Honor Mom and Dad-Exodus 20

• Video Sun 3/13/22: Chris, Betsy, Will, Abhinav, Jamie, Christy shared.
• The Torah commands us to love God (Dt 6:5), neighbor (Lev 19:18) and stranger (Lev 19:24), but not parents. Why? Is it more important to honor parents (Exo 20:12; Lev 19:3) than to love [and/or obey] them?
• What links honoring father and mother to Sabbath keeping and to being holy (Lev 19:2-3)? Paired with the Sabbath, why is honoring parents at the heart of God’s Way and the summons to holiness?
• Why does God specify a reward [long life in the land] only to honoring father and mother (Exo 20:12; 21:15, 17) rather than, say, to not murdering (Exo 20:13)?
• Instead of honoring parents, who/what do they honor? How is honoring parents a major bulwark against totalitarian regimes?
• How does lying cause great evil (Exo 20:16)? [What lie was told that made African slavery {communism, Nazism, anti-semitism} possible?]
• Why prohibit against covetous thoughts and desire (Exo 20:17; Jas 1:14-15)?

“Speak to the entire assembly of Israeland say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the Lord your God,am holy. Each of you must respect [fear/revere] your mother and father, and you must observe [keep] my Sabbaths. I am the Lord your God” (Lev 19:2-3).

Honor father and mother (Exo 20:12). It is the only commandment in which “no” or “not” (lo) does not appear. God does not say, “Honor your father and mother if they are honorable,” but to honor them regardless. In most societies, honor is usually reserved not for mom and dad but for people out of the ordinary: heroes, rulers, and leaders who go, as it were, in the place of gods. Also, sadly, the natural family is the nursery of rivalry and iniquity, even to the point of patricide and incest. So, calling for the honoring of father and mother [equally] is another radical [Israelite] innovation.

Perpetuation. The natural cultural human tendency is to elevate heroes and leaders, giving pride of place to manly males, and naming children through their patronyms [deriving the name from the father or ancestor]. Instead of honoring the high and mighty, the way of the Lord calls for each child to honor his or her father and mother, elevating what they alone care for and do: the work of perpetuation. By elevating both equally, each child learns to esteem his/her spouse, and a way of living where perpetuation is most highly honored.

What it means to honor father and mother is not specified for good reason. By not reducing it to specific deeds or speeches would compel each son or daughter to be ever attentive to what honoring father or mother might require. The Decalogue is teaching here a settled [non-negotiable] attitude of mind and soul. {In the ordinances following the Decalogue, 2 of the 4 capital offences [on par with murder and kidnapping for the slave trade] are striking one’s father or mother, or cursing one’s father or mother.} An enduring obligation to honor parents is binding, even when an adult child may disagree with them and choose to act or live [or vote] in ways they would disapprove.

Honor implies

• distance,
• inequality,
• looking up to another with deferential respect,
• reverence, and
• even some measure of fear.

It is like what is owed to a god, for it is rooted in a feeling of fear, reverence and awe. When God proclaims His central teaching about holiness, the proper disposition toward father and mother is renewed, revised and placed in remarkable company: “Speak to the entire assembly of Israeland say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy. Each of you must respect [fear/revere] your mother and father, and you must observe [keep] my Sabbaths. I am the Lord your God” (Lev 19:2-3).

Gratitude. What’s the connection between honoring parents, Sabbath keeping and being holy? God may have created the world and the human race, but you owe your own existence to your parents, who are, to say the least, co–partners—equally with each other, equally with God–in your coming to be. For this gift of life, you are beholden to honor them, in gratitude. Not only for birth and existence but also for nurture, for rearing, and for initiation into a way of life informed by the disposition to gratitude and reverence. In their devotion to our being and well-being–given to us not because we merit it–our parents teach us explicitly and directly about God, His covenant, His commandments, and our first encounter with the goodness [beneficence] of the world and its bountiful Source.

Parents embody and model the awe–some, demanding, benevolent [well-meaning] and gracious authority of the Lord God of Israel, as they invoke praise or blame, reward or punishment, in response to righteous or wayward conduct, yet forgiving error and fault and remaining faithful to their children. Even when we no longer need their guidance, we owe them the honor due their office.

God reserves His most important teachings to address those aspects of human life most in need of correction–the dark and tragic troubles that lurk within the human household and that, absent biblical instruction, imperil all decent ways of life: the iniquities of incest and patricide. The danger of incest, destroyer of the distance between parent and child, is tied to a 2nd threat: resentment of and rebellion against parental authority, up to and including murder. The Bible’s first story about father and sons, the story of Noah‘s drunkenness, in a tale involving at least metaphorical [figurative] patricide by Ham, his hotheaded son (Gen 9:20-22). By going outside the tent and publicizing his father’s shame, Ham kills his father as a father by celebrating his father’s unfathering of himself. Ham’s brothers, Shem and Japheth, enter the tent backward and cover their father’s nakedness without witnessing or participating in it (Gen 9:23). When Noah awakes, he curses Canaan, son of Ham (Gen 9:24-25), but calls forth a blessing on “the Lord, God of Shem” (Gen 9:26) and Japheth (Gen 9:27), the sons whose pious action restores his fatherly dignity and authority.

