QUESTION: Is there a Jewish point of view about respect for ancestors? Is there a name for it? How about all the dead, including non-Jews?
ANSWER: There are really several questions here, all answered by Maimonides. Judaism, in its Orthodox Oral Torah version, is very concerned with respect, including self-respect. Therefore, respect for the “other” ends when the “other” demands deference, where one is commanded to deny one’s own self-respect.
A. The Respect due the parent
The norms of respecting parents are found in Mamrim 5, which deal with the rules of authority of Jewish society’s ethical and political institutions. By requiring stoning for the person who curses the parent [5:1], traditionally the most severe of capital punishment [when certain conditions, here not relevant, are met], reserved for crimes of treason, insurrection, and threatening the fabric of the Jewish social order, Judaism sees the Fifth Commandment [5:12] as a pillar of the socio-political order.
Cursing one’s grandparents, while a crime, does not rise [or fall] to the same level of depravity [5:3]. By assigning this moral valence, Jewish law structures a divinely ordained hierarchy that privileges parents as God’s agent in creation.
Less severe is the striking of a living parent that draws blood/causes a wound. [5:5] The punishment for this offense is choking which while as lethal as stoning, considered by halakhah to be less ignominious.
If the parent is a wicked person [5:12], they still may not be cursed or struck by their children. If the wicked parent is being led to their execution, the Torah accords them respect. Killing the condemned parent does not generate the death penalty on the progeny, but shaming the condemned remains a human dignity issue [see b’Arachin 7b]. Progeny should make all efforts not to be commissioned by the Jewish courts to restrain or arrest a parent. [5:13-4] By applying this law to all offenses except incitement to do a pagan act, the Torah ideology of Torah is manifest. God commands respect for parents; when parents deny God, the source of the respect that parents are due, they forfeit their claim to filial respect.
The doctrine of honoring parents has two dimensions. Progeny are expected to care for their parents in old age—as parents cared for their children in early childhood—doing as does God. [6:1] While honoring parents is expressed physically, revering parents is expressed socially, i.e. not contradicting them, not sitting in their seat, standing in their place, or even evaluating, as if superior to them, their words. Also disallowed is calling a parent by name, even after the parent’s demise. [6:3] This rule parallels the prohibition of calling God the name that may not be pronounced [bSan 90a, 101b, bAvoda Zara 18a]. In a case where the father is the Torah student of the son, and hence required to show respect to his Torah teacher, the son’s biological tie here overrides protocol [6:4]. And this protocol applies after the parent’s demise. One refers to his male parent not as “father,” but “my father my master.” [6:5] In the first year after a father’s death, the son says “may his grave be his atonement” [see Deuteronomy 32:43] and after a year express confidence that his father has merited eternal life in the world to come. Even if a parent wrongly shames or squanders the estate of the child, that child has no license to speak without respect or to strike the parent. [6:7] The parent is nonetheless admonished not to be a stickler for honor or to press the son for the honor the father feels is his due, lest the son break down and violate the required protocol. [6:8] Therefore Jewish law, in stark contrast to Roman society that kills its young [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/300867?uid=3738240&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101607544581] , Jewish law forbids the striking of adult offspring by an irate parent, so that adult progeny not be pushed beyond the breaking point and strike back. [6:10] When a parent suffers from dementia, the parent must be serviced gently and patiently; if the child is unable to do, a surrogate caregiver must be provided. [6:10]
Even a wicked parent deserves respect. If the parent violates Jewish law, the child does not confront the parent directly, but asks “is not such and such written in the Torah.” [6:11] If however the parent tells the child to violate the law, God’s honor, which is the source of the parent’s honor, takes precedence. [6:12]
B. The Respect due the Torah teacher
The rules regarding respect for parents are paralleled by the rules regarding respect for Torah teachers. [Laws of Torah Study, 5:1] Just as God gets first claim on respect, one’s Torah master gets respect before the parent; the parent gives the child this finite life, while the teacher brings the child into the eternal world to come.
