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Nov. 1, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
50:39
Timeless Wisdom - How a Liberal, New York, Ivy League Jew became a Conservative
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November is National Family Caregivers Month.
One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
Working families can't afford to wait.
It's time to care for America's caregivers.
Learn more at AARP.org/slash careforcaregivers.
Paid for by AARP.
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
The purpose of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah inaugurates the 10 days of penitence.
In Judaism.
This is our time to reflect on what type of person we have been and what type of person we ought to be.
So one should use this time to reflect on oneself.
That's another reason I get so annoyed at rabbis, whatever their position, though it tends to be more one than the other in this particular instance, who use this platform for political, social change or whatever views they have on it.
The whole point is to how can I be a better person?
Not how can I vote better.
I mean, that's all important.
Of course it's important.
I do that for a living.
But the purpose, you can't make a better world if you don't start making a better you.
Judaism always understood this, and one of the terrible things that we have done is macroize character.
So the definition of a good person has become, even in schools, having the right position.
So that if you have the right position on the environment or whatever, and I'm not taking a position now, even if it's a position I agree with, I don't agree with that approach.
The purpose, especially of youth, is to work on your own character.
You can't do tikkun olam before you do tikkunatsmi.
You don't repair the world before you repair yourself.
So the purpose of Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur is to think, what kind of person am I?
And what kind of person do I want to be in the next year?
And that's where rabbis would give, ideally, a sort of what they call musarshir, a lesson, a morality lesson, something to better ourselves.
Tonight I want to talk to you, and I debated it to the last moment.
And I'll tell you at the end part of the reason why I chose this topic.
I decided to take a commandment of the Ten Commandments that everybody's familiar with all ten.
This one is particularly well known.
I want to make the case for why it is of particular significance.
I have a game with myself.
I never meant it to be a game, but it's a sort of game that I play with myself.
And that is, which is the most important of the Ten Commandments?
And incidentally, I have argued for much of my life that it is do not steal.
Since all the other ethical commandments, that is the second five, the first five, except for the one I'm going to talk about, are between the individual and God.
But the second set, the left-hand side, because Hebrew goes right to left, the six to ten are how we treat our fellow human being.
And all of them emanate from stealing.
To murder is to steal a life.
To commit adultery is to steal a spouse.
To bear false witness is to steal justice.
And to covet is, of course, to want to steal.
And so they're all stealing.
If you don't take what doesn't belong to you, you have fulfilled in effect the Ten Commandments.
Having said that, I'd like to make the case for either tide for first or in first is honor your father and your mother.
And I mentioned to parents who came in who still have kids living with them, you got a real bonus coming tonight because I'm going to tell you how important it is that your children honor the commandment to honor you.
I hope you leave with an understanding of the utter incomparable significance of this commandment, honor your father and mother.
It's fair to say that if it is not widely observed, society will collapse.
And it is clear that the Ten Commandments themselves believe that.
And I will make that case in a moment.
First, I want to do a little Hebrew with you.
The Hebrew word for honor your mother, honor your father and mother is kabed.
That's the verb, kabed.
It comes from the root kabeh, which means heavy.
To honor is, in effect, make the parental role heavy.
Take it heavily, seriously.
Now, this will blow your minds.
I wouldn't have even told you that if I didn't tell you what's the opposite of honor your parents from either common sense or the Torah perspective, there is another thing, the opposite that you cannot do to your parents.
Curse them.
You've heard that.
Do not curse your parents.
In fact, it's a capital offense, and nobody was ever executed for it, but the Torah lists it as a capital offense to show you how serious it is.
The Hebrew word to curse is kalel, which comes from the Hebrew verb kal, which means light, as opposed to heavy.
You honor your parents, you make that role heavy.
You dishonor them, you curse them by making it light.
That's, by the way, one of the joys of knowing Torah Hebrew is that these things, which are impossible to know, obviously in translation, just fill you with awe when you understand the Hebrew.
