This commandment has been a difficult one for many of us. People whose relationship to their parents is tense at best, because they are queer and trans, because their parents are abusive, because of disagreements about Israel—or just because the whole thing feels too patriarchal and authoritarian.

One of the things I most treasure in the Chazal is their ability to rethink and massage the Torah into new meanings where all we found was pain. And so, channelling this energy of theirs, I want to offer a twofold perspective that allows us to make new meaning of this passage.

The starting point is the remark, made by so many rabbis and scholars, that the ten utterances seem structured into two sets of five. When we group them, the categories seem to be roughly—one set of five for relations between God and humanity, and one set of five for relations within humanity.

Except for that pesky “honour your parents,” the fifth commandment. And to add insult to injury, it’s a bit cryptic—how does honouring your parents influence how long you’re on earth? Unless it’s a threat, I guess.

This is where I bring in the kabbalistic clef of this roman-à-clef that is Torah. In a kabbalistic mood, these two issues are readily resolved. There is nothing to explain regarding the sets of five, because the commandment no longer has anything to do with earthly parents. Rather, father and mother are Chokhmah and Binah. You must honour—nay, glorify—the divine wisdom and discernment that is ours. That is within us, because we are b’tzelem Elohim. And how do we do that? Simply by walking in wisdom and discernment as we meander through this mess that we call a world.

But let us get back to “glory.” You’ll notice I pulled a bit of a switcharoo, going from “honouring” to “glorifying.” This brings us to the second problem I identified, that of the long days. How and why does glorifying bring about long days? Here Kabbalah also provides the key.

The first key is “glory,” which has many uses in Kabbalah but one of them is the flow of divine glory down through the Sefirotic tree.

Glory… so how does that tie back to the lengthening of days? Well, here’s the second key. One of the faces of God is called Ze’eir Anpin—the short-nosed one. Ze’eir Anpin embodies the duality of God trying to balance between the order and expansiveness, judgment and lovingkindness. And it turns out that another name for Ze’eir Anpin’s names is the “Days of the World.”

And it also turns out that when humans act in godly ways, it draws dew aka glory down the divine beard and drips onto Ze’eir Anpin. And then Ze’eir Anpin’s face becomes longer and starts resembling His father Arikh Anpin—the long-nosed one. And when that happens, the world tilts heavily towards Chesed and all judgment and destruction is appeased.

And so, what does the Torah mean when it says: “Honour your favour and your mother in order that your days may be long upon the ground which HaShem your God is giving you”? It’s giving us the key to keeping our world alive—be wise, be discerning, and you may yet avoid the destruction of the world. An especially welcome lesson in the week of Tu BiShevat.

But now we need to circle back, because Sod, the mystical is not the last step of kabbalistic interpretation. We must still circle back to Peshat, the simple interpretation, and appreciate it with new eyes.

One of the reasons why we must honour our parents, the Zohar teaches us, is that just like the Concealed of Concealed partnered Father and Mother partnered to create Adam, so did HaShem partner with our parents to make each and everyone of us.

But in the Torah and rabbinic sources alike, terms for parents do not only refer to our immediate parents. They also refer to our ancestors, and they refer to our teachers. So perhaps we should not read “honour your parents,” but “honour your antecedents.” Honour your ancestors, honour your teachers, honour all those who made you who you are.

And what would it mean to honour them except than to value their stories, their traditions, their wisdom, their covenants, their commitments, their resistance? To keep them alive through our teachings and deeds.

This peshat interpretation would also reconcile our two earlier issues. From the days of Abraham and Sarah, our inheritance cannot be severed from the covenant or from Torah—our relationship to our ancestors is a relationship to God. Hence it is counted among the commandments between God and humans. And for our days to be long? That is simply an echo of Torah’s self-conception—that it was given to us “for our lasting good and for our survival” (Deuteronomy 6:24).

We have now translated “honour your father and your mother” into wholly new. Rather than seeing in it a call for uncritical obedience or self-effacement, we can choose to read it as a call to emulate divine wisdom and discernment, drawing the long line of ancestors going back all the way to the dawn of humanity that is embodied in our stories, our traditions, our covenants, our commitments, and our resistance. That, to me, is a much more inspiring message.

I end with a few words from R’ Mordecai Kaplan: “It is not so much our duty to our fathers that makes it important for us to maintain the continuity of our tradition as it is our duty to our children. All human progress has been achieved by the fact that each generation begins its career where its predecessors left off, availing itself of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the past ages. [...] Religion is necessarily rooted in the soil of tradition, but its life depends on its ability to send forth new shoots into the light of our own day.”