Honor Thy...

We live in a season of eye rolls.

Scroll long enough and you’ll find the same refrain: Some version of “Okay, Boomer.” The tone is half-joke, half-verdict.  It isn’t about argument anymore.  It’s shorthand for contempt.  A shrug that ends conversation before beginning.

To be fair, it’s a bit turnabout. 

Every generation learns this snide from the previous.  The young have always been called lazy.  Entitled.  Too loud.  The old have always been written off as slow.  Selfish.  Cranky.  The names change: Flapper.  Hippie.  Millennial.  Yet the gesture is the same: One side eye rolls at the other.

Still, the vibe is different now.  What used to be teasing has hardened into fracture.   The old are guilty by category: They ruined the planet.  They rigged markets.  They built systems no one can afford to live in.  Maybe some of this is true.  But truth isn’t what drives our dishonoring.  What drives it is a surrender of agency, and fatigue: The clean satisfaction of throwing away the past because carrying respect takes energy.

We do not inherit the world; we inherit a responsibility.  Responsibility begins with remembrance.

The cycle of contempt has become frictionless.  It scrolls by in real time.  Fed by algorithms that reward outrage and irony.  Every voice is leveled.  Every statement is performance.  The elders no longer instruct; they trend.  The young don’t listen; they react.

Once, the weight of age meant something.  A lined face carried authority.  Or at least an illusion of it.  Experience was a kind of capital: You earned it by suffering.  Now it reads as obsolescence.  The same culture that worships youth also refuse to grow up.  It has no need to learn from anyone who came before because it is already fluent in its own reflection.

Chesterton’s Fence was torn asunder long ago. 

There is something new in this speed of this contempt.  Each voice ranked by clicks.  Not ranked by wisdom.  Conversation is stripped of its vertical dimension.  We no longer speak upward or downward.  We speak sideways.  Endlessly.  Reverence sounds outdated.  Gratitude sounds naïve.

The result is a quiet dislocation.  Families fracture.  Institutions hollow.  Whole nations lose a sense of lineage.  We move through history like orphans.  A generation does not vanish by dying; it vanishes when we stop listening.  To forget how to honor those who gave us life is to forget how to inhabit time itself.

Honor was once a matter of gravity: The recognition that all lives carry weight.  That we are shaped by those who were.  Without this heft, we drift.  Memory.  Meaning.  Even our moral sense of debt and inheritance. 

The Greeks had a strong memory of severe consequences for dishonoring – an act of hubris – against an eternal order:  Demise.  Imprisonment.  Eternal damnation.

The ancient commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother was not sentimental.  It was structural.  It named a way a people become human. 

And when structure breaks, when mockery replaces reverence, you feel it.  A lightness that isn’t freedom but disconnection.  A society without weight.  A flotilla of forgetfulness.

We talk about “respect” as if it were optional.  Vintage.  A kind of social etiquette that can be adjusted by mood.  Or context.  But the older language was heavier.  It didn’t ask for politeness; it demanded.  Or, literally commanded.

When Moses came down from the mountain, he didn’t bring advice on emotional boundaries.  He brought words carved in stone.  One was: kabbed.  To honor, to revere.

When the commandment says Honor thy father and thy mother, it does not mean obey without thought.  It means remember them who bore.  The verb carries gravity.  An insistence that life is not self-made.  That the self is never our starting point.  It takes two to make three.  Or, specifically, thee.

In the old world, father and mother were not just people who raised you.  They were the generation behind you.  The elders around the fire.  The keepers of story.  They held the line between memory and chaos.  To honor them was to honor the continuity of creation.

The ancients understood something we’ve forgotten: That civilization depends on memory.  When the bond between generations thins, our center caves.

The text never separates private life from public order. 

When Exodus adds the promise that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you it’s not speaking to individuals but to a people.  To a community.  To a neighborhood.  To a generation.  It warns that when reverence collapses, nations fail.  The land itself becomes unstable.  Untended.  Worn thin by amnesia.

This commandment sits in the middle of ten for a reason. 

On one side, the words are about God; on the other, about how to live with others.  Honor thy father and thy mother is the hinge.  To revere the source of life above and the givers of life below.  It is one vibe.  The line between the divine and the human runs through family.

There is no sentimentality in it. 

The ancients understood duty stripped of romance.  You might not like your parents.  They might have failed you.  Still, the commandment remains.  It is not about feeling.  It is about preserving structure.  You give weight even when affection falters.  Because without mass, everything floats apart.

That’s what kabbed meant in the desert: To hold against chaos.  To remember that freedom without memory is just exile by another name.  Without memory it is drift; drift disguised as choice.

The rabbis were not poets, but they understood weight.  They split the commandment into two verbs: kibbud and mora.  Honor and Reverence.  One meant action.  The other meant restraint.  Feed them.  Clothe them.  Help them rise.  Do not contradict.  Do not sit in their place.  Do not erase the line between you.