But that's what we're talking about, taking your parents, the parental role, seriously.
It is clear from the Ten Commandments themselves how uniquely significant honoring your mother and father is.
This is the only commandment that belongs to both sides of the Ten Commandments.
The first four, right, are about how you treat God.
The second five are how you treat your fellow human.
The bridge is how you treat your parents.
It is so important that from the way in which the Ten Commandments are structured, remember, it's the only commandment on the first five that is about people.
But it's on the God side.
How you treat your parents ultimately is how you will treat God or not treat God or ignore God or take God very lightly.
It's the bridge between God and man.
It is of such extraordinary significance that it's listed in the divine commandments, the only one about how we treat people.
It would have made perfect sense if it would have been on the other side, correct?
And you could have put do not murder in the God side.
Perfect.
Nobody would have asked why.
In addition, this and the Sabbath commandment are the only positive commandments of the Ten Commandments.
They are all in the negative.
Do not take God's name in vain.
Do not worship false gods.
Do not steal.
Do not murder.
Do not covet, right?
The only positive commandments in the Ten Commandments are keep the Sabbath day holy and honor your father and mother, which gives you an idea of how important the Sabbath is and how important honoring your parents is.
By the way, the Torah even has an answer to the problem of what if your parents tell you to violate the Sabbath?
It actually has a, there's a verse in the Torah later on about both in one verse.
And it says, you shall, a person shall fear his mother and father, and you shall keep my Sabbaths.
I will deal with that a little later, but that's the reason for that verse, because it's a dilemma.
They're the only two positive commandments in the Ten Commandments.
Well, what if one necessitates violating the other?
What do you do?
Your parent is maybe a wonderful person, but says, excuse me, I don't believe in this Sabbath jazz.
What do you do?
Okay, we'll get to that later because I don't want to get off track.
Another interesting aspect of honor your father and mother and the Ten Commandments is you honor in the way it is listed.
You honor one way of honoring your father and mother is by observing the next five commandments.
Because, and you know this to be true, even if you're an atheist, you know this to be true.
If somebody does murder, does steal, or any of the others listed on side two of the Ten Commandments, don't we often ask you, how were they raised?
That's the first thing you ask.
What kind of parents did this guy have?
Right?
So one, again, it's so, it's ingenious.
This is why, sorry for the advertisement, this is why I believe in the divinity of the Torah and certainly the divinity of the Ten Commandments.
These brilliant bridges and insights, I just don't believe a bunch of very smart guys 3,000 years ago wrote up.
There's no parallel to this stuff anyway.
But that's, think of that as when you go through life, the dishonor you bring to your parents, if you acted a certain way at any age, not just at 15.
In fact, more if you're an adult.
15, all right, he'll grow up.
You know, he's a devil now, but what if you're a devil at 40?
Then people do wonder, what sort of parents, what sort of upbringing did you have?
Now, this is dedicated to three groups.
Honor your father and mother.
To little children, to grown children, to parents.
Now, to little children, Most little kids love their parents.
It's one of the painful parts of parenthood that often you don't quite feel that amount of love.
Maybe you shouldn't.
You know, your son clings to you at four.
You might not want that form of affection at 24.
At least certainly his wife wouldn't like to see that, let me put it that way.
But by and large, little kids love their parents.
But they need to know that what they have to do, whether they love them or not, and they do almost always love their parents when they're little, you have to honor them.
I will make a big deal about the fact that there is no commandment to love your parents in the Torah.
There's a commandment to love the stranger.
There is a commandment to love God.
And there's a commandment to love your neighbor.
There is no commandment to love your parents.
Among the many, many, many reasons is that it's more important that you honor your parents than that you love them.
That's how important honoring parents is.
You love them, great.
What matters is, do you honor them?
The parental role being sustained and honored is more important than whether you love your parents at 5 or 50.
That's why I am convinced, among other reasons, there is no law, no commandment to love your parents.
Either you do or you don't, that's your business.
