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

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Elisha ben Abuyah is my favorite Talmudic character, by the way. It's his friendship with R. Meir that just breaks my heart.

You know the whole story about how, one Shabbat, R. Meir was walking along, and Elisha rode up next to him on his horse, and they argued about Elisha's apostateism (as shown clearly by the fact that Elisha was riding on Shabbat) for some time.

And suddenly, Elisha cries out, "Turn back!"

"We're at the Shabbat limit (the limit of how far you're allowed to go on Shabbat) -- I've been counting my horse's hoofbeats all along to keep track of it, and we're at the Shabbat limit, and you have to turn back."

That breaks my heart. Judaism is so important to him that he 1) can't bear to see his friend violate Shabbat, even in a relatively minor way, even by accident, and 2) he's been KEEPING TRACK of the Shabbat laws, so he KNOWS, even better that Meir who DOES follow, and 3) he can't bring himself to follow them himself, even though he clearly wants to.

I love Elisha ben Abuyah. I feel like I understand him far too well.