LEVITICUS | 19:3 honor — LEV300 Clearly, it is best to honor one's parents...
LEV300 Clearly, it is best to honor one's parents out of love and to love them while fulfilling the duties of honoring them, but that is not always how a child feels. The law demands honor and respect of parents, but, at least according to Maimonides, it does not demand love of them. It does, however, require not only honor and reverence for God but also love of God, even when, as in the case of the biblical Job, one feels anything but love. There is another way in which honor and respect for God supersedes that for parents, and that is derived from the juxtaposition of the commands to revere one's parents and to keep My Sabbaths [this verse]. The Rabbis read the "and" of this verse such that the second clause is a condition for the first: "You shall each revere his mother and his father and [that is, on condition that or as long as] you keep My Sabbaths." ... Based on this general principle, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel [the Rosh, d. 1327, Germany and Spain) ruled that a man should disregard his father's insistence that he not make peace with an enemy, because "the father who commanded his son to hate a man does not have the right to command him to violate the Torah." The Torah commands, after all, "You shall not hate your brother in your heart," and the Rabbis derived from the verse in Psalms, "Seek peace and pursue it" that we actively must try to make peace with our enemies. (Responsa Rosh (1881), 15:5, cited in Herring (1984), 208. The verses cited are Leviticus 19:17 and Psalms 34:15, the latter of which the Rabbis understood to be a positive command to seek peace; see J. Pe'ah 1:1). Despite parental objections to a particular school, most scholars permit an adult son to study Torah where he wishes, even though the parents do not object to his studying Torah altogether (See, for example, Rabbi Israel Isserlien (1390-1460), Responsa Trumat ha-Deshen, no. 40 and S.A. Yoreh De'ah 240:25); and most permit a son or daughter to immigrate to Israel over parental objections so as to fulfill the commitment to live there [lengthy footnote omitted].
Source Key | DORFFLOV |
Verse | 19:3 |
Keyword(s) | honor |
Source Page(s) | 132-3 |