Ki Teitze

[cellio]

This Shabbat's torah portion talked about the bird and the chicks. If you come upon a nest and want to take the chicks, you have to first send the mother bird away; the reward for this is long life. (Aside: Elisha ben Abuyah became an apostate when he witnessed a violation of that promise, according to the talmud.) This is one of two commandments for which the stated reward is long life; the other is honoring your parents.

Is there a connection? Sending the mother bird away before taking her young resonates with that -- that if we would do that for a bird, how much moreso should we honor people. And is there a connection between both of those and the rebellious child?

If a child is so rebellious that his parents can't deal with him, the torah says, they are to kill him. There's a judicial process, and the rabbis added many, many restrictions to ensure that it could never actually happen. (And they say it never happened.) So the penalty for not honoring your parents is not getting a long life, and the degenerate case of that is a very short life for extreme dishonor. Not that we should take that literally.

Comments

[cellio]

I know Elisha ben Abuyah largely through the filter of As a Driven Leaf. (It's a novelization and the author says up front he's changed some details, but I believe the overall feel is right.) It's quite touching, yes.

I can see another explanation for his behavior at the boundary: he does not want to be the cause of Meir transgressing something that he (Meir) considers important. I've actually seen that sort of thing (from both ends) -- people who don't keep kosher going out of their way to make sure their observant friends can eat at their house, and stuff like that. It's a sign of caring about the other person.

Also, to traditional Judaism (as I understand it), there aren't really "major" and "minor" transgressions of, e.g. Shabbat. The teaching is that you can't possibly know which mitzvot are more important to God, so you have to keep them all.