Shalom Brothers: When a Son Stops Being an Extension of His Father (Ki Tetzei)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International

Family life is messy at worst and meaningful at best. Parent-child relationships are not as easy to navigate as one might think. Just because parent and child might share a genetics or an emotional bond, that does not mean they both inherently connect with, or understand, one another. One of the things I love the most about Judaism and our Torah is the inclusion of life’s messiness as meaningful experiences. 

Parashat Ki Teitzei contains some of the Torah’s most uncomfortable family laws. Deuteronomy 21 moves rapidly from the captive woman to the loved and unloved wives and then to the ben sorer u’moreh, the “wayward and defiant son.” The sequence itself is telling. Rashi, drawing on earlier rabbinic tradition, reads these laws as connected: disordered desire produces conflict within the home, and conflict within the home can eventually produce rupture between parent and child.

The rebellious-son law is terrifying. If a son refuses to heed his parents even after discipline, they bring him before the town elders and declare that he is defiant, gluttonous and drunk. The Torah prescribes death (Deuteronomy 21:18–21).

The rabbis were so disturbed by this law that they effectively legislated it out of existence. The Talmud records the view that there “never was” such a case and never would be; the passage exists so that we might study it and learn from it (Sanhedrin 71a). Perhaps what we are supposed to study is not rebellious children but frightened parents.

Parenthood begins with an extraordinary imbalance of power. Your child cannot eat, cross a street, choose a school or survive the night without you. For years, being a good parent means making decisions for another human being. Then adolescence arrives and quietly changes the job description.

Developmental researchers describe autonomy as one of the central tasks of adolescence. Teenagers across cultures increasingly seek control over personal decisions while trying, ideally, to remain connected to their families. The goal is not detachment. It is the more complicated achievement of becoming a separate person while preserving a relationship with the people from whom one is separating. Parents know this intellectually. Emotionally, it can feel like betrayal.

I can feel it happening with my own teenage sons, particularly around Judaism. I am a rabbi, but outside explicitly religious settings I rarely advertise it through what I wear. My older son has chosen almost the opposite approach. He wears a large silver Magen David over his shirt, making visible an identity that his rabbi father often carries more quietly.

His younger brother is traveling in another direction. Judaism interests him considerably less. He seems especially pleased to report to me when he has enjoyed pepperoni pizza in the school cafeteria. Don’t get me started on what our conversations about Israel are like these days. It’s not pretty.

There is a temptation for a father to interpret both choices through himself. One son is embracing my tradition. The other is rejecting my tradition. But that is precisely the mistake. They are not making statements about me. They are becoming themselves.

Yusuf/Cat Stevens understood the emotional trap in “Father and Son.” The father tells the younger man, “I was once like you are now,” while the son experiences a father who keeps talking when what he needs is to be heard. The genius of the song is that neither character is a villain. They simply occupy different developmental moments and mistake that distance for failure of love. Parents often forget that we once occupied the other side of this argument.

We too chose music our parents disliked, questioned their assumptions, changed our appearance, rejected parts of their worldview and constructed identities they could not entirely understand. Yet when our children do the same thing, we can experience normal differentiation as evidence that something has gone wrong.

For fathers, there is an additional challenge. Men are often comfortable being needed. Providing, instructing and protecting give us recognizable roles. Adolescence asks us to surrender some of that authority before we are emotionally ready to relinquish it.

The danger is not that our sons will rebel. Some rebellion is built into growing up. The danger is that fathers will make continued closeness conditional upon obedience.

The ben sorer u’moreh presents the most extreme imaginable version of that error: disagreement escalates until a family conflict becomes a public prosecution. The rabbis’ refusal to allow the law practical application may itself contain a warning. A son becoming different from his father cannot be treated as a crime.

The work of fatherhood therefore changes. When children are young, we construct the boundaries of their world. As they grow, we must increasingly become people they can return to voluntarily. That requires a strange kind of masculine strength: resisting the urge to win.

My hope is not that my sons become Jewish exactly as I am Jewish, think as I think or make the choices I would make. My hope is that the Judaism they inherit gives them enough confidence to wrestle with it, enough security to disagree with me and enough love to keep talking.

The measure of successful fatherhood may not be whether our sons follow us. It may be whether, after finding their own road, they still know the way home.