VAETCHANAN
Honor Thy Parents
Parents are the people to whom we owe everything: our very existence and everything we have achieved. They dedicated precious years and endless resources—at the expense of their personal comfort—to raise us.
Honoring parents is also a continuous duty and involves effort on the part of the children. It applies day and night, when there is time and when there isn’t, when it is convenient to do so and when it isn’t. It requires keeping quiet and not responding with insolence even if we may feel slighted.
And the main challenge is in the later years when parents become dependent on their children.
Specifically, honoring parents presents three challenges: First, qualitative honor. To provide parents with what they need out of a feeling of joy and privilege, something that will honor and elevate them and not, G-d forbid, make them feel as a burden upon their children.
Indeed, the Gemara places an emphasis on treating parents with dignity and honor, not merely on the act of giving itself.
