To make a baby, you need three ingredients according to the ancient Near Eastern understanding of the reproductive process: you need the mother’s seed, the father’s seed, and God. The mother and father each make their contribution in the customary way and then God conjures the gestation by congealing the two human elements, like the effect of rennet to make cheese. The parents are literally seen as co-creators with God. This is the context of the Biblical commandment to “honor your mother and father.”
This commandment appears on the first of the two tablets – the one having to do with our relationship with God, rather than where you would expect it to be, on the tablet pertaining to our relationships with each other. Mother and father, in their capacity as parents, are in a trinity of partnership with the divine. They are God-like. Honoring our fathers and mothers is seen as an extension of honoring God. Rabbi Bahya ben Asher from the 13th century says, speaking in God’s voice, “Just as I have commanded you with respect to honoring Me, I likewise command you today to honor your parents, who are my collaborators in your formation.”
Of course this all sounds a little heteronormative for our understanding of family these days. We know today that biology and parenthood are often two different things. Children are raised by same sex couples, single parents, adoptive parents, relatives, or friends. And this would have also been true in Biblical days. There were orphaned children, so-called “illegitimate” children, and many other categories of children who would have been raised by people other than biological parents. My guess is that if you asked a rabbi, this commandment would have been equally binding to them. Honor the people who parented you, regardless of whether they are the same people who contributed DNA to your magical soup in the womb.
Because, after all, the act of creation of a person doesn’t end at birth. In many ways, it has just begun. The real meat of parenting is what happens once you have a real live, breathing, arguing, squirming person in your arms. It is this active, daily parenting that I believe the Fifth Commandment is really about. Maybe Mothers’ Day with its cards and roses and rose-colored renderings of our childhood memories is an echo of an attempt to fulfill this commandment.
For many of us, the idea of honoring our parents, whether on Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, or any other day is not a straightforward proposition. It’s complicated. It conjures mixed feelings, old resentments, love, and guilt. And being commanded to honor them is even more uncomfortable. Some might say in response, “You obviously don’t know my mother.” And it’s true. Our parents may have been abusive or neglectful or emotionally unavailable. Our parents might have not really seen us, not had time for us. We may not trust or even like them. Or they may not be alive anymore, which makes the whole topic even more fraught.
Journalist Sara Davidson has just published a book called The December Project with reflections and interviews with an 89-year-old man named Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. In it he talks extensively about what it means to be in the December of life, looking back on one’s many decades here on earth and contemplating death. At a panel discussion about the project, someone asked Zalman, “How do you work with regret?”
He seemed get very excited about the question. This was clearly something he had given a lot of thought to. In his answer, he talked about regret as a kind of disrespect to one’s past. He assumed the voice of the past self talking to the current self, saying, “Don’t dis me. The person you are now wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the person I was then.” The person you are now wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the person I was then.
It’s so easy to look back on our lives and wish that things could have been different. If only I had done x, y, and z instead of a, b, and c, life would be great. If only my mother had done this or that differently, I’d be so much better off. So much happier, so much richer, so much smarter. I’d have a partner. I wouldn’t be anxious. I wouldn’t have this addiction or that eating disorder.
But Zalman is saying that this line of thinking is debilitating. And it’s unintelligible. We can’t know how our lives would be now if some factor had been different in our past. We can only know ourselves today as the living product of a marbled history, all the ways in which we were loved and the ways in which we were abandoned, all our successes and missteps, all our hard work and all our bad luck, all our pain and all our good luck.
To say that our parents are only worthy of honoring to the extent that they were “good parents” is to say that we are only worth honoring to the extent that we are good. Honoring mother and father is way of honoring the entirety of the life that has made us who we are. It’s a way of honoring ourselves. Maybe to make a baby you need just three ingredients, but to make an adult you need thousands. Countless people, countless moments have collaborated in our formation. We have been parented by the world. Nurtured and disciplined and at times failed by life itself.
And so here we are, the deeply flawed and beautiful children of that process. We could re-interpret the Fifth Commandment to say, instead of just “Honor your mother and father,” “Honor all of that which has made you you.” To be able to honor that which is imperfect – our parents, our histories, and our world – is to honor the truth of who we are. In the end, it is to offer ourselves an unconditional embrace and, with that embrace, to know great peace.