The Fifth Commandment

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, January 26, 2008

You might suppose that this week’s Torah portion with the Ten Commandments is one of the easier ones to explain to children, but if you think about it, you’ll realize that there is one challenge: adultery. Try explaining adultery to a room of enthusiastic kindergarten students. Actually this year I heard a new explanation, one that’s actually sort of clever. Adultery, the sin of being rude to adults- the flipside I guess in the student’s mind, of honoring your parents.

Jack, you have done a really beautiful job in discussing this fifth commandment, honor your father and your mother. Its the one that the rabbis often described as the most difficult to properly fulfill. They were not thinking so much of the difficulties in being a polite and respectful young person with hopelessly dense and embarrassing middle aged parents- but of the challenges of being an adult child of an aging or perhaps ill mother or father. Honoring them properly is something that takes great sensitivity for, as the rabbis observed, one man can feed his aged father a fatted kid and not honor him, and another can serve him bread and water and fulfill the mitzvah.

Jack talked about how honoring his father did not have to end with his father’s death. In that he was standing on good ground halachically. In the Talmud a whole discussion of how one honors one’s father after his death. Honoring one’s deceased parent included remembering things that one’s father had taught and giving him credit, and speaking of the ways that his memory continues to be a blessing.

Good relations between parents and children were highly valued by Jewish tradition, with recognition that they are not always achieved in real life. For that reason, when the prophet Malachi spoke about Elijah coming just before the coming of the Messiah, one of his important duties was to turn the hearts of parents to the children and the hearts of children to the parents. Perhaps it is only in Messianic time, in the perfect time outside of history, that parents and children can be totally in synch without any misunderstandings or conflicts.

One of the nicest midrashim relates to the Rabbis belief that the Ten Commandments of the book of Exodus paralleled the ten commands with which God created the world. For each of the sayings that resulted in creation in Genesis Chapter 1, the rabbis found a parallel among the Ten Commandments in Exodus Chapter 20. For example, they saw a connection between the first commandment, “I am Adonai your God,” and God saying:”Let there be light.” They held that honor your father and mother corresponded with God’s command:” Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky”. They compared father and mother to the sun and to the moon and wrote that just as the light of these two luminaries guide us in the physical world, the light of our parents helps to guide us in the moral and spiritual realms.

I found that teaching particularly meaningful this morning, thinking of the beautiful poem by Hannah Senesh yesh kochavim found in our new prayer book, Mishkan Tefillah:

There are stars up above,
so far away we only see their light
long, long after the star itself is gone.
And so it is with people that we loved,
their memories keep shining ever brightly
though their time with us is done.
But the stars that light up the darkest night,
these are the lights that guide us.
As we live our days, these are the ways we remember.