The son who never was … until he was

Sadly, some people still believe that the Torah is ancient and obsolete. In my congregation, whenever I give a sermon that touches on the weekly portion and contemporary events, the audience no longer marvels at how relevant the Torah is in our generation. It is a regular occurrence and now presumed by my listeners to be so.

Clearly, the Torah is anything but obsolete. It talks to us in the uncanniest ways.

Sponsored Large Custom Desk Mat: An Affordable Canvas for Your Desktop AliExpress See the review →

This week’s Torah reading contains a passage that bothered me for many years. It hasn’t in recent times, though that’s not necessarily good news.

In Parshat Ki Teitzei, we read about a boy who is stubborn, rebellious, a glutton, a drunkard. He is completely deaf to the appeals and pleas of his father and mother. Eventually, his parents haul him before the elders of the city. If the court finds against him, that’s it—the death penalty. Not for stealing a car or hurting anyone. Simply for being, essentially, a very badly behaved teenager with an insatiable taste for meat and wine.

Now this is very strange indeed! Because if that’s the law, then half the bar mitzvah boys I’ve met over the years would be in serious trouble.

Naturally, this bothered our sages as well. If you open the Talmud in Sanhedrin 71a, you can read how the rabbis of the Talmud were practically wrestling this law to the ground, examining every last detail. And the more they dug, the stranger it got.

This boy must be past 13 years old but not yet showing a beard—a window of maybe a few months, if that. He must steal specifically from his father to buy meat and wine in very specific amounts. Both parents must bring the charge together—and here’s my favorite part—since the law requires that the mother and father sound alike, look alike and stand the same height. (I don’t know many couples who would pass that test on a good day, let alone while dragging their son to court.)

By the time the rabbis are done, Rabbi Yehuda throws up his hands and says: This never happened, and it never will. Lo haya v’lo atid lihyot. Case closed—such a son never existed and never will.

So why on earth is it written in the Torah at all? Rabbi Yehuda has a beautiful answer: “Expound it and receive your reward.”

Study it. Grapple with it. That’s the point—not that anyone was ever actually stoned in a town square for finishing too much biltong too quickly.

Another commentary holds that the Torah shares such an outrageous scenario to serve as a deterrent for the son to appreciate the gravity of not respecting his parents’ guidance. A further opinion asserts that it is a warning to the parents not to be lax or overindulgent with their children.

And then, into this tidy scholarly consensus, along comes Rabbi Jonathan and says: “I saw one. And I sat by his grave!”

For most of my life, my friends, I was firmly on Team Rabbi Yehuda.

Of course, such a case never existed. It seemed like exactly the kind of thing the rabbis loved to do—take an idea, stretch it to its most extreme, impossible edge, purely so we would have something juicy to argue about in the beit midrash. A brilliant thought experiment, though not very practical.

These days, however, I must tell you with a heavy heart that I’ve had to change my mind. Tragically, in our own generation—in our own comfortable, successful, sophisticated Western communities—I think Rabbi Jonathan may have been onto something after all: “I have seen such a son. I have stood by his grave.”

Here’s how it looks today, and this is not a rabbi getting carried away with a good sermon illustration. A young man—a good kid, from a good home—is offered a taste of something for free (once, maybe at a party just to try it). And somehow, almost before anyone notices, it’s not “once” anymore. It’s a habit, and it’s an expensive one—far more than any teenager’s allowance could ever cover.

So he starts to steal to pay for this new habit.

From whom? His own parents, of course. Mom can’t find her jewelry and assumes that it must be the cleaning lady. Dad can’t account for the cash missing from his wallet.

Meanwhile, right under their own roof, it is their own Mark or Kevin, Stacy or Samantha.

I am not exaggerating. Why do you think every community now has rehab centers? Why are there rabbis whose full-time work is helping Jewish families whose children have become drug addicts—kids from wonderful homes with wonderful parents who did everything right?

The ben sorer u’moreh—“stubborn and rebellious son”—is no longer a legal curiosity from a dusty page of the Talmud. It is a warning label the Torah stuck on the box 3,000 years ago, and we’re only now reading the fine print.

It’s not only Hollywood celebrities or stars of the stage with lives of excess that die of overdoses. It is happening in our own backyard.

So here is my plea to you, and I say this as someone who used to think this could never happen to “people like us.” Keep your eyes open. Trust your children (please, trust them), but don’t over-trust. Know where they are and who they’re with. And the moment something feels off, don’t wait for it to sort itself out: Step in, and, if necessary, get professional help immediately.

Remember: When you take away the high, you can’t just leave a space where it used to be. Something must fill that vacuum—something positive, something spiritual, something with real meaning. Nature and teenagers abhor a vacuum.

Was the stubborn and rebellious son a case that never existed and never will exist? I wish I could still say yes with the same confidence I once had. I pray that it never happens to any of us or to anyone we love. And if, God forbid, it ever does, may we have the wisdom to catch it early and the courage to act on it.

May God watch over our children, and may we never have reason to know this story firsthand.

Get the latest updates in our WhatsApp group.