That's between you and them or you and you.
But you have to honor them, love them or not.
To grown children who do not love their parents, grown children who love their parents will automatically honor them usually.
But what if you don't love your parents?
What if you have ambivalence?
If people didn't have ambivalence about their parents, most psychiatrists and psychologists would be out of business.
What do people talk about by and large when they go to a psychiatrist?
Their third grade teacher?
No, their parents, or at least one of them, right?
Ambiguity and ambivalence is the norm.
That's fine.
But it doesn't matter.
What you feel about your parents is only of your concern and your therapists, if you will, or your spouses.
But of God's concern and society's concern is how do you treat them.
And third, this commandment is also addressed to parents.
It seems to be addressed only to children, and that could be my age or a five-year-old.
We're all children if our parents are living.
But it's also addressed to parents.
You must know what it is that your children must do with regard to you.
And this is particularly relevant in our time because so many parents primarily seek to be loved, not honored.
And if you primarily seek to be loved by your children, you will compromise on your parental role.
By definition, it is as inevitable as day following night and night following day that if you seek primarily to be loved by your children, you will compromise your parental obligations.
You won't discipline them because they won't love you when you discipline them at that moment at any rate.
You won't make demands upon them and you won't make demands that they treat you in a certain way.
And we'll talk about what those examples of that treatment.
I'm just beginning and you're seeing the depth of this commandment.
Honor your father and mother.
How unbelievably important it is and how much it is a message as well to the parents.
This is what you must get from your children.
Whether they love you or not at any given moment is a very interesting question of no concern to society and even in the final analysis to God.
This is part, by the way, of Judaism's great, great, great lesson, which has shaped all of my work on radio and in writing.
And that is that deeds are more important than feelings.
I'll never forget.
I'm sure you've heard, many of you anyway, have heard me say this.
Happily, people don't remember everything I say, including me.
You came over and told me how my talk last year moved you, and I asked you, what did I talk about?
Happily you knew.
That would have been a tough moment.
It really moved me.
I don't remember what it was about, but God knows it moved me.
But there is this story that I have told.
It is in some ways the most memorable.
Well, I have a few tie for first, most memorable call of my radio career of 27 years.
The man who called me up, an adult man, about 40 years old, told me, Dennis, I just got to work this out with you, because you know I talk about micro as well as macro and always did on the radio.
And he said, Dennis, I'm a lousy son.
I said, you really?
You're a lousy son?
And why is that?
He said, well, I'm the sole physical, financial, emotional support of my ill mom.
I have been for 10 years.
She lives with me, and I've got to tell you, there are times I wish she would succumb to her illness.
I mean, Dennis, did you hear what I said?
There were times I wish my mother died of her illness.
And I said, sir, you are not only not a bad son, you are one of the most wonderful sons I have ever had the honor of meeting, even if only by telephone.
He said, Dennis, please, don't be sarcastic.
He was certain I was sarcastic.
I said, sir, I am entirely serious.
I measure what you are as a son by how you treat your mother, not by what you think sometimes.
I don't care what you think sometimes.
If what you told me is true, that for 10 years you have given up much of your life to take care of your mother financially, emotionally, and physically, and you're telling me you're a bad son, what are you nuts?
Of course you're going to think that sometimes.
You're a human being.
You're normal.
If you didn't think that, you wouldn't be as good a son, because then it would come so naturally, you wouldn't be battling.
You battle yourself to do all this good for your mother.
You're terrific.
I know I changed the guy's life.
I know it, because he had enough respect for me to take it seriously.
But I got this all from this essential Jewish teaching.
It's not the thought that is central of greatest significance, but the deed.
I measure everything by the deed.
That's why good intentions in politics or good intentions in private life don't measure up to what did you do.
That's why I am convinced that wisdom has achieved more good than good intentions.
Maybe you'll talk about that one of the Jom Kipper or next year or tomorrow because I have a debate on tomorrow as well.
