THE UR-DEBATE

Honoring the 5th: Why our family doesn't do Mother’s Day. (Rabbi Daniel Lapin, NRO, 5/14/03)

Whether you like it or not, most would agree that the Ten Commandments lie at the core of Western civilization. Why, even retaining our seven-day week in place of what would be a vastly more convenient calendar based upon a five-day week, is only on account of the fourth Commandment regarding the Sabbath day. Without that pesky fourth Commandment, we could reuse our calendars year after year since every year would be identical.

Well, the fifth Commandment doesn't instruct us to honor our fathers and mothers only on two special days each year, does it? No, the Commandment is valid for 365 days each year and 366 in leap years. My wife and I have always suspected that observance of an annual Mother's Day or Father's Day actually diminishes observance of the fifth Commandment. Not wanting to run the risk of that happening, we just declared from our children's' infancy that in our home, Mother's Day and Father's Day was everyday!

To my relief, our children accepted this, but on growing a little older, they inquired about another verse found early in the 19th chapter of Leviticus, "Everyone should fear his mother and father." Contrasting this with that fifth Commandment which did so much for our family's lifestyle, they asked, "Why reverse the order?" In Exodus, honor your father and mother but in Leviticus fear your mother and father? Does the Bible instruct us to honor our fathers more than our mothers but to fear our mothers more than our fathers?

Of course not! The Bible never asks us to do the easy and the natural. In fact, its very greatness is how it introduces us to the revolutionary idea that makes Western civilization possible. Namely that it is not only possible, but vital that we overcome nature, particularly our own. [Emphasis added]

In the Comments to one of Orrin's posts below, on why Athens needs Jerusalem, we have been discussing the story of the Garden of Eden from the view point of the three Abrahamaic religions. Although I find Rabbi Lapin's main point -- that Mother's Day and Father's Day detract from observing the 5th Commandment -- banal, his argument goes to the heart of Jewish understanding of Adam's fall.

In Jewish theology, we are all born with two instincts: to honor G-d and obey his commandments, on the one hand, and to satisfy our physical needs, on the other. In the Garden of Eden, before the Fall, these two instincts were in equipoise; Adam and Eve didn't feel any conflict between them. By preferring their desire to eat the fruit to their desire to obey G-d, Adam and Eve set in motion the conflict between body and soul, clean and unclean, abstinence and hedonism that undergirds all of human history. What we lost in the Garden was peace, what we gained was conflict.

As an aside, these two instincts are sometimes oversimplified as an instinct towards good versus an instinct towards evil. It is not that simple. G-d created us with appetites and with the ability to enjoy food, drink, love and life. It is not wrong, in and of itself, to satisfy these urges or even to revel in them, unless G-d has commanded otherwise. Some Rabbi's teach that a self-conscous asceticism beyond that commanded by G-d can be as straight a path to sin and error as the most epicurean of lifestyles. The good life is lived by rediscovering (or more properly, since we can never actually attain this rediscovery, striving towards) the equipoise between these two urges that was gifted to Adam and Eve. Posted by David Cohen at May 14, 2003 10:49 AM