculine form) can refer to both a “friend” in a platonic sense and a “boyfriend” in a romantic one.

I learned this distinction the hard way when I was 14 and befriended a non-Jewish boy at school. My mom, ever the inquisitive one, started asking about him. I casually responded in Hebrew that he was just my chaver, and she immediately corrected me, insisting he wasn’t my chaver—he was a yedid (acquaintance or distant friend)—out of concern that I might be in a relationship.

Seven years later, during a trip to Israel, I listened as two Israeli women shared their frustration with the word chaver and how it fails to capture the complexity of defining a relationship. I recently reached out to one of those women, Shir Yehoshua, who told me the word still causes her angst. When she uses chaver to describe a close male friend, people assume she is talking about her boyfriend. She doesn’t use the word yedid because she thinks it negates the closeness of the relationships. “If you have a female friend, you wouldn’t call her yedida,” Yehoshua says. “If you call her yedida, she’s not your friend.”

The root of the word chaver is chet. bet. reish (ח.ב.ר), which means connection, according to Galia Hatav, a specialist in biblical Hebrew at the University of Florida, adding that the Hebrew word for society (chevra) shares the same root. Joel Chasnoff, a stand-up comedian in Israel who publishes an online newsletter called Hebrew is Magic, thinks the double meaning speaks to the Israeli conception of friendship. Chasnoff grew up in Evanston, IL, and joined the IDF after graduating from college where he noticed that “friendship in Israel, like ‘friendship’ in Hebrew, it’s not just someone you know,” he says. Friends in Israel “reveal secrets, they are much more intimate, and I think part of it might be related to that idea of being bound together.”

Even those in charge of setting the standards of the modern Hebrew language acknowledge the confusion surrounding the term. “It could be a little blurry, and sometimes I think the speakers want to make it blurry,” says Barak Dan, head of the Academic Secretariat of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem. “In many cases, it’s very convenient when you don’t want to make it clear.” To distinguish between relationships, Hebrew speakers sometimes use a doubled phrase. “One can say chaver,” Dan says, “and the listener would ask, ‘Is he [a] chaver or chaver chaver?’”

Yehoshua did this when her best friend came out as a lesbian, and said she had a chavera. “Chavera, chavera?” Yehoshua asked, “or like me and you chavera?” Another way to differentiate between a friend and a romantic partner, is to use a definite article and say ha’chaver (the boyfriend). If a woman were to say, “ze ha’chaver sheli,” it would be understood as “This is my boyfriend.”

In the past 20 years, a newer term has emerged for those seeking a clearer distinction between friends and romantic partners: ben zug (masculine) and bat zug (feminine). This term translates to “spouse,” “partner” or “mate,” and is especially useful in LGBTQ+ communities but is not exclusive to them. Chasnoff, for example, has a friend who refers to her spouse as bat zug. “It’s a younger generation’s attempt to break away from norms and boxed-in, defined relationships,” Chasnoff says. “It’s the idea that I can love this person and have a romantic relationship with this person, maybe even have a child with this person, but I don’t want to be defined as boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife.”

In the 1970s, the slang term yaziz became popular to describe a “friend with benefits” or someone with whom you have casual sex. The Hebrew letter zayin was substituted for the letter dalet in the word yedid to allude to the Hebrew slang words lezayen (to have sex) or ziyun (sex).

The Academy of the Hebrew Language has never thought it was worthwhile to coin a new word for boyfriend, according to Dan. “We normally let the language speakers figure things out themselves.” A suggestion was once pitched to the Academy to create a new compound word, chaben and chabat, from chaver ben (friend, son) and chavera bat (friend, daughter), but Dan says it doesn’t fit Hebrew’s structure. “In Hebrew, when you make a compound word like that, it doesn’t have meaning,” he explains, because Hebrew is built around roots and patterns, unlike languages such as English or German, where compound words can be easily understood.

Have relationships evolved past the words used to describe them? Perhaps the ambiguity of the word chaver captures the awkwardness of modern relationships. Friends and family asking for clarification can force couples to ask themselves and each other “What are we, exactly?”