But this subject of what propels us to do good, wisdom or a good intention, is something people don't think about.
But anyway, again, I don't want to get sidetracked.
So, back to our commandment.
Another aspect of honoring mother and father in the Ten Commandments and throughout the Torah is the Torah's belief that your parents are of identical worthiness of honoring.
It flips the words.
In the Ten Commandments, the father comes first.
In the commandment about having awe or even fear, but not being in the sense of quaking as you know, scared, but awe/slash/fear of your parents, it puts the mother first.
Constantly, and by the way, the Hebrew doesn't say honor your father and mother.
It says honor your father and your mother.
V'et.
It makes it clear she has her own distinct identity, and you know, I am not Mr. Feminist, but I am Mr. Hopefully Accuracy.
That's what the Ten Commandments tell you.
Your father and mother are of equal significance.
Both must be obeyed.
Both must be honored.
Next point: honoring parents may be considered a means toward honoring God.
It is very, in fact, Freud said this.
Freud was an atheist.
How you see your father, since God is in masculine terms in the Western world, how you see your father specifically tremendously affects whether you will believe in God and how you see God.
You love your father, there's a good chance you will more easily love God.
You honor your father, there's a bigger chance you will honor God.
God has a vested interest in people honoring their parents.
Totalitarian states have a vested interest in your not honoring your parents.
That's why this leads to liberty, as the founders of America understood.
If you honor your parents, when parents are honored, it is much harder to create a totalitarian state.
The first thing that totalitarianism did, Nazism and communism did, was to try to rend asunder the ties of a child to the parent.
The hero of the Soviet Union was a Ukrainian boy who snitched on his father for keeping some food rather than starve during the Ukrainian famine that Stalin induced to kill millions of Ukrainians to collectivize the agriculture of the Ukraine.
Pavlik Morozov, that's the boy's name.
He was a national hero for snitching on his father who was then executed by the communists.
And the Nazis did the same thing.
Report to us what your parents said.
Because you owe your allegiance to the Führer, not to the Fater.
To the Fater Land, but not to the Fater.
Honoring parents is a preserve of liberty.
That's, again, and a preserve of God's authority.
Next, the Torah considers parents to be co-creators with God.
That's why it's on the God side.
We're co-creators as parents in two ways.
One is the obvious, the physical way.
God created us, and with God, we create a child.
But even if you didn't create the child physically, you adopted the child, let's say, you are still co-creator with God because you raised the child.
By the way, in Hebrew, the verb to parent is the same as the verb of Torah.
Torah, Horah.
Horah is a parent, Torah is Torah.
And Morah is teacher.
Teacher, parent, and Torah are identical words for all intents and purposes in Hebrew.
That's how important the parent is.
Now, these are already some of the reasons it is so significant.
We continue.
Society is dependent.
Society, not just the family, is dependent on children honoring parents.
First, as I said, God will not be honored in Judaism.
The Torah believes that God is necessary for a good society.
Secondly, you have a higher authority.
And honoring a higher authority is dependent upon honoring one's parents.
Now, if you have a higher authority, you don't worship the state, right?
It is an inoculation against worshiping of the state or of some other parent.
But now, if I leave you with nothing else, this is what I want to leave you with.
Honoring your parents is the antidote to narcissism.
We have a plague.
Dr. Stephen Marmer, the psychiatrist that I have from UCLA, I have on my show on the Happiness Hour periodically.
He's a brilliant man, very great insights.
I asked him, what was the biggest problem when you started in psychiatry about 40 years earlier?
Said, guilt.
People came in with a lot of gratuitous guilt.
What's the biggest problem today?
Narcissism.
Almost the opposite of guilt.
Narcissism is, if there is a plague in America, that's the plague.
Narcissism.
And narcissism begins when the child believes he or she is the center of the family.
If I am the center of the family, I am the center of my life.
It all starts there.
The worst possible thing for society, forget for the family, is for the child to think he or she runs the house or that it's a democracy.
Democracy is good in a handful of places.
