D'var Torah

The Importance of a Father Figure

RABBI HERB COHEN

Many, many years ago when I was a student in an afternoon Hebrew school, we would misbehave and cause grief to our well-intentioned teachers. I remember vividly that one day when the teacher left the room, we started to have a catch not with a ball, but with a tefilin bag with tefilin inside of it that gave the bag weight. Our teacher, who was a Holocaust survivor, suddenly returned and his face turned ashen when he realized what his charges were doing in his absence. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. We were desecrating that which he felt, and what we should have felt, was holy.

We immediately sensed the folly of what we had done. We had been grossly insensitive to someone who had suffered indescribably for simply being a Jew. In the face of our teacher’s blank but pained visage, we were speechless. That indelible scene of so many years ago still lingers with me today, and I recall that event of long ago as I peruse this week’s Torah portion, which details the tragic event of the golden calf which occurs when Moses is not present.

The sad and tragic story of the sin of the golden calf provides a vivid example of what happens when there is a lack of visible authority. Without the presence of Moses who is communing with God on the mountain top, the children of Israel, getting nervous, decide to worship an idol. Although some commentators understand this act not as a rejection of Moses, but as a way to sublimate their worship of God until he returns, nonetheless the worship of the golden sin leaves a perpetual stain on the history of the Jewish people from which it never recovers. The Torah tells us that the Jews not only brought sacrifices to the idol, but they also ate and drank and committed acts of immorality. All this occurs because Moses, the father figure, is not present.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding is a novel that recounts what happens when a father figure is not present. Ostensibly, it is about a group of boys, survivors of a plane crash, who find themselves isolated on a remote island. At first, it seems idyllic; but without adult supervision, without a symbol of parental authority, the boys descend into savagery, ultimately resulting in anarchy and murder. Good people can sometimes do terrible things when they feel no one is watching who will hold them accountable for their actions.

The Ethics of the Fathers drives home this point when it wisely remarks about the attitude we should have towards our government, which in many ways is our surrogate father, our  emblem of authority: “Pray for the welfare of the government, because if people did not fear it, a man would swallow his fellow alive (Avot 3:2).”

At the end of Lord of the Flies when adults return to rescue the lost boys, Ralph, the leader of the group, breaks down and cries. Golding writes: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart….” As we reflect on our own existential states, we always need to remember the importance of the father figure, the importance of the symbol of authority, and how it, in a positive sense, shapes the world in which we live.