The only commandment that specifies a reward (Exo 20:12). Why? It’s not a promise that those who honor parents will live a long life, or have more descendants. But it promises the nation collectively that if its people honor their parents, the family will be preserved, its religious traditions and beliefs will be preserved, and the civilization will long endure. The breakdown of the family guarantees the breakdown of a civilization. A society where children don’t honor parents will lose the means through which the society’s culture, religion, and ethics are transmitted. Also, strong families form a major bulwark against totalitarian regimes, where the children‘s loyalty and obedience shifts from parents to the state [a “pharaoh”]. One of the first things totalitarian regimes seek to do is weaken parental authority and replace it with the party or state.

It most likely means that the land will not cast them out as it will soon do to the Canaanites, precisely for iniquitous practices. Honor your father and mother so that the land will not be defiled and vomit you out.

Living as holy people: summation. The injunction to honor father and mother constitutes teaches about

• gratitude,
• creatureliness,
• importance of parental authority,
• sacred distance,
• respect, and
• reverence, precisely to produce
• holiness [qedushah] in humanity that often becomes a den of iniquity and a seedbed of tragedy.

1. Sabbath observance offers a correction against the [especially Egyptian] penchant for human mastery and pride that culminates in despotism and slavery.
2. Honoring father and mother offers a correction against [especially Canaanite] penchant for sexual unrestraint, including incest, that washes out all distinctions and lets loose a wildness incompatible with the created order and with living as a holy people.

Adherence to these 2 teachings–each a summons to a life of reverent looking up and moral gravity–offers the best chance for creatures who are blessed to bear the likeness of divinity (Gen 1:26-27).

Live your life parochially. It is all but impossible to love your neighbors as yourself if you treat lightly your most immediate “neighbors,” those who are most emphatically your own and also most able to guide you to your full humanity. Beware the lover of humanity [or holiness] who does not honor his own father and mother. Beware also the universalist who has contempt for the particulars.

The “Second Table“: Moral Principles for Neighbors. These principles, regarding the conduct of man with man, not only form the bedrock of biblical morality but also are arguably the indispensable foundations of any decent society. Important boundaries are erected between what is mine and what is thine [first 3 defend the foundational–rather than the highest–human goods]:

• life  (Exo 20:13), without which nothing else is possible.
• wife  (Exo 20:14), marriage and fidelity and clarity about paternity, without which family stability and responsible parenthood are difficult.
• property  (Exo 20:15), without which one’s chance of living well–or even making a living–is severely compromised
• reputation  (Exo 20:16).

The only commandment against thought (Exo 20:17). Highly atypical of the Torah, it legislates thought. Of the 613 laws in the Torah, virtually none prohibit thought. The Decalogue concludes by focusing not on overt action but on an internal condition of the heart or soul, of desire or yearning. Its uniqueness is suggested both by its greater length and by spelling out the 7 things belonging to your neighbor that you not only must not steal but also must not even long for [7 “covet-ables”]:

1. house
2. wife
3. manservant
4. maidservant
5. ox
6. ass [donkey]
7. anything that is your neighbors (Exo 20:17).

When you covet (hamad: yearn for, desire, lust after, or to simply want), you want to possess something that belongs to someone else. Desire itself cannot be absolutely legislated but we all learn to condition ourselves as to what is realistic desire and what has to be confined to the realm of mere fantasy–for both moral and practical reasons. A peasant may be struck by the beauty of a princess, but knowing that she is beyond his reach, will not linger on coveting her in his heart.

Deforming your own soul. Not content with your own portion of good things, you don’t or can’t see them in their true light: as means to–and participants in–a higher way of life. Also, denying covetous desires builds a fence against other forbidden deeds. If you don’t covet the things that are your neighbor’s, you will be less likely to kill, steal, commit adultery, or make your neighbor suffer harm or loss by lying about him. In Hebrew, covet [chamad] is more than a mere delight in or desire for. It means to desire to the point of seeking to take something that belongs to another person. It connotes the [hard-to-resist] urge to do, spilling over into active planning to make the coveted object one’s own. The 1st biblical use of the verb was after the serpent undermined God’s command (Gen 3:1-5). Then the woman’s imaginative soul soared quickly from 1) seeing to 2) coveting [desirable] to 3) disobedience (Gen 3:6).