Stamp clubs and the like.
But we don't have a democracy in America.
It's a republic.
It's a very rare thing where democracy is the best way.
And it's the worst way.
The idea, let's vote.
I mean, if you want to vote on what color car, fine, vote on what color car you next get.
I mean, there are times when it's just a fun thing.
That's fine.
But still in all, you should vote all you like, and either parent has a veto.
That's the way it should really be.
This is good for your children.
Forget that it's good for you.
It's good for your children.
Narcissism ruins people's lives.
They ruin others' lives, but they also ruin their own.
It's very hard to undo narcissism.
If you grew up with the family revolving around you and the parents revolving around you, this, by the way, was a very big problem with Joseph.
Joseph's dream was that the family bowed down to him.
Remember that?
And the truth is, he was a narcissist.
It took him a long time to get rid of his narcissism and finally grow up and be able to kiss his brothers.
But that's what the dream is.
That is exactly the dream.
I, Joseph, am the center of this family, and you all bow down to me.
Remember Joseph's dreams?
If you don't, read Genesis.
It's a great book.
One of the reasons it's a great book is no matter how dysfunctional your family is, this will give you solace and consolation.
As I said to parents, love of parents is not to be sought.
Rather, it is to be what is to be sought is to be respected.
Now, one of the great additional lessons is to the child, whatever your feelings, this is especially true as the child gets older, toward teens and for the rest of one's life.
Whatever your feelings at any given time toward your parents, you still have to honor them.
By the way, I hold that to be true.
I'll give you an example outside of parenthood.
President.
There was a former president that I do not respect at all.
You don't have to guess, you all know.
And yet, as fate would have it, he was in radio studio that I went to broadcast one day.
He had been on the show prior to me.
And I stood up and I said, Hello, Mr. President.
Even though he was not president at the time, I honored the presidency by doing that.
And it was not what I wanted to do, it was not what my feelings wanted.
But the President of the United States is the President of the United States, and that's the way it should be.
You fight, you fight, you fight if you don't agree, but you honor the presidency.
When the press did not like a president, and there were presidents they couldn't stand, as you well know, they still stood every time he came in to a press conference.
It would have been very, very bad if the press started sitting when a president entered a room because they happened not to have liked his policies.
There are things you do because you must perpetuate the honor of that particular position.
And the highest position in Judaism, in the Torah, after God, is the parent.
That's how important it is.
That's how much honor it should have.
Whatever your feelings at any given time, you still honor your parents.
Whatever you're going through vis-a-vis your parents, that's it.
I wrote, I, years ago, many years ago, I learned about a new phenomenon, and it is relatively new, of a fair number of adult children who don't speak to a parent.
Raise your hand, not if it's your child.
Nobody's going to raise their head if it's their own child.
But raise your hand if you know anybody who has an adult child who doesn't speak to a parent.
Okay, so that's it.
So about 10% of you just in this room, 15% of you, and that's the ones who raise their hand.
And I'm sure that, you know, most people don't want to admit it, and you may not even know about it.
But even just here, that's a lot.
If 15% of Americans don't speak to their parents, that's a lot.
That's millions of people.
And the heartache that is involved there.
So I raised this as an issue on my radio show about 15, 20 years ago.
If you're an adult and you don't speak to your parent or parents, call me up.
It lit up like a proverbial Christmas tree in a second.
Every line taken.
Never forget only one call I remember, a woman in her 20s, lived in Santa Monica.
So, hi, hi, Dennis Hine.
So you don't speak to whom?
I don't speak to my mother.
How long have you not spoken to your mother?
Five years.
Why don't you speak to your mother?
Oh, no, no.
I didn't do it that way.
I said, I'm just curious, did your mother mistreat you?
No, never mistreated me.
Did she abuse you?
Never abused me.
Did she love you?
She loved me.
Well, Nami understand, I said.
Your mother loved you, didn't abuse you, didn't mistreat you, and you don't talk to her?
