כבד את אביך ואת אמך… למען יאריכון ימיך
“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live longer in the land that HaShem your God is giving you”.
To maintain the dignity of our parents while the Mitsva of honoring them is done, is something we learn from a passage in the Jerusalem Talmud, which states that “it is possible to feed one’s parents with exotic delicacies, and still be considered a wicked son; and it is possible to force a parent to work on milling, and still be considered a good son. ”
The Talmud illustrates these cases with two real stories:
The first case, a son fed his father very fancy food, exotic birds. One day the father asked the son: “where do you have the money from to afford these foods?” And the son said: “Quiet, old man. A dog eats quietly what he is giving, you also must eat your food without asking questions”. This son, the Rabbis said, will inherit hell.
The second case concerns a child who worked in the mill of his father. One day, the king summoned the mill workers to the palace to help with a very difficult job. The king asked each family to send one worker. The son decided to volunteer to work for the king, to avoid his father to be treated in an undignified way by the king’s workers, and asked his father to take his place in the grinding of the family. This son, who sent his father to work at the mill, the Sages said, “will inherit paradise .'”
When a son or daughter are assisting or helping their elderly parents, they must do so with joy and a positive body language. If a son or daughter helps her parents but makes the parents feel they are a burden, untold emotional pain is generated for the parents, especially when they depend exclusively on this child.
The rabbis explained that when we help our parents, we should talk to them with sweetness, with good words and with the respect that is due to a higher authority.
When elderly parents come to visit the house of their children, they must be received with love and honor. And the son or daughter should teach their own children to honor and respect their grandparents.
Finally, we quoted at the head of this article, the text of the 5th commandment that indicates the obligation to honor our parents. The Tora says: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live longer in the land HaShem your God is giving you”, this is the conventional translation of this pasuq: when caring for our elderly parents, we will merit to enjoy a longer life.
There is a second alternative reading of this pasuq: Instead of translating lema’an ya-arikhun yamekha as “so that you may live longer” we can translate it as “so when you may live longer”. Briefly, and in my own words: If you honor your parents, when you grow older you will deserve to be honored by your children in the same way you have honored your parents. This is, of course, a huge “natural” reward. And in my experience as a rabbi, this is a rule that has almost no exceptions: as we age, we will be treated by our children in the same way we have treated and honor our parents. Our children may not always hear what we say, but certainly, they always see what we do, and they remember and imitate what we did.
