“Honor Your Father and Your Mother”
« כַּבֵּד אֶת אָבִיךָ וְאֶת אִמֶּךָ »
Kabbed et avikha ve-et immekha
Honor your father and your mother
(Ex 20:12)
In Le Sens des Choses (also appearing under the English title Reformed, available on Prime/Max), a female rabbi, Léa, begins her ministry in a liberal synagogue in Strasbourg. Episode 5, titled The Rebellious Son, places Léa once again in a position of tension: how can she support Jewish parents, detached from religious practice, when faced with the strict religious observance of their son? For the son, it seems an obvious return to orthodoxy; for the parents, a painful experience of religious radicalization. A mirror effect, perhaps, especially for the father?
Léa turns to Arié, an Orthodox rabbi and former mentor, for guidance. A subtle strategist, Arié chooses not to confront the son directly. He meets him at the yeshiva. There, he wields a gentle weapon: humor. With a touch of amusement, he reproaches the young man for disregarding ḥaverut (חֲבֵרוּת)—the principle of studying with a partner (from the same root as ḥaver חָבֵר, “friend”). He evokes the binomial structure of Talmudic learning, where one learns to think in tandem, to contradict without rupture, to seek together. Ḥaverut is not about agreement: it’s a maintained tension. A living polarity.
Is being two enough to fulfill ḥaverut?
Léa and Arié later find themselves together at a public Republican conference on coexistence, with various faith representatives invited for what was presented—mistakenly—as an “ecumenical dialogue.” Léa quickly finds herself in an unexpected configuration. A man from the audience, visibly agitated, confronts the imam, challenging the compatibility of Islam with the Republic. Léa takes the microphone to affirm that Islam is not the issue and reminds the audience that radicalization, in all its forms, exists across every religious tradition.
From there, a dynamic unfolds: Léa and her Orthodox colleague, each from their own position, speak out, respond to one another, occupy the space—and end up saturating it. They unintentionally embody the two poles of an artificial divide. What was meant to be a space for dialogue becomes a battleground. The debate is locked down. They can no longer step back. Pushed into a corner, Léa’s voice overwhelms Arié’s, who—within the eyes of the invited audience—becomes the figure of religious intolerance.
How can one continue to speak without being ventriloquized?
Léa receives applause. The man who attacked Islam earlier now warmly congratulates her. Others line up for selfies. Her intervention is already circulating on social media and poised to go viral. Arié, in contrast, leaves the room defeated. And Léa? She understands the bitter irony: her victory is also a defeat. The applause conceals a hijacking. A carefully balanced and nuanced statement can be instantly co-opted.
To convey this (deceptive) disillusionment, the series adds a final scene during the closing credits. A woman congratulates Léa while accusing Arié of extremism. She concludes with, “Religion and patriarchy, they’re the same. One can’t disappear without the other.” Léa maintains her smile, but her unease is evident. She’s celebrated for a battle she didn’t choose, propelled into a camp she never joined. Her subtle position is twisted, absorbed, and repurposed.
“There is a boundary”
This is where the Fifth Commandment—Honor your father and your mother—resurfaces, not as an abstract religious principle but as a point of rupture. Because it’s the father’s voice, his dismay—and that of his wife—that closes the episode.
“Yesh gvul” (יש גבול), he says — “There is a boundary.”
A phrase passed down from his own father, with whom he had once broken ties. A simple, grave phrase laid like a dam against collapse.
We are thus invited to see Léa and Arié in a new light—not as opponents, nor even as complements, but as an interpretive ḥaverut. They embody a dual-voiced reading, a sustained tension without fusion. They’re not here to settle or unify. They’re here to let the friction between two fidelities be heard. Let’s caricature for a moment: one fidelity to the letter, the other to the spirit; one to the tradition’s body, the other to its breath. But in truth, Arié is as much spirit as letter, as much breath as body—and so is Léa. The two interpenetrate.
On the Limit
The Hebrew word גְּבוּל (gᵊvūl) first refers to a concrete boundary—a geographical border, a territorial marker. In the Hebrew Bible, it is often used to define tribal boundaries (e.g., in Joshua) or national frontiers.
