As I write this month, it is the eve of my parents' arrival in Washington. I just purchased a dining- room table and chairs. Though they are currently in the IKEA boxes in which they were wrestled into my home, they will be in place before the plane hits the tarmac. The chipped, 40-year-old veneer table, which I inherited from my grandmother and which bears the mallet marks from my parents' last visit when my father and I tried valiantly to give it life for a few more months, will lovingly and with gratitude be placed in the dumpster.

I planned the weekend's activities, hired a cleaning service and stocked the house with coffee, bagels and peanut butter cookies. I made sure that they were visiting when I was "on" so that they could hear me speak and lead services. I let the tea kettle get dingy — it's something my father always notices and I know that it gives him satisfaction to shine it, a small gesture of his enormous caring.

Intellectually, I know that my parents don't need to see a new table. They have eaten on the rickety old table countless times (before and after it was in my possession). They don't care where we are or what we do as long as we are together; they insist they would enjoy standing in line with me at the dry cleaner's. And yet, though I have wanted a new table for a while, I chose this week to purchase it. Emotionally, I know that seeing a new table will put my parents at ease. It will be an outward symbol of my wellbeing. It will say, "she may be 700 miles away, but she has everything she needs."

Judaism has many things to say about the way we treat our parents. In the biblical book of Exodus (20:11) we read, "Honor your father and mother, so that your days will be long upon the earth which Adonai your God gave you." In Leviticus (19:2) we read, "You shall each revere his mother and father and keep my Sabbaths: I, Adonai, am your God."

You may notice immediately that although we are commanded to love the stranger and to love our neighbor, we are not commanded to love our parents. Nor are parents commanded to love their children. Perhaps the Torah does not command familial love because it is beyond words; it would be too difficult to describe how to do it. Perhaps it does not command familial love because it assumes its existence.
So how do we achieve that which the Torah demands? The Talmud suggests that Archie Bunker was right to get angry each time he found someone else in his recliner. We learn--in the section of Talmud devoted to the laws of marriage--that to revere one's parents means that children are not to sit nor stand in their place nor to oppose or support them if they are having an argument with another person. To honor one's parents, proposes the same source, means that we are to make sure that they are fed and clothed and to lead them in and out.

So parents are to be accorded respect. They are to be cared for in the way in which they--hopefully--cared for their children. So I planned some outings and made some introductions and purchased some coffee.

Rabbi Yochanan, a first-century scholar, said that it would be better for all of us if we were never to meet our parents, because it is impossible to show them the honor they deserve.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a 20th-century Jewish scholar, suggested that parents must earn reverence from their children. He wrote, "Unless my child will sense in my personal existence acts and attitudes which evoke reverence--the ability to delay satisfactions, to overcome prejudices, to sense the holy, to strive for the noble--why should he revere me?"

This month, students in our religious school will learn about honoring parents. May they--and we--find a way to show their parents the honor they deserve and may the parents among us be worthy of the honor they are shown.