They treated honor as a physical discipline.  It was something measured by the body: How you stand.  How you speak.  How you engage.  The Talmud has a story about a merchant, Dama ben Netina, who turned down riches rather than wake his sleeping father.  To modern ears, it sounds absurd.  Nostalgic.  Mawkish. 

Maimonides later wrote it like law: Feed them from their own means if they have it, from yours if they don’t.  Even if their mind breaks, bear with them.  If you can’t, find someone who can.  You owe care.  You can step back, but you can’t walk away.  It’s the cold mercy of structure: Obligation doesn’t depend on warmth.

The early Church Fathers came at it differently but landed at the same spot.  Augustine said the commandment stood between heaven and earth.  To honor parents was to honor the Creator who worked through them.  He warned against blind obedience but kept the gravity intact: Disobey a parent’s sin, not the parent.

St. Chrysostom saw the city in it.  When children stop honoring parents, he said, citizens stop honoring rulers.  Walls fall.  A house without reverence becomes a nation without memory.  He told the wealthy to stop endowing theaters and start feeding aging parents.  His logic was blunt: You cannot build public virtue on private contempt.

Break the family, break the generation; break the generation, break the nation.  For every fracture among kin becomes a fracture of our whole.

The ancients, of all cultures, understood: The fissure begins at the dinner table and ends crashing city gates.

Across these traditions, the details align: A syntax of duty.  The boundaries of obedience.  Honor is not affection.  You honor your parents because they stand between you and the void.  It is how we the living repay our debt of being.

The commandment is not about manners.  It’s about memory.  When you strip it down, it says one thing: Do not live as if you invented yourself.  

Say “no” to narcissism.

That’s why it sits in the middle of ten, the hinge between worship and ethics.  The first tablet teaches how to face God, the second how we face each other.  Honor connects the two. 

The promise attached that your days may be long in the land was never a mere personal blessing.  It is social law.  A nation that remembers, survives.  A nation that mocks, dissolves.  Our stories believed, bind.  Forgotten, they fracture.

Longevity is not reward but consequence.  Forget the root, and the branch withers.

Modern ears hear “honor” and think deference.  Hierarchy.  Control.  But the older rhythm is different.  To honor is to anchor. 

We live light now.  We call it independent.  No strings.  No debts.  No duties that last beyond the moment.  We cancel what came before.  Rename it progress.  Scroll on.  The past is treated like an infection: You disinfect by forgetting.

To a modern the past is as fleeting as last month’s TikTok reel.  Ephemeral.

We have burned Chesterton’s Fence as kindling.  

But the cost is clear.  Families fracture over small words and old wounds.   Institutions, once meant to hold memory, collapse into slogans.   Everyone speaks in the present tense. 

The old commandment isn’t waiting for belief to make sense again.  It’s waiting for attention. 

There are ways back.  Small ones.  Listening before correcting.  Letting silence sit between sentences.  Learning your parents’ stories, even ones that hurt.  Telling them to your children so the line doesn’t break.  Checking our presentism prejudice in favor of genuine curiosity.  Caring for the old not because it feels good but because it is required.

The same pattern extends beyond family.  Honoring mentors who shaped us.  The teachers who stayed late.  The janitor who kept the lights on.  The founders of the small institutions that gave us a start.  The idea is not wistful.  It’s continuity.  Every act of remembrance pushes back chaos.

Reverence doesn’t mean silence.  You can question the generations before you.  You can name the damage.  The blindness.  The waste.  But contempt is not critique.  Critique, the real kind, is an act of care: An attempt to learn.  To grow.  To repair breaches or harvest a remanent. 

The commandment allows for rebellion; it does not allow for erasure.  You can change the world without spitting on the hands that pulled you up.

To honor is not to bow.  It is to remember.  It is to live as if the past still matters.  As if the ground beneath your feet was laid by human hands, not by chance.

Reverence enlarges us.  It slows the pulse.  Steadies the gaze.  It makes room for gratitude.  Which is a form of realism: An understanding that what we have was made by others. 

The act of honoring is not submission: It is participation.  We are a part of something larger than ourselves. 

The young do not lose anything by honoring the old.  They gain context.  Inheritance.  The leveraging of longer memory.  The old do not lose anything by blessing the young.  They gain continuity.  The proof that their labor meant something. 

Reverence tightens the circle.

Maybe this is the real promise hidden in the old words: that your days may be long in the land.  That a people who remember will still have ground to stand on. That gratitude practiced, deliberate, unromantic, might just be the thing that saves us from vanishing into our own reflection.

The little steps we take toward gratitude are important.  But our frame of mind more so. 

We’ve trained our minds on bad ideas.  A crooked ethic produces crooked outcomes; a bereft philosophy leaves a people starving.  We cannot mend a fracture with falsehoods.   Bad ideas beget bad outcomes.  Our morals have thinned into slogans, our philosophy into scoffing.

We cannot rise above the ideas that rule us.  We cannot build a better future on the ruins of failed notions.  Most civilizations are not beaten by armies; they collapse under the weight of errors they cherish.

Our families, our kinfolk, and our futures depend upon a spirit of gratitude.  And those that forget this, do not fail.  They drift into desert.