But gᵊvūl isn’t merely a line on a map. It implies a structure of convivencia, a symbolic order that separates without necessarily opposing. It’s a threshold one doesn’t cross without consent or consequence. Ethically and ontologically, it belongs to the liminal.
In halakha (Jewish law), we find the principle of הַסָּגַת גְּבוּל (hassagat gᵊvūl)—the prohibition against encroaching on another’s domain or position, whether physical, professional, social, or spiritual. It’s a form of respectful separation.
In Le Sens des Choses, gᵊvūl operates on several levels:
an internal limit, not to be crossed in debate;
an ethical limit, set by the father to protect the integrity of his speech;
a structural limit, which Léa tries to uphold against polarization.
But another Hebrew word comes to mind in light of the father's reflection:
שְׂפָה (sᵊfāh) — a poetic and ambivalent term in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew. It means both:
edge, bank, border — spatially:
sᵊfat hayam (שְׂפַת הַיָּם) = the edge of the sea (Gen 22:17; Ex 14:30)lip, rim, mouth — corporeally or architecturally:
One speaks of the lip of a vessel (1 Kgs 7:23; 7:26) — the boundary of a container, both limit and opening.
Thus, it also means border. And this is the word I spontaneously associate with Paul Tillich. Not arbitrarily, but because Tillich himself chose that word for the title of his intellectual autobiography:
On the Boundary (1966).
The first page begins with this confession:
“In the introduction to my Religiöse Verwirklichung (Religious Realization), I wrote:
‘The boundary is the best place for acquiring knowledge.’
When asked to explain how my ideas grew from my life, I thought that the concept of boundary might be the most fitting symbol of my personal and intellectual journey. At almost every stage, I had to stand between alternative possibilities of existence, never fully at home in either, and never entirely opposed to either.
Yet thought requires openness to new possibilities—and so this in-between position is fertile for reflection.
But it is difficult—and dangerous—in life, which constantly demands decisions, and thus the exclusion of other options. This disposition, and the tension it implies, shaped both my destiny and my work.” (p. 13)
What Tillich describes here, I tend to associate—perhaps mistakenly, but consistently—with the Hebrew word sᵊfāh, which means both edge, bank and language. A speech from the boundary, from the edge of meaning, the riverbank, the lip of discourse. Are we back, once again, to the margins, to the talvera, to the peripheries?
Not exactly. This isn’t exile or exclusion, but a place of elaboration, of sustained tension—where one speaks without being fixed in one pole or the other.
The Border of Speech
Does the boundary—sᵊfāh—say something about language itself?
Is speech always uttered from an edge, a threshold, a place that could tip over?
Léa speaks from such a place. Arié too. But caught in the gears of the event, neither realizes that they are, in a way, speaking from the same place.
Thus, Le Sens des Choses doesn’t offer a solution. It offers a topography—a map of tensions. It doesn’t point to a “right” side. It teaches us to stay at the threshold—where the boundary becomes a place of speech, of study, of truth perhaps. Where the voice doesn’t seek to triumph, but to endure without distortion.
“Honor Your Father and Your Mother”
And the rebellious son?
He embodies the central tension of the episode: between fidelity and rupture, between family inheritance and the individual quest for reintegration into a collective. His pursuit of Orthodox practice, perceived as betrayal by his secular parents, highlights the Fifth Commandment—“Honor your father and your mother.” But the episode, through ḥaverut and the interplay between Léa and Arié, suggests that honor does not lie in blind obedience or fusion, but in maintaining tension, in dialogue that respects boundaries—on both sides.
Arié, approaching the son with humor at the yeshiva, does not try to bring him back to his parents’ worldview. He seeks instead to teach him ḥaverut—learning to think with the other, to honor multiple voices, even in disagreement. The son, in rebelling, draws a boundary (gᵊvūl) between himself and his parents—but that boundary is also a sᵊfāh, a threshold from which speech might emerge. When the father says “Yesh gvul” (“There is a boundary”), he is not rejecting his son, but setting an ethical limit—refusing to let rupture collapse the relationship.
The rebellious son is not an antagonist, but a mirror of Léa and Arié’s own struggles. Like them, he navigates between tradition and self-assertion. The series does not resolve this tension—it invites us to see in the rebellion a possibility for ḥaverut, a space where parents and children, tradition and modernity, can coexist without dissolution.
