For better or for worse, 99% of conversations with therapists around the world revolve around parents. It almost need not be said how enormous a role parents play in our lives, both as children while under their roof, and as adults long since "independent." The fact that we must give them honor and respect as a small token of appreciation for their bringing us into the world, feeding us, changing our diapers, cleaning up our messes, and giving us love, manners and education...is obvious. Yet, there it is, engraved on the 10 Commandments by Hashem Himself:
...כַּבֵּד אֶת-אָבִיךָ, וְאֶת-אִמֶּךָ
"Honor your father and your mother..."
The Torah does not state the obvious. If you're wondering where we find prescriptions for common courtesy in the Torah, you're looking in the wrong place. "Derech Eretz Kadma laTorah" common courtesy is prerequisite to the Torah (Vayikra Rabba 9:3). Derech Eretz was on the SAT's to get into the university of Torah. The Torah assumes that we understand that we owe a debt of gratitude to our parents and that this involves a fundamental level of honor and respect on our part. Why then would G!d find it so critical to eternally engrave it in stone as #5 on the 10 Commandments?!?
Beyond the Obvious
This question crops up again and again. We could ask a similar question in terms of the prohibition of murder or the obligation of giving charity. They're obvious, no?
The introductory answer to all of these questions is that in these cases, the Torah is coming to give our basic intuition 1) shape, and 2) proportions.
Shape: While we may (and should) intuit that murder is wrong, as soon as you get a case with one or two degrees of complexity you will either not know what to do, or even worse, mistakenly think you do. For example, murder is bad, right? (Right.) Let's say it's for self defense -- can a person kill another then? (Definitely.) What if a terrorist tells A to kill B, or he will kill A -- can A kill B? Why or why not? You can imagine more complex cases as well. This is without getting to abortion, euthanasia and the definition of life. Very quickly, life gets complicated, and our intuitions and "sense of right and wrong" will simply not suffice. This is the domain of Halacha, the legal output the Torah that very precisely defines the weights, boundaries and conditions of every law.
Even though we all intuit the importance of honoring our fathers and mothers, the Torah comes to teach us how to do it in the best possible way.
Proportions: Aside from the aforementioned difficulty of the human mind defining a system ethics without being arbitrary, there is another important limitation that we must admit to possessing. We can only appreciate the importance of a yet un-experienced value through some "exchange rate" with another value which we do have experience with.
For example, let's say someone tells you that a Bruce Springstein concert is "amazing," and you've never been to one. You will ask him, "how so?" He may respond, "well, I took off of work for a week, and slept in a tent on top of the pavement, living off of trail mix and water." You, who realize the value of money, a job, sleep, and decent food will probably say, "wow, it must be a really amazing experience."
This form of valuation has its limits since there are things of essential value that are non-transferable. People can speak your ear off from now until tomorrow, but you will never even begin to understand the value of being a father until you have a child. This is also where the Torah helps us. It shows us the Divine proportions of those values which are infinite and therefore beyond our realm of experience.
The Divine Proportions of Honoring our Parents
Let's take a closer look at the 10 Commandments:
(This piece is based on the writings of the Maharal in Tiferet Yisrael Ch. 35 and 41. It is a tremendously deep and powerful concept that requires study and contemplation to begin to appreciate properly and apply in one's life. Hopefully, it served to whet your palette to look into it further.)
Beyond the Obvious
This question crops up again and again. We could ask a similar question in terms of the prohibition of murder or the obligation of giving charity. They're obvious, no?
The introductory answer to all of these questions is that in these cases, the Torah is coming to give our basic intuition 1) shape, and 2) proportions.
Shape: While we may (and should) intuit that murder is wrong, as soon as you get a case with one or two degrees of complexity you will either not know what to do, or even worse, mistakenly think you do. For example, murder is bad, right? (Right.) Let's say it's for self defense -- can a person kill another then? (Definitely.) What if a terrorist tells A to kill B, or he will kill A -- can A kill B? Why or why not? You can imagine more complex cases as well. This is without getting to abortion, euthanasia and the definition of life. Very quickly, life gets complicated, and our intuitions and "sense of right and wrong" will simply not suffice. This is the domain of Halacha, the legal output the Torah that very precisely defines the weights, boundaries and conditions of every law.
Even though we all intuit the importance of honoring our fathers and mothers, the Torah comes to teach us how to do it in the best possible way.
Proportions: Aside from the aforementioned difficulty of the human mind defining a system ethics without being arbitrary, there is another important limitation that we must admit to possessing. We can only appreciate the importance of a yet un-experienced value through some "exchange rate" with another value which we do have experience with.