Why?
Well, she's a very domineering personality, and if I let her back in my life, my therapist said that she would once again be dominating.
What does one say to that?
You have a domineering mother, therefore you don't talk to her?
And your therapist gave you this brilliant idea?
By the way, every single person who said that they did not talk to their parents said their therapist agreed with them.
And look, I'm not anti-therapy.
I'm anti-most therapists.
I think they're utterly incompetent.
By the way, so does every psychiatrist and psychologist I've ever had on my radio show.
They think that the majority of their colleagues are incompetent.
There's no doubt in my mind that's true.
A great therapist can help your life tremendously.
But finding a great therapist is almost as hard as finding a great spouse.
Maybe they should have an e-harmony for therapy.
It's a real problem.
Now, here is a theory that I have.
I would love somebody to do the following study.
They randomly pick a thousand people who, adults who do not speak to a parent, see what percentage of them are actively religious Jews or Christians.
Regularly go to synagogue or church.
And I'll bet you it's disproportionately small.
And it's not because every religious person has a great relationship with a parent.
That's ridiculous.
It's because religious people study the Ten Commandments and think that they're obligated to live by them.
That's why.
And only that reason.
The religious, angry child still believes I have to honor my mother and dad.
If I am allowed a national audience to make the case for religion, I would use, honor your father and mother, and this particular example, that would be my case.
Just this.
This would be my most powerful case.
I am so certain that the statistics would bear me out.
That religious people, actively religious people, who have trouble with their parents are more likely to show them honor than actively secular people.
Because they believe they are bound to this commandment.
Honoring your parents from an early age, you learn to do what is right even when you don't feel it.
You learn to set aside grudges, and that will eventually lead to more closeness.
If you honor your mother or your father, whichever one you have a problem with, as an adult, you still honor them.
Over time, it's probable you will get more close.
I obviously must add that if your parent is a psychopath, most of this does not apply.
Okay?
But that's not the case in the vast majority of instances.
There's another reason you should observe it, because later you will regret having not observed it.
When your parent dies, and in the vast majority of cases, a parent dies before the child does, that's the way it ought to be.
When they die, It's not a good burden to think, hmm, maybe I should have treated mom or dad better.
Better to go in the opposite direction, treat them better, and then have this clear conscience upon their death than the other way around.
You will be at peace with yourself after they die.
And being at peace with yourself is a pretty good thing in life, not always attained.
There's another reason, reason number 42, I think, on my list.
Honor your parents so that your children will see you honor them, and they will emulate you and honor you.
I always give this example of my father when I was a kid living at home.
My father called his mother every day, every night.
And it would usually be after dinner, and at least I remember it at that time.
It would be at the kitchen table, and he'd call her up, and she'd start yelling at him.
She was not an easy woman.
And she'd just start yelling at him.
I never knew what she yelled because she yelled in Yiddish.
She didn't know English, and I didn't know Yiddish.
But you didn't have to know Yiddish to know she was yelling at him.
I thought, you know, I'm like the dog, that famous Farsight cartoon of the dog who, you know, all he hears is.
So I got and then some negative word to my father.
And I would know, anyway, I knew by the tone.
What did my father do?
He would gently put the phone down on the kitchen table and about every 40 seconds or so go, Yama, Yama, and then put it down.
He didn't want his blood pressure to go up, and he didn't want to hang up on his mother.
So he'd call every night, go, Yama, Yama, put it down, hear the yelling, and then go back to Yama.
I learned, that was a huge lesson to me.
It was clear.
And by the way, there's no doubt in my mind if my father were not a religious Jew in this case or religious person, that he wouldn't have done this every night.
There's no doubt in my mind.
That, at least for my father, I'm sure there are obviously secular people with difficult parents who treat them beautifully.
I have no doubt about that.
I just think that the numbers are quite skewed in favor of those who believe that there's a commandment, honor your father and mother.
And honor is not the same as blind obedience, by the way.
And the Torah deals with that.
