The Talmud returns often to a gentile from Ashkelon named Dama ben Netina, whom the sages held up as the gold standard of the commandment to honor father and mother. They told his story to shame Jews whose observance of the fifth commandment was less rigorous.
Once, his mother struck him in public. The blow landed across his face in front of the leading merchants of the city. He said nothing. He did not protest. He did not pull away. He let her slap land and absorbed the humiliation without a word.
The second detail is quieter but perhaps more striking. After his father died, Dama ben Netina never once sat in his father's chair. The chair remained where it had always been. He would walk past it every day. He would stand near it. He would never occupy it. It was his father's place, and his father's absence did not change that.
Gaster's Exempla (No. 187, 1924) and Kiddushin 31a preserve these details. The Talmud then notes the cosmic payoff — once, when the High Priest needed to replace a lost gemstone from the priestly breastplate, and the matching jewel was only available from Dama ben Netina, he refused to wake his sleeping father to open the chest where it was stored. He lost the enormous profit. A year later his cow gave birth to a pure red heifer — the rarest animal required for the Temple purification rite — and the Jews paid him the full purchase price he had forgone.
Honoring parents, the rabbis said through Dama's example, is not a nice feeling. It is a posture — a chair you refuse to sit in, a cheek you let be slapped — and the universe eventually settles the account.