For example, let's say someone tells you that a Bruce Springstein concert is "amazing," and you've never been to one. You will ask him, "how so?" He may respond, "well, I took off of work for a week, and slept in a tent on top of the pavement, living off of trail mix and water." You, who realize the value of money, a job, sleep, and decent food will probably say, "wow, it must be a really amazing experience."
This form of valuation has its limits since there are things of essential value that are non-transferable. People can speak your ear off from now until tomorrow, but you will never even begin to understand the value of being a father until you have a child. This is also where the Torah helps us. It shows us the Divine proportions of those values which are infinite and therefore beyond our realm of experience.
The Divine Proportions of Honoring our Parents
Let's take a closer look at the 10 Commandments:
(This is not an accurate picture -- the tablets were actually square, but for our purposes, it will work. Pardon as well the Olde English translation.)
A quick overview of the 10 commandments will reveal that they are divided into two: five on the right and five on the left. On closer inspection, you will see that this division makes a lot of sense: the ones on the right (I am Hashem etc., Don't have idols etc., Don't use My Name in vain etc...) all have to do with our relationship with G!d; the ones on the left (Don't murder, Don't commit adultery, Don't steal...), all have to do with our relationship with other people.
There's just one exception to this neat division...כַּבֵּד אֶת-אָבִיךָ, וְאֶת-אִמֶּךָ Honor your father and mother... It's on the wrong side! My father and mother are people like anyone else! Maybe G!d really only could think of 4 commandments between man and G!d, but for symmetry's sake threw the one about parents on the right side?
No. We're the one's on the wrong side. We do not have anything in our personal experience to be able to imagine what Hashem wanted to communicate to us in the Fifth Commandment. For us to begin to appreciate it, we have to start from the top and see how it builds one on top of the next:
1) "I am Hashem..." The root of everything is to Know that G!d is an "I" Who is personally interested in our freedom.
2) "You shall have no other gods before Me..." It's not sufficient to believe in G!d, if we have other things in our life to which we turn to as independent sources of power. The fact that one has an idol is paradoxical to the true belief in G!d.
3) "Do not take Hashem your G!d's Name in vain..." It is not sufficient to believe in G!d, even without having any other idols in one's life. Belief in G!d must filter down to the realization that His Name, the way we speak about Him, and the way we don't speak about Him -- they matter! Even our consciousness of G!d is Holy.
4) "Remember the Shabbat to keep it holy..." Even if one does all of the above, it is not enough if one does not realize that G!d created the physical world and all of the laws that govern it. We must realize it and live it. Not just our though and speech, but our actions have objective meaning. Whether or not we light a match on any given Saturday matters!
Lastly,
5) כַּבֵּד אֶת-אָבִיךָ, וְאֶת-אִמֶּךָ "Honor your father and mother..."
Even if our consciousness of G!d is such that we recognize that He created the physical world, and this awareness even impacts our actions on the seventh day of the week...it is not enough...
G!d did not only create this world in broad strokes with general rules and left it on autopilot...He created you.
This means that your parents didn't "randomly" cross paths. On their 1st date -- Hashem was there. When they got engaged, G!d was there. Under the chuppa, G!d was there. Your conception -- with all of the billions of possibilities of combination racing to become you -- G!d was there conducting the symphony!
You are not a random blob of molecules that happened to come together at the right place and at the right time. The Almighty saw to it that you would be born to your parents. Yes, your parents specifically. As surely as you look the way you look because He made you that way, so too He custom tailored the home that you would be raised in. Otherwise, why should your parents be any different than anyone else? You may owe them more honor and respect from common courtesy and gratitude, but not more. Hashem is telling us that as much as every person bickers with his parents and gives them a hard time, he must accept that the Almighty Himself sent them to be his parents, and him to be their son.
The Talmud in Kiddushin expresses this explicitly:
"There are three partners involved in making a person: Hakadosh Baruch Hu (G!d), [the person's] father, and his mother. When a person gives honor to his father and mother, HKBH says, 'I will consider it as if I lived amongst them and they gave Me honor...' And when a person causes pain to his parents, HKBH says, 'I did well by not living amongst them, for if I did, they would cause Me pain as well.' " (31b).This is for us as much as lesson in being children as it should be in being parents aware of the cosmically critical role we play for our children, destined to be the ones who teach them how to have a healthy relationship with Hashem.
(This piece is based on the writings of the Maharal in Tiferet Yisrael Ch. 35 and 41. It is a tremendously deep and powerful concept that requires study and contemplation to begin to appreciate properly and apply in one's life. Hopefully, it served to whet your palette to look into it further.)
That was fantastic! Thank you so much!!
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