What if your parent tells you to violate the Sabbath?
So you have a conflict of two of the Ten Commandments.
So now listen to this.
This is truly interesting, I think.
Here is the Ish Imova Viv Tiraove Shapto Taiki Smoro.
By the way, does anybody know Hebrew or am I talking to myself?
Okay, fine.
A man shall fear his mother and father.
Now here's the interesting thing about translation.
Veet shap to taikishishmoro.
And my Sabbaths you shall observe, you shall keep.
Hebrew, Torah Hebrew does not have a word for but.
Later Hebrew, modern Hebrew, does, aval.
But Torah Hebrew uses and to mean and and also to mean but.
But the reader has to figure out when it is.
So, what is the Torah saying?
You must fear your mother and father, but keep my Sabbaths.
That would mean, yeah, you better listen to your parents.
But my Sabbaths come first because God is higher.
There's a hierarchy.
God parent you.
So in that case, since I instructed both, Sabbaths, if they tell you violate the Sabbath, you can't.
That's the traditional Jewish reading of that verse, that it's a but.
I read it as and.
Just literally what it is.
Vit means and.
Man shall honor his father, shall fear his mother and father.
Notice mother came first here, because you're more likely to fear your father, so it put mother first.
It's brilliant.
The stuff is brilliant.
A man shall fear his mother and father and keep my Sabbaths.
This is how I read it.
Exactly as written.
You do both.
You figure out a way to keep my Sabbaths while honoring your parents.
That's how I read it.
And by the way, this is actually quite apt in light of a phenomenon in Jewish life that some of you may be familiar with, and that is of less observant or non-observant Jewish parents whose child becomes very observant.
What they call a baal tsuvah.
And so the kid now is visiting the parents, can't eat in their own home because they're not kosher enough or kosher at all for the child, who is now very observant.
I speak to these people.
Some parents are so ticked off, and they take it so personally.
My own kid, I raised and loved in the mother's case carried, and he won't eat off my own dishes, to which I tell the parent, what are you an idiot?
So what?
Get new dishes.
What is the get paper dishes?
What's more important than having your kid eating your house?
Why are you making a big deal over dishes?
It's all pride.
It's so funny.
I have that situation.
My son, my older son, is more observant than I.
So we have special dishes for when he and his wife visit.
What do I care?
What's the skin off my back?
Right?
And so it's infinitely more important to me that my son and his wife come to my home right all the way.
And he does.
They're wonderful about it.
You know, slept all the way.
I'm coming for the holiday of Sukkot, which is the holiday after Yom Kippur.
I've always built a sukkah, so that's not an issue.
But they're very strict.
They check for bugs in the lettuce.
I mean, the whole nine yards.
And so fine.
What do I care?
On the other hand, the kid has to figure out a way too to eat in that parent's house because you do have to honor your parents, Mr. Baal Tsuva Smarty Pants.
So both have to, they can't let pride stop them from getting the right dishes, and they can't go to the nth halachic degree because the nth halachik, that is Jewish legal degree, is not nearly as important as honor your father and mother.
That's the genius of, why would that sentence be in the Torah?
Because clearly it arises so often where you will have a conflict.
And the Torah's answer is, damn it, do both.
Figure out a way both to honor your parents and keep my Sabbath.
That's good stuff.
And that's so, it's not blind obedience.
Honoring your parents is not blind obedience.
If your mother is Ma Barker, you say no politely.
She was a criminal, in case you didn't know.
Finally, what does it entail?
What does it take to honor your parent?
What does it mean?
Speech and actions.
The way you speak to your parent, and this is particularly important in our day and age.
Kids do not talk to you like they should not talk to you like they talk to their pals.
Parents often say to me, and I have witnessed this myself, that they will overhear somehow their kid talking to a friend from high school and using words that they never hear.
And I always tell the parent, you should cheer.
That is a great sign.
I'm not happy that the kid's cursing to the friends, but most cases they're going to stop it by 50.