Respect for Ancestors and Its Limits
QUESTION: Is there a Jewish point of view about
respect for ancestors? Is there a name for it? How about all the dead, including non-Jews?
ANSWER: There are really several questions here, all answered by Maimonides. Judaism, in its Orthodox Oral Torah version, is very concerned with respect, including self-respect. Therefore, respect for the “other” ends when the “other” demands deference, where one is commanded to deny one’s own self-respect.
A. The Respect due the parent
The norms of respecting parents are found in Mamrim 5, which deal with the rules of authority of Jewish society’s ethical and political institutions. By requiring stoning for the person who curses the parent [5:1], traditionally the most severe of capital punishment [when certain conditions, here not relevant, are met], reserved for crimes of treason, insurrection, and threatening the fabric of the Jewish social order, Judaism sees the Fifth Commandment [5:12] as a pillar of the socio-political order.
Cursing one’s grandparents, while a crime, does not rise [or fall] to the same level of depravity [5:3]. By assigning this moral valence, Jewish law structures a divinely ordained hierarchy that privileges parents as God’s agent in creation.
Less severe is the striking of a living parent that draws blood/causes a wound. [5:5] The punishment for this offense is choking which while as lethal as stoning, considered by halakhah to be less ignominious.
If the parent is a wicked person [5:12], they still may not be cursed or struck by their children. If the wicked parent is being led to their execution, the Torah accods them respect. Killing the condemned parent does not generate the death penalty on the progeny, but shaming the condemned remains a human dignity issue [see b’Arachin 7b]. Progeny should make all efforts not to be commissioned by the Jewish courts to restrain or arrest a parent. [5:13-4] By applying this law to all offenses except incitement to do a pagan act, the Torah ideology of Torah is manifest. God commands respect for parents; when parents deny God, the source of the respect that parents are due, they forfeit their claim to filial respect.
The doctrine of honoring parents has two dimensions. Progeny are expected to care for their parents in old age—as parents cared for their children in early childhood—doing as does God. [6:1] While honoring parents is expressed physically, revering parents is expressed socially, i.e. not contradicting them, not sitting in their seat, standing in their place, or even evaluating, as if superior to them, their words. Also disallowed is calling a parent by name, even after the parent’s demise. [6:3] This rule parallels the prohibition of calling God the name that may not be pronounced [bSan 90a, 101b, bAvoda Zara 18a]. In a case where the father is the Torah student of the son, and hence required to show respect to his Torah teacher, the son’s biological tie here overrides protocol [6:4]. And this protocol applies after the parent’s demise. One refers to his male parent not as “father,” but “my father my master.” [6:5] In the first year after a father’s death, the son says “may his grave be his atonement” [see Deuteronomy 32:43] and after a year express confidence that his father has merited eternal life in the world to come. Even if a parent wrongly shames or squanders the estate of the child, that child has no license to speak without respect or to strike the parent. [6:7] The parent is nonetheless admonished not to be a stickler for honor or to press the son for the honor the father feels is his due, lest the son break down and violate the required protocol. [6:8] Therefore Jewish law, in stark contrast to Roman society that kills its young [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/300867?uid=3738240&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101607544581] , Jewish law forbids the striking of adult offspring by an irate parent, so that adult progeny not be pushed beyond the breaking point and strike back. [6:10] When a parent suffers from dementia, the parent must be serviced gently and patiently; if the child is unable to do, a surrogate caregiver must be provided. [6:10]
Even a wicked parent deserves respect. If the parent violates Jewish law, the child does not confront the parent directly, but asks “is not such and such written in the Torah.” [6:11] If however the parent tells the child to violate the law, God’s honor, which is the source of the parent’s honor, takes precedence. [6:12]
B. The Respect due the Torah teacher
The rules regarding respect for parents are paralleled by the rules regarding respect for Torah teachers. [Laws of Torah Study, 5:1] Just as God gets first claim on respect, one’s Torah master gets respect before the parent; the parent gives the child this finite life, while the teacher brings the child into the eternal world to come.
