Between Honoring (כיבוד) and Fearing (מורא) Father and Mother: What if the Son is a Sage?

On Bavli Qidushin 30b–31b, the Mishnah’s teaching about כל מצות האב על הבן [mQid 1:7 on bQid 29a] is famously discussed. A chain of aggadic anecdotes tells of the difficulties of how to properly honor a parent (כיבוד אב ואם). While daughters are not part of the didactic design of the sugya at all, mothers of sons are addressed conspicuously often. In the literary fabric of halakhic and aggadic components alike, mothers are unfailingly allotted the part of an old woman with irritating habits, with the side-effect of a comic relief character. Finally, the last and most artfully reworked Aggadah about Rav Asi and his old mother ends with her death. The sequence of anecdotal accounts about embarrassing appearances of mothers in their sons’ adult lives attracted in recent years the attention of trained Talmud scholars, as well as of those interested in the intersection between Rabbinic Literature and Gender Studies (Blidstein:1975; Valler:1993; Rovner:2005; Kosman:2005; Israeli & Raveh:2018; Rubenstein:2018).

Whereas Rav Asi’s mother’s death might be seen as the dramatic finale to the give-and-take about honoring of father and mother, it is not the last word in our sugya about the ‘obligation concerning the father incumbent upon the son.’ Certainly, the discussion continues, now with fearing of father and mother (מורא אב ואם) [bQid 31b–33b], a commandment equally derived from Scripture [Lev 19:3]. In my talk, I suggest reading the story about Rav Asi as the crucial turning point of our sugya rather than its end, in that it bridges the Gemara’s discussions about כיבוד and מורא that come before and after it. The two commandments each relate to both father and mother—however, from now on, mothers (as daughters did already before) vanish from the scene. The sons carry on, as well as the fathers, and even more so if either is a sage. In the latter case, instead of his family home, the son’s new home will be the study house, and his new parent—his teacher.