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Our Rabbi's Message
January 25th 2008
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelIn the Parasha, which we read this week, Moses receives the Ten Commandments. Those two tablets of the law have become the ethical basis of Judeo-Christian culture. And indeed their influence can be found in countries that are no longer Christian and even in countries that never were Christian. They are among the most permanent structures of Western society.
They are interesting for what they teach and they are interesting for that which they do not teach. Let us concentrate on the fifth Commandment which states: "Honor your father and your mother".. That is the only one of the ten commandments which includes a reward for those who obey its precept. It is a law that applies to parents whether they are alive or they are dead. It tells us, without the mincing of words, how we should act to our parents. The punishment for breaking that law is death itself. We have an obligation to treat the generation which preceded us with kindness and with respect. We are not commanded to love parents, but we are commanded to always honor them.
However, the opposite is not true. There is no command in the entire Torah, the entire Bible and even in the Christian's Bible which teaches that we must honor and respect our children. There is no law that prohibits child abuse. One consequence of that lacuna is the concept of honor killings which is very much alive in many Moslem countries and even has appeared in these United States.
Indeed the commands in the Torah which teach how a parent should treat his progeny are rather drastic. In many cases the parents are commanded to put their children to death for even a small showing of disrespect. Our Oral Law has done much to enforce the rights and obligations a parent has to his and her children. It has gone a long way to prohibit child abuse, but historically such a prohibition is a new idea, which developed long after the Torah took shape and was canonized.
We have to accept our past, but the very fact that Torah does not include protections for children must teach us that the Torah is the beginning of progressive revelation. Torah is a book that allows us to learn what God desires from us, but it is not a sealed and final document. Rather it is a living and holy text, which we must use in every generation to learn what is right and to find what God demands from us.
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