Rabbi Tarfon lived at the edge of the first century, one of the great teachers of the Mishnah. He is remembered for sharp legal rulings and for a single small act of tenderness that the Talmud refused to forget.
On the Sabbath his elderly mother wanted to walk in the courtyard. The stones were hard and perhaps painful under her aged feet. Tarfon knelt beside her. He placed his hands, palms up, on the ground in front of her. And he asked her to step on them.
She walked across her son's open hands, and when she reached the end of them, he moved them ahead of her again, and she kept walking. In this way she made her Sabbath stroll without her feet touching a single cold stone (Kiddushin 31b; Gaster, Exempla No. 190).
When other rabbis heard of this, they said: even this extravagant display of honor does not reach the floor of what a child owes a parent. The commandment to honor father and mother, they taught, is measured in something deeper than gesture. Rabbi Tarfon's hands were beautiful. But they were not enough.
The little story carries a strange lesson. The sage who bent himself into furniture for his mother's feet — even he had not done everything. The mitzvah of honoring a parent is older and larger than any single scene of devotion, because it is a lifelong accounting, not a single posture.
A man's hands beneath his mother's feet is a beautiful image. But the deeper teaching is that every one of us is still in debt, and still has time to begin paying.