When in the presence of his teacher, the student may not issue a halakhic ruling [6:2] and when not in the presence of the teacher, he may provide information in order to avoid wrongdoing. The student must acquire permission to rule in the lifetime of the teacher. Since God is the ultimate teacher, it is God’s generative honor that animates any and all honor accorded to mortals. [6:3] And the student does not address the teacher, like the parent, by name [6:5], and the student stands in the presence of the teacher [5:7] as well as the parent, and the student does not challenge the teacher who violates the law directly, but instead asks, as if curious, “did you not teach so and so?” Maimonides’s syntax demonstrates that he views the respect due to parents and teachers similarly. While the teacher may waive his honorific due, the student nevertheless must treat the teacher with reverence [6:11]. This respect applies even after the parent dies. [6:12] And the teacher must acknowledge and respect the student, who in the learning encounter sharpens the teacher. [5:13]
C. When Respect ends, and why
Respect for the other in Orthodox Judaism’s canonically prescriptive version, which is the benchmark by which Jewish sociology, hierarchy, and street culture are evaluated, is driven by the ritual commands to perform social gestures of respect to the other who carries the image of God.” We note that parents and teachers are commanded to show respect to progeny and students as well.
Respect in Judaism applies to the individual. Demands for deference are demands of self-disrespect. At times, our ancestors were wrong, doing idolatry [bPesahim 116a]; our ancestors are not always Jewishly correct [Lamentations 5:7]
Pagan societies create slaves who “just follow orders.” Submission to elites, surrender to hierarchy, and nullification of oneself are religious virtues. In this world, respect is deferential. In contrast, Jews obey divine authority, not human authority. Elites and hierarchies that demand nullification of self, submission and surrender do see respect as deferential. In Judaism, glory goes to God, Who disdains the disrespect that happens when deference rather that respect is demanded.
QUESTION: Is there a Jewish point of view about respect for ancestors? Is there a name for it? How about all the dead, including non-Jews?
ANSWER:Judaism teaches high respect for ancestors.Most directly, the Fifth of the Ten Divine Utterances (more commonly but less precisely known as the Ten Commandments), Exodus 20:12 and Deuteronomy 5:16, mandates “honor your father and your mother”.This is restated, with a slightly different emphasis, in the “Holiness Code”, Leviticus 19:3:“Let a person revere his mother and his father.”
Because of the centrality to Jewish tradition of the Fifth Utterance, kabbed et avikha… (“Honor your father”), the name of the value concept is kibbud av, i.e. “honoring the father”, or more broadly, kibbud av va-‘em, “honoring the father and mother.” But it should be clear that the tradition does not limit the honor to only the immediate ancestors.
Post-biblical (rabbinic) commentary extends this basic point to grandparents.The leading 16th century Ashkenazic rabbi, Moses Isserles, ruled that a grandson may recite the mourner’s kaddish in memory of his maternal grandfather, let alone his paternal grandfather. (She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Rema, # 118). The Rabbis also mandated respect for one’s in-laws, and commanded the participation in one’s mate’s sorrow during bereavement. For example, “a man rends his garments at the death of his father in law or mother in law, in respect for his wife.” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Mo’ed Katan, 20b)
Since the two biblical sources commanding filial piety speak in slightly different terms, the Rabbis investigated the nuances of each verb.What is honor and what is reverence? The Rabbis defined honor in terms of personal service that the (adult as well as juvenile) child would render for a parent: physically caring for the parent, attending to his elementary needs of nutrition and domicile, serving as his escort while away from home. Reverence refers to an emotional attitude: rejoicing in the company of the parent and in the opportunity to fulfill the parent’s needs, resisting any sense of resentment at having to care for a parent.From these examples, it should be clear that kibbud av applies, perhaps especially, to situations in which the child is fully grown and the parent is aged. As a mentor of mine expresses it, “kibbud av ain’t for sissies!” Here, too, it should be clear that the kinds of activities mandated by the commandments to honor and revere apply fully to our relationship with our grandparents, whose advanced age will often present physical needs and emotional challenges to us when we are still at an earlier stage of our own life trajectories.
