Father’s Day is complicated for me. On the one hand, I treasure the time I spend with my children and grandchildren. When I look at this growing family—at the generations that have come from us—I am filled with profound gratitude. Their lives feel like a modern Jewish miracle. To be a father and grandfather is to stand in quiet defiance of the death sentence that was imposed on my very own family and on the Jewish people as a whole. As the Jewish partisan song says, Mir zaynen do. We are here.
Maybe that sounds a little dramatic for a Sunday on the porch barbecuing hot dogs, but it is a profound life marker. And let me tell you, parenting lays out the timeline. It’s like placing two mirrors facing each other – the reflection keeps repeating into infinity. L’dor vador: from generation to generation.
On the other hand… Father’s Day brings up some painful memories. And to be clear, these parent days are difficult for people on many levels. How to walk this tightrope for those raised by a single parent, or when folks have parents who abandoned or abused their kids. Parents who tried living their lives through their children. And then, of course, people who wanted to be parents but could not. Father’s Day can be problematic.
The Torah says Kabed et avicha v’et imecha. Honor your father and your mother. Five words: no asterisk, no footnote, no clause that begins ‘unless’. It sits there in the Ten Commandments between God and murder — between our obligations heavenward and our obligations to each other — as if to say: this is the hinge.
For years after my father’s death, I wondered how I was supposed to live with this commandment. How do I square my own unresolved anger and trauma surrounding my father’s physical and mental abuse with a sense that I somehow owed him my respect – or something?
In the Talmud, the rabbis split the obligation to parents in two. There is kibbud — honor, which they define entirely as a list of actions: feed them, clothe them, walk them in and out. And there is yirah — reverence, which is also defined by conduct: don’t sit in their seat, don’t contradict them, don’t shame them. But nowhere — nowhere! — does the Torah command us to feel anything. It does not say love them. It does not say to cherish their memory. It commands a way of behaving, not a state of the heart. Which means that the tradition, from the beginning, made room for children who act with dignity toward a parent they cannot love. The deed and the feeling were never the same obligation. They aren’t even the same word.
And forgiveness? Forgiveness is a third thing entirely, and the Torah does not put it on this list. It cannot be commanded. I don’t recall my father ever saying he loved me. He certainly never apologized for his rage against me and what followed. Forgiveness cannot be scheduled to arrive before a funeral, and it is owed to no one on demand, least of all to someone who never asked.
I forgive the thirteen-year-old boy my father was, who lost everything in the Holocaust – traumatized, alone, bereft. It took me time to get that far, but it was like a gift I gave myself when I could say it and mean it. But for the adult who wronged me, broke me, terrified me with his anger and rejection, there is no forgiveness – or reverence. I acknowledge him and feel sorry he could not make any room in his heart for me. This means whatever shortcomings I have as a father – and I have many – my children know my heart is wide open – always. I am here.
Before Shabbat 