Things that matter most [higher goods] are NOT the unshareable things, but the things that we and our neighbor have in common:

1. knowledge of God,
2. what God requires of us,
3. receiving/participating in His grace and bounty of Creation, and
4. the opportunity–despite our frailty and penchant for iniquity–to live a life of blessing and holiness.

True community. To live among neighbors who yearn for the shareable goods—higher things–is to live in a true community, in which all can be lifted up in the pursuit and practice of holiness. Such a polity–even if only an aspiration–is a light unto the nations. Your neighbor’s desire to possess higher goods in no way diminishes your chances of attaining/obtaining them.

Reference:

1. Leon R. Kass. Founding God’s Nation. Reading Exodus. 2021.
2. James K. Bruckner. Exodus. New International Bible Commentary. 2008.
3. John Goldingay. Exodus & Leviticus for Everyone. 2010.
4. Robert Alter. The Hebrew Bible. A translation with commentary. The Five Books of Moses. 2019.
5. Dennis Prager. Exodus. God, Slavery, and Freedom. The Rational Bible. 2018.

• Toward a leader one can have a range of unfortunate attitudes from unhealthy reverence to contemptuous disrespect 
• 613 commandments.
• God’s name “I Will Be What I Will Be” is not necessarily a name of who God is [Hi, I’m Ben], but God is saying, “Watch what I say. Watch what I do.”
• Apotheosis [noun]. Gk apotheoun, to make a god or to deify. Apotheosis implies a polytheistic conception of gods. It is the glorification of a subject to divine levels and commonly, the treatment of a human being, any other living thing, or an abstract idea in the likeness of a deity. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre.  The highest point in the development of something; culmination or climax.
• Dionysian:relating to the Greek god Dionysus, known for the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature [Canaan].
• Apollonian: relating to the god Apollo, relating to the rational, ordered, and self-disciplined aspects of human nature [Egypt].
• Technocracy: The government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts.
• Exodus shows, “No God, no Law. No Law, no Children of God/Israel. Conversely, no Children of Israel as led by Moses, no knowledge of God.” Culture and theology are upstream from politics.
• Halachic: body of Jewish law supplementing scriptural law and forming the legal part of the Talmud.
• Solicitude: care or concern for someone or something. “I was touched by his solicitude”
• Mensch [noun]: a person of integrity and honor, “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. Sentence eg. He was a real mensch: a decent, responsible person, a particularly good man of integrity and honor.
• To read philosophically–the pursuit and love of wisdom, to living well, and for human flourishing. Let the book inhabit you, sympathize with the characters, let the experience work on you. Gen 1-11 is human life unrestricted, in the absence of instruction, we take pride in human reason and freedom. Genesis teaches the need for a new way and through the patriarchs, God has gotten a toe hold into the world.
• Tabernacle, Hebrew Mishkan, (“dwelling”), in Jewish history, the portable sanctuary constructed by Moses as a place of worship for the Hebrew tribes during the period of wandering that preceded their arrival in the Promised Land.
• Egypt: Techno-despotism, preoccupation with long life, absence of decay, immortality. The essence of Egypt is a recurrent human possibility. What is Egypt? It is a fertile place, the gift of the river not dependent on the rain, a paradise that worships the sun and where all kinds of natural powers are revered, while the human animal does not have special or dignified standing (cf. Gen 1:26-27). While they worship natural deities, inside the palace Pharaoh has his sorcerers / magicians do things to nature to make it even more hospitable. While they revere the river and the sun,  they are obsessed with mortality and decay [everything from their hieroglyph to shaving their bodies to embalming their dead, they want to make time stand still]. You have the rule of 1 man as a god who rules in his own interest, and with Joseph you have a technological and administrative state bent on conquering mortality and making nature more hospitable to human needs, while human dignity is not well respected and moral practices are out the window.
• Canaanites: earth worshippers given over to the pleasures of the flesh. Eat, drink, tomorrow we die. Exuberant. Dionysiac culture. We see both Egypt and Canaan in our broader culture.
• So can you rely on technological progress [Silicon valley] and administration and prosperity on the one hand, or can you rely on I’m OK, you’re OK, and let’s let it all hang out and get over our repressions and enjoy life? Can we build the universal city of man [Mesopotamians/ the U.N.]? Can these produce a people that is well governed and long lasting.
• bedraggled adjective dirty and disheveled. “we got there, tired and bedraggled” disheveled, disordered, untidy, unkempt, tousled, disarranged.
• Moses’ shining face: “I will be with you” is now stamped on his face.
• A haggadah is a collection of Jewish prayers and readings written to accompany the Passover ‘seder’, a ritual meal eaten on the eve of the Passover festival.
• It’s not that the Jews kept the Sabbath but that the Sabbath kept the Jews.
• Not only did the Jews keep the Passover, but the Passover has kept the Jews alive.

The Bible’s first [and almost only previous] mention of father and mother is Gen 2:24.