At the heart of this week’s Torah portion, Yitro, God
gives us the Torah on Mount Sinai. At
the core of that revelation is aseret ha-dibrot, the Ten Commandments
(or in Hebrew, “utterances.”) And at the
very center of those foundational laws we find the commandment:
Honor your father and your mother, that you may long
endure on the land that the Holy One, your God is giving you
Our Sages saw the fifth commandment as a kind of bridge
between the two tablets. They categorize
the first four utterances as bein adam la-Makom—principles that apply “between
humanity and God”: the affirmation of God’s existence, the prohibition of
idolatry, the injunction to refrain from taking God’s name in vain, and the
commandment to observe Shabbat. The
final five utterances, by contrast, they categorize as bein adam le-chavero—principles
governing the way we treat one another: prohibitions on murder, adultery,
theft, false witness, and covetousness. But
the fifth utterance falls somewhere in the middle. Honoring parents would seem to belong with
the laws around human interaction, yet it is grouped with the mitzvot around
our relationships with God. The Rabbis
suggest that parents act as God’s partners in creating life. We are obligated to respect our parents in
this capacity. Even when they fail
dismally in raising (or failing to raise) us, we still owe them a debt of
gratitude for bringing us into existence, together with the Holy One.
In his book The Way into Judaism and the Environment, Jeremy
Benstein suggests that we need a new category of mitzvot—bein adam le-olam—for
those moral and ethical obligations we have toward the Earth and the rest of
God’s creation. He asks: “Where is the
consciousness that we have a larger task, a mission for humanity regarding the
world? Given the global challenges
facing us, we need a framework, a guiding vision, a purpose.”
Perhaps the Torah itself suggests such a category in the way
the fifth commandment links honoring parents with the promise of a long life on
the land that God gives us. We tend to
associate environmental repair with children, rather than parents; many
ecological exhortations urge us to tend to the earth for the sake of those who
will inherit it. This seems natural—and yet
it has not (yet) proven to be a very effective formula. We have, for the most part, been irresponsible
when it comes to living sustainably in order to leave our descendants with a
better world.
Torah offers us a different path. If our relationship with the land depends
upon respecting our parents, then that bond between us and the earth is best built
through gratitude rather than guilt. We
should honor the rest of God’s creation for the same reason that we should
honor even bad parents: for giving us the ongoing gift of life itself. If we are truly thankful for the planet that
sustains us, we will act in a manner that allows future generations to express
that same gratitude.
This is our challenge.
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