Ra'anana Community Kollel - Parshat Vaetchanan 5764

Honoring Parents and the Red Cow

Rabbi Binyomin Lipson

Honor your father and mother as Hashem your G-d has commanded you.

(Devarim 5:16)

In discussing the great obligation to honor one’s parents, the Gemara (Kidushin 31) relates the story of a certain gentile who was in possession of a rare and valuable gem which was needed by the Jewish Sages for the breastplate of the Kohain Gadol. However, when the Sages arrived in order to purchase this treasure, the Gemara relates that he refused to sell it to them for a rather unusual reason. The key to the safe in which the gem was kept was hidden under his father’s pillow, and his father was fast asleep! Thus, rather than awaken him, the gentile declined the Sages’ offer in order not to disturb his father. The Gemara goes on the relate that the next year, Hashem rewarded this man for this great act of self-sacrifice by allowing a parah adumah to be born in his herd. This was indeed an extremely valuable reward, as the parah adumah was desperately needed by the Jewish people for ritual purposes and was at the same time extremely rare and hard to attain. When the Sages approached the gentile a second time in order to purchase the parah adumah, he responded that although he knew that they would have been willing to pay any amount of money for it, he only wished to receive the payment that he had lost out on by honoring his father on the previous occasion.

Why did Hashem reward this man specifically by giving him a parah adumah? Certainly, there were countless other ways in which He could have made him rich? Many explain that the reason why Hashem chose this this specific method in which to reward him was in order to make an important point by emphasizing a unique quality that is only found amongst the Jewish people. The mitzvah of honoring one’s parents is one of the most logically understood mitzvot in the Torah. Indeed, anyone who contemplates all that his parents have done for him, from the minute he was born until the present will undoubtedly feel a tremendous sense of gratitude. Thus, the “mitzvah” which this gentile was willing to loose so much for was in fact a logical conclusion at which any intelligent person could have arrived. True, he was willing to sacrifice a large amount of money for it, but in essence he was acting in accordance with his own logic and reason.

The mitzvah of parah adumah on the other hand represents the exact opposite of this line of thinking. We are told that this mitzvah is the ultimate chok, a command which we can never hope to understand in any way with our own intellectual faculties. Without question, when it comes to the mitzvah of parah adumah, there is absolutely no question that we are acting solely according to the command of a higher power; our all-knowing Creator who formed heaven and Earth. The nations of the world have many social laws which they keep with great scrutiny, but they are always those which they arrive at through the use of human logic. It is only Klal Yisrael, Hashem’s chosen nation which is capable of committing itself to a set of guidelines which is beyond their level of intellectual comprehension, and this is what Hashem wanted to illustrate by giving the reward of a parah adumah. This is what the Torah alludes to by telling us to honor our parents “as Hashem your G-d has commanded you”. Specifically because this mitzvah lends itself to logical understanding, we need to be remind to adhere to it, not because our minds tell us to, but rather, because we have been commanded to do so by our Creator.

There is yet another interesting point which we see from this story. When the Jewish Sages went to the gentile the second time in order to purchase the parah adumah, he responded that although he knew that they would be wiling to pay any price that he asked, he would only charge them the amount of money “that I lost for the honor of my father.” When we examine this response carefully, we can see that although he was willing to uphold the social value of honoring his father even to the extent that he stood to loose a large sum of money, it was still considered by him as a “loss” that he needed to be compensated for in the following year. Many times in the process of performing a mitzvah it is necessary for us to spend money, not only to purchase mitzvah objects, (Torah books, tefillin, mezuzot, etc.) but also to avoid violating negative prohibitions. The question is, do we relate to these two categories in the same way? When we buy a kosher mezuzah for our house we feel that our money has been well spent on something from which we will derive great benefit. Do we have the same feeling when we have to pay significantly extra for a flight that will arrive significantly before Shabbat?

These are two unquestionably valuable lessons that we can honestly say that we gleaned from the story of the gentile and his red cow!