Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Emor, in which we receive some more laws relating to the priests’ duties and how they are to conduct themselves throughout their lives. We also receive rules about the holy days - more about how to observe Shabbat, as well as the expectations of the pilgrimage festivals (Shavuot, Sukkot, and Pesach), Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, and the Omer. In our secular American life we also have set times for celebrations and expressing gratitude. Next weekend, for example, is Mother’s Day! There can be reasons that such days are painful or cliche, but they still help many of us remember to set aside time in our busy self-absorbed schedules to express our gratitude to our parents or others in our lives being celebrated on these so-called “Hallmark Holidays.” 

Judaism of course has a long history of honoring parental figures, even if there's no explicitly Jewish Mother's Day or Father's Day. Most of us know one of the 10 Commandments is to “Honor Your Father and Mother”. There are also several laws in the Torah regarding animal mothers and their children, such as not to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk, and to shoo away a mother bird before taking eggs from a nest. Likewise, in this week’s Torah portion tells the priests not to slaughter an animal on the same day as its young, and that an animal should be allowed to stay with its mother for at least seven days before it is slaughtered for food or sacrifice (or both, as this parasha also discusses the tithed meat the priests may eat of the sacrificial animals). 

In the modern commentary, The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, this section of the parasha is discussed under the heading “Mother Love Among the Flocks.” After connecting this string of laws regarding the animal mothers and their “object lessons” for how they control our kashrut, the book concludes this segment with “Mother Rachel adds: From the days of the Garden of Eden until Noah’s generation, human beings did not eat animal flesh, but after the Great Flood, our lust for meat grew so great that God permitted us to kill and eat other creatures, but only if we did so with mindfulness and discipline. Since animal mothers, like human ones, love their young, we should spare them unnecessary distress by taking away their young too soon after birth or by allowing the mothers to see them die.” 

Coincidentally, today’s kabbalistic realm for the Omer count (day 30) is also about mindfulness and discipline. Gevurah shebeHod can have a lot of translations - strength in humility, discernment in gratitude, and discipline in mindfulness or empathy. There is probably no greater example of this balancing act than that which develops in a lifetime of parent-child relationships. When the child is young, the parent must withdraw and make expansive space for the child to grow and learn. The parent must also be a source of strength and discipline for the child, but mostly parents with empathy and awe. As the child grows into adulthood there may be a brief window where the relationship starts to feel more in balance, though of course, the parents are always the parents and will always see their children as children. But now, both parties have learned both strength and awareness of others’ needs. And eventually, the scales tip again, this time in the opposite direction. Both parties learn a new type of humility as the child now becomes - in some fashion - the caretaker for an ailing or elderly parent. Now it is the child who must withdraw to make expansive space for their parents' needs in their final years, who must be a source of strength.  Rabbi Jacob Best Adler offers an Omer mussar teaching for Day 30, Gevurah shebeHod: “Humility in Jewish tradition is less about ‘humbling yourself’ and more about balance – ‘taking up the right amount of space.’ This takes discipline. Take the compliment – but don’t believe the hype.” 

This depth of parent-child relationship may not extend to the animal world, but all this together I believe teaches something far more universal about the connections between those that create us and raise us, and those we create and raise. This Shabbat, may we honor those in our lives that served parental roles for us, and may we cherish those for whom we played parental roles. May we savor the time we get to spend with loved ones of any generation, and may we honor these sacred bonds even in our treatment of other species. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.