It’s a bracha to have parents. But brachos don’t come easy.
Kibud Av V’Eim in particular is not an easy mitzvah, because you’ve seen your parents at their worst, and you’ve seen other people’s parents at their best, and sometimes you’re not actually sure the mitzvah was created with your particular parents in mind.
It was. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need help. So here are some tips, from someone who probably doesn’t know your parents:
-Your parents are always right. Except that you know some people who are definitely not always right, and many of those people are also parents.
-If your parents do something that you may have once learned is against halacha and you have to point it out, you need to say, “Totty, didn’t we once learn that…?” This will cause him to be embarrassed that he’s forgetting halachos, but also a little proud that you’re retaining what you’re learning, so hopefully it will balance out.
-That said, if you want to have a regular learning seder with your father, I would suggest halacha.
-Here’s a great halacha for teenagers: You’re not supposed to say chutzpadik things to your parents, but as far as we can tell, halacha says nothing about rolling your eyes.
-You have to do what you can. For example, I have one teenage son who is such a tzaddik – he knows that he has problems being respectful and tactful when he talks to his parents, so he tries not to talk to his parents. One-word answers, if that.
-If you think your parents dress in outdated clothing and listen to music from before you were born, ask yourself what event in their life might have caused them to stop keeping up with trends and spending a lot of money on themselves, sometime around the year you were born.
- According to halacha, a married woman is obligated to honor her parents to the extent that her husband does not object. This halacha has zero ramifications, as the husband will never object, if he knows what’s good for him.
-When you first get married, your going-away-for-Shabbos schedule must be as follows: Shabbos sheva brachos, then her parents, then his parents, who will talk all Shabbos about how you were basically at her parents for two weeks in a row, then you need a week off to experiment with Shabbos recipes, then you go to one of the relatives on his side who’s been begging since you got engaged, then her parents, who will talk about how you basically went to his side two times in a row, then his parents who will talk about how if you were going to someone on his side why couldn’t it be them? And so on for about 9 months until you have your first child, at which point you can use your kids as excuses whenever you need to for the following 20-40 years, during which time things will shift and your parents will be coming to you for Shabbos and you can talk about how they go to your other siblings more.
-No matter what, you need to at the very least call your parents before Shabbos. True, if we go by Shammai’s meat-buying rules, any time you call them is technically before Shabbos. But it only counts as a pre-Shabbos call if you end it with, “Have a Good Shabbos,” which may or may not be chutzpah if you say it on a Sunday.
-In every couple, there will be one spouse who talks to their parents multiple times a day and one who talks to their parents once a week.
-You might be lucky enough to have a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who calls you sometimes independently of your own child. This will be your favorite child.
-Likewise, every couple has one set of parents who will never ever call them, and one set that will call them multiple times a day to tell them the same stories. There is no in between. Both sets take an incredible amount of patience.
-If you have a parent or parent-in-law on the phone and they refuse to hang up, you cannot hang up either. You can hint as much as you want, as you would to a non-Jew on Shabbos, but they will pretend they don’t understand your hints. They will cheerfully listen in the background while you make supper, deal with clients, or drop off an entire carpool of first graders one at a time. And then at a random time in there, they will say, “Well, I have to get going,” and you will immediately get that hint.
-Whenever you find yourself in the same town as your parents for any reason, you need to pop in. In exchange, they need to have something in the fridge that you can nosh on. If you live in the same town as your parents, you need to pop in at least once every time you leave your house.
-Whenever your parents find themselves in the same town as you, they need to call first. It does not work both ways. The difference is which one of you suddenly needs to run around cleaning first.
-You want your kids to spend a lot of time with your parents whenever possible. If for nothing else than for both parties to see how easy they’ve had it dealing with you. But you don’t necessarily want to have to be there while this is happening.
-If you go on vacation with your spouse, you need to leave your kids at your parents. Your parents might not necessarily be up for it, but they’ll be upset if you don’t ask, and they won’t say no if you do.
-Everyone’s parents are hard to feed. The easier your parents will be to put up technically, as far as how many unmarried children come along with them, the harder it will be to cook for them. Both of them will suddenly have developed health issues since you’ve stopped living with them or gone on diets that no longer allow them to eat the foods that you’re great at making, and they will not either be able to eat the same set of foods as each other, and sometimes they will forget to tell you any of this until they’re at the actual seudah. (“Oh yeah, we no longer eat any of these foods.”) Often, they will remind you that they actually did tell you, weeks ago, while you were doing carpool, “Oh yeah, your father has the gout,” but you’re not entirely sure what the gout is and never actually looked up how it might affect his diet.
-When your parents come into the room, you should stand up, in case you’re sitting in the seat they want to sit in. This includes a situation in which your parent comes into the room, forgets why he came in, and immediately leaves.
-Here’s a dilemma: You’re not supposed to wake up your parents. But just because your parents are in their room, that doesn’t mean they’re asleep. Can you go in and check? No, because they told you that you have to knock. But if you knock and they’re asleep, it will wake them up. The only way to not wake them up is to go in quietly without knocking. You can just say, “Forget it,” but if you don’t wake them up and the reason you had was important, they might later say, “You should have woken me.” But you don’t know if the thing is important enough to wake them for, and the only way to find out is to ask, possibly by waking them up first. This is why Kibud Av V’eim has such a big reward.
-Although many Jewish parents want their children to become doctors, there are a lot of shaylos about those doctors then operating on their parents, from drawing blood to causing injury to waking them up after the operation. (“Aren’t you going to stop the flow of drugs?” “No. I don’t think I can do that.” “You don’t want to ask a shaylah?” “My father’s my rav.”)
-Also, if your eldest child is learning to talk and you yell your spouse’s name across the house and your child repeats it, you should immediately switch to calling them “Mommy” in front of the kids forever and ever. Not that this happened to us.
-Try to avoid being friends with people who have the same name as one of your parents. If you’re a boy and you have to be friends with such a person, chas v’shalom, most people are noheig to just call him by his last name. Unless his last name is the same as your father’s first name, but that mostly only comes up with Sephardim.
-If you are a girl marrying a guy with the same name as your father, you should also only call him by his last name. Your father will.
-If your father’s name is Abba, you need to ask a shaylah. “What if I call him Totty?” I don’t know; doesn’t that just mean Abba? If your father’s name is Yaakov, are you allowed to call him Jacob?
-There’s also an inyan of honoring an eldest sibling. And you should, because this is pretty much the only thing we eldest siblings have left, besides for fasting on Erev Pesach and being the guinea pig for all our parents’ mistakes. And accidentally calling our parents by their first names as toddlers until they start calling each other “Mommy” and “Totty.”
-As far as I know, the issur of causing injury doesn’t apply to a sibling.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.