Jewish tradition clearly extends the obligation of kibbud av beyond the death of the parent. The rituals of mourning and memorialization, including the tearing of one’s garments at the news of death, the recitation of the mourner’s kaddish, and so on, may strike us today as psychological supports for the bereaved, and indeed they are; but in the language of the classical sources, they are presented as actions undertaken to show respect (and in the case of the kaddish, to show spiritual support) for the deceased.
The final part of the question has a particular contemporary relevance, and perhaps it is the kernel of the problem pondered by the questioner. In an age with many more inter-marriages than was the norm in previous generations, and also many more conversions to Judaism, is there a Jewish obligation of the Jew- by- choice to memorialize a non-Jewish ancestor? In this area, we may frankly acknowledge that a change of sensibility divides modernist from traditionalist interpreters of Judaism.The classic expression is that the convert is no longer bound by ties of relatedness to his Gentile family of origin.The spiritual as well as social reality in the Jewish communal circles I have served, on the other hand, is that the Jew by choice and his Gentile parents, or the grandchild of one set of Jewish and one set of Gentile grandparents, will quite naturally relate to his Gentile forebears in a loving way, analogous to his relationship to his Jewish forebears.
Given this reality, I counsel the Jewish children or grandchildren of non-Jews that they may take advantage of the support and consolation provided by Jewish mourning ceremonial, when their non-Jewish relatives have passed away, although they are not obliged to do so. Most of the Jewish people I have counseled have opted to mourn all of their deceased relatives, using the spiritual and behavioral vocabulary of our tradition, and they report that the experience has in fact deepened their appreciation for the teachings of Judaism as guides for us throughout our lives.
If the questioner should be struggling with the pain of grief and bereavement, it is my prayer that Ha-Makom, i.e. God, Who is everywhere, will be very close to him, and will ease his tribulations, b’tokh she’ar avelei tziyon vi-rushalayim, amongst all other mourners within our faith community.
An ancient people, Jews connect with their ancestors in many ways.
One is through memorializing of the (relatively) recently deceased. Jews will recite Kaddish Yatom (the mourner’s or “Orphan’s” kaddish) on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing (“yarzeit”), as well as at specific Yizkor (memorial) services throughout the year. In some communities, names of those being remembered are inscribed on plaques or memorial walls, which are sometimes lit or otherwise indicated on the day of their yarzeitIn addition, many Jewish communities observe specific remembrances of Jews who died in the Shoah (Holocaust) or other massacres where there might not be family to remember them by. Askenazi Jews frequently name new children after deceased grandparents or other relatives as a kind of living memorial, and all Hebrew names include the parents’ names as well (“Ploni, Son of Ploni and Plonit”). In these ways Jews remember their more immediate ancestors.
In more metaphorical ways, Jews connect with their ancestors. There are many rabbinic texts that describe how all Jews—all that ever were and ever will be—stood at Sinai to receive Torah. The reenactment of certain rituals (including the second day of festivals) is done in memory of our ancestors’ piety. The recitation of the “Avot” prayer as the first part of the Amidah invokes the zechut, the merit, of our spiritual ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel).
It is not unusual for Jewish communities—especially more progressive ones—to have ways of remembering non-Jews as well. Sometimes it’s for specific occasions, be it in times of national crisis (9/11), members of the military who died in the past week, the “Righteous of the Nations”; non-Jews who helped save Jews during the Holocaust, or non-Jewish members of the IDF who died protecting the State of Israel. Additionally, some communities will also recite Kaddish for non-Jewish relatives of congregants.
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