And I'm not happy about that.
Why do I cheer?
Because they know they can't talk that way to you.
So look at the bright side of the fact.
That's more important.
They know what's right.
They can obviously control it because you don't hear them talk that way.
And it may not even just be expletives.
It just may be, you know, whatever the lingo of the day is.
They don't use it with you.
They speak more decently with you.
That's right.
That's fine.
Don't panic about the way they speak to friends.
Be very happy about the fact that they don't speak that way to you.
This means you're doing your job.
You can't control everything they do, but you can control how they talk to you and how they treat you.
That's what you need to control.
One does not talk to the parent the way one talks to a peer.
And there are little things that I believe in.
Every family will have its own thing, and I don't in any way claim that this is the right way, but these are ways that I think are just examples.
The first time you see the parent that day, you get up and say hello.
Not the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.
That's robotic, in my opinion.
That's a step for child.
But the first time you see mom and dad that day and you greet them, you get up.
It's not a buddy.
It's a parent.
Others will have a special chair for dad.
I'll bet you a lot of you grew up in a home where the only person who sat in a certain chair was dad.
That's good.
It may sound archaic today, and fine.
If it's archaic, it's archaic.
I don't care what your contemporary version is.
But there is, you know, maybe that's only dad's beer.
Just kidding.
Just kidding about that.
Nobody touches dad's beer.
But if that's yours, it doesn't, I don't care what it is.
So long as it, that's dad's or that's mom.
That's important, the distinction.
Does dad sit at the head of the table?
Different parents have different philosophies on that, where the parents shouldn't sit at the head of the table and not.
It's your call.
I have had head of the table thinking, but I'm just offering you, you've got to do something.
That's my point.
I don't care what it is, but something that physically announces this is the parent.
So this is what the Torah is talking about.
And I will end with, what if it's really difficult to honor your parents?
What if you do have a difficult?
I don't mean that they lock you in a refrigerator or sexually or otherwise abused you.
What if you just have a very difficult parent?
Sometimes honoring them might entail something like moving away.
You might be able to more honor your parent by moving, oddly enough, to another city.
The conflict is then minimized because you can't possibly be in physical proximity that much.
Who knows?
But figure out what works to enable you to keep this commandment in the Torah.
That's my case for the centrality of this commandment.
A society where kids honor their parents and where parents are worthy, obviously, of that honor, is going to be a good society.
And you want to know the proof?
I said the proof was in the Ten Commandments.
And it is in the Ten Commandments.
It is the only one of the Ten Commandments, and it is the only one of only two laws in the entire Torah of 613 laws that gives you a reward.
The only one of the Ten Commandments that announces a reward, so that your days will be lengthened on the land that I give you.
What does that mean?
It means God is saying, you keep this commandment.
This commandment alone will ensure the survival of your society.
It's written directly.
It doesn't say it about any other commandment.
So, this is what was on my mind to share with you.
Because it's not observed, it's widely not observed.
Or people take it for granted.
Okay, your parents are fine.
It's not so big.
It's a very, very big deal.
What prompted this, and I don't mean it all to be melodramatic, but just because we all have our lives, my own mother, I have my parents, but it doesn't seem that I will have my mother for a long time.
She's very, she's on her last days, apparently.
And it's fairly sudden, but she's 89, and that's the way it happens.
And it made me think about my relationship to my parents.
And I will tell you that with whatever difficulties I had with my parents when I was much younger, and it was really when I was much younger, following this dictum of honoring my parents no matter what I was personally going through vis-a-vis them enables me, it gives me a lot of peace with my mother in apparently her final days.
It has given me some peace.
A lot of peace, not some.
That I know, she even said it to me just two weeks ago.
What two boys I have who so have shown me such respect their whole lives.
That was a very big deal for me to hear.
And it's true.
We both have.
Isn't it worth it?
All it does is shape society, give you peace, and prevent narcissism.
Just one commandment.
Shanatur.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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